Mehdi Ben Barka                                                                                    Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne

The decade began with promising signs.  From the Sierra Maestra in 1959, under the nose of the imperialist giant, a group of young revolutionaries revitalized the population of a tiny island and brought down a hated dictatorship.  Two years later, the Cuban Revolution took on a clearly socialist color.  In April of 1961 the failure of the imperialist invastion at the Bay of Pigs increased U.S. humiliation.  Above all in Indochina, where the Vietnamese people’s armed struggle was ceaselessly advancing despite the huge military resources used by the United States.     

The Brazilian Defeat

            The defeat in Brazil had weighed heavily on the world environment.  At the beginning of the ‘60’s, broad sectors of the middle and lower classes had offered vague proposals for basic reforms that, according to their promises, would rescue the marginalized in the cities and countryside and would also promote industrialization that in the three preceding decades had somewhat modernizad the country’s anachronistic rural structure.  In 1964, the national reform project was brought to a violent halt.  In the name of the country’s proletarian class, the military imposed a dictatorship and harshly repressed the popular movement.  The defeat was all the more painful because it came in the face of no resistance whatsoever, exactly when many believed victory to be just a step away.

            The great popular leaders – Jango, Brizola and Arraes – abandoned the country without resistance.  Brizola had proponed, unsuccessfully, a last minute opposition which was totally rejected by the president, João Goulart, his brother-in-law.  The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), the great leftist organization with a pro-Soviet orientation, supported the constitucional government’s domination of national populism until the bitter end, hindering autonomous organization of the workers.  After the coup of 1964, the Party (PCB) resumed its collaborationist policy without any self-criticism whatsoever.

            However, in Brazil, the winners euphoria would be short lived.  Throughout the world, the global capitalist crisis which would manifest itself in the world’s main economies in 1967 for the first time, following many years of uninterrupted growth, would demand that blue-collar and salaried workers tighten their belts, so that big business could pull its chestnuts out of the fire.  Beginning in April of 1964, the Brazilian military intervened in the unions and denied the political rights of popular parliamentarians.  Military democrats were replaced, social achievements were suppressed and income for the middle and working classes fell sharply due to the recessive political violence dictated by big business to a government under the dictatorship of Castelo Branco [1964-1967].

            Unemployment increased.  Inflation grew.  The disillusioned middle class went over to the opposition, after having been summoned by imperialism, the Church and the rightwing parties, to protest in 1964 “With God, the Country and the Family,” in order to pave the way for a military intervention that would save the country from a “dictatorship of the unions.”  Anti-popular politicians or coup supporters such as Carlos Lacerda and Juscelino Kubitschek, on the margins of power, joined with João Goulart in a fleeting “Broad Front,” at the end of 1966, once they realized the military entended to remain in power forever.

Black Power

The international situation was tense and dynamic.  After the failure of conservative Arab regimes, in particular in Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in the Six Day War against Israel at the beginning of June 1967, the Palestinian guerrillas took over the anti-Zionist struggle, replacing the demoralized conservatives.  With the economic crisis which arrived in the United Status, due in great measure to war spending which previously had only brought benefits to big business, the U.S. pacifist movement strongly criticized the intervention in Vietnam and the values of the “American way of life.”  Yankee imperialism was being beaten up at home.  Malcolm X was killed in February of 1965, in New York, but black power was growing within black neighborhoods torched by the hatred of a humiliated people.  Latino North Americans and indigenous North Americans were also raising their heads.  In Vietnam on January 30, 1968, the military’s dreams of victory died with the Tet Offensive, during which the Vietcong attacked more than thirty cities in south Vietnam and the very U.S. embassy in Saigon.  Meanwhile the U.S. working class continued to be paralyzed under the hegemony of big business.

