Bill Edwards, 4 July 2007

The Brazilian ‘movimento tenentista’ or ‘lieutenants movement’ is very hard to define, it owes something to the spirit of the famous liberator of Columbia, Venezuela, and other parts of Central and South America from the Spanish, the man who gave his name to the country of Bolivia – Simon Bolivar. (1783- 1830) This is where Hugo Chavez gets the name for his political party from – Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement and has renamed Venezuela the ‘Bolivarian republic ofVenezuela’ and seems to have lifted Simon Bolivar from the status of cult to an almost religious ideology. The arguments over Bolivar continue to divide the Latin left until today, as an orthodox Marxist/Leninist Communist I find him somewhat of a typical bourgeois whose independence wars only served the ruling commercial and imperialist class of that time – i.e. Bolivar threw the Spanish out ofVenezuela and Columbia with the help of yes, the British, then turned all economic interests over to the Brits in exchange for ‘Independence.’

However some of the more progressive writers and historians have remarked upon his very liberal attitude to slaves and indigenous Indians. Simon Bolivar warrants serious study in his own right but today I am concentrating on 20th century progressive military movements in Brazil. In the 50s, 60s and 70s many South and Central American guerrilla groups, especially those Trotskyites who split from orthodox regional communist parties, reinvented a lot Bolivar’s nationalistic philosophy and used it along with ideas from other populist and nationalist 19th century leaders such as Simon Rodriguez and Ezequiel Zamora. Arrogant to the extent of being insufferable, Bolivar believed that South America was crying out for strong, disciplined leadership to which he thought he perfectly fitted the bill. He left volumes of correspondence much of which survived the wars and is now deposited in the National Libraries of several countries.

Although almost unheard of outside of the Spanish speaking South and Central Americas, you cannot escape Simon Bolivar in these countries, statues in town squares, principal avenues and roads named after him, paintings in public places, bars and restaurants.

Political and Social discontent first surfaced in the 1910s as basically an attempt by the younger, middle class officers to better their pay and conditions in the Brazilian army, and to a lesser degree, Brazilian Navy at that time under much influence and training of the elite French army officer class.

The frustration continued for the next ten years as Brazil just exchanged one oligarchic President for another, usually alternating between a representative of the states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, known fondly as the coffee and milk ( café com leite) period, coffee from Sao Paulo and dairy product from Minas Gerais.

This frustration began to boil over amongst the younger lieutenants and captains in Rio de Janeiro when the total reactionary Artur Bemandes was elected President ( only mostly white, property owning males of a certain economic wealth were allowed to vote) in 1922. It is believed that a son of a former President then a captain of artillery in Rio de Janeiro was one of the ringleaders.

There was no unique political expression binding the army rebels together, often elitist and mostly reformist about the only demand they agreed upon was free elementary education for the masses, they considered themselves ‘Citizen Soldiers’. In the future these rebels would become communists, social fascists, nazi racists, conservatives and liberals of every hue. There was also a lot of discontent about pay, conditions and methods of promotion. It must be remembered that the lieutenants’ movement was a minority one and never really decided if it was rebelling against the army hierarchy or the central government.

The army, due to compulsory conscription, had expanded rapidly in the first decades of the 20th century, expanding 52% faster than the population until the end of the old republic in 1930. Draft dodging was endemic.

On the 5th July 1922, exactly 85 years ago today, the first armed uprising took place, incensed by the imprisonment of Marshall Hermes da Fonseca, a former President of the Republic, for allegedly insulting President Bemandes, and the closure of the military club in Rio, the cadets of Realengo Military School and young officers of the Copacabafia Fort ( still standing and in use today) took to the streets with rifles in hand. Bemandes immediately imposed a state of siege nationwide and dispatched loyal troops to subdue the uprising. The military cadets soon buckled and went back to school but at the Copacabana Fort sixteen of the original eighteen rebels were killed before the legalists could impose their will. The two survivors were Siquiera Campos and Eduardo Gomes, both of whom would continue to conspire against President Bemanades and his government. Campos died in an air crash in 1930 where millions (in today’s money) of dollars also went missing, money meant to keep the ‘tenentes’ movement viable and alive.

