Introduction
Due to the confluence of Cold War geopolitical disputes and an internal political and economic crisis, Brazil underwent a military coup in 1964, justified by an alleged ‘communist threat’. Given the closure of democratic channels of popular participation, many left-wing militants began to see armed struggle as the only possible way to politically oppose the dictatorship. However, there was little mass engagement in armed struggle, because of the difficulties of mobilising supporters while operating clandestinely and the efficacy of anti-communist discourse.Footnote 1
The main attempt to form rural guerrilla groups in Brazil during the military dictatorship of 1964–85 was that of the Partido Comunista do Brasil (Communist Party of Brazil, PCdoB),Footnote 2 which had been sending militants to the Araguaia region in northern Brazil since 1967. Although many aspects of PCdoB activity have yet to be studied, there is an extensive literature that investigates this campaign.Footnote 3 In this article, I analyse a more ephemeral revolutionary attempt by a smaller group of militants. The Movimento Revolucionário Oito de Outubro (‘8 October’ Revolutionary Movement, MR-8) tried to mobilise a group of peasants in Brotas de Macaúbas (hereafter Brotas), in the hinterland of Bahia, to form a rural guerrilla group. Although there are already studies on the MR-8, most of this work focuses on the repression suffered by the militants.Footnote 4 My article sheds light on the interactions between militants and peasants, an aspect that has not been explored in detail within the existing literature.
Rural areas were critical for armed confrontation in several important revolutions of the twentieth century, especially the Russian (1917), the Chinese (1949) and the Cuban (1959). Influenced by these political events, leaders of many Brazilian left-wing organisations of the late 1960s and early 1970s established a strategy of political struggle that sought to start their revolution in the countryside, mobilising peasants to join them. Although the armed struggle against the Brazilian dictatorship took place mainly in cities, most organisations envisioned the countryside in their political strategies as the ideal geographic space for the revolution to begin through rural guerrilla groups.
Given this context, the following questions guided my work: 1) What were the main characteristics of militant–peasant communication? 2) What strategies did the militants use to gain the trust of the peasants? 3) What did the militants tell the peasants, and how? 4) How did the peasants receive and respond to the militants’ messages? 5) What are the conditions that led to peasant political engagement? The construction of these research questions was inspired by Eric Wolf's study of the peasant wars of the twentieth century:
Who is it, then, that speaks to the peasant and what is it that they communicate which moves the peasant to violent political action? Peasants often harbor a deep sense of injustice, but this sense of injustice must be given shape and expression in organization before it can become active on the political scene; and it is obvious that not every callow agitator will find a welcome hearing in village circles traditionally suspicious of outsiders, especially when they come from the city. What circumstances and what sets of people will prove propitious to the establishment of such communication?Footnote 5
Paulo Freire provides the basis of my reflection on communication between militants and peasants. A Brazilian educator, Freire contended that revolutionary processes should happen through horizontal and emancipatory forms of political mobilisation and popular education and he therefore advanced the theory of ‘dialogical action’, according to which liberation from various forms of oppression occurs only if people question the reality in which they live. Freire proposed that communication with the masses was not only a stage of revolution, but the very ‘essence of revolutionary action’.Footnote 6
To carry out this research, I analysed documents written by the armed forces and the MR-8, as well as testimonials of former MR-8 militants who agreed to give interviews either to other researchers or to me. My approach to them was facilitated by my commitment to human rights advocacy in the context of transitional justice in Brazil. The interviewees helped me to get in touch with residents of Brotas, where I carried out two ten-day field trips in February 2017 and September 2018, conducting interviews and informal conversations with about 20 peasants and other residents who were directly or indirectly involved. They represent approximately 50 per cent of those who interacted with the MR-8 militants and who are still alive.
The article places special attention on the testimonials of Olderico Barreto,Footnote 7 who was involved in MR-8's Brotas group encouraged by his brother José Campos Barreto (the latter, better known as Zequinha, was the main leader of the MR-8 in Brotas; he was killed by the army in 1971); João Lopes Salgado, a member of the MR-8's national board, originally from south-east Brazil and a frequent visitor to Brotas; Edelzuita Pacheco da Silva, a close friend of the Barreto family and spouse of a peasant who joined the MR-8's Brotas group; and Euval Rosa Campos, a resident of the urban area of Brotas and a cousin of Zequinha's who also joined the group. While I developed a relationship of trust with some of these interviewees, others did not agree to record interviews or avoided engaging in conversations about the MR-8 in the region. Because the memory of the dictatorship is still alive among locals, many of them feared some sort of retaliation.
The article begins with a historical overview of the establishment of the MR-8 and its understanding of the Brazilian peasantry. It then analyses how militants led by Zequinha approached the population of Brotas and the region, the political work they carried out and the peasants’ response to it, the consequences of the arrival in the area of Carlos Lamarca (one of the dictatorship's most wanted militants) and, finally, the military repression of the MR-8's campaign.
