PARTIDO COMUNISTA BRASILEIRA (PCB)
Address: Rua da Lapa, 180, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Themes: Unions and Workers
Translated from the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard
Founded in 1922 and heavily influenced by the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) is the oldest existing political party in Brazil, though it was illegal through long stretches of Brazil’s history. Persecuted by Getúlio Vargas under the Estado Novo (1937-1945), the PCB sought to reorganize under the leadership of Luís Carlos Prestes. Prestes’s comrade Olga Benário had been murdered in a concentration camp after Vargas deported her to Nazi Germany.
The PCB regained its legal status from 1945-1947, after the Estado Novo regime ended. President Eurico Gaspar Dutra (1946-1951) made the party illegal once again. Fearing the rise of a party of the masses, he decided to cancel the organization’s registration and cancel the terms of the communist congressmen. The PCB’s return to illegality marked the beginning of growing anti-communist sentiment inspired by the Cold War. In Brazil, anti-communism found its roots in the 1935 Communist Insurrection. Still, the PCB continued to act in politics while in hiding and through the 1964 coup. They created class alliances between different democratic social sectors with common interests and demands in the struggle against imperialism and mega-agricultural estates.
In the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the PCB played a major role in urban unions. The trajectory of the Rio de Janeiro Metalworkers’ Union is a representative example of the close relationship between unions and the party. Communists participated and acted in popular and workers’ movements through the General Worker’s Command (CGT) and in the student movement through the National Student Union (UNE), together with other popular forces on the left. The party was central to creating UNE Popular Culture Centers (CPC). It dialogued with the nationalist movement, had militant members in the armed forces, and participated in elections indirectly and behind the scenes.
After 1952, the communists, in alliance with the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), organized strikes, picketing, rallies, and campaigns – the most well known being “petroleum is ours” in 1953. In broad strokes, the PCB defended a nationalistic, democratic “phase” in the Brazilian revolution. It characterized US imperialism and big agriculture as “feudal” and the major impediments to a “democratic and sovereign” development in Brazil.
In March 1958, the PCB presented an important political document known as the “Declaration of March 1958,” which deepened understanding about capitalism’s development in Brazil and the concept of peaceful paths to national and democratic revolution in the country. It emphasized the need for a “democratic, nationalistic government” created from “peaceful pressure from the popular masses,” strengthened by nationalistic sectors of bourgeois classes and separate from powers “submissive” to foreign interests. To this end, the victory of the “nationalistic and democratic front in elections would be needed, as well as the “resistance of popular masses” to use “democratic legality” against any attempt to establish a dictatorship “serving the North American monopoly.”
This defense of democratic and legal action did not help the PCB escape the repression that the entirety of the left suffered after the 1964 coup. The party suffered persecution, imprisonment, torture, deaths, and disappearances. In the context of ideological polarizations of the 1960s, the PCB came to represent the “evil” that conservative and military forces behind the 1964 coup against João Goulart would fight. Workers died and disappeared in the months immediately following the coup in Rio de Janeiro: the graphic designer and union member Newton Eduardo de Oliveira (PE), was killed in his own home; the graphic designer Israel Tavares Roque (BA), disappeared from the Central do Brasil train station; the sailor Divo Fernandes D’oliveira, disappeared from the Professor Lemos Brito penitentiary; along with many other union members.
We can evaluate the persecution of the PCB in the military police investigation (IPM) called for by the 1964 Military Tribunal. Fernandinho de Carvalho, the coronel who reported on the investigation, exuberantly expresses the need to persecute communists. He then asserts: “One can rest assured that in the present moment the PCB fully operates throughout the country, with the ability to measurably influence national politics.” He concludes:
The restrictive actions of the Revolution did not manage to affect the Party’s base, which remained intact and ready to return to their activities at the earliest opportunity. The major leaders in the PC are in the country, though they have not been located, and continue to act in hiding. […] In organized labor, communists are gaining new traction with union members, winning on almost every ticket (Brasil Nunca Mais Digital, IPM número 279, folha 4221).
Together with democratic forces, the party was unable to mobilize immediate resistance to the dictatorship in April 1964. When the military regime entered, activists in the Great Party –Partidão, as the PCB referred to itself –carried out a situation analysis and identified the military dictatorship as the result of an “alliance of private capital,” both national and international, that aimed to obstruct direct political participation of the masses in order to achieve “conservative modernization” in Brazil. As seen in resolutions from the party’s VI Conference in 1967, Brazilian communists characterized the dictatorship as “long-term” with “fascist elements.”
In opposition to the dictatorial regime, the PCB defended establishing broad-based movement in defense of democratic liberties. The move to combat the regime through democratic means brought about internal divisions, and the option of armed resistance arose in other groups. The Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B) – led by João Amazonas, Maurício Grabois, Pedro Pomar, and Diógenes Arruda – was created in 1962 along the lines of Maoist China and Albanian socialism.
