1Albeit mistaken, the association is not surprising. The biography of former Steel Workers’ Union leader Lula is often considered a model for the modern self-confident Brazilian worker and Volkswagen (vw) is regularly depicted as a central contributor to the modernization of Brazilian industry. [2] This anecdote highlights the historical importance of vw in the national consciousness, especially when it comes to references to the phase of rapid economic development that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Both Lula and vw do Brasil (vwb) are symbols of the Brazilian miracle, the period in which Brazil saw its GDP growth breaking records, its infrastructure modernizing and its middle-class enlarging. That Lula is viewed as a piece of national history in Brazil will not surprise the reader. But how did vw, a foreign company, manage to be so strongly associated with a project praised by all Brazilian governments since the 1930s as genuinely nationalist : the country’s industrialization and achievement of higher living standards ?

2I suggest that–with the help of Brazilian actors–vw inserted itself in a narrative of development in which economic growth and technical improvement are seen as essential steps towards the fulfilment of national histories. While the western-inspired storyline of “development” subsists in the languages of politics and business, it has fortunately been surpassed by students of history, who do not envisage development as a historical process but rather as a concept, an idea, a belief, a discourse. [3] Yet, development and its parent terms progress and modernization remain embarrassing concepts for those who undertake to analyse them. Transnational historians in particular still hesitate over which box development belongs in, as it has served historically as rhetorical clothing for multinational, national and even very local projects. [4] In cases of enmeshment between foreign intervention and national development discourses in the southern hemisphere, the concept of “post-development”, inspired by the post-colonial claim to decentralize knowledge, has raised the suspicion that development stood for imposing western patterns of domination on peripheral areas of the world. [5]

3Some scholars, seeing this view as reductive, have identified an appropriation of development by southern nationalist approaches : they have looked at how southern hemisphere actors have adapted, transformed, and sometimes deliberately deformed or even parodied western patterns of modernization with the purpose of consolidating national or local identities. [6] I suggest tackling the issue from the other end, by looking at how actors with western roots attempt to integrate themselves in a national development project and make “national” a key element of their economic engagement in the South. Much has been said about western actors’ strategies to introduce their own patterns of consumption, cultural views and economic model into southern areas. On the other hand, little has been written about the mimicry of “nationalization” these actors had to undertake to be successful in the societies in which they tried to take root. Using the example of vw’s history in Brazil, I intend to highlight the mechanisms of this process, which I call Brazilianization.

4In spite of having remained Latin America’s private company with the greatest business volume for decades, vwb has never been subject to much historical research, except for a few contributions exploring its role as an economic agent. [7] Going beyond a purely economic perspective, I suggest also looking at the points of contact between Brazilian national construction discourses and vw’s corporate development strategies. It is the aim of this article to connect these points of contact together, in order to map the process through which vw took root in the Brazilian land.

5Looking at the first decades of vwb’s existence, I will essentially focus on the “economic miracle” from 1968 to 1973–a particular period, in which Brazil’s record growth and vwb’s economic take-off coincided. This period offered fertile ground for vw to construct a link between the firm’s identity and Brazilian national-developmentalism, which was a vague set of ambitious socio-economic goals used by the country’s elites as an instrument of national cohesion. Originally exploited by governmental leaders in the 1950s to designate their import-substituting industrial policy, the expression “national-developmentalism” was appropriated by the military presidents of the authoritarian regime, this time to promote different economic contents. Only the final objectives of “national-developmentalism” remained the same : the complete territorial integration of the country, the achievement of industrial-nation socio-economic standards and the rise of Brazil to being a global player.

6Written on the basis of company sources, advertising publications and documents from a state agency for the development of the Amazon, this article shows how vw conquered a space in the national-developmentalist agenda. [8] It starts by identifying the initial conditions for vw’s success in Brazil. It subsequently tells how vw took advantage of the climate established by the military regime to become a symbol of the Brazilian economic miracle. The last section explores vw’s participation in national construction, mainly by examining a farming project in the Amazon launched by the company in partnership with the Brazilian state.

