A US-funded think tank network spread free-market ideology into Brazil’s protests.

Evidence

Brazilian academic Camila Rocha, who has traced the rise of free-market think tanks in the country, calls the Atlas Network a kind of “neoliberal Comintern,” likening the pro-business super-NGO to the Communist International, as it funds and coordinates organizations that promote its own very different ideology across the world. Though Estudantes Pela Liberdade and associated organizations in Brazil (like the Instituto Mises and the Instituto Millenium) promote self-consciously “neoliberal” thinkers, they usually avoid that word (and its negative connotations in South America). They prefer the word liberal, which in Portuguese has none of the center-left connotations it does in the United States. It means freedom in a very different sense than the MPL understands it. It means “free markets.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 417

Categorization

• QUESTION: Interesting asymmetry: the word ‘liberal’ means opposite things in US vs Brazilian Portuguese — worth chasing in cross-cultural political vocabulary.
• XREF: Connects to ch14’s theme of Brazilian right organizations and ch8’s media-created movements. — connects to: Billionaire-backed radical-right networks manipulate politics through clandestine think tanks. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1768; Foreign protest frames shaped how Brazilians interpreted their own uprising — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 45; Mont Pelerin Society networks seeded think tanks across Latin America — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 561 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘liberal’ in Portuguese means free-market, the opposite of the US center-left meaning.

Broader Connections

• Mont Pelerin Society networks seeded think tanks across Latin America #expands (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 561
• Billionaire-backed radical-right networks manipulate politics through clandestine think tanks. #complicates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1768
• Neoliberalism’s spread depended on transnational discourse networks rather than national institutions alone #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2118
• Foreign protest frames shaped how Brazilians interpreted their own uprising #qualifies (0.75) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 45
• European free-market think tank networks grew fourfold after 2000 #corroborates (0.70) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 556