The MR-8 and its Understanding of the Brazilian Peasantry
The name MR-8 has been used by two different groups consecutively, giving rise to what are known as the ‘first’ and ‘second’ MR-8. In practice, both MR-8 groups had splintered off from the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party, PCB).Footnote 8 Many partisans left the party in the early years of the dictatorship because they considered the PCB to be too ‘pacifist’ and ‘reformist’.Footnote 9
The ‘first MR-8’ was one of the first armed communist organisations; it was dismantled by the Brazilian government in 1969. Its defeat generated media headlines, publicising the military's strength in eliminating what was considered a subversive organisation.Footnote 10 Soon thereafter, the Dissidência Comunista da Guanabara (Communist Faction of Guanabara, DI-GB, which would become the ‘second MR-8’),Footnote 11 carried out its first armed action (a bank robbery). In response to media reports it released a statement claiming responsibility for the robbery under the name MR-8, undoing the political gain that the military had achieved with the dismantling of the ‘first MR-8’. In this article, ‘MR-8’ refers to the ‘second MR-8’, which lasted longer, survived the dictatorship and is the better-known group. The new MR-8 espoused a combination of armed and unarmed action. Its militants believed that armed struggle should be based on guerrilla groups and efforts to raise the awareness of the masses, a condition for its success.Footnote 12
In a document from September 1970,Footnote 13 the MR-8 addressed the social problems faced by Brazil's rural population, problems that intensified the exodus from the countryside in the 1960s. It indicated that the MR-8 was planning to start a rural guerrilla campaign in 1972, demonstrating how optimistic militants were in their own capacity to mobilise enough peasants to be able to start the revolution in only two years. Such overconfidence may be explained by a characteristic of Marxism–Leninism pointed out by Daniel A. Reis, i.e. belief in the inevitability of revolution as something immanent in the historical process: ‘Hence the belief that, despite setbacks, the revolutionary process would always be, in historical terms, advancing.’Footnote 14 The MR-8 document also outlined the organisation's approach to mobilising rural supporters, calling for militants to insert themselves into farms owned by peasants who were already sympathetic to the organisation, and ‘to grab the hoe handle with determination … and extreme sacrifice’, in order to progressively expand its political base.Footnote 15
João Lopes Salgado, who co-authored the 1970 document, provided the following comments with regard to the organisation's revolutionary strategy:
All the organisations that chose the path of armed struggle had the countryside as their objective because we thought that the armed struggle would consolidate itself in the countryside. We had this vision that peasants were more susceptible to armed engagement … that peasants were the best social class for the armed struggle … and that great victories against the armed forces would be possible in the forests, in the most inhospitable regions.Footnote 16
In September 1969, in a joint mission with the Ação Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Alliance, ALN), the MR-8 kidnapped US Ambassador Charles Elbrick, thereby becoming one of the dictatorship's most targeted organisations. As a result, militants who had not yet gone underground needed to do so quickly, leading the MR-8 to become isolated from the public.
Rural mobilisation became even more central to the MR-8's political strategy after Carlos Lamarca joined the organisation in March 1971. Persecuted by the dictatorship, he was sent to Brotas, where Zequinha, a militant born in that municipality, was already coordinating peasant mobilisation efforts, as will be described below.
According to César Benjamin, another MR-8 militant, Lamarca strengthened the organisation's commitment to the agrarian question: ‘The first time I heard of a boia-fria was in a letter from Lamarca, pointing out the changes that were taking place in the Brazilian countryside with the concentration of rural workers in the peripheries of the cities of the interior.’Footnote 17
Benjamin's statement highlights a fundamental problem of the Brazilian armed Left at the time: their lack of knowledge about the agrarian reality which militants believed would launch the revolutionary process. Although some leaders were slightly familiar with the structural problems that characterised rural Brazil in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the fact that most urban militants were completely unaware of peasant problems compromised the mobilisation of peasants for guerrilla warfare.
Lamarca himself recognised this difficulty, even before joining the MR-8. In a newspaper interview in June 1970, he stated: ‘We must take account of the fact that comrades trained abroad [i.e. outside rural Brazil] are not prepared for rural guerrilla warfare, since they were always city-based.’Footnote 18 Nevertheless, he emphasised the feasibility of rural guerrilla warfare and stated that it was a ‘matter of time’ before the revolutionary organisations mobilised large groups of people to join the armed struggle. Asked whether the necessary conditions existed for the revolution to be successful, he answered:
They exist, not only in Brazil, but in all of Latin America. It is in the countryside that capitalist exploitation is most inhumane … and where repression has been most fierce in the struggles already fought. There is a whole past of peasant struggle and organisation that the dominant class omits from our history.Footnote 19
The MR-8's strategy had similarities with the Chinese and Cuban traditions and with anti-colonial liberationist Frantz Fanon's theories of armed revolution, which held peasants to be more likely than urban workers to embrace revolution due to their social vulnerability.Footnote 20 As such, the agrarian characteristics of Brazilian society in the 1960s may have contributed to overconfidence among militants, leading them to neglect the constraints that facilitated the defeat of the MR-8's attempt at revolution.
The MR-8's Approach to the Peasants of Brotas
In the 1960s, Brotas, in the Chapada Diamantina region (hinterland of Bahia), was a municipality of about 10,000 inhabitants. Although much of the Brazilian peasantry at the time was landless or had insecure access to land, Brotas peasants, for the most part, owned small tracts of land with security of tenure.Footnote 21 For this reason, the MR-8 did not target landlessness in its attempt to mobilise peasants in Brotas. Salgado explained: ‘Their struggle was not for more land, it was for better living conditions. They faced hunger, even though they owned land. They had to work as miners because they did not earn enough to live on.’Footnote 22 On the other hand, while the agrarian question was not central to the militants’ message, it was central to the military's discourse to legitimise repression, as explained below.
Olderico Barreto, Zequinha's brother, reported that the peasants of Brotas did not engage in politics because they thought it was for ‘bosses, not workers’.Footnote 23 In that region, local oligarchies had power over peasants, owing to their social prestige and political privileges that allowed them to control policing and exercise extra-legal authority.Footnote 24 Moreover, religious leaders in the strongly Catholic region propagated conservative values that reinforced the oligarchical social order of the 1960s and 1970s.
The harsh reality of peasant life before the coup remained virtually unchanged under the military dictatorship, making it difficult for militants to blame the dictatorship for the hardships of peasants. Therefore, in Olderico's view, they needed to find alternative narratives to mobilise peasants in opposition to the military regime, and to change the commonly held belief that political engagement was for ‘bosses, not workers’. The MR-8's work in Brotas gave the organisation some political hope at a time when the military regime was arresting a large number of its militants, forcing them to spend more time trying to hide than working on their political project.
