Brazil

[Terrance]

It is ironic that the film _Brazil_, on the fascist uses of technology
as epitomized in a Western European industrial setting, proffers the
image of Brazil as the libido- releasing escape from oppression. Despite
the international image of an uninhibited Brazilian society as
extrapolated from the tourist's understanding of carnival, at least
since the Brazilian version of a fascist movement beginning in the
1930s, Brazil has hardly been mistaken for by Brazilians themselves as a
nonrepressive, oppressive-free society. Increasingly, the uses of
technology for the control of the individual developed in Europe and the
United States have been utilized by Brazilian authoritarian regimes,
allowing for the appearance in abundance in contemporary Brazilian
writing of the science fiction narremes of the disastrous consequences
of the unchecked technological abuses of the environment and the
development of specialized technical instruments to control, persecute,
and "correct" the citizenry. 

>From Hispania, Volume 75, Number 4, October 1992

"Spanish, American and Brazilian Literature: A History of Disconsonance"
David William Foster, Arizona State University