Brazilian Security and Defence Policy under President Dilma Rousseff: Transition and Initial Challenges

Abstract

The new president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who resisted the civilian-military rule (1964–1985) in her youth, has been engaging civil society and congress in security and defence issues for the production of the first national defence white paper. Her performance in this area is a good indication of the state of democracy in post-transition Brazil. Using the literature on third wave democracy transition and consolidation, this piece examines how previous presidents dealt with the main security and defence issues in order to identify change and continuity early in the Rousseff administration and also what sort of challenges the new president must rise to. As part of Latin America, Brazil lies in a largely demilitarized, but at the same time extremely violent region of the world. As an emerging soft power, Brazil has recently made defence a bigger issue in the national political agenda but still struggles to deal with its dark history of human rights abuses in the civilian-military dictatorship. Rousseff has shown an awareness of civilian-military issues, but it is still unclear whether she has enough political capital and whether that will translate into the required political support to democratically define the role of the armed forces in Brazil.