Zequinha's role was central in leading the MR-8's project in Brotas. His family was relatively privileged in the region, owning two properties and a small store that served as a convenient space for networking with peasants. Zequinha's mother, Nair Campos Barreto, was a midwife and teacher, and his father, José Barreto, was well respected in the village.Footnote 25 When Zequinha was 12 years old, he entered a seminary, as was customary for many children, given the strong influence of Catholicism in the region. Although only a low-ranking ecclesiastical position, being a seminarian afforded Zequinha some authority in his community.Footnote 26
In 1964, leaving the seminary after six years of study, Zequinha followed the dominant migratory current in Brazil at that time and moved to São Paulo, where he carried out his military service. Zequinha then sought employment as a factory labourer in Osasco, a municipality in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. During this period, the young immigrant from Bahia combined his factory work with college education as a mature student and participated in a left-wing reading group. In both his work and his studies, Zequinha stood out as a leader capable of influencing people around him, which would be key for his later work with peasants in Brotas. In Osasco, he even coordinated a workers’ strike that led to his imprisonment for nearly three months.Footnote 27
Zequinha's imprisonment served as a political awaking for Olderico, who moved to São Paulo to spend time with his brother: ‘I started to experience political life this way’, Olderico recalled.Footnote 28 With the implementation of Institutional Act no. 5 in December 1968,Footnote 29 Zequinha feared rearrest and went underground. Olderico then acted on Zequinha's behalf when he needed to give a name that would not arouse suspicion.Footnote 30
With the increase in repression, Zequinha realised he needed to leave São Paulo. He spent some time in Rio de Janeiro and, at the beginning of 1970, returned to Bahia with Olderico. They spent a short time in Salvador, where Zequinha contacted Lúcia Murat, then a regional leader of the MR-8 in Bahia, with whom he discussed the possibility of carrying out political work with peasants in his region through the MR-8.Footnote 31 However, shortly after their arrival, Zequinha and Olderico had to flee Salvador after two banks were robbed by other revolutionary organisations.
Zequinha's case echoes the sociopolitical process described by Antonio Gramsci of the southern Italian peasants who migrated to the industrialised north, established contact with the revolutionary ideas more common in that region, and subsequently returned to their villages spreading such ideas.Footnote 32 Because of the multiple spaces in which Zequinha circulated, the sociologist Marcelo Ridenti describes him as a ‘composite figure’ who embodied ‘the diverse social process in which armed opposition to the military regime took root in the second half of the 1960s’.Footnote 33
According to Olderico, Zequinha had been reflecting on the armed struggle: ‘He thought there was still no consciousness in the population. So the stage he was advocating for was primarily that of awareness. The armed struggle would come later. [Otherwise, it would be] like starting to build a house with the roof.’Footnote 34 Consciousness building formed the basis of Zequinha's return to Brotas and of the various political training activities that he began there, as outlined below.
Salgado, who was responsible for the organisation's political work in the Bahian countryside, says that in his first conversation with Zequinha in Bahia, they agreed that their objective in that region was only recruitment, not the instigation of an armed confrontation. Chapada Diamantina's caatinga (dry shrubland) environment did not favour guerrilla warfare, which is better suited to forested areas where militants can hide from the forces of the state. It was important, however, to take advantage of the fact that Zequinha had previous ties, as a ‘son of that land’, with the local population. As sociologists Marcelo Silva and Bianca Ruskowski point out, in these cases, ‘mediation [between individuals and causes or organisations] tends to occur in a “natural” way, since these individuals are already indirectly connected to organisations due to bonds built in other spheres of life’.Footnote 35
Furthermore, the Chapada Diamantina region is relatively close to the Goiás–Bahia state border. It was considered potentially ‘strategic for a guerrilla group’ because it contained thick forests, was crossed by several important highways, and was located at a convenient distance from the national capital, Brasília: close enough to get there quickly and far enough to avoid being caught by agents of the regime.Footnote 36
Zequinha's tendency to attract an entourage, coupled with his considerable prestige within the community, meant that peasants warmed to him. His prestige was grounded in the fact that he was the son of a respected local family and a former seminarian. Moreover, he had lived in other states, could sing in English whilst accompanying himself on his guitar, and was considered by his friends to be intelligent and charismatic. All these characteristics helped him as leader of the MR-8's political work with peasants in Brotas.
The Peasants’ Response to the MR-8's Political Work
The political work of the MR-8 in Brotas began with Zequinha. According to Salgado's account:
Zequinha convinced peasants of the injustices they were experiencing there … He started by developing a programme of politicising the people he knew, with whom he had a relationship of trust, with those interested in knowing his history. And he had strong leadership characteristics.Footnote 37
Edelzuita Pacheco da Silva reports that, during this time, Zequinha frequently gave public talks attended by the residents of Buriti Cristalino, the rural community where she and her family lived, and of surrounding areas:
Zequinha gave lectures, talked about human beings, taught that humans are rational. The irrational ones are those without reason. We would take notes … He taught these lessons for a couple of months. But they were just lectures … he didn't say anything [specifically about guerrilla warfare].Footnote 38
In the interviews I conducted with former residents who spent time with Zequinha, they repeatedly mentioned his concern about the peasants’ right to social security. Edelzuita, for example, reported that Zequinha frequently told rural workers: ‘You are going to retire, you have a right, because you work!’Footnote 39 Miguel Barreto, Zequinha's cousin, also emphasised Zequinha's keenness to communicate with his fellow residents of Brotas:
Zequinha dedicated his life to the cause of peasants … He knew the difficulties faced by the rural man. He said: ‘The government has to find a solution to support these people in the countryside who grow old, work until they die and leave nothing for their families.’ … And by irony of fate, a few months after his death, rural workers were given the right to retire.Footnote 40
The MR-8's advocacy for social rights shows that its work was not restricted to the recruitment of peasants for armed struggle: it included efforts to improve the quality of life and to build a popular base of support in rural areas. Militants also raised the issue of regressive taxation, arguing that it was unfair for hungry peasants to be forced to pay ad valorem taxes on property and livestock.Footnote 41 Edelzuita recalls that Zequinha managed to convince her husband Abel Pereira da Silva to resign from his job as a tax collector: ‘He [Zequinha] said, “Oh Abel, please stop doing that … it is ridiculous. How dare you tax something that the person worked to produce?” … Then Abel quit.’Footnote 42 In addition to being a tax collector, Abel was a peasant who raised dairy cattle and grew beans (a Brazilian staple).
