THE ABBINK MISSION IN BAHIA: EXPECTATIONS OF BAHIA’S INTELLECTUALS ABOUT NORTH AMERICAN CAPITAL (1948-1950)

Abstract

After the Second War, the U. S. points about Latin America involved research actions, which aimed, among some academics expectations, indicate which areas had potentials for capital investment. The surveys were viewed with distrust by Brazilian businessmen and intellectuals and, at Bahia, it was not different. In the article, I discuss the Abbink Mission (1948), and its intellectual repercussion, for people like Inácio Tosta Filho, Thales de Azevedo and others, like Carlos Mariguella. Each of those persons produced opinions write in daily newspapers, to show ways to understanding how North American capital to engage with traditional sectors of the Brahian economy or completed refuted it. The texts used here are extracted from Jornal A Tarde, O Jornal and Correio da Manhã, O Momento and from the Revista Problemas. The analysis of texts are based on the methodologies of Intellectual History and Political History, mediated by proposals for observing the Expanded State and the action of intellectuals, circumscribed in the Antonio Gramsci perspectives. The government agents and diplomacy expressed projects with divergent views that the civil society have built – the some State – in privative apparatuses of hegemony, seen here in instruments for the production of knowledge and science which indicated or collaborated with other projects in defense of class interests.