Abstract
We celebrate the life and accomplishments of Theotônio dos Santos Júnior, a founding participating editor of Latin American Perspectives. Born in Carangola, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and the author of more than three dozen books and collaborator in scores of others along with more than 150 academic articles, Theotônio was trained as a political scientist in the federal universities in Minas and in Brasília. As a young professor at the Universidade de Brasília, he was among those expelled after the military coup of 1964, when on assignment for The Nation I first met him in July hiding from the police and the military in Rio de Janeiro. Our all-night conversation revealed not only his deep insight into the coup and its implications but a new understanding of underdevelopment in Brazil. In 1966 he fled to exile in Chile, where he elaborated his understanding of backwardness and dependency and challenged orthodox economic theories about development in a seminal article in American Economic Review (May 1970). We met again in 1972, this time in Santiago, where he, Vânia Bambirra, Ruy Mauro Marini, and others had associated with the Centro de Estudios Socioeconómicos and initiated a research program on Latin American dependency. The September 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende necessitated a second exile in 1974 to Mexico and a professorship at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. At that time Theotônio published a lengthy chapter on Brazil in the popular volume edited by Ronald Chilcote and Joel Edelstein, Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond (1974).
An amnesty in 1980 permitted him a return to Belo Horizonte and an unsuccessful run for the Minas de Gerais governorship in 1982, when we met once again and began a long friendship and collaboration over my many years of teaching and researching in Brazil. In 1988 he moved to Rio de Janeiro and joined the economics faculty at the Universidade Federal Fluminense.
We shall miss Theotônio. Our memories of his scholarly contributions, his intellectual curiosity, and his friendly outreach to others will inspire present and future scholars in their research and teaching.