Edelzuita's testimony shows that the militants tried to change some of the peasants’ ways of life. To fully engage in the revolution, it would not be enough for peasants to simply agree with radical ideas: they would have to adopt a new lifestyle in line with the revolutionary project and abandon certain practices, such as collecting taxes on hungry people, which reinforced patterns of exploitation opposed by the MR-8.
A significant MR-8 member who moved to the region in early 1971 was Luiz Antônio Santa Bárbara. He had previously been a member of the student movement in Feira de Santana, a municipality about 100 km from the Bahian capital, Salvador. Son of a humble family, ‘his life history enabled him to do political work in rural areas, according to MR-8 criteria’.Footnote 43 ‘Zequinha presented Santa Bárbara as a former colleague with whom he had studied in the seminary who was coming to stay for a while, to work in mining.’Footnote 44 Zequinha used the local mining industry as a smokescreen to justify the presence of strangers, since it attracted many people from outside Brotas.
In practice, however, Santa Bárbara embedded himself in the community primarily as a teacher, using the code name Roberto. As there was no school in Buriti Cristalino, Edelzuita offered him the possibility of working as a literacy instructor. To Santa Bárbara, teaching was a strategic way to approach the community, gain respect, have a space through which he could spread ideas and build closer relationships with people. The children of Buriti and surrounding communities would go to the Zequinha family home to attend Santa Bárbara's classes.
One of the main forms of communication developed under Santa Bárbara's watch was a play performed by local children. According to Olderico, the script addressed the cost of living, ‘tax violence’ (unjustly high property taxes), health and education.Footnote 45 A good number of my interviewees reported having heard of ‘Professor Roberto's theatre’.Footnote 46
MR-8 militants also distributed political brochures and educational booklets amongst the peasantry. The organisation provided a typewriter to the militants in Brotas for the production of these materials. According to Olderico, the recommendation was to destroy the brochures after they had been read. Town dwellers too received them. For example, Euval Rosa Campos, son of a Brotas merchant, remembers getting such materials. Carlos Araújo, a resident of Ibotirama (a neighbouring municipality), with whom Zequinha also discussed politics, reported having borrowed a copy of Marx's Capital from Zequinha. Edelzuita calls to mind a booklet she lovingly kept called The Workers’ ABC:
It was a book instructing people … to work without being too dependent on others [i.e. the elites], because people here at that time were almost like slaves and did not develop. [The militants advocated for] workers’, people's development. And it taught us that those who worked should not be required to pay taxes. And the booklet all rhymed. It was a novel. It was described in that way: a workers’ novel … Contact with these people [militants] gave rise to so much development in my life!Footnote 47
This recollection by Edelzuita shows that, despite the ultimate defeat of its attempt at revolution, the political work of the MR-8 raised emancipatory consciousness among some workers. She indicates that the political ideas she learned from the militants made her more independent, leading her to realise she was capable of doing more than she had imagined. A few years later, she became a community health worker.
Conversations around broadcasts by Radio Havana were another characteristic of MR-8's work with peasants. Raúl Castro (at the time Minister of the Armed Forces) established this shortwave radio station in 1961, with the objective of broadcasting information about the Cuban Revolution and other revolutionary political experiences around the world. Edelzuita reports that her husband Abel and Zequinha used to listen to Radio Havana together, and spent hours exchanging ideas. The attention militants paid to Castro's radio station corroborates historian Jean Sales's argument about the importance of the Cuban Revolution for Brazilian left-wing organisations.Footnote 48
Public events, such as football (soccer) matches, meetings in bars, religious festivals, theatre performances and music sessions with his guitar provided Zequinha with opportunities to meet with peasants and discuss their social conditions, and to stimulate critical reflections on their everyday existence – a fundamental step in the process of political mobilisation. As sociologist Daniel Cefaï points out, politics happens especially in places where people meet for the most trivial reasons in their daily lives.Footnote 49
In the bars and during the football matches that he organised, Zequinha also shared his experiences of life in São Paulo, addressing social and regional inequalities and how definitions of rich, poor, abundance and scarcity varied across regions. Olderico recounted the following story, heard from one of his cousins: ‘Zequinha once told me that eating beans and rice was to be hungry. I did not understand what he meant at the time. I understood only after I went to live in São Paulo. There, I understood that if you do not have a side dish [to eat with beans and rice], you are seen as someone going hungry.’Footnote 50
Zequinha also discussed the marketing of local produce in his conversations with the population: ‘He was concerned [with] people organising themselves in cooperatives, uniting, participating more actively [in this matter].’Footnote 51
MR-8 militants believed that they should recruit not only peasants but also urbanites to their cause. Thus, in addition to Buriti Cristalino and neighbouring rural communities, Zequinha and his comrades included the urban areas of Brotas and Ibotirama, a regional centre in the mid-west of Bahia, as sites of political action. Zequinha also had conversations with local authorities, such as Brotas's chief judge. He interacted regularly with councillor Carlos Souza, a merchant and grandson of a former mayor of Brotas. Souza recounts that Zequinha was ‘very intelligent’, that he knew Latin and spoke English and that they talked about politics, socialism and inequality. Carlos also reported that Zequinha gave him details of a robbery carried out against a former governor of São Paulo, an indication of some degree of mutual trust.Footnote 52
Miguel Barreto reported that he frequently visited his home town of Ibotirama and played the guitar. In the intervals between songs, Zequinha would tell tales about guerrilla warfare in other countries.Footnote 53 Carlos Araújo added that Zequinha also talked about Francisco Julião, one of the leaders of the Ligas Camponesas (Peasant Leagues) of small-scale farmers before the coup of 1964.Footnote 54 Lamartine Araújo, Carlos's brother, speculated that, although Zequinha talked much about politics, he did not address issues related to armed struggle with them because he did not want to endanger those he considered ‘too innocent’ or ‘too weak’ to risk having access to sensitive information.Footnote 55
Salgado reports that Zequinha also wanted to mobilise miners in the region.Footnote 56 Olderico recalls joining his brother in conversations with contacts in the neighbouring municipalities of Xique-Xique and Oliveira dos Brejinhos.Footnote 57 As shown above, the work of the MR-8 in Chapada Diamantina had a regional scope and focused simultaneously on the mobilisation of peasants, miners and urbanites. This approach can be seen as an indication that the MR-8 had departed from Debrayism, a widespread interpretation of the Cuban Revolution developed by philosopher Régis Debray, according to whom the peasantry would be the driving force of a revolution, with urban organisations serving only a secondary role.Footnote 58 Although Debrayism was an appealing tendency in Latin America in the late 1960s, it was criticised by several scholars, such as Vania Bambirra and Bert Useem, for neglecting the role of urban social movements in the Cuban Revolution.Footnote 59 The fact that the MR-8 did not blindly follow this appealing but simplistic political tendency can be seen as a sign of its political discernment.
