"One day, around forty years ago, my father was taking me to school and he said:" "Isinha, I'm going to tell you a secret that you can't tell anyone, Uncle Carlos is Carlos Marighella." "Uncle Carlos was married to Aunt Clara, my mother's sister, and ever since I can remember, he was always showing up and then disappearing from home." "Uncle Carlos was affectionate, fun-loving, wrote poems for us and told stories about faraway places." "I had never associated his face with the pictures in the newspapers, magazines and wanted posters spread throughout the city." "Carlos Marighella was public enemy number one during the military dictatorship." "He was assassinated on a street in São Paulo in 1969." "I think this film began about that time, because" "I have always wanted to know who Carlos really was, this dear and forbidden uncle who lived for almost forty years in hiding, without leaving any traces." "Let me tell you a bit about my life:" "My father," "Augusto Marighella moved from Italy to Brazil." "He worked as mechanic in machinery shops in Salvador." "He met my mother, Maria Rita, in Bahia and had eight children with her." "I descend from Aswan blacks on my mother's side," "African slaves brought from Sudan and renowned for their participation in the uprising against the slave holders in Bahia." "This anarchist from Sicily, Augusto Marighella is seduced, or seduced, we will never know, a beautiful girl from the bay area in Salvador, called Maria Rita." "Maria Rita descended from the black Malês people who fomented major black revolutions at the beginning of the XIX century in Bahia." "Carlos was born from this union." "Carlos Marighella, brought up in a home in which you could find both spaghetti and caruru." "Where you could find anarchists and Malês uprisings." "So, how could this boy Carlos, aspire to anything less?" "I was born December 5, 1911." "Ever since a boy I used to think a lot about a problem my father talked about almost daily:" "Why do the poor work their whole life and never have anything?" "The boys, they were all, how could you say, raised to follow in the footsteps of my grandfather." "My father was he only son who didn't become a mechanic and work in the shops, and he used to tell me this, because my grandfather wanted my father to continue his studies." "He had already noticed from the start that my father had talent, had the inclination and the possibility of leading an academic life, as a student." "He would save the newspapers for my father to read, save pieces of candles for him to read them with." "I knew all about Marighella, the way he was, before meeting him personally because he used to go to the same school as my sister, Iracema, both "A" students." "They were good in math, Portuguese, good in English and my sister would always talk about his goings-on." "Marighella was always in the middle of the student's activities." "He was very active, participative." "So his life as a student was always hectic, liked to write verses as well, in jest, which was his Bahiano side." "There's this famous physic's exam of his on mirrors, in verse and everything." "High school, Bahia, 23rd of the eight month." "Doctor, please allow me to scribble thus on this written exam." "Mirrors are surfaces that produce, after polished, the reflection of light." "Two cases mirrors present, after an image they emit." "Case the first:" "A point is what you have, the second, an object it will be." "He was a tall guy, strong, athletic build, and extremely courageous, very brave." "I consider him as being one of the bravest men I ever met in my life." "Symbolically his biological constitution was made up by his people." "He incarnated them biologically, and by a stroke of good luck, he also incarnated them morally and psychologically." "He felt the needs of his people." "He was a poor man, he was a true man of the masses and did not abandon his social class." "And it is as a member of this class that he imagined what he wanted for his country, to do away with poverty and social injustice." "I embraced the communist cause when I was still studying civil engineering at the Polytechnic School in Bahia." "A little before finishing the course I dropped out of school and gave up my career." "A profound feeling of revolt and social injustice would not allow me to continue working for my diploma in a Bahia where kids are forced to work to be able to eat." "Do you know how communism was installed in Bahia?" "This was before, when he was still young." "When he began getting involved as an activist in Bahia." "The Integralists, at that time, in '35, were all delighted, thinking that Hitler was going to dominate the world, his ideas." "They set up a rally in Bahia, a congress, I don't know what it was." "They all came with their suitcases and everything." "And Marighella who had already awoken, not all that much, to freedom fighting formed a small group of friends, they bought poster paper and drew hammer on scythes on them, making a bunch of posters only they