 From July 31 to August 10, 1967, the first international meeting of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS) took place in Havana, Cuba.  After a brief and superficial summary of the island’s lived experience, the Cuban leadership made a clear proposal that the rural guerrilla struggle be unconditionally expanded; “Create one, two, many Vietnams.”  While somewhat confused and voluntary, the OLAS broke with the monopoly of Soviet politics which maintained, in Latin America and around the world, a policy of collaboration and subordination by popular movements to the national bourgeoisie presenting themselves as progressives.  The widely advertised presence of the well known PCB communist militant Carlos Marighella at the OLAS meeting resulted in his expulsion upon his return to Brazil.  The capture and murder of Che Guevara on October 8, 1967, in the Bolivian jungle, was seen as a hard blow in the long road to be traveled, and not as a result of inconsistencies between the proposal to begin armed struggle with small groups at the margins of the workers real struggles and consciousness.

            In Brazil, as in Italy, West Germany, Japan, Mexico and many other regions throughout the world, 1968 began within the framework of explicit resistance.  The economic crisis of 1967 allowed the Brazilian workers movement, fighting against the wage supression, to recover a bit from the blows it had suffered.  On April 16, 1,200 workers in the Belgo-Mineira steelworks in Contagem, Minas Gerais, went on strike.  In the blink of an eye 16 million workers were on strike.  The movement disappeared at the beginning of the following month when wages were increased 10%.  May 1, 1968 marked a new victory.  After having been invited by agents posing as members of the unions and the PCB to speak at Praça da Sé, Governor Abreu Sodré and his team were booed, surrounded and forced to seek refuge in São Paulo’s cátedra.  Protesters burned the podium and began to march in a demonstration.  The following month assembly plants in São Bernardo were briefly hit.

"Passeata" (protest march in Brazil)

 Paris burning?

In May, strong European winds began to fan the flames. Paris as well as all of France, began to suffer convulsions from an enraged university studentbody.  Shortly thereafter, the workers movement began a long, tough general strike.  De Gaulle’s goverment was forced to step back, the bourgeoisie shook, talk of a popular government began, the French Communist Party brought demonstrators to the streets and occupied factories to support the institutional struggle, entrenching themselves beneath a noisy electoral failure.  That May, the French revived the world, practically overshadowing the strong student and worker struggles also taking place in Italy and West Germany, the latter awoken by t he attempt on the life of the student leader Rudi Dutschke, April 11, 1968.  The same month, Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee.  In France the struggles were against authoritarianism, discrimination and the privileged, in favor of a democratic worker’s socialism.  A generation of leaders in their twenties inspired the world’s youth with their radicalism, nonconformism, autonomy and coherente: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Krivine, Jacques Sauvageot, Alain Geismar  etc.

The Cuban victory launched the principle that a revolution could begin through exemplary deeds of various guerrillas.  In 1967 the foco theory was put forth by the young French Régis Debray, an intellectual who hastily took on the guerrilla mantle, with little success.  If it couldn’t start in the countryside, it would start in the cities.  Starting in January of 1967, the activism of the Red Guards against a capitalist restoration (completely victorious by now), distinguished itself as Maoism, above all among young radical Catholics. Trotskyist organizations in France created revolutionary Marxist, anti-Stalinist, anti-bureaucratic propaganda, returning to the example of Ernest Mandel, referring to a global audience.