While Zequinha's position as an insider facilitated his political work, the fact that he had been previously arrested in São Paulo forced him to remain inconspicuous, to avoid identification by the authorities; many of his interlocutors commented on this. Carlos Araújo recounted an episode in which a policeman passed by them and Zequinha said: ‘I do not like these people.’Footnote 60 Similarly, Euval noted that Zequinha did not like to be photographed.Footnote 61 Olderico, who was already taking his first steps as a committed militant, reported: ‘For security reasons, no one was supposed to know about our activities. Zequinha … had a [different] level of openness with each person and did not talk to them collectively, but individually [about sensitive topics, such as the revolutionary project].’ That level depended on the degree of trust he developed with each person.Footnote 62
Abel da Silva was part of Zequinha's trusted inner circle. His wife Edelzuita reports that Abel told her about his involvement with the MR-8 only many years after the event. A neighbour of the Barreto family, who preferred not to give an interview, when asked informally about his interaction with the militants replied: ‘They wanted to convince people to create an army and go to another place.’Footnote 63 This ‘other place’, according to Salgado, was an area close to the municipality of Barreiras, near the Goiás–Bahia border.Footnote 64 The organisation had sent two militants to start organising an infrastructural base to implement the rural guerrilla strategy: ‘They had already taken possession of a piece of land.’Footnote 65 Salgado wanted to send Lamarca to this area as soon as possible in order to avoid the risk of being caught in Brotas, but his plan failed.
Euval was also someone with whom Zequinha felt safe discussing the revolutionary political project in more depth:
Zequinha talked about other countries, Cuba, for example. He talked about Fidel Castro, socialist regimes. I sometimes argued with him: ‘Zequinha, but wouldn't it be difficult for us to confront the Brazilian army?’ He would respond by talking about the Cold War, arguing that when the United States invaded Vietnam, despite having more soldiers, they lost the war. So, Brazilian peasants could also defeat the Brazilian army. He said that the fight would not [immediately] be between government soldiers and guerrilla fighters. That would be a fight for the future. The first step would be to form teams that could go … [to fight the government army]. Certainly, his thought was that good-quality weapons would arrive soon, and that we would finally engage in armed struggle … For us, it was difficult to understand guerrilla warfare, but because of our friendship, I was willing to go [to fight]. And besides me, several others were also willing to.Footnote 66
More than political belief, friendship with Zequinha was the main reason for Euval's willingness to engage in guerrilla warfare. In fact, as shown by other researchers, reciprocal emotions of affection and loyalty have been proven to play a key role in political involvement, especially when it comes to clandestine organisations.Footnote 67 Like most of the revolutionary militants at the time in Brazil, Euval was in his 20s when he was invited to commit to the group.
Salgado also worked for a short period of time in Brotas. When he arrived, Zequinha had already started his political work:
The role I played [in terms of] recruiting [peasants] was based on a political project that was already under way [led by Zequinha and Santa Bárbara]. So some of the peasants already had a certain level of consciousness, not yet political, [but] a consciousness of revolt at a certain level, [which allowed us to tell them]: ‘There is a way to address your situation: fighting the dictatorship, fighting imperialism. Why do we have such [unfavourable] conditions of life here?’ And we elaborated on why they were so exploited, why they had to pay taxes and the ITR [Imposto sobre a Propriedade Territorial Rural, an ad valorem federal land tax] … ‘Look, there is a way to address this. There is a political party, there is an armed struggle’ … I had access to some families. I used to reach out to them at night. Then, when a peasant became more involved, I would talk to the family, to his wife, to his children, and have dinner at his house.Footnote 68
In this excerpt, Salgado outlines a second phase in the engagement process. In line with Regina Novaes's reflections on political mediation, we could say that, following the work previously carried out by ‘insider mediator’ Zequinha, MR-8 militants sought to deepen the political debate. This second phase of engagement included dialogue with another militant, this time an ‘outsider mediator’.Footnote 69 The fact that the conversations between Salgado and the peasants took place at night because he could not appear in public is an indication of some level of complicity between them and militants.
According to Salgado, although militants had some conversations with peasant women, their discussions of armed struggle targeted only men. ‘It was a mistake of ours to think that only men could take part in the fighting. The PCB already had many women involved. I think this [bias] stems from our culture’, Salgado reasoned when asked about gender preference in the MR-8's political work.Footnote 70 In urban guerrilla groups, there was a greater female presence. However, gender issues started to gain momentum in Brazilian social movements only in the 1980s. Despite dialogue about armed struggle being restricted to men, peasant women in Brotas attended the political education activities promoted by militants, such as the lectures and play mentioned previously.