Implantation in Brazil

7“Authentic Volkswagen pieces. The people’s car”, announced a smiling mechanic in a 1950 commercial for the Brásmotor Company, which sold vw Beetles assembled in Brazil from parts imported from Germany. [9] However, with German industry still in the phase of reconstruction from the Second World War and the vw brand lacking any kind of popular identity in Brazil, there was no sign that the Beetle would become the main “people’s car” in the country. [10] It was quite unexpected that at about the same time internal vw market research identified Brazil as the most appropriate Latin American country for the construction of an automobile plant. [11] Besides the size of the country’s population and some technical considerations concerning Brazilian patent protection policy, vw was encouraged to make this choice by the repeated expression of the will of the local political class to endow Brazil with a strong durable goods industry. [12]

8The fact that Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas (1951-1954) assured the project of building a vw plant in Sao Paulo of his support in 1953 (on the condition that it would serve the national interest) confirmed the existence in Brazil of a favourable political climate for the expansion of the car industry. [13] The same year, vw took its first step in the Brazilian market by opening a small assembly plant, whose few hundred workers assembled 3,000 passenger cars by 1957. While Ford and GM had been offering large-size quality cars to the happy few, the Beetle found its public in the emerging Brazilian middle class thanks to its comparatively low price, good durability, simple mechanics, small size and low fuel consumption. [14] As early as 1962, vw became market leader with 53,342 vehicles produced that year. While in the late 1950s the majority of the vehicle parts were imported from Germany, in 1962 98% of the components were manufactured in Brazil. [15] This figure was reached under pressure from the president Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961) himself, who had high hopes from the implantation of vw in his country.

Figure 1

President Juscelino Kubitschek standing in a beetle, 1959 (revue Auto Esporte, illustrant un article paru le 19 février 2009. En ligne sur http://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Revista/Autoesporte/0,,EMI27176-10142,00-FUSCA+FAZ+ANOS+DE+BRASIL+E+GANHA+SELO+E+CARIMBO+COMEMORATIVO.html)

President Juscelino Kubitschek standing in a beetle, 1959 (revue Auto Esporte, illustrant un article paru le 19 février 2009. En ligne sur http://revistaautoesporte.globo.com/Revista/Autoesporte/0,,EMI27176-10142,00-FUSCA+FAZ+ANOS+DE+BRASIL+E+GANHA+SELO+E+CARIMBO+COMEMORATIVO.html)

9Kubitschek governed Brazil on the basis of an ambitious planning policy, setting rigorous objectives for industrial production. [16] Anxious to put industrial progress at the service of national integration, he believed that the access of a growing number of Brazilians to their own vehicles would contribute to opening up the country’s sparsely populated interior. By facilitating individual movement within the national territory, passenger cars should also strengthen the Brazilians’ patriotic feeling. [17] Hence, Kubitschek launched a historically unprecedented highway building programme. He also ordered that the new capital city, Brasilia, be designed and built according to technical criteria facilitating the circulation of cars. With his frank and direct demands of the vw management (“The Volkswagen is the ideal vehicle for our roads. […] I need your car”), Kubitschek personally contributed to the development of vwb into a mass-producer. [18] When on March 1^st 1959 the first Beetle made entirely in Brazil came off the assembly line, Kubitschek was sitting in the vehicle, smiling to the photographers next to the governor of Sao Paulo and vwb’s general director. [19] When a couple of months later vw’s international head Heinz Nordhoff inaugurated the first vw factory in the industrial outskirts of Sao Paulo, it was again in the presence of Kubitschek. [20]

10vw’s ability to develop good contacts with the top Brazilian political elite was largely thanks to its partnership with the local firm Monteiro Aranha (ma), which held 20% of vwb’s shares. [21] Founded in 1917 and originally a glass producer, ma had long experience of negotiation with political decision-makers because of its participation in a wide array of enterprises, many of which were involved in public contracts. [22] ma’s help proved crucial for vw to obtain import licenses–a delicate task, due to Brazil’s strategy of import-substituting industrialization since the 1950s. However, vw knew some convincing ways of overcoming the restrictions implied by the import-substitution policy, as it proved in 1961 by delivering free personal vehicles to Brazilian senators and congressmen before the vote for a law on duty-free imports. [23] Only in 1962 did the understanding between vw and the political class begin to be put in serious jeopardy, when the then president João Goulart (1961-1964), defying the congress with the active support of workers’ trade unions, came out with a strongly protectionist platform. The government set a series of obstacles in the way of multinational companies : it introduced higher restrictions on import licenses, increased the compulsory deposit that multinational firms had to leave with the Banco do Brasil from 100% to 150% for every dollar spent on imports, and pressed vw to completely stop importing vehicle components from Germany. [24] The galloping inflation under Goulart was another problem that preoccupied vw and threatened the cost-effectiveness of its Brazilian operation. [25] In reality, most of Brazil’s business circles and foreign partners–particularly the US–were preoccupied by Goulart’s leftist measures and radicalizing nationalism and they were not the last to support the military coup that toppled the government on April 1^st, 1964.