Weakened by the defeat of 1964, the PCB exploded into a constellation of radical groups.  Young people making up a large part of the Young University Catholics (JUC) and the Young Catholic Workers (JOC) joined the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle.  Then, Brazil had a large number of small revolutionary organizations – ALN (National Liberation Action), PCBR (Revolutionary Communist Party), AP (Popular Action), POLOP (Workers Politics), VAR-Palmares (Armed Revolutionary Vanguard – Palmares), POC (Workers Communist Party), Bolshevik-Trotskyite Fraction, MRT, etc¹. – some with hundreds of militants, generally between the ages of 17 and 25, usually with regional reach.  The young university students and those still in high school were partisans of a political, cultural and ideological struggle, with courage, generosity and impatience.  They took to the streets, chanting “More social spending, and less cannons,” ["Mais verbas e menos canhões"]; “One, two, many Vietnams” ["Um, dois, mil Vietnãs"], “The people united, will take down the dictatorship,” [“O povo unido derruba a ditadura”], “Long live the worker-student alliance” [“Viva a aliança operário-estudantil”]. Conscious that practice also requires theory, the young militants read tirelessly; history, economics, sociology above all: The Russian Revolution by Trotsky, The Bolivian Diary by Guevara, The Three Prophets by Isaac Deutscher, The Brazilian Revoloution by Caio Prado Júnior, The Red Book by Mao, the Poems Written From Prison by Ho Chi Minh.

In 1968, for the first time in Brazil, the group Brazilian Civilization published Karl Marx’s Capital.  Militants devoured the ins and outs of the thick books, page by page, without understanding very much. The smallest details of the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were studied and debated, although interest in Brazilian history was much greater, especially in the period prior to 1930, during which capitalism’s sociological categories were not entirely functional.  Outside the country, arguments took place and harsh debates developed.  The future was within grasp.  They embraced the clouds in an assault on heaven.

 
                                                                              Roda-viva

Culture belongs to the people

The creative explosion invaded the arts, especially music, theatre, film and national written work.  A radical aesthetic with indigenous tupiniquim roots assured glorious moments in national film production. Nélson Pereira dos Santos filmed the classic Vidas Secas (Dry Lives), in 1963, and Anselmo Duarte conquered Cannes with El pagador de promesas (The Payer of Promises) in 1962. Glauber Rocha, practically a child, directed Tierra en trance (Land in a Trance) in 1967, y finished in 1969 with El dragón de la maldad y el santo guerrero (The Evil Dragon and the Warrior Saint). Bertolt Brecht was a fixture in national theaters —Señora Carrar’s Rifles, Galileo Galilei; The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children. Brazilian playwrights produced Libertad, libertad y Arena conta Zumbi, (Liberty, Liberty and Sand According to Zumbi) in 1965, Arena conta Tiradentes, in 1967, and brought explosive works Roda Viva to stages in 1968, which became the object of attacks from right-wing paramilitary groups.

 
Arena conta Tiradentes                                                              

In a country with few readers and television still in its infancy, the cultural struggle showed its colors in the area of popular music.  Only partially unaware of the role they played, Roberto Carlos, Erasmo Carlos, Vanderléia and the group “Jovem Guarda” preached in favor of de-politicization and asked only “that you clothe me in this winter, that everything else goes to hell.”  The left totally dominated the musical field, with a selection that only accepted craques: Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Jair Rodrigues, Gilberto Gil, Geraldo Vandré, Vinícius de Morães, etc., and politicized struggle converted music festivals into practically pitched battles.

Through music the projects for the country’s future were debated.  In an iconoclastic time, without ceremonies, the public came out against the sacred monsters that had been constructed, sometims daring to cross the line, or what they thought the line might have been.  On March 28th, 1968, three days before the fourth anniversary of the coup, the military police for the Army and Air Force invaded the restaurant Calabouço, in Rio de Janeiro, firing at point-blank range against the students and killing the 18 year old Édison Luís de Lima Souto. The following day, a Friday, the former capital of the Republic was grought to a halt by 60,000 people saying farewell to the high school student.

The response was violent.  For several days, the city became an intensive battlefield.  On one side, students and regular people.  On the other, the police and the army.  University students, high school students and civilians were killed.  As they patrolled the streets of the city center, the soldiers huddled under building canopies to protect themselves from objects being hurled from the buildings.  A military policeman on horseback died when a heavy bucket full of wet cement, hurled from a building under construction, fell on his head.