One of the conspirators at the Realengo Military school was identified as 24 year old Captain Luiz Carlos Prestes at that time an instructor at the college. As ‘punishment’ he was posted to the interior of Brazil’s southernmost State, Rio Grande do Sul, in charge of a work battalion building army barracks in the middle of nowhere. Others who allegedly had helped ferment this rebellion, or spoken out of turn, were posted to the back of beyond, Brazil is a huge country and communications were not that clever at that time, some were imprisoned for short periods but none were decommissioned, Bernandes did not have the bottle to do that, fearing general military rebellion and civilian unrest.

In the next two years nothing much seems to have changed in the eyes of the rebel soldiers so a much bigger revolt was launched in Sao Paulo on the 5th July 1924, two years to the day after the first revolt in Rio. Much better organised than the Rio uprising, the Sao Paulo rebellion was much bigger involving officers, sergeants and ratings from several different army groups and States and elements of the navy in the north and northeast of Brazil. A couple of naval ships including a large cruiser were taken over by mutineers and sailed to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital city where they threatened (but not much more) to shell the President’s Palace and other government buildings. One or two shells were lobbed into Rio but there were no recorded casualties or damage.

However it was a very different story in Sao Paulo, the uprising had been quite well received, several thousand troops had taken part and officers who remained loyal to the government had been (mostly) rounded up and imprisoned. Many Italian, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants were demanding that the rebel soldiers arm them and let them form militias in the working class districts and slums. The rebels would only arm those that had previous military experience in their countries of origin and would submit themselves to military discipline, records show that many workers, especially Italian and German gave a good account of themselves in the fighting that followed.

The rebels, for the first time, issued a written proclamation to advise the population the reasons for their attempted overthrow of the Bernandes administration, please note I do not use the word revolution as this movement was essentially reformist in character. There were basically only two concrete demands:

1/ Secret vote and extension of voting rights to larger portion of population but not general suffrage.

2/ Free basic elementary education for all children.

The rest of the communication was concerned with decentralisation of power to state governments and the moralisation and independence of the legislature at all levels.

Within six days of the uprising Sao Paulo was circled by loyal government troops from other states and a brutal artillery bombardment began, there was no consideration of what today is known as collateral damage, whole working class districts, especially those that had the misfortune to be near army barracks were indiscriminately shelled from both artillery and bombs dropped by hand from over flying army planes. More than 1.800 buildings were destroyed, the civilian death toll was at ,least five hundred with over ten thousand wounded. Being wounded was pretty much a death sentence as there were no public hospitals, disease and gangrene were common and as the vast majority of wounded were poor and had no access to health care other than that provided by the rebels in the first few days before the uprising was squashed.

The decisive battle was on the 11th July when rebel positions were overrun by vastly superior in both numbers and arms, government loyalist armies. Those rebels who lived in Sao Paulo melted away into the shanty towns and slums, to live and hopefully fight another day but about a thousand of the more militant soldiers, loaded up a goods train at the main Praca da Luz station with artillery pieces, armoured cars, machine guns and as much food and ammo as they could find and fought their way out of Sao Paulo by train.

On the 12th of July there were a series of small uprisings and battles in various parts of Brazil, the biggest probably being that in Bela Vista in Mato Grosso, maybe the idea was to try and divert government military attention from Sao Paulo but it was too little too late, the remaining rebels had fled to the interior of Sao Paulo State, the train gave out near Bauru and from there the rebels rode or marched into the wild interior of the State of Parana where they knew they were fairly safe as it would take the authorities months to form an army able to track them down.

Meanwhile Captain Luiz Carlos Prestes who had been one of the main architects of the rebellion had been unable to take part s he was laid low in the south of the country with malaria and dysentery. However on the 28th October 1924, young army officers from the 1st battalion in Santo Angela in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, led by Captain Prestes rebelled with the aim of destroying the Bemandes government, after some local fighting, Prestes’s rebels set out in a mounted and marching column known as the ‘coluna gaucha’ determined to traverse the south of the country and meet up with the Sao Paulo rebels, led by Miguel Costa, who were camped near Santa Helena in the State of Parana.

