ABSTRACT
Denunciations about communist conspiracies linked to foreign powers have circulated among right-wing groups in Brazil since the 1920s. The apex was the disclosure of the “Cohen Plan” in October 1937, an apocryphal text that revealed an imminent (and imagined) communist coup. Recently, in the context of the Workers’ Party’s rise to power (2002–16), radical right-wing groups have reappropriated the communist conspiracy theory to mobilize it in campaigns for the removal of that party from the government (resulting in Dilma Roussef’s impeachment in 2016) and for Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018. This chapter analyses the connections and lines of continuity involving the two historical contexts, but also the differences between them, for example, regarding changes in the figure of the foreign enemy. The aim is to understand the reasons for the recurrent use of the communist menace by radical right-wing groups and to explain why such this remains effective in the twenty-first century.