A hundred thousand against the dictatorship

 The student agitation spread over the entirety of Brazil, with demonstrations in the largest cities.  On Wednesday, June 26th, the movement reached its peak.  In Rio de Janeiro, a hundred thousand people gathered in Cinelândia and marched toward the city center, in a demonstration permitted by the government.  50,000 people protested in the streets of Recife.  The large demonstrations had the desired effect.  Som days later, a commission from “The March of 100,000” in Río de Janeiro was received in Brasilia by the dictator Costa e Silva.  A representative from the UNE (National Student Union), a group that was illegalized immediately after the coup, was part of the delegation.  Nevertheless, the meeting went nowhere.

The worker’s movement led the union opposition to plan a wider strike for the end of the year, a key moment for various important reasons.  The explosion of demonstrations in June moved up the strike.  On July 16th, José Ibrahim, the 20 year old president of the Metalworkers Union in Osasco, linked to the militant organization VPR (Revolutionary Popular Vanguard) brought COBRASMA (Companhia Brasileira de Materiais Ferroviários) to a standstill, with an occupation of the company and the retention of two salaried workers, which was joined by ten thousand workers from other industries.  The movement demanded a wage hike of 35%, salary reviews every three months and other actions.

The military dictatorship responded violently.  Hundreds of workers were arrested and fired.  COBRASMA was invaded.  José Ibrahim was then arrested, and exiled to Chile. Zequinha Barreto², a workers’ supervisor at COBRASMA was arrested and tortured.  After five days, the strike was broken.  A second strike, at Contagem, Minas Gerais, in October, was easily suppressed.  The general strike planned for the end of the year would never take place.

 
Osasco

Demonstrations in the country began to decline.  On October 12th, the student movement, the backbone of the opposition, suffered a strong blow.  Underestimating the strength of the repression, the UNE leaders met at their 30th Congress in Ibiúna, a little city in the interior of São Paulo, along with thousands of delegates from all over the country.  The detention of participants allowed the arrest of leadership and the localization of student leaders from throughout the entire country.  The same day that the Congress at Ibiúna fell, the U.S. captain Charles Chandler, a CIA agent studying sociology in Brazil, was shot in front of his S São Paulo residence by a military commander of the VPR.

The two events reflected that orientation that the resistance would come to adopt in the following years.  Armed actions by groups of courageous young, socially isolated militants, tried to take the place of the mass movement in retreat.  On October 2nd in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the Mexican capital, between two and three hundred demonstrators were killed by the army and the police, ten days after the start of the Olympic Games, which were celebrated without the least remorse.

UNE Congress, Ibiúna, October, 1968

Between 1969 and 1973, especially, organizations of militaristic leftists, inspired by the Guevaran foco, launched spectacular actions – bank robberies, kidnappings of ambassadors, hijackings, executions of torturers, rural guerrilla actions, etc., without gaining the support of the urban and rural workers for immediate armed struggle, which was millions of light years away from their consciousness, necessities and capacity to organize at that time.

Isolated, the organizations would be decimated, one after the other, by repression, which extended as much to the militant rebels as to the popular classes.  In those years, the cars driven by the emerging middle class appeared in the streets with a bumper sticker, distributed by the repressors: “Brazil: love it or leave it,” modeled on the right-wing U.S. slogan, America love it or leave it.

Without handkerchief or I.D.

            On September 28th, 1968, at the Globo network’s Third International Festival in São Paulo, Caetano Veloso accompanied by Mutantes, presented the song “Prohibition is prohibited,” dressed in colored plastic clothing, with exotic necklaces, while a young North American dressed even more psychedelically, climbed up and shouted from the stage as though he were part of the choreography.  Geraldo Vandré’s final song, “Caminhando”- “Pra Não Dizer que Não Falei das Flores” [Walking – So that it can’t be said that I didn’t talk of flowers], which had become a kind of anthem for the resistance, was part of the competition. “Vem, vamos embora/ Que esperar não é saber/ Quem sabe faz a hora/ Não espera acontecer” [Come on, let’s demonstrate/ That to wait does not mean to know/ Who knows what time will tell/ Don’t wait for it to happen]. [Listen to the song] 

The unforgettable boos that were directed at Caetano Veloso were a faithful reflection of the public’s conscience, formed practically by the youth alone, ever more distant from the intelligentsia and the declining resistance. In 1972, Elis Regina would sing that he only wanted “a house in the country, of a reasonable size…”  The desertion of his companion Jair Rodrigues, [“The nigger is voiceless/and what he did was already plenty/but pay attention/when you give the nigger a chance/the entire city will sing.”]