When the Prestes Column from the south joined up with the surviving rebels from Sao Paulo and other radicals who had travelled from other parts of Brazil there was a total of some 3000 armed men, many combat experienced and another 300 or so women, cooks, farriers for the horses and mules etc. Both groups rustled horses and livestock, sequestrated food and medical supplies. Although this was pure theft, Prestes gave everyone who they commandeered or stole from, a receipt and a promissory note that could be cashed when Prestes and co took political and economic power, they are still waiting although Prestes was very strict in only allowing his men to steal from the rich and well off. Looting, rape and drunkenness, of which there were a couple of cases especially in the beginning were dealt with severely, offenders were given a hearing and if found guilty of the former two -shot, drunks being punished by loss of rations and a couple of days hard labour.

The rebels were camped in Santa Helena for a couple of months as they planned their next move and getting their soldiers into shape, this was nearly their undoing as Government troops had caught up with them much sooner than anticipated, early in 1925, fierce fighting broke out with heavy losses on both sides, in was only by literally burning a wooden bridge that traversed the River Parana did the bulk of the rebels escape, leaving a rearguard of about 200 of their best and most experienced fighters on the other side of the river to engage and divert the loyalist army.

Prestes and Miguel Costa decided that a war of liberation against the Bernandes government should be mounted by their rebel army, a war of movement, fighting on the run , never getting involved in pitched, set piece battles, hit and run, the classic guerrilla tactic, this before any of Mao’s long march, the soviet and Yugoslav resistance against the nazis during WW2, before Fidel’s adventures in the Cuban sierra or Che in Africa or Bolivia.

The ‘Prestes Column’ was born, for the next 21 months they marched and rode often through virgin jungle for more than 25.000 kilometres, (15.000 miles) attacking and taking control of many small and several large size towns and cities, preaching social justice, emptying the jails of the poor and replacing them with rich landowners and others of the exploiting class, the odd throat may have been cut especially if the local rich had fought arid killed any of the Column’s men but nobody shed any tears over them except in the case of Padre Aristides…cidade Pianco in the state of Pariaba.

Chased by Federal forces under the command of Marshall Rondon the Column was never beaten in battle although distracters of Prestes will say he always managed to avoid the big ambushes and committing his men against superior forces, however, that was the general idea, hit and run, live to fight another day. Bernandes was so frustrated that he authorised the payment of outlaw criminal gangs, os canguceiros and janguncas, motivated by free pardons and bags of gold coin, Prestes Column saw off most of them but some were a nuisance, tracking the column for weeks at a time. It is rumoured that the famous bandit Lampeao and his woman, Maria Bonita were involved in the chase.

To cut a long story short, after many battles, at one time the column was reduced to about 600 men, but new peasant and worker volunteers always made up the numbers wherever the column was. Never beaten in battle the column took refuge in Bolivia in 1927, where Prestes obtained work for all his soldiers building railroads for the Bolivian Government.

This historic march did not achieve it’s aim, the downfall of the Bernandes government but it did achieve to bring to light the absolute poverty and misery of inhabitants of the interior of Brazil under the rule of the ‘Colonels’ where slavery was quite common even though prohibited since 1853(?). Bemandes was forced to change the 1891 constitution, making the imposing of a state of emergency easier, limiting habeas corpus and taking back power from the States.

Prestes was not long in Bolivia, after making sure his men were working, getting paid and fed and receiving whatever health care was available (funds were left for this until the men could establish their own cooperative) he slipped clandestinely into Argentina, at that time a cauldron of anarcho- syndicalism, socialism of every philosopher, and most important – Marxist-Leninism. Having been introduced to Marxism and Communism on the long march, in Buenos Aires, Prestes got down to serious study and became a committed Marxist-Leninist, a belief that would never desert him during his 92 years of life.

In 1930 another revolt installed Getulio Vargas as President, this revolt was led by the more moderate of the ‘tenente’ movement but Prestes and other militants did not participate. He did have a long meeting with fellow ‘gaucho’ Vargas in Porte Alegre in 1930 where he tried to persuade Vargas of the need for a communist revolution, Vargas was not swayed but was impressed enough to give Prestes US$400.000 (today this would be in tens of millions) of tax payers money for him to carry on the ‘tenentes’ movement, not fully realising that Prestes was now much further to the left than the rather nationalistic military movements. Prestes gave most of the money to the Argentine Comintem to carry on the revolutionary struggle in South America, the rest he gave to Siqueira Campos to give to the remnants of the Column in Bolivia and those still living clandestinely in Brazil. As mentioned the plane carrying Campos back from Argentina crashed, the wreckage and bodies were found three days later but the cash had gone.

