Question : Communist Brazil, Was it really possible ?

Gonzaga said:

Sorry, but there is simply now way it could have succeeded. First, the rebells simply didn't have any important support among the population. It was rather a military rebbellion inspired by communists than a proper communist rebellion, given the fact that all the conspirators were from the Army. It had nothing to do with organized workers. The majority of them were simple soldiers who knew nothing about communism, they only believed it was something that would be good to Brazil. If the officers that convinced them to join the fight had told them that Fascism was the solution for the nation's problems they would join the fight too. They fought more due to loyalties and dislike of their commanders rather than ideology. It also meant that when the rebells asked some of their fellow officers to join the movement many of them decided that they needed to inform their commanders about it or even try to convince the commanders to join the rebellion.

Also, the government was well aware of the insurrection, and only in Natal, the lest important of the three cities where they rebelled (Natal, Recife and Rio de Janeiro) the movement managed to occupy a public building other than their own headquarters, and they simply fled and gave up when they saw a loyal company arriving the to city.

Finally, it only happened because Luis Carlos Prestes sent wrong information to Moscow, informing that support for communism was widespread among the Brazilian population. The contacts between him and the Politburo were known by the British, who informed Vargas that a revolt was likely to happen. The rebells simply had no chance.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any good online source about it in English, but there is this good work of Frank D. Mccann: "Soldiers of the Pátria: A History of the Brazilian Army, 1889-1937" (Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804732221). He gives a lot of interesting information about the movement and why it was doomed from the start.

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037771 said:

When I did research on the Communists in Brazil for my own timeline (in my sig below,) and when I took a class in second year dedicated to Brazil in the 20th century, I was never convinced that the Party (and others like them) would have taken over, bar a civil war between two other factions.

As you've pointed out, armed rebellion never got them anywhere; the forces that be were always far too strong. It didn't get them anywhere in the 1930s, in 1945 and 1951 when they started infiltrating rural cooperatives in Pernambuco to turn them into self-defence organisations, or in the 1960s-70s when they were fighting the post-'64 military government.

That said, they were nevertheless a force to be reckoned with up until the coup in 1964. The Communist Party of Brazil was outlawed in 1947 IIRC, but their members still managed to scatter themselves throughout the legal left-leaning parties and the trade union structure. Moreover, despite the illegality of the PCB, there wasn't as much of a stigma against Communists as, say, in the United States. This was very much the case in the disturbingly poor Northeast, which American journalists and aid workers in the early 1960s then misinterpreted as a hotbed of Marxist-Leninist intrigue. Yet this didn't stop destructive factionalism within the far-Left in Brazil, fuelled by the example of the Sino-Soviet split and the pettiness of individual leaders like Prestes and (AFAIK) Marighela.

I would say the Communists would have a chance at power by picking sides carefully in any Brazilian civil war. There were a few cases where this seemed possible - the 1964 coup is one - but then you'd have to look at cases outside Brazil to shape a plausible timeline, like the Spanish Civil War. The two chapters of my timeline where I stashed away more specific research are here and here. I examined the Communists in depth, so it might be useful.

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Dom Pedro III said:

Well, I don't have much to add in terms of the overall history, but I can talk a bit about my family's experience with this, which was on the front lines of this conflict.

As mentioned, communists infiltrated the peasant leagues in the state of Pernambuco, but they also moved into the state north of it, Paraiba where my family is from.

They were plantation owners. I'm not going to defend most of them because they were pretty awful on the whole. But I will say that my grandfather was one of the few plantation owners in the area who treated his workers like human beings instead of animals. In fact, this saved his life because while the workers on a lot of other farms rose up against the landowners when the organizers from the liga camponesas came around, his workers refused. They saw that he was an honest employer (which is why he ultimately went out of business).

Violence between the peasants and the landowners became rampant in the 1950s. Squatting by peasants was broken up with brutal attacks. Peasants, organized by communist instigators, slaughtered their employers. The common euphemism was "tying a bell around their neck", which referred to a little ritual of public humiliation before they were executed.

My father was an active participant in the chaos on both sides. On the one hand, he walked around with a pistol and two grenades in his pocket waiting for an angry mob of communists to try to kill him. One time they got a tip that the workers were making a move on the plantation, so my father rounded up as many people as he could and drove out there. When they got to the farm, the place was empty. But that had been payday. If they had rolled through about two hours earlier, they would've seen a crowd of hundreds of peasants surrounding my grandfather, and they probably would've started shooting into a group of people just collecting their wages.

But he also went to school in João Pessoa, the capital of the state, where many of the students had fully embraced the communist message. Riots against the police were common, and my father wasn't one to miss a good civil disturbance.

Naturally, my family being conservative planters welcomed the 1964 coup, and my great-grandfather served as Senator in the post-coup Congress. However, it became apparent that we'd just traded one terror for another. The peasant revolts were crushed, and soon people started disappearing. My father had friends who were taken by the military authorities. He managed to get one of them out after pulling a lot of strings, but he had been tortured too severely to survive for long. I won't go into detail about what was done to him.

So we went from increasing instability and mob violence to more than twenty years of military dictatorship where thousands of people were brutally murdered by their own government. Thankfully, I came along after all that but just in time for the rough transition back to democracy. So that's the very short version of one family's experience of the communist uprisings in the Nordeste (Northeast) of Brazil.

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