First actions Despite being advocated by a very small group within the Brazilian political left, guerrilla warfare didn't break out until 1964. The purpose of the armed struggle was not the restoration of the pre-coup system, but the realization of a socialist revolution in Brazil. The left-wing nationalist groups, composed mainly of former low-ranking military officers who had been dismissed in 1964 and gathered under the leadership of
Leonel Brizola, were the first to launch an armed struggle. They organized the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and sent some of its members to establish contacts with Brizola, who was coordinating the opposition from his exile in Uruguay. Although he agreed with the guerrilla plan, he insisted on the idea of an insurrection in Rio Grande do Sul, convincing the emissaries of the ex-servicemen, who began to conspire for the insurrection and established links with the military. Organizations such as POLOP and AP also participated in the insurrectionary plan, directly or indirectly. In April 1966, the army discovered connections to the project within the barracks, arrested officers and put an end to the conspiratorial plot. Another uprising, supposedly linked to Brizola's plan, was the
Três Passos Guerrilla movement. In March 1965, Colonel
Jefferson Cardim, in command of 22 men, crossed Rio Grande do Sul and
Santa Catarina to
Paraná to find the rebels, which didn't happen. The group was dispersed on March 27, after an exchange of fire with an army troop. Once the insurrectionary attempts had failed, the nationalists and their former subordinates started the guerrilla project. They intended to launch five combat fronts: one on the border between Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, in the
Caparaó mountain range, which would have two commands at different points, in
Mato Grosso, Rio de Janeiro, on the border between Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina and in the south of
Maranhão. According to the plan, Brizola would enter Brazil through Rio Grande do Sul with the outbreak of five guerrilla fronts. Due to different problems, only the Caparaó mountain front was prepared, and with a single command instead of the two planned. Groups of MNR militants, almost exclusively ex-subalterns from the
Armed Forces, arrived in the region at the end of 1966 and formed a unit of 14 members led by Amadeu Felipe da Luz Ferreira. Between March and April 1967, the
Caparaó Guerrilla movement ended without a shot being fired, with its members arrested by a police patrol from Minas Gerais. According to archives of the
Superior Military Court revealed after re-democratization, during this period, an extreme right-wing group linked to members of the armed forces began to carry out false flag operations with the aim of manipulating public opinion and justifying the intensification of authoritarianism and repression by the dictatorial regime. The most impactful act related to the Brazilian armed struggle took place on July 25, 1966: a bomb was placed at
Guararapes airport in
Recife, aimed at the then Minister of War and presidential candidate,
Artur da Costa e Silva. The bomb killed two people and injured more than ten, but missed its target. The attack, attributed to the PCBR at the time, was allegedly the work of Alípio de Freitas, a member of the AP, who was in Recife in mid-1966 when Costa e Silva's visit was announced, but denied any involvement in the case even after the amnesty. Admiral Nelson Gomes Fernandes and journalist Edson Régis de Carvalho died in the attack. The outcome of the action, which became known as the Guararapes Airport Attack, was the immediate suspension by the AP leadership of any involvement by the organization in acts of urban guerrilla warfare. Converted to Maoism, the AP began to defend guerrilla warfare in the countryside and stopped conducting actions in the cities. In December 1967, the first robbery by an armed group was carried out by the ALN, when they intercepted a car carrying money in the
Santo Amaro neighborhood. In command of the action, Marighella collected the money from the robbery. Other thefts of bank branches and paying cars were committed, as well as the seizure of explosives used in construction. The heists were notable for their numbers and the robbers'
modus operandi. Until 1967, bank robberies rarely exceeded two a year in São Paulo and the criminals robbed the tellers and the customers, while the guerrillas targeted the bank vaults. Initially, the rebels didn't identify themselves in order to trick the police into thinking they were dealing with common criminals and the organizations could accumulate more firepower. On November 13, 1968, a paying car belonging to the Guanabara State Pension Institute (
Instituto de Previdência do Estado do Rio de Janeiro - IPEG) was intercepted by three armed men, who took
NCr$ 120,000. In the afternoon, a sergeant recognized the car in which the guerrillas had carried out the robbery at a gas station. Warned by the sergeant, the police arrested the driver, who underwent torture and provided information about the perpetrators, including the name of Marighella. From then on, newspapers and magazines published long articles about him. Before that, the ALN had already claimed a bomb attack in March 1968 on the US Consulate in São Paulo, revealing the existence of an armed struggle project to overthrow the regime. By the end of 1968, other left-wing organizations had conducted armed actions. The Red Wing had organized three robberies, confiscated dynamite from a quarry and stole printing machines from the Kelmaq store in order to set up a clandestine workshop. On the night of July 1, 1968, COLINA murdered Edward Ernest Tito Otto Maximilian von Westernhagen, a major in the West German Army who had been mistaken for
Gary Prado Salmón, one of
Che Guevara's executioners. The most daring actions of the period were perpetrated by the VPR, including the theft of dynamite and
FAL rifles from the guard at the Military Hospital in
Cambuci on June 22; the attack on the 2nd Army Division's headquarters on June 26, which resulted in the death of Mário Kozel Filho; the murder of US Captain
Charles Rodney Chandler, a
Vietnam War veteran, on October 12; and the theft of a large stock of weapons from the Diana Store, in downtown São Paulo, on December 11.