In the years to follow, only a few artists would continue with feet of lead, playing with fire. Standing out among them was Chico Buarque, who made a good attack with a simple rock rhythm [you don’t care for it, but your daughter does,] or with classical and hard compositions such as “fado tropical” togeterh with Ruy Guerra in 1972-73, or with “Cálice” in 1975 together with Gilberto Gil. His “Apesar de você”, in 1970, became the anthem of the final struggle against the dictatorship and the hope for a public apology for the crimes committed under it, something which has not occurred even to the present day. [Today you are the one who directs/You’ve spoken, everything’s been said/There’s nothing more to say;” “You’re going to receive what you deserve by far/For each tear that has fallen/In my sea of shame.”]

The year that had started under the sign of public desire, ended under military despotism.  The resistance began its descent to hell.  On August 29, 1968, heavily armed police nand military troops invaded the University of Brasilia.  The pictures distributed by the press brought to mind the actions of Nazi occupation trooops.  Students were forced to march with their hands on their heads, and to throw themselves to the ground at gunpoint.   

The coup was announced days later.  An anodyne statement from the deputy Márcio Moreira Alves on September 2nd and 3rd, which asked the public to boycott the September Seventh military parade [commemoration of Brazilian independence,] served for the military to submit a petition lifting parliamentary immunity, in order to launch a process to restore its stained military honor.

On December 12, the National Congress rejected the humiliating petition. The following day, December 13th, 1968, the government finished off what democratic freedom had remained.  The case Márcio Moreira Alves was the excuse.  At the beginning of the year, in April, the commander of the João Paulo Burnier brigade had proposed that Parasar, the Air Force’s rescue service undertake a broad terrorist campaign, with individual executions and mass attacks, in order to cement the regime completely.

The plan was frustrated by the opposition of the flight captain Sérgio Ribeiro Miranda de Carvalho, punished and dismissed for his courage.  The Acto Institucional nº 5 closed Congress, the Legislative assemblies, suspended habeas-corpus, strengthened censorship, prepared the path for repression, imprisonment, torture and the elimination of the opposition.

The decline of the popular movement had roots far deeper than that of repression.  It had passed unnoticed to an opposition formed, in a large majority, by youth who had just awakened to a political life.  From the beginnings of 1968, after years of decline, the national economy grew.  The extreme exploitation of workers, the entry of international capital, the re-orientation of production toward exports, the opening of new markets, etc., provoked a revival in domestic production.  Unemployment fell, capital accumulation grew, national entrepreneurs backed by the regime were allowed to increase earnings substantially.

Now, for the business owners, talk of democracy and union rights was indecent.  To the contrary, they asked insistently for more repression, financed and even participated directly in torture, along with the police and military.  In the decades to follow, the national population would pay pathetically the social and economic bill for the Miracle.  In the middle of 1968, the economic expansion and the police repression acquired adherents from broad sectors of society, particularly the middle class, through an apathetic attitude and even lukewarm support for a military regime that promised to make their dreams come true.

 The fall of inflation, affordable housing and low-cost loans permitted large sectors of the middle class to achieve their dream of home ownership, their first car, their first trip to Europe.  In the following years, upon visiting the Old World, the children of the Miracle distanced themselves from the bothersome exiles and extradited compatriots they ran into by accident.