The Arrival of Carlos Lamarca
Carlos Lamarca's journey to Brotas in June 1971 to escape arrest led to a series of challenges for Zequinha and his group. Salgado explains that the MR-8 had not planned to invite Lamarca to Brotas at that time, since the political work there was still in its initial stages. However, due to increased persecution in Rio de Janeiro, the leaders of the MR-8 had to bring forward his move to Bahia. When he arrived in the urban area of Brotas, Lamarca was presented as a geologist visiting the region for research purposes. Once again, mining was the alibi. Nevertheless, locals were suspicious of Lamarca, since he was accompanied by Zequinha, who had no history of working in the mining sector.
Zequinha and his brothers Olderico and Otoniel found a place for Lamarca to hide in Buriti Cristalino, about 20 km from the Brotas urban region. Every day someone from the Barreto family would bring him meals. Zequinha's parents did not know their sons were hiding a fugitive, as they were not aware of their sons’ political involvement with the MR-8. Olderico remembers situations when Lamarca expressed a desire to engage in ordinary conversations with peasants, but was unable to because he had to avoid seeing anyone who could report him to the police. He spent most of his time writing. In his first diary entry, Lamarca wrote: ‘Today, 29 June [1971], is considered a holy day here, a day of celebration. Since I am in hiding, I will listen to some of the peasants’ merry-making from afar.’ Later, he narrates an encounter with a ‘tough old politicised peasant companion’, from whom he felt ‘that revolutionary force’ during their conversation.Footnote 71 Some interviewees mentioned that other people also knew about Lamarca's presence in Brotas. It is likely that peasants like CrispinFootnote 72 and Abel, because of their relationship of trust with Zequinha and Santa Bárbara, knew about it too.
A friend of the Barreto family indicated that she knew that Zequinha and his brothers were taking food to someone, but ‘as a secret, that she could not talk about’.Footnote 73 She also said that after Lamarca's arrival, Zequinha avoided appearing in public. In addition, even though the people of Brotas did not know that the newcomer was Lamarca, the arrival of a stranger made them apprehensive. Those who opposed Zequinha's political work started to spread ‘rumours that what Zequinha and his companions wanted was not the good of humanity and of the peasants, but the defeat of everyone’.Footnote 74 With the arrival of Lamarca, residents began to suspect the presence of ‘communists’ in the region. A recurrent and ubiquitous anti-communist discourse ensued, effectively associating communism with the ‘destruction of everything’.Footnote 75
The then-principal of the local school, who preferred not to give an interview, reported informally that Zequinha inquired about becoming an English teacher. She did not hire him, however, because she was convinced that he would soon leave. She said people feared Zequinha, especially after Lamarca's arrival. Although Lamarca was introduced as a geologist, people were suspicious because they knew about Zequinha's political views and his imprisonment in São Paulo. It did not make sense for Zequinha to be bringing a geologist to the city, according to the community.Footnote 76 Miguel Barreto told me that his father forbade him from playing soccer with Zequinha because he was suspicious of him.Footnote 77
Others, like Euval, with whom Zequinha had already discussed his political work, were not affected by anti-communist rumours. Owing to his good relationship with Zequinha, there was no reason for Euval to avoid him, nor to worry about the fact that he had been under arrest in São Paulo, nor to believe the military's narrative that he was a ‘terrorist’. ‘For us, it did not change a thing’, Euval commented.Footnote 78
Despite the fact that Lamarca did not interact directly with local peasants during his short time in Buriti (June to August 1971), he wrote about the MR-8's regional work in his diary. In his first entry, he notes: ‘The documents on the countryside's role in the revolution have had an extraordinary effect. Everyone is happy, they liked it … I think they want to see the countryside as central.’Footnote 79 As a newcomer to the MR-8, Lamarca was celebrating the fact that there was a convergence of views between his and other militant groups regarding the centrality of rural guerrillas to the revolution. In the entry for the following day, he recorded that he would discuss ‘with some comrades the documents about the countryside … and the education plan they were developing with the peasants’.Footnote 80 Commenting on his writings, Lamarca's editors Emiliano José and Oldack de Miranda wrote: ‘The more the militants became integrated in the region, the more they realised that reality did not coincide with their original vision.’Footnote 81 It was for this reason that both Olderico and Salgado reiterated that Brotas was a region only for the recruitment of peasants, not for armed action.Footnote 82
In Lamarca's other diary entries, we find some evidence of his involvement in Brotas – for example, in his notes from 2 July 1971: ‘I got stuck into the peasant education plan. I will participate by writing and the comrades will discuss with them [the peasants], reading and explaining. All I need to do is explain what imperialism is. I will try hard to be properly understood.’Footnote 83 Olderico adds that the script for the play that Santa Bárbara organised in Buriti was written by Lamarca.Footnote 84
According to Freire's theory of dialogic communication, Lamarca could not hope for effective communication with the peasants without sharing his life with them: cohabitation and coexistence between interlocutors is a precondition for effective dialogue. Lamarca understood the reality of the region partially and indirectly, because he was living there and received information from local inhabitants like Zequinha and his brothers Olderico and Otoniel. However, the information they provided was not enough for Lamarca to identify the ‘generating words’ Freire believes to be fundamental to the process of popular education. Lamarca himself lamented the impossibility of living with the peasants: ‘I only regret not being in direct contact to better adapt and start the Cultural Revolution.’Footnote 85 Nevertheless, Lamarca's alignment with the theory of dialogical action is evident in the following comment: ‘We definitely have to incorporate aspects of religion in this phase of political engagement. Here … misery is intense, religion explains questions about everything and [the peasant] is deeply attached to it. [Incorporating religion] will require great effort from us and much political skill. It will not be easy, but it is necessary.’Footnote 86
Ultimately, Lamarca's presence in Brotas attracted the attention of the state's military forces, interrupting the MR-8's peasant mobilisation work in the region. Ruptures in such endeavours were the fate of other armed organisations across Latin America.