knew about." "They waited till night, all dark, everyone sleeping and then climbed up the light posts and hung them up high, nobody saw them." "The next day, everyone started waking up and saw the posters." "They began spreading the word:" "Communism had arrived in Bahia." "What I mean is that he was audacious that way, ever since he was young." "He liked visual things, to do things that people could look at, take note of." "And of course, all the young people, everyone wanted to work with him." "Because you have to remember what it meant to be a communist in Brazil between 1930 and 1964 in Brazil." "Being a communist didn't mean just being leftwing." "Being a communist meant embracing a profound cause." "I'd say that being a communist in any part of the world meant being part of an army involved in a worldwide revolution." "Although this army was fragile in Brazil, it was an army that represented a global revolution, and one that had triumphed in a very important country like Russia, which became the Soviet Union." "So being a communist carried an ontological weight with it, it meant donating your life to a cause." "The character of the revolution is that of fighting for national independence, the emancipation from oligarchies and the socialist road to full economic and social development." "Brazilian revolutionaries active in the four corners of the country, in the mountains, jungles, plains or caatingas should count on the support of the revolutionaries from the cities." "In reality, Marighella is the comely mulatto expression of communism in Bahia in the '30s, a funny type of communism because it was not Marxist, they didn't even know who Marx was, made up of mulattos, like" "Jorge Amado, Edson Carneiro, Couto Ferraz, so you had this bunch of kids seduced by the communist utopia who, at the same time, did not withdraw from their daily activities in the city or the greater bay area." "Before 1930 no Brazilian intellectual found it necessary to take a political stance, it was something else." "They would often become congressmen, civil servants, conservatives, liberals." "After 1930, because of communism and fascism, all the intellectuals began to feel the necessity of taking a political stand and turned into fascists, rightwing, leftwing or liberals, but they could no longer do nothing." "After 1930, Getúlio Vargas represents this, urban conservatives begin to speak out, Brazil was going from a democracy for the few to a democracy for all and nobody could stand by with their arms crossed." "Uncle Carlos would always come at nightfall, and leave before dawn, he'd set the breakfast table, decorating it with a flower from the garden and disappear before anyone woke up." "When I got my first address book I asked him to give me his address." "But he only sang:" ""I don't have a place to stay, that's why I live on the beach." "I don't have a place to stay, that's why I live on the beach"." "The Sugarloaf, just a sweet lie!" "It would have been better if it was an enormous loaf of bread, real bread, able to feed all the starving people in the city for a long time." "My father left Bahia and moved to Rio de Janeiro to reorganize the communist party that had suffered harsh repression after the revolt in 1935, and he was arrested in Rio and this newspaper, widely read at the time," "the Gazeta de Noticias, came out with an article showing how communists were looked upon and treated at the time, because you can see here that the headlines say:" "Three gentlemen affected by communism have just been removed from society by those who are concerned with the proper social prophylaxis." "I was thrown into jails in the Federal District," "Fernando de Noronha, São Paulo and Ilha Grande." "I endured seven years of imprisonment." "I was submitted to the following types of torture:" "Punches, kicking and other blows, my entire body burned by the cigarettes the investigators themselves were smoking," "and investigator Galvão even pulled out his tiepin and stuck it under may nails which started t o bleed badly." "You know he was in the Fernando de Noronha prison during the New State, right?" "He worked as the cook's helper." "There were hundreds of prisoners, but Marighella, worried about losing time, came up with a couple ideas:" "Education for the prisoners, theater, and then, for example, language classes, anyone who knew a foreign language had to teach the others." "And he learned English, in his spare time, after work, at night, everyone would go to sleep and he'd stay up studying." "I love you so much that, in sum, there is no human force able to restrain this intoxicating passion for which, if tortured in your name" "I would happily, indifferent to pain, die smiling and murmuring your name." "In 1945, the Soviet Union grew in the eyes of the whole world, because of their terrible struggle for freedom." "The Soviet Union's victory did not result in any socialistic ideals being brought to Brazil." "Here, the dictatorship, after the war, began to lose power and all