In 1969, in “Petty Bourgeois,” Martinho da Vila criticized the student movement, that was able to study at private universities financed by the dictatorship. [“They say that I’m bourgeois/Very privileged/But you’re the bourgeois.”]  Equally explicit were Dom and Ravel in 1970, with [“I love you/my Brazil./My heart is green, yellow, white, light blue./No-one guarantees the youth of Brazil.”] The clear public success of these songs showed which way the wind was blowing.

In a display of social progress, the middle classes normally closed their eyes to the extreme exploitation suffered by the working classes and headed the repression of the opposition.  The militants had been found like fish in water, in an insurrectionist population against the military regime, it was felt that now was not the hour to move.  In the universities they were pointed out, old friends crossed the street in order not to speak or be seen near a notorious subversive.

The economic expansion neutralized important workers sectors.  The low salaries and the rapid pace of production was seen almost as liberating for workers recently arrived from the country.  Days of 12 or more hours of work allowed the purchase of consumer goods that before were out of reach – television, refrigerator, etc.  Mainly, the expansion of the metal-mechanical industry created a young, relatively well paid workers’ aristocracy, which would harshly confront the regime at the end of the ‘70’s, when inflation’s return threatened their salaries.

Group of students guard the body of their colleague, Luís de Lima Souto, killed by police on March 28, 1968 in the Calabouço restaurant, in Río de Janeiro.

Repression at the mass at the Candelária church on the 7th day after the murder of Luís (Río de Janeiro, 04/04/68) Demonstration in São Paulo against the murder of the student Edson Luís, March, 1968

Dare to struggle, dare to win

The conservative modernization of the country would lead to a well-paid federal civil service, employed in the large cities, and in expansion.  The wild growth of private higher education diminished the social pressure provoked by the lack of space in the public universities.  The federal universities were reorganized, following U.S. models.  For the first time, a well-paid and well-financed academic bureaucracy was created, a large part of which would remain submerged for more than a decade in a tranquil and comfortable apoliticism disguised as scientific neutrality.

Socially isolated, insensitive to the new national context, the armed organizations were restricted, after 1969, to fighting in the darkness as Jacob Gorender, referred to it in his book by the same title, a small classic during those difficult years.  Caught between the confrontation between armed groups and forces of repression, the organizations that had not been carried away by the military adventre had severely cut their possibilities of intervention in context of the armed confrontation in which the country was living.

Incapable of presenting a political project that represented the needs of the broad masses, nor of proposing forms of struggle and organization that were at the level of the time, the left’s militants, severely isolated, fell in struggle, were incarcerated, exiled or tride to survive in the harsh context of the dictatorship.  In the hardest moments, haunted by the weight of the defeat, hundreds of militants remained in the country organizing the resistance as best they could.

The dictatorship of capital, while in 1968 appeared to stagger, was still able to maintain itself throughout the long years until 1985, when the workers and popular movement finally achieved a return to democracy, but without obtaining, at the moment of transition, the right to direct elections.  This fact led to a new defeat, replacing the military regime with a government that essentially maintained the institutional changes implemented during the twenty years of the dictatorship, which hurt the subordinate classes and favored the privileged.  In some ways, “everything changed, yet everything remained the same.”

Aggravated by the victory of the international neoliberal offensive at the end of the ‘80’s, forty years later, in 2008, the defeat of 1968 still weighs heavily on national life.  Those memorable days are remembered, in a condescending nostalgia, as a sign of many mistakes, countless deceptions, and to say that the fight should never have been waged, that the battle was already lost – as in the case of Zuenir Ventura, in the best-seller 1968: the year that never ended.

In 2008, the idea that without “daring to fight”, it’s not possible to win and there is no defeat worse than one suffered with fighting.  Those days of 1968, in Brazil and in the world are not simple historical facts to be told.  After forty years, 1968 continuse as the enigmatic sphinx that demands to be revealed in all its complexities.  As a powerful beacon, it continues to light, albeit from very far away, the horizon, the route to follow.