During the early 1930s while Getulio Vargas was still establishing political power in Brazil, Prestes formed and led the Alianca Nacional Libertadora, the ANC, a left wing popular front led by the Brazilian Communist Party of which Prestes was now a member, consisting of socialists, anarchists, trade unionist and progressives of all types including some early left wing church people. The ANL was formed to oppose Vargas’s crackdown on organised labour which started in earnest in 1934 backed by the agrarian oligarchies and the Intergralists – a fascist movement with substantial middle class and military support in the urban areas, led by an anti Jewish rabble rousing, populist lawyer called Pinio Salgado.

The right, by this time worried by the size of the ANC movement ( I believe just the Brazil CP had over 600.000 paid up members at this time ), forced the Brazilian Congress to outlaw all left wing parties and movements, all being branded as subversive. This forced the left, led by the CPB into an armed insurrection which they were by no means prepared for and was quickly crushed by the Vargas government. Prestes was imprisoned for ten years and tortured violently as the Vargas regime turned to terror, violence, torture and summary trials and clandestine executions. In an effort to break Prestes, Vargas had Prestes’s German Jewish, pregnant wife, Olga Benario, deported to Nazi Germany where she died in the gas chamber at Ravensberg concentration camp, but not until after Prestes’s mother and sister had managed to rescue Prestes daughter, Anita, when she was three months old from the concentration camp after an international campaign but they failed to win a reprieve for Olga who was condemned for revolutionary violence in 1930’s Germany, when she had shot a judge in helping a leading communist to escape from a courtroom.

Prestes was in prison for nine years, severely tortured by the notorious Rio police chief Flinito Muller, he was held in solitary confinement the whole time. Prison guards kept his spirits up by smuggling newspapers and food into his cell, bringing and delivering messages to other comrades who had escaped the repression after the failed uprising. Whilst in prison in 1943, Prestes was elected general secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party, then a mass party reputed to have had over 600.000 card carrying members, numbers never equalled before or since the 1940’s and early fifties, one of the reasons for United States paranoia.

Released in the general amnesty of 1945 after Getulio Vargas had switched from supporting the axis in the early years of the war to actively sending Brazilian troops to fight alongside the allies in the 1944/5 Italian campaign, Vargas had no option but to call elections. Prestes was elected Senator winning over 160.000 votes in Rio de Janeiro, making him the highest ever voted senator in Brazilian history. The CPB elected many deputados to the Congress including the writer Jorge Armado and the architect Oscar Neidemeyer.

Under pressure from the USA, Vargas, who been elected on a populist mandate in 1946, again outlawed the CPB in 1947 forcing Prestes underground until 1958 when the ban was lifted. During this period Prestes met his second wife, Maria, who was one of the comrades designated to look after Prestes whilst he was on the run. They had 8 children during these 11 years, each born in a different ‘safe’ house. Liberty lasted for only six years until the US backed military coup of 1964, Prestes went clandestine again but after the split in the PCB when the Maoists left to form the PC do B, Prestes was recalled to Moscow in 1971 where he remained in exile until the 1979 political amnesty.

Prestes split with the CPB in 1980 when it reformed as the Partida Socialista Popular. He lived to see democracy return to Brazil in the late 1980s and campaigned for communism until his death in Rio on March 7th 1990, aged 92.

To my eternal regret, I never met Prestes when I lived in Brazil, but I do remember one radio interview not long before I left after my first seven year stay in 1990, the reporter introduced Prestes as a life long socialist, ‘I’m not a socialist’ Prestes growled, ‘I’m a revolutionary communist.’ That he was.

Images:

Map of ‘Coluna Prestes’. The total distance marched was a little over 25,000 kilometres, approx. 15,000 miles, over a period of 21 months. http://www.brazilbrazil.com/h/hst_193b.jpg

Southwest Parana: leaders of the ‘Coluna Prestes’, Prestes is seated, third from left. http://www.nacionalidade.pr.gov.br/modules/xcgal/displayimage.php?pid=20&fullsize

top