the political prisoners were granted amnesty and released, Luiz Carlos Prestes, Marighella, Agildo and all the other prisoners." "Democracy brought back the legality of the Communist Party." "Prestes had this historical tradition, was already a legendary figure, and when he would appear, it was really something phenomenal," "Prestes' rallies were extraordinary, not only in São Paulo, in the Pacaembu stadium, but in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Januario." "We all had this idea that our struggle for socialism, for communism, was very close, a question of years, days, before the whole world became socialist." "Later, I returned with Marighella in his campaign for the constituency in '46, in which he was a candidate from Bahia and I participated in some of his rallies, at factories, in the poor neighborhoods, we held three or four of them." "We managed to elect seventeen representatives i n the constituency." "Our biggest cause was for the agrarian reform and against imperialism, and Marighella was a great speaker." "Like I said, Marighella's worst problem was finishing the rallies, somebody had to go up and pull him away, if not, he wouldn't stop, he'd continue on like a machine gun." "As representatives of the people and the constituency of 1946, we should seek reality above all else." "Brazilians in the vast countryside don't get married with all this complication, with so much red-tape." "For 30 million illiterate people indissoluble marriage is just a bunch of baloney, a mere religious dogma." "We learn and live." "There will be no democracy under no circumstances without freedom of religion, without secular education and without divorce." "My father met my mother in Rio de Janeiro, and they were living together like a married couple when my father was elected representative." "It was the only time, the period between '45 and '47 that the party was legal and able to act freely, but in '47 the president, General Dutra, revoked the legality of the" "Communist Party." "After the Communist Party's register was revoked, my mother came to Bahia and got married here, she reconstructed her life differently, inclusively because my father went underground for a long time, and so, when I was born in May, my father had gone" "underground, he evaporated and I only met him when" "I was seven years old and so I went through the embarrassment of not having a father during these years which were, you could say, rather marking, because at school, I was the only boy who didn't have a birth certificate." "Let "A" be the figure seen below, let the mirror be, the open line "C"." "Point "P", a given point it be, with its incident radius in "R", as you may note." "The reflected radius comes later and the luminous radius is point 2." "Clara came here to Rio, became active in the movement and told me how, around two months earlier, when she was in Recife where she was working as a stewardess and already a member of the party," "she delivered correspondence." "She'd go to headquarters and pick up letters to take to the other states she traveled to and on one of these days, she told me:" "I was all dressed in my uniform, real pretty like, and there was this big mulatto standing at the door, who looked at me, but I walked by without looking back, took the correspondence and left." "When I came back, Jorge Amado told me:" "Look, that guy who was standing at the door," "Carlos Marighella, said:" "Hmm, what a pretty white girl you guys found." "And she told me she was flattered and began going back more." "When my stepfather heard about how she was dating Marighella, I think the worst thing for him was that he was a communist." "How could I, huh?" "It was just inconceivable to him." "I'd say to him:" "But dad me crying and all but, dad, he's "goy, reuter and schwartz", which means he was a Christian, communist and black." "Well, he's all that, but he's a great person!" "Wonderful, and all that." "A huge heart!" "But there was no way, he wouldn't have it." "He sent for her here in Rio and cut up all her clothes so she couldn't go out, wouldn't be able to run away, and Marighella went to Recife, to Adalgiza Cavalcanti's house, the first woman to be elected a representative in Recife" "by the party, to Jaboatão, a town known as little Moscow, sat down and they thought up a dress that would fit" "Clara which Adalgiza sewed, snuck it in and gave it to Clara." "Clara put it on and eloped with Marighella that night wearing the dress." "It is a great love story in the end." "He had this grandiose aspect about him, grandiose and fun, good-humored, like the guy who goes out dressed as a girl to dance carnival while undercover." "And, one of these times, during carnival, he went out dressed as a lame mule, limping and all..." "With his costume and everything, this carnival thing, he was good at it, he liked it." "I think he was a great lady's man, I wouldn't say he was especially good-looking, but he was different, in my time people would say a guy had or didn't have "churupitor"." "These were the days of burlesque theater and when you wanted to say someone was nice, handsome, sexy, we'd say the guy had "churupitor"." "So Marighella had "churupitor"." "The nights that Uncle Carlos was at home, he'd put us to sleep." "He'd pick us up, take us into our room and stay talking to us and telling stories until we fell asleep." "Sometimes he'd disappear for a long time, and when he showed up again, tell us that he had been to Africa, to hunt snakes and other things like that, and he'd give us details of how he caught the snakes, put them" "into shoe boxes, and how he'd take them to the" "Butanta Institute for them to make vaccines with." "To us, he was our hero." "The party sent me totally underground, perhaps a little exaggerated, you know?" "And in these circumstances, after working with Prestes," "I went to work for Marighella." "I was his driver..." "One day I was feeling horrible, I was late, but only a bit late and when Marighella got into the car, he was very mad and cussed me out..." "He overdid it I think, because I was shocked." "I thought a bit, while I was driving, and I said:" "Look comrade, you're a head of the party and I'm your driver, but I'm not your employee," "I'm a comrade of yours, and I just can't accept the way you just treated me." "Around twenty minutes later, as he got out of the car, he said:" "Falcão, I'm real sorry." "And after that we got along very well together." "For over a year." "He was unable to stay in Rio so the party sent him to São Paulo." "And he became the political head there, and he began working with the peasant movement, labor movement, women's movements, all the main social movements, but we all had to live clandestine." "I mean, nobody could know your name, your address, we'd only meet others during meetings, nobody knew where you were, right." "I was known as Vera at the time." "And nobody saw Marighella, he'd leave early in the morning and come in late at night." "Hunted down by the police, you know, hunting communists." "And it had now begun on a worldwide scale, with the Cold War, right?" "In reality, with Stalin in power, everyone was a Stalinist because they thought he was the continuation of Lenin." "As for training, the party gave courses on Stalin, courses on Marxism, all copied from the Soviet courses, only in Portuguese, and Marighella headed one of these schools." "What did they teach?" "The statutes were almost identical to those from the Soviet Union." "It was as if they were used as models for communists around the world." "I was severely attacked by a magazine headed by Marighella, the Fundamentos magazine, they didn't use his name, but it was his..." "We were from the Brazilian Socialist Party and you know that inside leftwing factions disputes are many times more heated than that between the right and left, a kind of territorial competition." "They would call us Trotskyists, because at that time, different from today, they would cuss at you like that, anyone who didn't agree with the party line was a Trotskyist, a synonym, more or less, for thief, assassin." "Jorge Amado, when he wrote Subterranean Freedom, with its Stalinist cover, something he liked, as did all the party leaders and intellectuals in the" "Communist Party, Carlos Marighella is used as the novel's hero." "Incidentally, the hero's name in the novel is Carlos." "An evident reference to Marighella." "It was socialist realism in Brazil." "One day he came home and said:" "Clara, I have to learn English." "And I said:" "Why?" "He said:" "Because I'm going on a trip." "I didn't ask him where he was going." "I couldn't, because we were underground." "You'd never know where anybody was going, how long they'd be staying." "When he came back," "I was in jail, I had been arrested in Campinas, with my books, etc." "And all, very dangerous communist girl, like they said." "When we met, after they let me out, the first thing" "I asked him:" "Listen, can you tell me where you've been all this time?" "And he told me:" "I was in China." "In China?" "And how did you get by on your English?" "He said:" "Great!" "What do you mean, great?" "You can't even pronounce the words." "And he said:" "Neither can the Chinese." "He went to the Soviet Union once, he went to China and got very sick there." "He stayed in a hospital and couldn't talk to the Chinese nurses." "So he used to draw things, he'd draw a glass and ask them to write the word for it in Chinese, and even made this great dictionary that the police took when they raided our apartment in Rio." "It's such a pity, not having that dictionary." "I think the last time I saw Marighella, that I can remember, was at a meeting when we found out about the accusations against Stalin, with all the party leaders." "I remember that Marighella had a..." "he gave a very emotional speech, when he felt that he had been fooled by Stalin, you know?" "And, he cried, he was really upset by the accusations." "Stalin was looked up to by everybody like a father, a wise man, as