Communist Revolt in Brazil 1935

A new constitution in 1934 reorganized the political system by creating a legislature with both state and social-sector representatives. It contained some electoral reforms, including women's suffrage, a secret ballot, and special courts to supervise elections. The Constituent Assembly elected Vargas president for a four-year term. However, the attempt to harness the revolution to the old system, somewhat remodeled, would soon fail completely and take Brazil into prolonged dictatorship. Brazilian leftist helped in that process by becoming a credible threat.

In November 1935, the clandestine Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), nominally led by tenente (junior army officer, literally lieutenant) hero Luis Carlos Prestes (leader of Prestes Column 1924-27) but in reality closely directed by Soviet agents operating out of the Comintern office in Montevideo, launched a military insurrection to overthrow the Brazilian government. All three of the attacks occurred in army barracks; they involved communist militants, fellow travelers of the National Liberating Alliance, and soldiers and noncommissioned officers enlisted to the cause. In Natal, in Rio Grande do Norte, the rebels raised the red flag over the barracks and issued various manifestos declaring the liberation of the oppressed from international domination; in Recife fighting flared in various parts of the city; in Rio de Janeiro it broke out at Praia Vermelha, a military station in residential Urca. Loyal troops put down each of the outbreaks easily and arrested most of the participants.

The folly of the communists, who apparently believed that the masses were ready to rise up against Vargas, gave hardliners and pro-fascists justification for inducing the government to suspend civil rights under a state of national emergency. Under the new National Security Law, thousands of persons were held and imprisoned. Many of those jailed were only nominally connected to the ANL or to leftist causes and had certainly not been involved in the insurrection. Prestes and his German wife, Olga Benario, and several Comintern agents were captured early in 1936. He was sentenced to prison; his Jewish (and pregnant) wife was deported to Nazi Germany, where she perished in a death camp in 1942. The Comintern agents were tortured savagely, in some cases until they died.

As a result of the communist revolt, the majority of the officer corps closed ranks against the "subversive" Left. It also brought the Catholic Church and propertied interests into alliance with the military to combat all progressive forces that could be viewed as allies of the Communists. Thus, the abortive revolt enabled Vargas to lay the groundwork for his own coup and the establishment of a long-term dictatorship.

References

History of Brazil, 103; Brazil: Culture and Politics, 62-3; Brazil - A Country Study.

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