Take-off under the civilian-military regime

11The junta that took power in 1964 did so with the justification that communism and corruption were threatening the democratic system. Through a series of “institutional acts”, the regime (recently qualified as “civilian-military” because of the support it could count on within parts of the population) set the basis of authoritarian rules between 1965 and 1968. [26] vwb, whose rise had largely begun through its collaboration with democratic governments, did not necessarily lean toward dictatorship. Still, the civilian-military regime held the promise of solving most of the issues that preoccupied multinational companies under Goulart : political instability, a still underdeveloped infrastructure network, high inflation and the growing influence of trade unionism. At vwb, the favourable economic climate created by the governing junta mattered more than the state violence employed to maintain this new economic order. As vwb’s national director Werner P. Schmidt summarised in a 1971 interview about economic progress in Brazil :

12

“Of course the police and the military torture prisoners[;] political dissidents are […] shot. But an objective report should always add that things just do not go forward without severity. And things are going forward.” [27]

13Things were also going forward for foreign investors thanks to a revised nationalist approach, which was both industrialist and pragmatic. In spite of the monetarist phase that marked the regime’s first three years, aimed at regaining the confidence of foreign lenders, the military leaders ensured continuity with the national-developmentalist pomposity of the democratic cabinets. They exalted the conquest of the interior territories–above all the Amazon region, endorsed road transport as the backbone of Brazil’s development and emphasised the pressing necessity of modernizing the country’s infrastructure. However, they handled the “national” pole of this national-developmentalist discourse with more flexibility than their predecessors. Multinational firms stopped being scapegoats for politicians in periods when governments sought to restore their popularity ; economists defending import-substitution lost the upper hand in government think tanks, which relieved the pressure on firms’ production conditions. [28] More remarkably, the regime’s political leaders did not balk at saying publicly that Brazil needed foreign capital if it wanted to become a great industrial power. In the absence of fair electoral competition, the military governments were not as concerned as their predecessors about losing popular support. They could dedicate a greater part of their public discourse to gaining the confidence of investors.

14This approach encouraged vw to appropriate the official nationalist rhetoric, since this rhetoric was no longer embedded in a hostile approach to foreign economic actors. In an article on vw commercials, Marques shows that the firm’s advertisement strategy changed after the arrival in power of the military. vw started to refer intensively to the link between automobile production and national development. [29] Besides a range of commercials celebrating the optimistic economic climate brought by the new government, vw openly supported some specific government projects. For example, a TV advert for the Beetle praised the building of the Transamazonia, a nearly 5,000 km-long highway planned to cross the rain forest from East to West. The Transamazonia was one of the main measures in the planning programme adopted in 1970 under the leadership of the then president Emílio Médici (1969-1974). [30] vw’s advert, which featured bulldozers clearing a path through the immense forest, contained a message echoing Médici’s triumphal declarations of conquest over nature as a condition for national development. The voiceover said :

15

“This is the Transamazonia, the work of definitive conquest of one of the world’s richest regions. Men and machines are fighting restlessly against the forest, against the climate, to give Brazil its masterpiece highway.” [31]

16The end of the commercial showed the future arrival of the Beetle on this road, as a symbol of taming the “green hell” and making it accessible to Brazilians.

17vw’s commercials sought harmony with key elements of the government propaganda. This had the advantage of appealing directly to the patriotic vein of middle-class consumers. An important part of this middle-class was in tune with the regime’s discourse of national progress and restoration of a stable economic order. [32] In this context, vw was both helping national feelings to develop and using these feelings to build itself a Brazilianized image, on the basis of a liberal version of the national-developmentalist discourse, close to the government’s rhetoric.

