Resumen de Desbunde and its discontents: counterculture and authoritarian modernization in Brazil, 1968–1974
“For my generation,” writes Alex Polari, “our option was precisely this: either pirar [flip out], trip out on drugs, or join the armed struggle. Heroism vs. alienation, as we who joined the armed struggle saw it; caretice [conformity] vs. liberation, as they saw it.” Born in 1951, Polari was a teen during the cultural effervescence and political struggle of mid-to-late 1960s Brazil but reached adulthood during a period of severe repression—the so-called sufoco (suffocation)—between late 1968 and 1974, when public protest and left-wing cultural expression were suppressed and censored. Polari opted for the “heroic” option of armed struggle, as he recounted in his memoirs published in 1982 during the abertura, a period of political opening leading up to the restoration of formal democracy in 1985. Yet he also expressed a deep affinity for those who “flipped out” and embraced attitudes and practices associated with the counterculture.