Carlos Marighella and Joaquim Câmara Ferreira, past leaders of the PCB, created the São Paulo Communist Group in 1968, which would later give rise to the National Liberation Action (ALN) guerilla movement. Other organizations formed around the same time: the Communist Labor Party (POC) in Rio Grande do Sul, the Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party (Pcbr), led by Apolônio de Carvalho, Jacob Gorender, and Mário Alves, and the 8th October Revolutionary Movement (MR-8).
In 1974, the PCB intensified its participation in congressional elections by joining the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) in order to weaken the dictatorship institutionally. The MDB carried the 1974 elections, winning 16 of 22 Senate seats. The MDB went from having 87 to 165 representatives in the House, marking one of the first “consolidated” demonstrations of force by the opposition to the military regime. The PCB carried out this action with broad-based mobilizing in worker, student, and popular movements.
From 1973-76, with the defeat of armed resistance groups, the repressive apparatus of the military regime intensified its actions against the Great Party. It unleashed intense repression against PCB communities through “Operation Radar,” organized under the command of the Army Intelligence Center (CIE) with collaboration from the Department of Information Operations – Center for Internal Defense Operations (DOI-CODI), which identified 42 members of the Central Committee (CC). The operation caused imprisonment and persecution throughout Brazil, as it was systematic and carried out with institutional backing, as demonstrated by a confidential document from March 1975 entitled “Neutralizing the PCB” in the 2nd Section of the II Army:
The DOI-CODI of the II Army, in analyzing the PCB’s structure and operation, organized a list of members from the Central Committee based on their actions and position within the party. The imprisonment of these individuals would cause irreparable damage to the leftist organization in the short and medium-term. […] The following characteristics were used to organize the list: political repercussions and “moral” consequence for other communists; intellectual and ideological qualities, aside from past militancy, that might facilitate ascension to higher political positions or the reorganization of the party; interest from Intelligence Agencies, based on their intel. These factors informed the following list of individuals, in no particular order: Giocondo Gerbasi Alves Dias […]. Hércules Correia dos Reis[…]. Orlando da Silva Rosa Bonfim Junior […]. Jaime Amorim de Miranda […]. Aristeu Nogueira Campos […]. Hiram de Lima Pereira […]. (Informações no 485/75 e 487/75, de 13/3/1975, da 2o Seção do II Exército. Arquivo Nacional, SNI: BR_DFANBSB_V8_AC_ACE_81057_75, pp. 8-1.)
As this was a clandestine operation against a group opposed to armed resistance, the repressive agents could not forge justifications for the deaths, as they did for killing members of armed resistance groups. Those involved in Operation Radar came up with a solution: to disappear the bodies after torture sessions and summary executions. Between March 1974 and January 1976, the following people were killed: David Capistrano da Costa, José Rosman, Walter de Souza Ribeiro, João Massena Melo, Luís Ignácio Maranhão Filho, Elson Costa, Hiran de Lima Pereira, Jayme Amorim de Miranda, Nestor Vera, Itair José Veloso, Alberto Aleixo, José Ferreira de Almeida, José Maximino de Andrade Neto, Pedro Jerônimo de Souza, José Montenegro de Lima (o Magrão); Orlando da Silva Rosa Júnior, Vladimir Herzog, Neide Alves dos Santos; and Manoel Fiel Filho. Of these victims, 11 are still disappeared and their remains have not been returned to their families to this day. Dozens of other leaders and activists in the CC and PCB were also tortured and imprisoned but not killed.
The unmitigated repression against the PCB did not just destroy the party’s leadership but also severed the party’s connections to Brazilian society, particularly in the media. In addition to the murders of Central Committee members, the military regime’s actions against the PCB identified public figures, distinguished members of the party, and the party’s printing apparatus. In 1973, the Volkswagen PCB cell was dismantled, and leaders in São Paulo were imprisoned and tortured. Imprisoning sectors of the party allowed the regime to locate the party’s printing department, which was in the Campo Grande neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. There, the newspaper Voz Operário, pamphlets, leaflets, and books were printed in a basement. The destruction of the printing department was a huge blow to the PCB, already weak from state repression.
Imprisonment and assassinations of Party leaders foreshadowed the severing of connections between the PCB and social movements as well as leadership in unions and popular movements. The dictatorship considered PCB an adversary that needed to be destroyed before opening up the country politically. The death of full sectors of the party, along with the dismantling of the party’s press infrastructure would isolate the actions of Brazilian communists, weakening one of the principal opposition forces to the military regime. In total, 39 activists were assassinated in different ways from the start of the coup to the so-called “détente” of the military regime.
The party began a process of reorganization in 1979, a period also marked by an intense internal crisis. The crisis was inspired both by dissent from Luís Carlos Prestes in April 1980 and by criticism from former activists like Gregório Bezerra. The majority of members in the Central Committee directed the restructuring effort, particularly during the VII PCB Conference in 1982 (during which a police operation resulted in the arrest of some members). In May 1985, the party became legal, having acted through the MDB and PMDB parties up until that point. Another mark of the restructuring process was the 1987 Conference, with the party already divided, and then the Conferences in 1991 and 1992, when internal divisions solidified, putting the party’s existence at risk In that context, a movement to rebuild the party both institutionally and in terms of \activism began, and would form the basis of the party’s current structure.