Mass struggles, collapse of the regime and immersion in the armed struggle When the military dictatorship was established in 1964, it attempted to purge political, trade union and military leaders who were committed to labour reformism, as well as cutting any organizational ties between these leaders and social movements. With the support of the urban middle classes and liberal civil sectors, anchored in the press and conservative parties,
Castelo Branco's government acted to reorient the Brazilian economy and institutionalize the authoritarian regime. There was a consensus among the military leadership and the
technocracy that the state and the economy needed to be modernized along capitalist lines in order to facilitate the entry of foreign capital. Castelo Branco's government also aimed to control inflation and restore Brazil's investment capacity. To achieve this, it applied a recessionary formula, controlling public spending and squeezing wages. Despite political support, the measures adopted by Castelo Branco's economic team did not have the desired effects. With the economy in crisis, part of the middle class and liberal sectors that had initially supported the coup soon became disillusioned with the new government. After Institutional Act Number Two (AI-2), which consolidated the authoritarian and dictatorial nature of the regime, several political and social segments expanded the resistance movement. The main pre-coup political leaders (
Carlos Lacerda,
João Goulart and
Juscelino Kubitschek) organized the Broad Front (
Frente Ampla), the student movement reached the streets, attracted attention and earned sympathy from the liberal press and the Congress assembled several
Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPIs), such as the one into the denationalization of land in the
Amazon and the agreement between
Time-Life and
Rede Globo. Repression and recession made the government unpopular, especially in the big urban centers. The student movement represented the most radicalized part of the opposition group. Since 1966, the students had held public protests against the dictatorship, clashing with the police and campaigning for a
null vote. It assumed the task of criticizing the regime and taking the lead in the struggle for social change. In 1968, the death of high school student
Edson Luís, shot by the police during a demonstration in Rio de Janeiro, sparked a series of protests across Brazil. More than 60,000 people attended his funeral and the seventh-day mass became a major conflict between students and the police. From the second half of 1968 onwards, influenced by the student uprisings in France in
May 1968, the protests reached their peak in the
March of the One Hundred Thousand (
Passeata dos Cem Mil), on June 26, which was widely supported by society, artists and intellectuals. During the demonstrations, the students managed to articulate the struggle for demands with the political fight, spreading slogans against the dictatorship based on specific student issues, such as the university reforms sought by the government. However, there were differences between the several branches of the student movement. While the AP and the PCdoB advocated strengthening the mass protests against the dictatorship, the groups represented by the university dissidents of the PCB were in favour of organizing an armed conflict. The clash between the various political orientations of the student movement marked the XXX UNE Congress, held clandestinely on a site in
Ibiúna, in the interior of São Paulo, in October 1968. The event ended with the arrest of 920 students, including leaders such as Luís Travassos and
José Dirceu. The repression, which had intensified in August with the military occupation of the
University of Brasilia (UnB), led some students to see the armed struggle as an alternative to opposing the regime, as the large street demonstrations waned. Also in 1968, the workers' movement returned to the political and social scene. Despite being harshly repressed and controlled from the beginning of the coup, the workers managed to regroup around new, younger and more radicalized leaders. The wage squeeze promoted by the regime began to be felt by the workers and, in April, 15,000 metalworkers went on strike for better salaries in
Contagem, in the interior of Minas Gerais. In July, metalworkers in
Osasco staged a radical strike and occupied the COBRASMA factory. The union was intervened and the army used repressive force to clear the factory. Both strikes were organized and led by groups of the revolutionary left, which branched out in the companies and dominated the metalworkers' unions. The actions of the left-wing organizations were centralized in the trade union apparatus, through which they prepared and led the strikes. Militants from AP, Corrente and COLINA played an important role in organizing the Contagem strike, while VPR militants were linked to the strike agitations in Osasco. Besides the radicalization of students and workers, fed by the growing oppositionism of the middle class and the leftist preaching of artists and intellectuals, opposition politicians started pressuring the regime. In September, deputy
Márcio Moreira Alves called the army a "torturers' cave" and recommended a
boycott of the
Independence Day military parades. The army claimed to be offended, and the government asked for Moreira Alves to leave to be prosecuted. On December 12, the
Chamber of Deputies denied the request by 216 votes to 141. The decision was followed by the proclamation of Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5), which put the National Congress and the State Legislatures into recess, reopened restrictions on political rights and abolished