18Even in Germany, vw executives made no secret of their sympathy with certain orientations of the regime, especially the economic ones. In 1970 a member of the management declared that vwb needed

19

“an economic policy, which recognizes that private entrepreneurial initiative is indispensable for the success […]. During my talk with the president Médici in Rio, I again received the confirmation that this policy will continue.” [33]

20Concretely, “this policy” first consisted in making the automobile industry a focus in state planning, principally through massive state investment to improve the road networks. In addition, various labour policy measures contributed to reducing vwb’s costs of production. With the official motive of containing inflation, the military acted to maintain low wages. [34] It also passed a law in 1966 to facilitate dismissals, which provoked an increase in the workers’ turnover at vwb. [35] The company was also able to take advantage of the repression of union protest.

21Obviously, a high level of growth under military rule was not the least factor to favour vw either. Castelo Branco, who took power in a context of exploding deficit, governed under the motto of recovering stability through credit restriction until 1967. Instead of continuing this policy, the successive military governments used the readjusted economy left by Castelo Branco as an opportunity to finance growth. Through massive state intervention in infrastructure sectors such as communications, energy and heavy industry (of which transport was not the least), and a large opening towards foreign credit, they successfully oriented Brazil along a path of double-digit annual growth that did not slow down between 1968 and 1973. [36] vw saw its take-off during these “miraculous” years, with a clear hegemony among the passenger car brands (a stable market share over 50%) and a rapidly increasing production and visibility on the Brazilian roads. [37] By 1975, three million vehicles had rolled out of the vwb plant. This success had positive consequences in terms of profits, especially in 1971 when vwb made the highest profit among all private companies in Brazil, paying out about 103 million us$ of dividends. [38]

22Not only did the military boost vwb’s benefits, but it also simplified the transfer of an increasing proportion of these benefits to Germany. The government increased the amount of possible profit remittances abroad, and showed a limitless tolerance towards the various manœuvres by vw to circumvent the remaining maximum remittances limit. [39] For example, vwb paid the German parent company unusually high consultancy fees, and bought machinery equipment from it at overvalued prices. Besides condoning such practices through a public discourse systematically glorifying the European know-how and technological expertise, the Brazilian government even made the consultancy fees tax-free. [40]

23There is no doubt that vw was a beneficiary of the Brazilian economic miracle. Remarkably, the firm also managed to figure as a key partner in this miracle. vw constructed this image primarily by addressing the public : not only its potential car customers in the Brazilian upper and middle classes, but also the lower social categories who might aspire to the same living standards. The Brazilians appropriated the Beetle to the point of giving it its own local name, “Fusca” (derived from the Brazilian pronunciation of “Volks”). The Fusca became part of the Brazilian daily life and gained a kind of cultural hegemony in the car sector, much so that literature professor Maria Vollny in a “Study of the Character of the Brazilian People” (1976) compared the Fusca in modern Brazil with the supremacy of the German piano in the late 19th century. [41] vw’s visibility in Brazilian cities contributed to this tendency : in Sao Paulo–by 1967 the city with the largest number of vw vehicles in the world–all the police cars were Volkswagens, as were nearly all the taxis. [42]

24The company also owed its fame to a clever communication. When it started building Beetles, vwb inaugurated a historically unprecedented relationship between a firm and the media in Brazil, by opening the doors of its factory to reporters and photographers. [43] In the 1960s, vw published advertisements in almost every single issue of the country’s main magazines. In 1961, the vwb management invited Alaor Gomes, a reputed TV journalist, to build a specific media relations area within the company. [44] Gomes was close to the political milieu and had worked as an advisor to the conservative ex-president Jânio Quadros (his father-in-law). Gomes created for vw the first press office in the business history of Brazil. This first initiative of a company in Brazil to establish a “planned, systemized and permanent relationship with the press” enabled vw to not only reinforce its publicity, but also to become an actor in shaping the Brazilian public opinion, as Chaparro underlines : “The press sector [of vw] became a compulsory source of information for the publishers, assignment editors and economic reporters of the big publications ; it took the role of an agenda-setter”. [45]

25This rigorous public relations work became the brand’s main instrument for spreading the message that vw was a symbol of socio-economic improvement in Brazil. vw even portrayed itself as an actor financing economic growth and producing national cohesion, for example by publishing commercials, which recounted vw’s contribution to the national tax revenues–as vw’s communicators liked to repeat, the company was Brazil’s biggest tax-payer. [46] vw’s commercials also suggested to the consumers imagining the price of “progress infrastructures” (electricity, factories, hospitals, schools, and roads) in numbers of Beetles, thus creating a mathematical association between vw and the concrete benefits earned by the Brazilians from economic growth.

