Salvador, 1911 – São Paulo (Brasil), 1969
By Ivana Jinkings
One of the most emblematic figures of the Brazilian left, Carlos Marighella was a leader of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), a constituent congressman in 1946, and the founder and main leader of the National Liberation Action (ALN), alongside Joaquim Câmara Ferreira, known as Velho.
Born in Salvador, he was the first of eight children of an Italian immigrant, Augusto, and a black woman of Hauçá slave descent, Maria Rita. At the age of nineteen, he entered the Polytechnic School of Bahia, from where he left at the end of 1933 to fully dedicate himself to revolutionary activism in the PCB. In the previous year, involved in protests against Juracy Magalhães – an intervener appointed by Getúlio Vargas – he was arrested for the first time.
A prominent activist, he moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1935. On May 1, 1936, he was once again arrested and subjected to torture for 21 days. After being released, he moved to São Paulo at the beginning of 1938. His mission was to confront a crisis between the São Paulo leadership and the Political Bureau.
In 1939, he was arrested by the Getúlio Vargas’ Estado Novo police, in a full offensive against communists. He remained incarcerated for about six years, most of the time in Fernando de Noronha and Ilha Grande, from where he was released with the 1945 amnesty. In that year, communists created “democratic committees” in the major cities, and the PCB grew rapidly across the country. In November, the Party achieved its legal registration, and the following month elected a senator – Luiz Carlos Prestes – and fourteen deputies, including Carlos Marighella, who by then was already a member of the Central Committee.
In the 1947 elections, the PCB elected 46 state deputies, becoming the fourth-largest party in electoral expression. In some cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the Republic (where they elected eighteen city councilors), it became the majority. Alarmed by the PCB’s electoral success (and aligned with the United States in the context of the Cold War), the government of Eurico Gaspar Dutra annulled the party’s registration in May. The following year, communist parliamentarians had their mandates revoked.
Marighella went underground after a short period of legal life, during which he worked in the press, editing the magazine Problemas (the official theoretical organ of the PCB). During this time, he dedicated himself to organizing the party, which broke with the “national union” line, and outside the parliament, began to prioritize the struggles to overthrow President Dutra and later Getúlio Vargas.
Divergences
During Vargas’ second government, Marighella began to act more directly in the union movement in São Paulo. The worsening of differences with the PCB leadership dates back to this time. In an interview given in 1969 to the French magazine Front, he declared that these divergences were the reason he was sent to China in 1953, where he remained until the following year. From China, he went to the Soviet Union but returned to Brazil in time to participate in the PCB’s Fourth Congress at the end of 1954.
In 1956, communists around the world were shocked by the revelations of the Kruschev Report on the crimes committed in the Soviet Union during Josef Stalin’s government. The publication of this document led a considerable number of militants and at least one leader – Agildo Barata – to leave the party. Marighella remained in the PCB.
In Brazil, the situation was different: under the government of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), communists experienced relative tranquility. The same occurred during João Goulart’s government (1961-1964), with which the party established close collaboration. With the military coup of 1964, which deposed Goulart, Marighella returned to underground life. In May, surrounded by police in a cinema in Rio de Janeiro, he resisted arrest, was shot in the chest – the bullet passed through and exited his left armpit, lodging in his left arm – and was arrested. Released three months later, he had a preventive arrest order issued and went underground again. In 1965, he published what may be his best book, Why I Resisted Arrest, and in 1966, The Brazilian Crisis, in which he criticizes the alliance strategy with the bourgeoisie and advocates for guerrilla warfare in the countryside as a way to end the dictatorship.
Break with the PCB
In the first half of 1967, Marighella still participated in the PCB’s State Conference in São Paulo, where the thesis that the defeat of the military government would only happen by force triumphed – against the Central Committee’s guidance. Without the party leadership’s authorization, he participated in the conference of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS) in Cuba, and strengthened ties with Fidel Castro, who, alongside Ernesto Che Guevara, would be an important reference for his conception of armed struggle. As a result, Marighella sent a letter breaking with the Central Committee, stating that “no one needs permission to practice revolutionary acts.”
In September, during the VI Congress process, several leaders were expelled from the PCB’s Central Committee, including Marighella, Joaquim Câmara Ferreira (1913-1970), Jacob Gorender (1923-2013), Mário Alves (1923-1970), and Apolônio de Carvalho (1912-2005). However, there were serious strategic and tactical differences between them, and the latter three founded the Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party (PCBR). Along with Ferreira, Marighella founded the São Paulo Communist Group, which in 1969 would become the National Liberation Action (ALN). The name was launched in a manifesto published by the newspapers during the Week of the Homeland, one of the demands made by the ALN and the Revolutionary Movement 8 of October (MR-8), in exchange for the life of U.S. ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick, who was kidnapped by the two organizations. The action was led by Câmara Ferreira, and it is said within the left that Marighella was caught by surprise by the initiative.
Marighella, however, directly organized several urban guerrilla actions in 1968 and 1969. In that year, he published his most impactful work, The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. He became pursued as public enemy number 1 by the military government, until in November 1969, he fell into an ambush set up by the repression officer Sérgio Paranhos Fleury: under torture, Dominican friars arranged a meeting with the revolutionary leader on a street in São Paulo. Waiting for him, alongside the priests, was a team from the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), who greeted him with a hail of bullets. Carlos Marighella’s body was exposed during the night of November 4, at number 800 of Alameda Casa Branca, in São Paulo. His place at the head of the ALN – considered the largest armed organization in Brazil – was taken by Câmara Ferreira, who was killed by the police a year later.