habeas corpus for those who violated the
National Security Law. Censorship became tougher and imposed total control over the press, opposition publications stopped circulating and artists were arrested and forced to leave the country. Non-armed organizations, such as the Communist Dissidence of Guanabara (DI-GB, later MR-8) and the PCBR, began organizing along these lines. The DI-GB created a special working group structured for urban guerrilla actions and began to carry out bank robberies and arms thefts. From the Pernambuco Regional Committee, the PCBR launched a number of actions in the
Northeast, such as a robbery of the Banco da Lavoura in
João Pessoa in May 1969, assaults on bank branches and gas stations in Recife and the destruction of a stage set up for the authorities at the Independence Day parade. The initiatives of the northeastern militants prompted activists in Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara, who quickly organized similar actions. In 1969, two actions delayed and caused an attack on the island. The first was the invasion of the
Rádio Nacional transmission station in Piraporinha on the morning of August 15 by twelve ALN guerrillas. They took control of the employees and broadcast a revolutionary manifesto read by Marighella. The
Diário da Noite newspaper in São Paulo published the full text, which led to the arrest of the editor-in-chief, Hermínio Sacchetta, and the opening of an investigation. On September 4, a joint command formed by ALN and DI-GB kidnapped the American ambassador
Charles Burke Elbrick and demanded the release of fifteen political prisoners with safe transfer abroad, as well as the dissemination of a manifesto in newspapers and radio and television stations throughout Brazil. The military accepted the proposal, releasing political prisoners and providing flights to Mexico. The joint manifesto was disseminated by major newspapers and radio and television stations. After this action, DI-GB adopted the acronym 8 October Revolutionary Movement (MR-8), which had previously been used by University Dissidence of Niterói, dismantled by the repression in April. The guerrilla actions aimed to raise funds to cover the clandestine structure of the organizations and to spread revolutionary propaganda to the masses. However, the long-term strategic plan was to launch rural guerrilla warfare, which was considered of fundamental importance in the fight against the dictatorship. In 1969, the ALN was preparing to transfer guerrillas from São Paulo to the southern region of Pará, which would be the convergence point for guerrillas simultaneously departing from rural areas in northern Paraná,
Dourados,
Chapada Diamantina, and
Guapiaçu. Each guerrilla group would occupy villages and towns, burn registries, attack large estates, and distribute food to the poor population. After splitting from VAR-Palmares, VPR established a guerrilla training camp in Ribeira Valley. In order to prepare future bases for the armed struggle in rural areas, the trained guerrillas were then sent to farms already purchased in Maranhão and Rio Grande do Sul. VAR also established a guerrilla training camp on a farm purchased in
Pará, which was soon dismantled. The PCBR also acquired two sites in the interior of Paraná. They sent some militants to the region to organize local agricultural and peasant workers.
Repression and dismantling of the urban guerrillas The urban armed actions, labeled as terrorism by the government and the mainstream media, caught the repressive apparatus of the state off guard. Until the end of the 1960s, state police forces, through the
Departments of Political and Social Order (
Departamentos de Ordem Política e Social - DOPS), were responsible for political repression operations. There was no national, militarized, and integrated system of police repression. The intelligence services of the Armed Forces were also highly fragmented, with functions divided among the Navy Information Center (
Centro de Informações da Marinha - CENIMAR), Air Force Information Center (
Centro de Informações da Aeronáutica - CISA), and Army Information Center (
Centro de Informações do Exército - CIE). The overlap of agencies and commands in the fight against urban guerrilla warfare, the lack of a nationally structured Federal Police and the inefficiency of DOPS hindered the fight against armed struggle. Fighting guerrillas required the existence of a centralized repressive apparatus. On June 29, 1969, Operation Bandeirantes (OBAN), a joint initiative of General José Canavarro Pereira, commander of the 2nd Army Division, and the São Paulo State Public Security Secretariat, was founded in São Paulo. OBAN's staff was composed of officers and subordinates from the Armed Forces and the São Paulo Public Force, as well as delegates, investigators and bureaucrats linked to the Secretariat of Security. Its structure was financed by large Brazilian and multinational companies. Installed on the premises of the 36th Police District next to the Army Police Barracks in Rio de Janeiro, the site became one of the most famous torture centers in Brazil. Civil police chief
