Counter Political: Networks of (miss)information: fighting against ‘general understanding’

The publications produced from exile during the period of the military dictatorships in Latin America show an advanced awareness of the ideological and political barriers produced by the distortion or invisibilization of certain facts by the media, co-opted by the dictatorial and neo-imperial powers. The FBI (Front brésilien d’Information) was a newspaper founded in 1969 in Alger (Algeria) by Brazilian refugees, which circulated through several countries in Europe and Latin America until 1973. The publication had different collaborators and delegations in Chile, Uruguay, France, Holland, Italy, Germany, where it was published at irregular intervals. It was conceived as a counter-hegemonic political tool of (un)information, aiming to unmask the crimes of the military dictatorship and the state of oppression in Brazil.​

The fact that the FBI was based in Alger, which was at the time one of the most important centers for revolutionary movements in Africa, marks the particularity of its perspective, aware of the extensive effects of imperialism and attentive to the problems and challenges common to the countries of the Global South. I am going to place a special focus on certain images, themes and recurrent terms of the FBI, which functioned as shared codes to understand and name different experiences of repression and resistance in the Southern Cone.