someone who didn't make mistakes." "And this was the beginning of his rupture with the party as well, you could call it something like that." "And then a normal line is traced, angle I incidentally equal to AR, looking towards the second R, the image is clearly seen in the background and by extension, the luminous ray that is reflected, meets obliquely." "Two triangles therefore the mirror produces." "Rectangles the two." "Both the same, equal." "Because an axis has in common, two equal angles forming one." "And we remained underground until '53, '54, after which we became legal, because Juscelino was elected and everything was related to the Brazilian political process, right?" "Juscelino didn't actually legalize the Communist Party at the time, but you had more freedom in which to organize anyway." "I remember once, Uncle Carlos came and stayed at our house for a long time." "He'd lie for hours on the ground in the backyard in the sun, without his shirt, doing exercises with heavy bricks." "It was very impressive to see that huge man, exerting himself and sweating profusely." "I only found out much later that he had come to recuperate from the wounds after being shot in a movie theater in '64." "The wounds must have been there, but I never saw them." "That day, when I first met my father, he picked me up and set me down in his lap." "And just started talking separated from him." "He rented a house in Meyer and then in 1961, more or less, we went to live with him, me, him and Aunt Clara, a very small apartment." "Just a one room place, but with lots of room, a big living room with a bookshelf and shelves filled with thousands of books." "Very Spartan, but comfortable." "And there was this tape recorder, which was very rare." "He brought it, I remember well, from some international meeting he had in Moscow and he began to tape a soap opera, something he'd do only on Saturday and Sundays." "He'd tape all the voices, the female voices, a soap opera that he'd play back and ask me my opinion, and I'd listen to every chapter." "So, he liked that kind of thing, he had a talent for it, if he hadn't had all his communist work to do, he would have most likely have worked with the arts and all." "And he liked music." "We lived through times of great transformation, we had "cinema novo", new theater, all the necessary political reforms being considered before the coup." "All of society, UNE, the unions, the peasant leagues, all humming with activity, but all these utopias weren't quiet as utopian anymore, despite the Cuban revolution, that had been a major victory." "And Vietnam which was still putting up resistance." "Our task is to create two, three, various Vietnams." "We represent two hundred and fifty million Latin Americans who have accepted the challenge of underdevelopment and united intend to vanquish it." "But, the greatest utopia of all, in reality, was the new man, to really create humanity, because we humans are still not what we could be." "In '64, this wave was on the rise, for example, even from an agrarian point of view," "Julião's peasant leagues were terrifying the sugar mill owners." "Urban proletariats, after being under the tutorship of the Ministry of Labor for a long time, were gaining a political conscious, because we could stop Brazil, really bring it to a halt." "The Communist Party's railway organization could do it, because of Jango coming into office, Janio's resignation," "I mean, these are things that forced you to take a position." "Marighella was active in Rio de Janeiro as well, you get me?" "The guy knew the problems involved in the working class struggle and participated in it, stimulated organization without sticking his nose up in the air, like some boss." "You could talk to him and he would understand your position as union a member, as a worker." "The truth is that the Communist Party, despite being institutionally clandestine, had a large and effective presence in Brazilian political events." "Important people from the government, important musicians and writers all used to call our place." "On that day, March 13th, I went to Rio with the delegation." "We arrived in Rio, went to the rally, lots of enthusiasm, people, maybe more, João Goulart coming out with a decree that was for us a major conquest in base reforms and most of all in the agrarian reform, urban reform." "We were a group of four or five young men, and one of us said:" "Why don't we go over to the central headquarters?" "So we went, nobody about, pretty empty, but there was this strong mulatto guy who saw us in the corridor, like I said, four or five of us, a bit lost." "He said:" "You guys...?" "Oh, we've just arrived from São Paulo and etc." "How'd the rally go?" "Just wonderful!" "How's São Paulo?" "Two times as wonderful!" "And then they told me:" "It's Carlos Marighella." "He had this map of Brazil on the wall and he said:" "Look, you guys, be careful, the coup is probably inevitable and we aren't going to be able to put up any resistance, no conditions