Building the Brazilian Economics in Santiago De Chile (1964-1973)

During the nearly 10 years between the Brazilian military coup in April 1964 and the breakdown of democracy in Chile in September 1973, hundreds of left-wing Brazilian intellectuals lived and produced knowledge in Santiago de Chile. Professors and researchers forced to leave Brazil managed to get inserted in the intellectual life of Chile which was at that time very attractive for leftists, since the country was experiencing very intense social changes promoted by Christian Democrats and Socialists. Many of them found jobs through the networks they established inside international organizations with representations in Santiago, such as the ECLA, FAO and ILO. Others through the ties they built with Chilean professors that received them in their universities and research centers, especially at those institutions such as the ILPES, FLACSO and ESCOLATINA that aimed to build Latin-American social science and economics research and had financial help from the Alliance for Progress, from Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and from the UN system. Politicians, professors, artists, journalists, well-known student leaders, and other liberal professionals could be found in the first wave of Brazilians who arrived in Santiago between 1964 and 1965. By 1968, after increasing repression in Brazil – due to the proclamation of the Institutional Act 5, which suspended civil rights – many students who had remained politically active were forced to leave the country in order to escape prison and torture, forming a second wave of Brazilian exiles in Chile. Once installed, the intellectuals from the first wave helped newcomers find jobs, scholarships, and get admitted to the universities and research institutions in which they were working. ECLA-ILPES and ESCOLATINA, where Brazilian professors Antonio Barros de Castro, Carlos Lessa, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Francisco Weffort, José Serra, Maria da Conceição Tavares taught, received the majority of Brazilian students interested in economics. The ties that they built in those institutions had effects on the field of economics in Brazil. Indeed, half of the professors of the economics department at the University of Campinas – considered one of the most left-leaning – studied or worked together in Chile during this period. The purpose of this article is to portray the networks built in the community of exiled Brazilian intellectuals who lived in Santiago between 1964 and 1973 and analyze the effects of their international circulation on the structure of the field of economics in Brazil. In order to do this, each migration wave will be characterized by 1) the occupations of exiled intellectuals while they were in Brazil, 2) their activities upon arrival in Chile, and 3) their professional insertion after leaving Chile. The links established in Santiago will be differentiated from previous links in order to demonstrate the effect of exile on research networks. Finally, the relationships that were retained after the reinstatement in Brazil are represented in order to highlight the long-term effects of the time spent in Chile.