26This publicity was not unjustified, as vw had participated in the economic development of the country, in the first place by creating nearly 40,000 jobs. [47] vw’s praises of itself as a humanist firm, distributing the fruits of development to Brazilians, were countless and found much echo in the media. According to company figures, by 1974 vw was indirectly contributing to the maintenance of 330,000 jobs (enabling a living for 1.5 million individuals). [48] It had helped its suppliers to develop with loans, bridge financing and advance payments. The increase in production at vw had enabled 803 vw retail companies to open. [49] Moreover, vw’s sales credits–an innovation in the Brazilian automobile sector–had helped the middle class to equip itself with vehicles. [50] By 1974 one third of the vw–employees even had a vw. [51] vwb claimed that it gave its workers the highest wages in the sector, as well as healthcare, pension insurance, financial aids subsidies for public transports and canteens, and a wide range of cheap entertainment offers. [52] A company brochure of 1973 said that vwb was “one of the most progressive and social enterprises of the country” and, more importantly, “a successful symbiosis between industrialization and the protection of the national interest”. [53]

27How far this eulogistic self-portrait differed from reality has been discussed by such authors as Doleschal, Schölermann and Würtele. [54] They have pointed out the negative weight of vw in the Brazilian balance of trade, mainly because of the purchase of equipment and licenses to the parent company. They have also discovered that wages at vw were actually lower than in other multinational firms and denounced the firm’s repressive attitude towards its workers. Although these criticisms are often backed up by solid statistics, they fail to address the impact of vw within the Brazilian industry and the chain of demand created by the company’s investments. However, the fact remains that behind vw’s much-vaunted progressiveness, there was a clear tendency to maximize profits at the expense of human issues. In these conditions, vwb needed more than a good corporate responsibility marketing to conquer the sympathy of the nation. As, in 1973-1974, the Brazilian miracle faced the beginning of its end, due to the uncertainty brought by the first global oil shock, it became clear that vw had to invest its self-promotional efforts in other fields than solely identifying itself with economic growth : it had to demonstrate even more clearly its Brazilian patriotism. The following section shows how this was done.

Vwb’s golden age : participating in the national construction

281973 initially promised to be an easy year for vwb : the company had reached top production rates and planned to open a second plant. [55] At the same time, the success of the firm triggered a sharper competition. Gm openly aimed to dethrone vw as market leader and Fiat started to set up in Brazil in the same market segment as vw, the production of small cheap cars stamped with the mark of European solidity. [56] In this context, the German executive board appointed as a new director of vwb the adequate personality to reassert vw’s dominance in the Brazilian car industry : the German director of Bosch in Brasil, Wolfgang Sauer, who was known for his stubbornness in pushing through original ideas. His tough character proved useful, as three months after his nomination the quadrupling of global oil prices gave strength to the nationalist wing of the Brazilian military’s demanding for less complaisant policies toward multinationals. [57]

29In the face of this increased pressured, Sauer held three trump cards. First, even more than his predecessors at vw he understood the importance of communication. In order to have a professional communicator sitting on the executive committee, he appointed the renowned journalist Walter Nori as vice-president of vwb. [58] The Sauer-Nori duo particularly developed internal communication, as an answer to the (re-) emergence of unionism among the workers. [59] vw launched various company journals (“family journals”, according to the management) for the employees, with information on the company’s social benevolence. As for external communication, press releases, press kits and shiny brochures proliferated. [60] Sauer himself liked to take centre in press interviews and public ceremonies.

30Second, Sauer could count on many friends among the regime’s main politicians and had excellent relations with the Médici government. [61] Nori remembers him as

31

“a very exposed public figure, who valued the effort of public relations, the contact with the press, with the authorities […] ; when we needed to book an appointment with the minister, the meeting was planned within the following hour, because he was a person who had a huge coverage in the media.” [62]

32Third, Sauer never portrayed himself as a foreigner. When he talked about Brazil, he always used the “we”, including himself and his business as part of the nation. He spoke an excellent Portuguese, which also gave him the possibility of addressing his Brazilian interlocutors directly, unlike the executives who had preceded him at the helm of vwb. [63] Celebrated by the local media as an authentic “líder Latino”, Sauer proved the ideal ambassador for vwb’s new proof of Brazilian patriotism : the Brasília passenger car. [64]

