Luís Carlos Prestes
Encyclopedia
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
opposition to the dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
of Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
.
Known as the "Knight of Hope" - title of a biography written by Jorge Amado
Jorge Amado
Jorge Leal Amado de Faria was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 49 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands in 1978...
- Prestes helped organize the failed tenente rebellion of 1922, a revolt by the largely middle class officer corps and poor conscripted servicemen against the agrarian oligarchies
Oligarchy
Oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with an elite class distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, commercial, and/or military legitimacy...
that dominated Brazil's Old Republic (1889–1930). As he was sick with typhoid fever, he was not able to fight on the day of the rebellion. From 1924 Prestes was one of the leaders of the insurrectionary movement, leading the Coluna Prestes
Coluna Prestes
The Coluna Prestes was a social rebel movement between 1925 an 1927 with links to tenentismo, of the República Velha, in Brazil.-External links:* , sítio da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.* PRESTES, Anita Leocádia....
Prestes' column on a 25000 km (15,534 mi) march through the rural Brazilian countryside, aiming not to defeat the enemy forces of the Federal government, but keep the column in being and continue to threaten the enemy.
The tenente revolt heralded the end of the politics of coffee and milk
Café com leite
Café com leite was a term that referred to the domination of Brazilian politics under the Old Republic by the landed gentries of São Paulo and Minas Gerais...
and coronelism
Coronelismo
Coronelismo was the system of machine politics in Brazil under the Old Republic . Known also as the "rule of the coronels", the term referred to the classic boss system under which the control of patronage was centralized in the hands of a locally dominant oligarch known as a coronel, particularly...
and the beginning of social reforms. Years later, in 1930 the Revolution of 1930 would bring down the Old Republic. Joined by many moderate tenentes, but not Prestes, the Revolution of 1930 installed Getúlio Vargas as provisional president. Although the tenentes sympathized with him, Vargas was a far more conservative figure. As the tenentes wanted Prestes to join Vargas, Prestes decided to meet him in Porto Alegre and explained his idea of socialist revolution for around two hours. Vargas was highly impressed by him, and even donated 800 contos de réis, around 400,000 USD, but Prestes viewed Vargas as the leader of a bourgeois revolution, and decided to donate most of the money to the Latin American branch of the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
, which financed the group for a few years. Another part of the money was given to the tenente Siqueira Campos, who died in a plane crash while flying from Argentina to Brazil. His body was discovered three days later, but the money was never found.
As Getúlio Vargas was gaining power in Brazil, Prestes turned to Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
while in exile in Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
. In the 1930s he went on to lead the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL), a left-wing popular front launched in 1935 of socialists, communists, and other progressives led by the Communist Party
Brazilian Communist Party
Brazilian Communist Party is the oldest political party still active in Brazil, founded in 1922, and one of the only Brazilian parties with a Stalinist orientation...
in opposition to Vargas' crackdown against organized labor.
Getúlio Vargas, then Brazil's president, would thus look to a form of authoritarianism that could suppress his enemies on the left, led by Prestes, through violence and state terror to survive with his coalition intact during the agitated years after 1934. Thus, Vargas, now allied with all the agrarian oligarchies, with an established network of economic and political power, and the Integralists (a fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
movement with a mass, popular support-base in urban Brazil), forced the Brazilian Congress to respond to the growth of the Communist movement.
Congress branded all leftist opposition as "subversive" under a March 1935 National Security Act that allowed the President to ban the ANL, which was forced, reluctantly, to begin an armed insurrection in November. The authoritarian regime, like its fascist counterparts in Europe, responded by imprisoning and torturing Prestes and violently crushing the Communist movement through state terror. By mid-1935 Brazilian politics were drastically destabilized. In July 1935 the government moved against the ANL, with troops raiding offices, confiscating propaganda, seizing records, and jailing leaders. Vested with its new emergency powers, the federal government imposed a crackdown on the entire left with arrests, torture, and summary trials.
Vargas, seeking to co-opt Brazil's fascist movement/paramilitary known as Integralism, led by Plínio Salgado
Plínio Salgado
Plínio Salgado was a Brazilian politician, writer, journalist, and theologian. He founded and led the Brazilian Integralist Action, a far-right political party inspired on the Italian Fascist movement....
, tolerated a tide of anti-Semitism, and may have targeted Prestes' wife to appease his new supporters. Vargas deported the pregnant, German-Jewish wife of Luís Carlos Prestes, Olga Benario, to Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, where she would die in a concentration camp. According to Prestes, he was a virgin until he met Olga Benario.
After Vargas started abandoning fascist-style autocracy in 1945 following his rapprochement with the World War II Allies in 1943, political prisoners were released, including Luís Carlos Prestes. Prestes gave an astute assessment of Vargas' politics, commenting, "Getúlio is very flexible. When it was fashionable to be a fascist, he was a fascist. Now that it is fashionable to be democratic, he will be a democrat." Many members of the Brazilian Communist Party
Brazilian Communist Party
Brazilian Communist Party is the oldest political party still active in Brazil, founded in 1922, and one of the only Brazilian parties with a Stalinist orientation...
were disgusted by Prestes and decided to leave the party.
