Telemontecarlo as a (failed) Italo-Brazilian communications experiment: South–South transnational business, politics and culture (1985-1994)

In July 1985, in what was promoted at the time as a rebuke of center–periphery relation patterns, Brazilian television network Globo, owned by Roberto Marinho, bought Telemontecarlo (TMC), a tiny private television station set in Monaco, with the goal of transforming it into an Italian national television network capable of competing with Fininvest, the leading commercial television group of the time. Encouraged by Italian Christian Democracy leaders, the Brazilian group’s presence in Italy provoked legal, political and economic warfare between Globo’s owners and the local dominant communications mogul and future Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Throughout this paper, I analyze the various transnational political, economic and cultural links between Brazil and Italy that both encouraged this unorthodox move and also led to its almost inevitable failure.