to." "You guys be careful, you find yourself a place, listen to what I say, keep alert." "And he had these huge hands and he'd point at the map and say:" "Because these outposts here are probably with the right, and these others here too." "It's dangerous here, Minas is dangerous, and listen," "São Paulo isn't what they're saying it is." "That's what he said, more or less, something that we didn't like at all, to tell you the truth, because we wanted to hear exactly the opposite." "We wanted to hear the exact opposite." "People were saying that João Goulart's government had a military scheme able to abort any attempt at a coup by the Armed Forces." "But my father, on the contrary, didn't believe it; he didn't believe Goulart had control over exactly this and that the coup was eminent, he realized this because of the tone of the speeches." "And so, what did he do?" "He enrolled me in a boarding school in 1964 and said:" "Look, you can come home whenever you want, but if anything happens, you'll have a place to eat, to sleel... is a closet" "When they overthrew the government, it seems like he had seen it coming, because it was..." "He came home one night, and news had spread about how they had already taken over Minas, that they were coming, but nobody knew for sure." "So, the best thing we can do couldn't take the books, we had to leave as we were." "And I don't know why, but we left at dawn, and instead of using the elevator he said:" "Let's use the stairs." "And as we walked down the stairs the police came up through the elevator." "We went by Flamengo where they were burning the UNE building, setting it on fire, and we went to Prestes' house," "where unhappily we left terribly disappointed..." "We were through, there would be no resistance, no nothing." "He had made arrangements with the caretaker," "I don't know the details, for her to get our clothes, because we hadn't been able to take practically anything." "She took a bundle of our clothes when she went to deliver his correspondence, because he got a lot of letters from abroad, which would all be sent home, after which he'd take to party headquarters." "And so, when he got close to the movie theater, he noticed, he didn't really see anything, but realized that he was being followed." "He ducked into the theater, a matinee session." "He went inside and right after, the lights went on and the police started shooting." "It so happens that at the matinee, for kids, there was a reporter from the Correio da Manha newspaper with a camera, as he was going to the office after the movies." "The pictures he took were really important because it shows when the police started shooting." "How he stood up and began to shout:" "Down with the military dictatorship, fascists!" "He was sent to jail, they wouldn't give him a habeas corpus, until Sobral Pinto, that great lawyer," "got one for him, but he had hardly even recuperated before he decided to start his activities again." "And everybody said:" "Marighella," "But, he wouldn't listen, he had already made up his mind to put up armed resistance, he thought there was no other way and that he couldn't take things lying down." "All this coincided with Cuba holding the OLAS convention," "Latin America Solidarity Organization." "And they invited the party to send representatives but the party refused." "As their ideals weren't in line with Cuba's political opinions." "But Marighella accepted their invitation, they invited him and he went." "He snuck out undercover and made his way to Cuba." "After arriving there, the party heard he was in" "Cuba and had made declarations in support of Cuba's positions, everybody thought he would be kicked out of the party, but before they could do that, he wrote them a letter telling them why he was leaving." "Havana, August 17, 1967." "To my comrades in the central committee of the PCB." "I am writing to inform you that I have decided, here in Havana, to cut all my relations with PCB's central committee." "I would like to make a public declaration on my disposition to fight as a true revolutionary together with the masses and never to wait for the rules of the bureaucratic and conventional political game that reigns among our leaders." "In my condition as a communist, to which" "I will never renounce and which can neither be given nor taken away by the central committee," "I will continue down the road of armed resistance, reaffirming my revolutionary attitude and definitely s evering all my ties with you." "With nothing more to be said, my communist greetings to all, Carlos Marighella." "After my father told me Uncle Carlos's secret I kept track of all the guerilla's activities and cheer for them." "I was real happy the day I heard they had taken over the National Radio station and celebrated their victory, but that night, all the noise frightened me." "I lay down staring at the ceiling, thinking:" "And what if they torture me, will I tell them or not?" "I was only ten years old and I never saw Uncle Carlos again." "Repression