Sérgio Paranhos Fleury occupied a prominent position in OBAN's structure, given the military's inexperience in proper police work, giving up systematic torture and extrajudicial executions during repressive activities. Torture was used systematically to dismantle revolutionary organizations. The military often used fabricated incidents and escapes to justify deaths under torture. From 1971 onwards, the repressive system developed a complex disappearance technique. The bodies of dead militants were incinerated, dismembered or buried as indigents or with changed names. A counter-information apparatus was organized to throw family members off the track. Several torture teams also maintained clandestine centers in order to circumvent the precarious control of the commanders and act without being accountable to the official repression system. In 1969, in direct response to the guerrilla groups, the regime proclaimed Institutional Acts 13 and 14, which instituted banishment and the death penalty, and reformulated the National Security Law, typifying new crimes and creating harsher penalties. The repressive procedures involved a combination of military repression (interrogations based on torture and eventual summary executions) and legal procedures to impute guilt under the National Security Law. When a militant was arrested in police operations, he was not immediately placed under the tutelage of the judicial authority. Normally, the team that captured the militant was not the same team that interrogated him. These operations occurred without search or arrest warrants and during ambushes that resembled kidnappings. The heads of the interrogators were senior officers, while the heads of the captors were usually lower-ranking military officers. The interrogations were monitored, recorded and registered. If the prisoner survived, he was handed over to the police authorities for an investigation, which was followed by a trial by the military justice system. As they engaged in armed struggle, left-wing organizations faced increasingly coordinated, equipped and informed repression, which brought a series of difficulties for their militants. Robberies of bank branches and paying cars brought in large sums of money, but quickly ran out to support the clandestine structure. Houses were rented to set up apparatuses to serve as homes for militants or as meeting places and weapons depots. The amount of money raised in robberies also decreased, as bank branches began to leave the bare minimum in their vaults and some actions yielded less than the cost of preparing and carrying them out. After a while, total commitment to the armed struggle alienated militants and sympathizers due to a lack of personal skills or ideological disposition. Especially from the end of 1969, the effects of the recovery of the national economy with the start of the
Brazilian miracle became more clearly felt, which made it even more difficult to recruit militants willing to fight against a dictatorship that generated development and harshly repressed its opponents. After the kidnapping of Charles Burke Elbrick, the repressive crisis caused severe casualties for the armed struggle. A series of arrests of militants led to the disappearance of important leaders of the revolutionary organizations. On November 4, 1969, Marighella was assassinated in an ambush and several contacts he had established were lost, as well as the resources for different actions that were supposed to be used in the preparation of rural guerrilla warfare. In early 1970, leaders of the MR-8, PCBR and VAR were also hit by repression. The Red Wing noticed that the money obtained from bank robberies did not compensate for the expenses and other problems they caused and proposed a retreat from the armed struggle and a rapprochement with the masses. The militants who were unhappy with the new approach formed the Tiradentes Revolutionary Movement (MRT) in São Paulo and the Marxist Revolutionary Movement (MRM) in Minas Gerais. The groups that were not completely disbanded, reorganized. The PCBR established a new national leadership and launched actions in the Northeast. The MR-8 also reconstituted its national leadership and benefited from the incorporation of a group of high school students from Bahia led by Sérgio Landulfo Furtado and the entry of José Campos Barreto, or Zequinha, who was involved in the strike agitations in Osasco and had been active in the VPR and VAR. The VPR began guerrilla training in the Ribeira Valley under the leadership of Carlos Lamarca. After Marighella's death, the ALN was led by Joaquim Câmara Ferreira, who, seeking the unity of the revolutionary left, contacted other organizations to carry out armed actions together. Between the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, the ALN, MR-8, MRT and VPR carried out some joint actions, including kidnapping diplomats and successful robberies of paying cars and bank branches. The last major actions carried out by the armed groups were the kidnappings of diplomats for the release of political prisoners. On March 12, the VPR, MRT and Democratic Resistance (
Resistência Democrática - REDE) mobilized in an action to free Shizuo Ozawa, known as Mário Japa, a member of the VPR's Regional Coordination who knew the organization's guerrilla training camp and could reveal Lamarca's whereabouts. To free him, the group kidnapped Nobuo Okushi, the Japanese consul in São Paulo. The rescue list included only five names, including that of Mário Japa. The
Médici government accepted the guerrillas' demands, releasing the political prisoners and sending them to Mexico. In April, the military discovered the location of the VPR's guerrilla training camp and Lamarca's whereabouts; on the 21st, the siege of the guerrillas in the Ribeira Valley began. The rebels, successful in escaping the military's encirclement, winning battles and taking prisoners, reached the city of São Paulo on the night of the 31st. After his escape, Lamarca spent five months sheltering in an apparatus provided by Joaquim Alencar de Seixas, member of the MRT. On July 11, the ALN and VPR captured the German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben. During the action, security guard Irlando de Souza Régis was shot and lost his life. The