33Although Sauer had taken no part in the creation of the Brasília, he found himself quite by chance at the head of vwb when the product came on the market. The Brasília, whose main characteristic was its practical spatial conception (large inside, small outside), extended and deepened the marketing idea successfully illustrated by the Fusca : the adaptability of the model to the Brazilian roads, hence its symbolic function as a tool in the process of territorial integration of the country. [65] Even more than the Fusca, the Brasília was resistant, well-suited to rough terrains, and, as such, to most of the new Brazilian highways. In fact, the Brasília had been tested on the Transamazonia before being launched on the Brazilian market. Since it was the first car conceived entirely in Brazil and for the Brazilian consumers, vw intended to sell it as an object of national pride. The operation was an immense success and sales of the Brasília rapidly grew above the threshold of 100,000 unities a year, with a pick peak of 157,700 in 1978. [66]

34It is not by chance that, to enhance its patriotic campaign, the new model wore the name of the futuristic capital city built by Kubitschek in five years, symbol of the Brazilian willpower and its irresistible march towards modernity. Settled in an under-populated plateau in the central Brazilian steppes, the city of Brasília was intended to give impulse to the territorial penetration of the country. It moved Brazil’s centre of gravity closer to the forest areas of the North, the economic exploitation of which had long been a stated goal of the political elites, at least since Vargas’ “Declaration of the Amazon River” in October 1940. In saying that “The Amazon, under the impact of our will and our labour […] will become a chapter in the history of civilization”, Vargas elevated the Amazonian conquest to a necessity for completing the Brazilian national project. [67] Although after this declaration vibrant calls for the occupation of the rain forest became recurrent in Brazilian politics and literature, they remained above all patriotic poetry until the military coup of 1964. [68] The military regime’s leaders, who saw the Amazon as a backward area subordinated to the yoke of nature, felt that modernizing the region would be a flamboyant proof of development, like the building of Brasilia under Kubitschek. A legislative package of October 1966, baptized “Operação Amazônia” (oa), created the political and financial conditions for the strategy of massive Amazonian development based on public planning. [69] According to an official document,

35

“Operação Amazônia is a complex of laws and measures that aims to promote a definitive integration of that region into the national socio-economic context. The way to achieve this result is to exploit the region’s natural potentialities.” [70]

36The oa laws and decrees launched various local state agencies and research and training institutes, set up duty-free zones in the Amazon, organized massive programmes of migration and agricultural settlements, and launched large infrastructure projects such as dams, electricity lines and roads. oa, however, was not only a legislative apparatus, but also a propaganda campaign that lasted for years, constructing and spreading new patterns of thinking about the Amazon, through a cycle of meetings, debates, conferences, and publications that were echoed in the radio and television programmes. In order to sensitize the nation, an annual Amazonia Day was instituted. [71] The official message of oa was to ask Brazilians to reject the two parallel images that had cohabited until then in the representations of the rain forest : the “picturesque region suitable for literary topics” on the one hand, and the “green hell” feared by men on the other. [72] These images symbolized passive attitudes and were to be replaced by the “new philosophy of the development”, marked by willpower and action. [73] For example, in December 1966, a group of Amazonian governors, federal ministers and national businessmen issued a “Declaration of the Amazon”, which promoted a confident and dominating attitude toward the rain forest :

37

“Today the Amazon, considered as a whole, still constitutes one of the largest desert spaces in the world, and a challenge to our capacity of realization. […] The rational occupation of this empty space is the main necessity for our national security.” [74]

38Behind this reference to national security lay the myth (widely shared among nationalists) that foreign powers might try to appropriate the Amazon if Brazil decided to keep the forest resources underexploited. The prominence of this “security” aspect in the oa propaganda aimed at mobilizing Brazilians behind a common feeling of national belonging. Moreover, the government presented the colonization of the Amazon as an act of reconciliation of the Brazilian community : the Amazon contained the promise of both fruitful resources for the economic elite to capitalize on and new land to be distributed among the poor. For the military, which was at the same time pushing through socio-economic policies that strongly aggravated the gap between rich and poor, it was a way to unify the diverse parts of Brazilian society into one single national project.