Bibliography

ABREU, João Batista de. As Manobras da Informação: análise da cobertura jornalística da luta armada no Brasil (1965-1979). Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2000.

ALMEIDA JR., Antônio Mendes de. Movimento Estudantil no Brasil. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1981. (Tudo É História, 23.)

ALVES, Márcio Moreira. 68 Mudou o Mundo: a explosão dos sonhos e a guinada conservadora num ano que valeu por décadas. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1993

GIANOTTI, Vito. História das lutas dos trabalhadores no Brasil, Mauad 2007

GORENDER, Jacob. Combate nas trevas: A esquerda brasileira. Das ilusões perdidas à luta armada. São Paulo: Ática, 1987

MARTINS FILHO, J.R. A rebelião estudantil: México, França e Brasil. Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 1996.

NÓVOA, Cristiane, NÓVOA, Jorge. Carlos Marighela: o homem por trás do mito. São Paulo: UNESP, 1999.

PONGE, Robert. [Org.] 1968: o ano das muitas primaveras. Porto Alegre: SMCPOA, 1998.

SANFELICE, José Luís. Movimento estudantil: A UNE na Resistência ao Golpe de 64. São Paulo: Cortez, 1986.

SANTOS, N.História da UNE: Depoimentos de Ex-Dirigentes. São Paulo:, Livramento, 1980.

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Editor’s Notes

1 – After the military coup of 1964, the parties were dissolved and after 1965, by decree of the regime, only two parties were allowed to exist : the National Renewal Alliance (Arena) and the “moderate” Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) which was a front for illegal parties.  Outside the institutionalized field, various groups resisted and sought to fight the dictatorship through urban or rural guerrilla warfare.  Among them, the main ones were : The Communist Party of Brazil (PcdoBP, one of the largest dissident factions of the PCB, created in 1962 ; the National Liberation Alliance (ALN) a splinter of the PCB which came forwarde in 1967 ; the Briazilian Revolutionary Communist Party (PCBR), another splinter faction of the PCB, formed in 1968 ; the Revolutionary October 8th Movement (MR-8) ; the Revolutionary Popular Vanguard (VPR), that put its emphasis on immediate revolutionary action ; Popular Action (AP), born in 1961 with its separation from the Young University Catholics (JUC), which held more sway in the student movement ; the Revolutionary Marxist Workers Organization-Worker’s Politics (Polop), founded in 1961 ; and the trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party (Port), founded in 1953.

2 – In July 1968 came the historic strike by the workers of Osasco, which was violently repressed by the police.  Zequinha Barreto, who worked at COBRASMA, was one of the movement’s main leaders. Nevertheless, everone was released several days later, except for Zequinha, who remained imprisoned 98 days, having been tortured barbarically.  Once free, he returned to the military wing of the VPR and went to live in São Paulo, Río de Janeiro y Salvador. In 1970, he became a member of MR-8.  He proposed that the group do its political work together with the campesinos in his home territory of Buruti Cristalino, with a view to launching the rural guerrilla struggle.  His brothers Otoniel and Olderico, as well as Luís António Santa Bárbara, João Lopes Salgado and Capitán Carlos Lamarca joined him. Zequinha Barreto was killed along with Comandante Carlos Lamarca, riddled with bullets by agents of the military dictatorship, on September 17, 1971 in Sertão da Bahia. He was only 26 years old. (Source: Instituto Zequinha Barreto)

Detention (above, 1968) and murder (below, 1971) of Zequinha Barreto, metallurgist and guerrilla

Source: http://www.viapolitica.com.br/artigo_view.php?id_artigo=56 and http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=4817&lg=po

Photos : Acervo Iconographia & Google

Original article published on March 8, 2008

About the author

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity and editor of the blog http://machetera.wordpress.com/. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, translator and reviser are cited.

URL of this article on Tlaxcala: http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=5014&lg=en