ABSTRACT
In Brazil, the military regime began to feel strong pressures for change at the end of the seventies, when a notable economic development had changed the country, or at least the more central parts of it. The possibility that, if no reforms were initiated, violent protests might spread was certainly on the minds of the regime’s more thoughtful elements. As a sign of the search for new methods one may take nationalist General Afonso Albuquerque Lima’s Piano Rondón, which offered university students a year of work and community service in the most inhospitable places, in lieu of military service. It was hoped that this local version of the Peace Corps would cement a new solidarity between the armed forces and the future intelligentsia, cured of unrealistic revolutionary ideas through the discovery of the “real Brazil.” The project was quite risky, as the Peruvian example might suggest, and it is surprising that it was accepted at all. It was applied, but never got really off the ground, and it involved only a few people.
