A área mais perigosa do hemisfério ocidental: o Nordeste do Brasil como problema político dos EUA (1961-1963)

Abstract

During the administration of Democratic President John F. Kennedy, which lasted from January 1961 to November 1963, there was a proliferation of speeches regarding the Northeast of Brazil. The region was taken as the object of diplomatic dispatches, reports, memos, public statements and interviews granted later by the most important characters involved with the American Foreign Service. We made use of this material, now available for public consultation under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, to analyze, according to the conditions of possibility at the time, how the Northeast of Brazil was converted into a space-context to legitimize the strategy of hegemony idealized by the U.S. government for the Western Hemisphere, symbolized by the Alliance for Progress, a policy of regional integration created in 1961, in the face of the Cold War.