Médici government quickly arranged for the publication of the revolutionaries' manifesto in the mainstream press and the release of forty political prisoners, who were sent to Algeria. The last kidnapping was conducted by the VPR. On September 7, in an action commanded directly by Lamarca, the group kidnapped Swiss ambassador Giovanni Enrico Bucher and demanded the release of seventy political prisoners. On this occasion, the Médici government rejected several names from the original list, especially those arrested on charges or convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment and who had taken part in the previous kidnappings. The unanticipated attitude forced the guerrillas to propose substitute names and some were also rejected. The negotiations lasted forty days and were conducted through secretive channels, while the police undertook a major investigation to locate Lamarca and the other guerrillas who were guarding Ambassador Bucher. In the end, an agreement was reached on the seventy political prisoners to be released, who were sent to Chile in exchange for Bucher's freedom. After the kidnapping of Enrico Bucher, the armed organizations faced increasingly serious difficulties. In 1971, almost all the armed organizations were dismantled by the repression and their leaders arrested or killed. The ALN still managed to sustain the guerrilla war until 1973, going through splits that gave rise to the Popular Liberation Movement (
Movimento de Libertação Popular - MOLIPO) and the
Leninist Tendency (
Tendência Leninista - TL). With the organizations shattered, militants imprisoned, killed, exiled or disappeared, and no prospect of recruiting new cadres, armed actions became a desperate means of survival for the militants and organizations still engaged in guerrilla warfare. With the increasing social marginalization of the armed groups in the early 1970s, the militants were faced with a dilemma between abandoning their organizations and being branded "traitors" or remaining in the armed struggle and facing almost fatal imprisonment or death. In March 1974, when General
Ernesto Geisel assumed the Presidency of the Republic, the urban guerrillas had already been extinguished at the cost of hundreds of prisoners, deaths, exiles and disappearances. The guerrillas were led by a military commission, which coordinated three detachments, each with its own commander and with around 21 members. Each section was subdivided into three groups of militants, including a chief and deputy chief for each group. The disciplinary and security rules were strict and the guerrillas only knew their comrades from their own detachment, ignoring the activities of the others. The preparation of the guerrillas was unknown to the population of Araguaia. The rebels settled as ordinary residents, who tried to be helpful and supportive of their neighbors. The low level of social conflict and the scant police presence facilitated the work of the militants, who integrated into the daily lives of the other rural workers without developing political activities. Occasionally, the militants carried out some assistance activities, such as medical and health care for the local residents. The military actions of the insurgents, who had few old weapons, were scarce and defensive. The guerrillas' political work only began at the end of 1972, after the defeat of the army's second campaign. They founded several sections of the Union for Freedom and People's Rights (
União pela Liberdade e pelos Direitos do Povo - ULDP), which developed a moderate program proposing democratic social reforms to solve the problems faced by the local population. However, the guerrillas lacked sufficient time to deepen their political work, although they did achieve some popular participation in the ULDP and a few adherents to the movement.
External support Some guerrilla groups received external support from China and Cuba. Before the coup, on March 29, 1964, ten PCdoB militants went to China for a political-military course. Among them were Osvaldo Orlando da Costa, João Carlos Haas Sobrinho, André Grabois, José Humberto Bronca and Paulo Mendes Rodrigues, who in 1967 settled on the banks of the Araguaia River to start rural guerrilla warfare. After abandoning
Foquismo and joining Maoism in 1967, the AP also had militants undergoing political-military training in China. Cuba supported the Brazilians at three different moments. The first was before the military coup, when Francisco Julião's Peasant Leagues received financial support from Cuba. After the dictatorship was established and the Leagues disbanded, Cuban support was transferred to the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR). After the dismantling of the Caparaó guerrillas, Cuban support shifted to the ANL. From 1967 onwards, Carlos Marighella became the main name of the Brazilian revolution for the Cubans. Until the beginning of 1970, Cuba trained guerrillas not only from the ALN, but also from the VPR and the MR-8, although it considered Marighella's organization to be the most suitable for unleashing the armed struggle in Brazil. For right-wing groups and the military, external support for the guerrillas was proof of international communism's interference in the direction of Brazil's internal politics. For the left-wing organizations aligned with
Foquismo and Maoism, Cuban or Chinese support represented legitimacy and status. == Amnesty, reparations and justice ==