And Prestes was right. Vargas astutely responded to the newly liberal sentiments of a middle class that was no longer fearful of disorder and proletarian discontent by moving away from fascist repression, promising "a new postwar era of liberty" that included amnesty for political prisoners, presidential elections, and the legalization of opposition parties, including the more moderate and weaker Communist Party. When asked how he could give his support to the man who deported his wife to her death, he answered by saying that the good of the common man was above personal disputes.
In elections of December 2, 1945, Prestes had the highest number of votes in the elections for the Senate for the Federal District.
In 1945 Vargas was ousted by the hard-right in the military partly because of these moves and the Communist movement was persecuted once again. The Party, however, would make another comeback following Brazil's move toward democratization in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Under the presidency of João Goulart
João Goulart
João Belchior Marques Goulart was a Brazilian politician and the 24th President of Brazil until a military coup d'état deposed him on April 1, 1964. He is considered to have been the last left-wing President of the country until Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003.-Name:João Goulart is...
(1961–64), a protégé of Getúlio Vargas and another gaúcho
Gaucho
Gaucho is a term commonly used to describe residents of the South American pampas, chacos, or Patagonian grasslands, found principally in parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Chile, and Southern Brazil...
from Rio Grande do Sul
Rio Grande do Sul
Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost state in Brazil, and the state with the fifth highest Human Development Index in the country. In this state is located the southernmost city in the country, Chuí, on the border with Uruguay. In the region of Bento Gonçalves and Caxias do Sul, the largest wine...
, the closeness of the government to the historically disenfranchised working class and peasantry and even to the Communist Party under none other than Luís Carlos Prestes was equally remarkable. Interestingly enough, Goulart appeared to have been co-opting the Communist movement in a manner reminiscent of Vargas' co-option of the Integralists shortly, and not coincidentally, before his ouster by reactionary forces. Once again, Prestes would be imprisoned and the Communist movement would be persecuted.
The experience, however, of the failed tenente rebellion and Vargas' suppression of the Communist movement left Prestes and some of his comrades sceptical of armed conflict for the rest of his life. His well-cultivated scepticism would later help precipitate the permanent schism between hard-line Maoists and orthodox Marxist-Leninists in the Brazilian Communist Party in the early 1960s. Prestes went on to lead the pro-Soviet faction of the party known as the Brazilian Communist Party
Brazilian Communist Party
Brazilian Communist Party is the oldest political party still active in Brazil, founded in 1922, and one of the only Brazilian parties with a Stalinist orientation...
or PCB while the Maoists formed the Communist Party of Brazil
Communist Party of Brazil
The Communist Party of Brazil is a political party in Brazil. It has national reach and deep penetration in the trade union and students movements. PCdoB dispute with the Brazilian Communist Party the title of "oldest political party in Brazil"...
PCdoB. While the Maoists went underground and engaged in urban combat against the military dictatorship
Military dictatorship
A military dictatorship is a form of government where in the political power resides with the military. It is similar but not identical to a stratocracy, a state ruled directly by the military....
after 1964, Prestes' faction would not do so.
In 1970, Prestes went to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
with his second wife and children, and only returned to Brazil after the amnesty for political offenders ten years later.
After his return to Brazil Prestes later abandoned the PCB without renouncing Marxism. He became a supporter of the Democratic Labour Party (Brazil)
Democratic Labour Party (Brazil)
The Democratic Labour Party is a populist, democratic socialist political party of Brazil. It was founded in 1979 by left-wing leader Leonel Brizola as an attempt to reorganize the Brazilian leftist forces during the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship...
and took part in Leonel Brizola
Leonel Brizola
Leonel de Moura Brizola was a Brazilian politician. Launched in politics by Getúlio Vargas, Brizola was the only politician to serve as governor of two different states in the whole history of Brazil. In 1959 he was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul, and in 1982 and 1990 he was elected...
's presidential campaign in 1989. He died in 1990.
See also
- João GoulartJoão GoulartJoão Belchior Marques Goulart was a Brazilian politician and the 24th President of Brazil until a military coup d'état deposed him on April 1, 1964. He is considered to have been the last left-wing President of the country until Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003.-Name:João Goulart is...
- Getulio VargasGetúlio VargasGetúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
- Brazilian Communist PartyBrazilian Communist PartyBrazilian Communist Party is the oldest political party still active in Brazil, founded in 1922, and one of the only Brazilian parties with a Stalinist orientation...
- Tenente revolts
External links
- A brief overview of the Prestes Column in Brazil 1924-1927
- Prestes in Timeline The most important dates of his career.
- Ciclo revolucionário brasileiro: do Tenentismo ao Estado Novo (in Portuguese)
- O Velho - A História de Luiz Carlos Prestes (Documentary about the life of Luís Carlos Prestes)