39oa foresaw that private capital had to take its part in this unifying project, through large-scale farming or extraction businesses that would pave the path for colonization and set high technological standards for the exploitation of natural resources in the region. To attract private companies to the forest, oa included a complex and extremely generous tax incentive system, which considerably reduced the risk of financial losses to private investors in Amazon projects. [75]

40In August 1973, the government selected twenty major businessmen, mostly based in industrial Sao Paulo, and invited them to visit a south-eastern region of the Amazon identified as a promising area for cattle raising. [76] The tour, the organization and progress of which were then reported in the national media, was organized by the Bank of the Amazon (basa), a state bank empowered by oa to be the main development founding institution for the Amazon area. [77] Four federal ministers (including the minister of planning, the minister of State, and the minister of farming) accompanied the entrepreneurs. [78] Wolfgang Sauer, the best best-paid executive in Brazil, was probably the most important among the guests coming from the private sector. [79]

41The basa visit to the Amazon had a highly symbolic meaning : it sealed the alliance between public authorities and private capital for the colonization of the forest. Even if some of them soon forgot this undertaking, all the entrepreneurs invited swore to the government, during a somewhat orotund ceremony, that they would invest in a monumental farming project. [80] The planning minister announced that “with the mission, a new phase in terms of economy of scale is beginning in the Amazon region”. The minister of State added that “the future of the Amazon lies in the hands of businessmen, whether Brazilian or foreign, for Brazil has lost its fear of foreign capital”. [81] This reference to foreign capital was a clear allusion to Sauer’s participation in the visit. Thus, the basa mission was a public demonstration of common interests, in which the investment policy of big companies such as vw and the nationalist goals of the regime converged.

42In December 1973, vw was the first of the invited companies to come up with a completed project. It was a 140,000 hectare cattle- and timber production farm in the south-eastern Amazon, planned to produce up to 100,000 heads of cattle. [82] The project, baptized Companhia Vale do Rio Cristalino (cvrc), after the name of the local river, had nothing to do with cars, but a lot with vw’s ambition to sell itself as an openly patriotic Brazilian company. The symbolism of the cvrc, framed in a national unity project of colonization, signified a further step in vw’s cultural implantation in Brazil.

43In fact, the farm became a showcase for vw’s alleged claim to be taking a motor role with humanitarian involvement in the country. Regular public engagements and commercials presented the virtues of this project to Brazilians. [83] With the help of an up-to-date agro-technological programme, the cvrc would triple the Brazilian patterns of productivity and create the “ox of the future”, which would make the Amazon a leading meat exporter. [84] The initiative was also presented as an answer to the problem of hunger among the Brazilian lower classes, through the improvement in protein production. [85] Furthermore, vw presented its Amazonian farm as an idyllic welfare village, where the employees were given exceptional benefits and comfortable living conditions. [86] This corporate responsibility marketing was close to the discourse already developed by vwb about its automobile workers in the Sao Paulo region. However, in the case of the cvrc, it was framed in a strong civilizationist discourse. The farm employees, coming from rural areas, were depicted as former “nomads” turned settlers and educated to the modern community life by vw. [87] In this sense, vw was aligning itself with the oa propaganda and its epic narrative of a population freed from the yoke of nature by the virtue of development.

44One example of this is that, in a document published in the early 1980s, vw related the epic of the first pioneers, who arrived during the “difficult times” of 1973-1974 when the cvrc was not yet an organized ranch, but still a portion of forest. [88] Food sometimes had to be dropped by aeroplane, when the weather prevented the transport by vehicles, but the vw-employees still managed to survive the difficult natural conditions. The first ranch houses were built with mud walls and covered with wild banana leaves, it was replaced after a few months by wooden houses, and a bit little later by the “third generation housing” in masonry : this was the story of pioneer men overcoming the hard conditions imposed by nature, to finally embrace a modern life. [89]

45The way the vw advertisements described the family gardens of the ranch housing complex was a meaningful illustration of this narrative of human detachment from the natural surroundings : “Even the individual gardens of the houses are wrenched from the wild. And, of course, these gardens have a proper fence, so as to keep wild animals away”. [90] What matters here is the physical separation from the wild encouraged by vw, with the intention of making the ranch families solidly settled within the borders of civilization. The more men and women of the ranch were educated according to the outlines of the cvrc project, the more they “will be able to decisively confront the obstacles of a […] hostile nature, taming it, putting it more efficiently to the service of the entrepreneurial community”. [91] As this shows, the inhabitants of the cvrc were educated according to the oa guidelines, which encouraged Brazilians to adopt a new, more assertive and rational attitude towards nature.