Repression
Repression, in the form of agents of the military regime, reached Brotas in August 1971. Otoniel and Santa Bárbara were assassinated. Olderico was shot, but survived and was taken prisoner to Salvador. Salgado was in Rio de Janeiro at the time and escaped imprisonment. He had agreed to meet Crispin in the city of Milagres (about 100 km from Brotas) to check that it would be safe to return to Brotas. Crispin informed Salgado of the situation, saving him from capture. Zequinha and Lamarca managed to escape on foot, wandering from house to house before they were identified and assassinated on 17 September 1971. The military regime did not go only after MR-8 militants, it also targeted local residents, especially the Barreto family and their neighbours, as potential supporters of the ‘subversives’. During their days in hiding, Zequinha and Lamarca had the support of friends who provided them with food and shelter, mainly out of a sense of kinship or friendship with Zequinha's family rather than out of political commitment.Footnote 87
The military sought to use the agrarian question as part of its discourse to legitimise violence, even in a region where landlessness was not a central issue. National land struggles before the coup had led the military to assume (or to create the narrative) that any communist action in the countryside was aimed at taking land from large landowners.Footnote 88
One of the state's successful strategies for bringing the population at large on side was Operation ACISO, an acronym for Ação Cívico-Social (Civic-Social Action). Through ACISO, the military distributed food, medicine and clothing, provided medical and social services and renovated a public building in Brotas. The military also benefited from government propaganda in the media, especially the campaign ‘Brazil: Love it or Leave it’ (‘Brasil: Ame-o ou Deixe-o’), which sought to delegitimise opponents of the dictatorship through psychological warfare.Footnote 89
In their competing narrative, the military took advantage of the state apparatus at its disposal to disseminate its point of view to the residents of Brotas, and to win their support, despite its violent approach. In Peru and some Central American countries, peasants who held guerrillas responsible for the violent situation in which they found themselves became involved in counter-revolutionary groups allied to repressive forces: this was fundamental to the defeat of revolutionary organisations. In Brotas, however, although some peasants blamed the militants for the arrival of the military in the municipality and the consequent violence, they did not form counter-revolutionary groups. The MR-8 was smaller than Peru's Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and other revolutionary organisations of Central America, and it was relatively easy for the Brazilian army to defeat it. However, the murder of Zequinha and Lamarca weeks after the military entered Brotas occurred owing to a peasant who informed the military of their hiding place, highlighting the effectiveness of the military's anti-militant discourse, in Brazil as in other Latin American countries.
Final Considerations
Like other Brazilian revolutionary experiences, the MR-8's project in Brotas was interrupted in its early stages. It had lasted from early 1969 to August 1971. During this period, militants managed to promote the engagement of a few peasants and to change the ways of life of some of them, like Abel who left his job as a tax collector because of Zequinha's criticism of the government's unfair taxation policies. Nevertheless, it was difficult for the MR-8 to gain political momentum in the region. The intensity of state repression, as well as public support for the military regime, hindered the progress of revolutionary movements in the Brazilian countryside. This outcome resembles the experience of Russian narodniki, members of the intelligentsia who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, went into the countryside to mobilise peasants for a revolutionary socialist project, but were repressed before achieving their goal.Footnote 90
I return to Wolf's question as to who it is who speaks to the peasant or, in other words, to whom it is that the peasant listens. In the case of the MR-8, the two and a half years of political work in Brotas were defined by the leadership of Zequinha, an ‘insider mediator’ who had the respect and trust of local residents, as well as relevant work and political militancy experience from his time in São Paulo between 1964 and 1968. Zequinha's role was fundamental to the MR-8's recruitment efforts in Brotas, since most peasants became involved with the organisation because of their trust in Zequinha, a ‘son of that land’, and not because of previous political experience, as was the case in other regions of Brazil. While ‘outsider mediators’ can build relationships of trust and establish dialogical communication with peasants, Zequinha's acquaintance with locals put him one step ahead of other, unknown militants, thereby mitigating the problem of distance from peasants to which James Scott refers.Footnote 91
In a challenge to Joel Migdal's theory, which argues that the main reason why peasants participate in revolutionary processes is their pragmatic interests, those who engaged with the MR-8 did not do so to address their socioeconomic needs.Footnote 92 However, the literacy work led by Santa Bárbara corroborates another part of Migdal's thesis, according to which the probability of peasants welcoming new institutional arrangements proposed by the militants is greater when the state is ‘structurally incapable’ of providing citizens with the services they need.Footnote 93 In Brazil in the 1970s, state weakness was evident in education. Were it not for the arrival of agents of the military regime, literacy work could have been a way to both undermine state authority and strengthen the role of the MR-8 within the population. The importance placed by the MR-8 on literacy echoes once again the strategies adopted by the leaders of Cuba's revolution. In 1961, the revolution having already triumphed, Fidel Castro launched Cuba's National Literacy Campaign, which succeeded in reducing illiteracy to practically zero.
A final question of Wolf's remains: ‘and what is it that they communicate?’ As we have seen, on several occasions MR-8 militants developed dialogical communication with the peasants of Brotas by denouncing the reality in which they were living, citing issues such as excessive tax bills and the lack of peasant rights like social security, education and health. The MR-8 militants encouraged the peasants with whom they had created a relationship of trust by highlighting successful revolutions in other countries at that time.
The general profile of Brotas peasants, especially the fact that they owned the land they worked, aligns well with the definition of ‘middle peasants’, the group most likely to join revolutionary projects, according to the theories of Hamza Alavi and Eric Wolf.Footnote 94 However, as both authors underscore, the mere predisposition of middle peasants to revolution is not enough to explain their process of political engagement. It is necessary to understand the conditions under which peasants become political subjects, i.e. to engage in processes of collective action in order to change the reality in which they live. In the case of the MR-8, Zequinha's authority and the political work he carried out with Santa Bárbara, as well as the socioeconomic hardships faced by Brotas residents, were key factors that led some peasants to become politicised. However, the military regime cut short the militants’ work in Brotas, making it impossible for them to mobilise more peasants.