46vw used its farming development project as a space of local transposition of the Brazilian national narrative–at least of the narrative, which the governing elites were striving to spread throughout the country. In many ways, vw was also helping the Brazilian central state to take root in a region–the Amazon–in which state powers and symbols of national identity had been dramatically underrepresented. It was set out in the contract passed between vw and the Brazilian state that “the cvrc was organized with the supreme purpose of contributing proficiently to the aspirations of the developmentalist movement in the Amazon”. [92] Under this impulse, the vw-ranch became a space for the promotion of Brazilianhood. The ranch population was given lessons in moral and civic education transmitting the “respect for the authorities and the laws of the country, thus awakening the spirit of nationality and patriotism”. [93] The cvrc also organized “civic celebrations during the most relevant national days”, so as to keep the national feeling of the workers alive in spite of their geographical isolation from the rest of the human population of the country. [94] The workers’ children were regularly gathered in line behind the Brazilian flag to sing the national hymn. This means that vw was doing more than just adapting itself to national patterns and endorsing the official nationalist discourse : vw was bringing the national state into the deep interior of Brazil, and thus delivering a demonstration of its Brazilianization to the governing military regime and its civilian supporters.

“The brand that knows our land”

47It would certainly be ingenuous to imagine that the whole country stood behind the cvrc. On the contrary, environmental campaigners loudly criticized this project, even though they started to raise their voice only several years after its start. A particularly strong dispute took place in June 1976, after the famous landscape gardener Burle Marx (inexactly) accused vw of having cleared a million forest hectares. [95] A couple of weeks later, the brand began to sell its cars with a new advertising slogan : “a marca que conhece o nosso chão” (“the brand that knows our land”). [96] It sounded like a self-confident answer to the ecologist groups, which criticized vw as a perpetrator of deforestation. These groups were mostly anchored in the middle class of the southern Brazilian urban centres, while vw considered itself deeply rooted into the Brazilian territory, right up to the pioneer frontier of the rain forest. vwb’s strong territorial implantation, of which the ranch project was a national showcase, had become the firm’s main argument against political attacks.

48Company marketing is certainly not objective information. In that sense, there might be something risible in vwb’s insistence on fashioning itself as an authentic Brazilian institution. Nevertheless, it can hardly be denied that vw made efforts to stand by what held the Brazilian nation together–even if vw’s conception of Brazilian patriotism consisted essentially in carrying over key features of government propaganda. While it was not necessarily the “partner in development” that it claimed to be to Brazil, vw actually managed to become a companion of the nationalist project proposed by the politico-economic elite of the country. Moreover, “The brand that knows our land”, together with other marketing slogans appealing to national feelings, was a sign that vw’s Brazilianization was not only a strategy to convince politicians, but also a central element to seduce Brazilian consumers.

Figure 2

The children of vw’s Amazonian ranch standing behind the vw company standard and Brazil’s national flag

The children of vw’s Amazonian ranch standing behind the vw company standard and Brazil’s national flag

49Although from a multinational background, vwb built its success on identifying itself with Brazilian development–from the top (through partnerships with policy makers) to the bottom (by selling the idea to the public that vw was a major actor in the national project). A spectacular step in this process was the company’s active participation in the colonization of the Amazon. The Amazon episode highlights both the public authorities’ recognition of vw as a partner in national progress and vw’s determination to underline its contribution to national unity.

50To recognize this does not mean that we have to fall into a marketing trap and credit vwb with selfless loyalty to its host country. Certainly, vwb excelled in communication more than it actually worked in the Brazilians’ interest. While the firm’s public relations policies adroitly manipulated national symbols, to the point that many Brazilians did not even remember that vw was actually a foreign group, vwb still transferred massive profits to its European parent company. Moreover, as a former executive recognized in his memoires, vwb’s management was poorly “Brazilianized”, and remained firmly led by Germans. [97] vw’s Brazilianization was not bound to happen : it only became possible because the authoritarian regime in power during the “economic miracle” promoted a national-developmentalist vision, which was compatible with the expectations of multinational investors and ready to integrate them into the national project.