Although revolutionary attempts like the MR-8's were quickly crushed, they contributed indirectly to the military regime's establishment in 1969 and 1971 of social rights for rural workers, such as pensions, paid sick-leave and funeral aid.Footnote 95 One factor that led the military government to extend these rights to rural workers was the national security paradigm. Through co-optation, the military sought to prevent social revolts promoted by ‘subversives’, as revolutionaries were called. Promoted by technocrats of the military government, rural welfare policy was based on the need to achieve ‘social justice’, seen as a condition for maintaining ‘social peace’.Footnote 96 Indeed, the pilot rural welfare programme of 1969 was established to benefit sugar-cane workers, in response to the strike they had held the previous year in Cabo, Pernambuco.Footnote 97
One major difficulty encountered by militants was their need to remain in hiding, which prevented them from showing themselves in public (Salgado and Lamarca) or revealing their true identity (Santa Bárbara). In addition, unlike other Brazilian revolutionary organisations of the time that tried to mobilise peasants, the MR-8 paid little attention to attempting to meet their day-to-day demands. According to a self-critique presented in a document dating from 1971, this approach made the MR-8's communication with peasants more difficult: ‘Sometimes, due to our petit bourgeois origins, we felt like armed struggle intellectuals talking to people worried about their daily meals … Even when we began to talk about the more concrete problems suffered by the people in each place, we often felt that our propaganda disappeared into thin air.’Footnote 98 The self-identification as ‘petit bourgeois’ stems from the fact that a significant proportion of militants came from the undergraduate student movement (university education at the time was accessible only to the privileged middle and upper classes). Ridenti points out that the MR-8, due to the circumstances of its foundation (see note Footnote 11), had more former students among its membership than did other revolutionary organisations.Footnote 99
One hypothesis for why the MR-8 did not concern itself with providing social assistance services in Brotas may be the fact that Zequinha already had authority over local residents. In addition to belonging to a respected family, he had studied in a seminary, was considered to be knowledgeable and was ‘a son of that land’. As a trusted insider, he did not need to provide assistance services to win the sympathy and trust of the Brotas community, unlike other Brazilian armed organisations at the time whose militants were outsiders unknown to local peasants.
On the other hand, merely being known to locals was apparently not enough to guarantee the success of the MR-8 initiative. Many peasants did not engage with the political project. Scott interprets peasants' non-engagement in this kind of situation as a result of their autonomy and resistance to external influence: peasant autonomy is expressed not only in relation to political actors, but also to religious leaders, technical experts and other community outsiders. Although Zequinha was an internal mediator, the ideas he brought came from the outside. For Scott, peasants who participated in revolutions, such as those of China, Russia and Vietnam, for example, did so because they were already in revolt and the revolutionary leaders in those countries were able to tailor their political narrative and objectives to address the peasants’ dissatisfaction. In the case of the MR-8 in Brazil, the non-engagement of peasants may have been due to the absence of the environment of revolt to which Scott refers, in spite of the success of other peasant-driven revolutions of the twentieth century.Footnote 100
Peasant non-engagement can also be viewed as a consequence of fear or limited understanding of the revolutionary project. The strength of anti-communist propaganda that had been widespread in Brazil since the early 1960s as a means of legitimising the 1964 coup and the military regime could have also played a role in preventing peasant involvement in armed resistance. The collaboration of some peasants who passed anti-militant information to the military could be seen as counter-revolutionary engagement on the part of the local population. However, this process occurred only after the arrival of the military in Brotas and to a lesser degree than in Peru, for example, since the MR-8 did not try to disrupt the peasants’ trade with the cities, nor did it create generational conflict among the peasants, as did the Shining Path.Footnote 101
How does the MR-8's experience help us understand political disputes during the military dictatorship in Brazil? In general terms, one could argue that the 1964 coup was carried out as a result of, among other reasons, a dispute over definitions of social justice. While the organisations closest to socialism advocated for an equal distribution of wealth and an end to the exploitation of the labour force, the organisations defending capitalism argued that socialism would deprive them of their freedom and raised the spectre of the beginning of a ‘communist dictatorship’ in the country. They therefore supported the overthrow of then-President João Goulart, seen as an associate of ‘the communists’.
The 1964 coup resulted in the systematic repression of organisations that posed some threat to the capitalist order, which the military supported at the time. The military, however, could not completely annihilate opposition organisations. On the contrary, by banning most channels of democratic participation, they effectively encouraged activists to join armed organisations like the MR-8. As presented in this article, these organisations sought to mobilise workers, including peasants, to engage in left-wing revolutionary projects. In their communication with the public, militants advocated for certain social rights, such as rural welfare, which were later granted, albeit partially, by the military government.
The case of the MR-8 exemplifies the adversities encountered by revolutionary organisations in their attempts to mobilise peasants for armed resistance against the Brazilian authoritarian regime of the 1970s. It also highlights the role of anti-communist propaganda in legitimising the military regime and guaranteeing its relative control over the country's rural population. Finally, the MR-8 experience reinforces the importance for political leaders of having an in-depth understanding of the local realities of the people they seek to mobilise in order to stimulate the critical spirit necessary for sustainable political engagement.
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on the author's PhD dissertation, defended in December 2019, for the Graduate Programme of Social Sciences in Development, Agriculture and Society of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author thanks the peasants and militants who shared their stories with him; the anonymous reviewers of JLAS; his supervisor, Dr Leonilde Medeiros, as well as the evaluation committee of his dissertation, Dr Daniel Aarão Reis, Dr Marcelo Ridenti, Dr Jean Sales and Dr Débora Lerrer for their advice; and all those who helped in different ways to promote the research.
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