then began to increase violently." "No quarter to the students, the unions, everywhere," "I mean, like I tell youngsters today, if you used earrings, you'd be arrested." "If you wore long hair, you'd be arrested." "Meetings were illegal." "Students couldn't meet together, couldn't hold assemblies." "They'd stick an orange inside your jeans and if it didn't fall out the bottom, you'd be arrested." "Just because the orange didn't come out the other side." "The freedom to criticize, hold your own opinion and to organize does not exist in Brazil." "The only two legal political parties, if you can call them that, Arena and MDB, are allowed to exist by the dictatorship solely to make foreigners believe that political freedom exists in Brazil." "The truth is that it doesn't." "Ever since the coup in 1964," "Brazil has been transformed into an American operational base, the largest North American companies, such as General Motors, General Electric, Firestone," "Swift, Armour, and foreign banks such as" "First National City Bank hold the country's strategic industrial and agricultural production in their hands." "And suddenly, Marighella came up with these ideas that fit like a glove, on issues such as decentralization and how it that leads to action that will form the vanguard and things like that." "So, this is the guy to listen to." "And from then on our interest in Marighella grew and we learned more about him." "Marighella was the type of guy that could win anyone over who talked to him." "He would do it by his simplicity and at the same time, clarity of ideas and his passion, and his high rank immediately inspired trust, especially ours, all young and inexperienced young men, knowing about his past." "If you look at it today, it isn't easy to understand what a decision like that meant, but I experienced a time of decision making involving a whole generation, a worldwide political moment." "Sure, there were hard things to face, I knew difficult times lay ahead, I had to break relations with my family, with school." "My friends." "But, at the same time, there was a volcano inside of me, goading me on because I knew I had to get involved in this type of activity and get into the fight." "Marighella, for us, under the circumstances, was like, a hero, a myth, not exactly a Guevara." "Guevara was a major myth, but in Brazil, it was Marighella." "After the victorious revolution, we will put into practice the following popular measures:" "Abolish all privileges and censorship, establish creative and religious freedom; free all political prisoners and eliminate the political police; create a state monopoly of the finances, foreign commerce, mineral wealth and fundamental services;" "confiscate all large estates and guarantee land deeds to farmers who work the land;" "eliminate corruption; jobs will be guaranteed for all men and women workers;" "reform the education system and expand scientific research." "We will free Brazil from its condition as a satellite of North American politics to create an independent country." "The process will be a long one, the first phase involves seeking the means, through a compulsory revolutionary tax to be paid by the banks." "Urban activities were merely tactical." "And therefore, it would be necessary to create armed groups to act in this direction." "Marighella wasn't only a guy who pulled the trigger." "He did pull the trigger, he took part in the military operations as well." "He was also someone who theorized on armed resistance, but also theorized on the revolutionary struggle." "So he also had this preoccupation with the organization and participation of the masses, contrary to what many people thought, it was an organization with a military and urban outlook." "And then a rural guerilla faction would be created comprised of a guerilla column that would be the embryo of a revolutionary army." "And on the other hand, create propaganda, to show, make it clear that there were people who would not submit to the regime and were taking action." "Marighella created a brilliant system, a horizontal structure, like the anarchists, you set up groups of three, four, five and only one has relations with the other, at the most three, and this chain continuous on up." "Whoever has a gun, whoever knows how to shoot, they may join forces with other Brazilian snipers, small armed groups can be created in the factories, workshops or any other place of work." "They may arise out of the neighborhoods, streets, housing projects, favelas, hideouts, huts and riverside dwellings, they can be created in schools, universities, farms, mills, estates, farming colonies and small hamlets, as well as in the countryside," "municipalities and their districts and villages." "Brazil is a country surrounded by guerillas in Bolivia, Columbia," "Venezuela and will never be able to aspire to freedom if not through guerilla warfare." "And another thing, the revolution has no models, we do not want to use the Cuban, he was very enthusiastic about Vietnam," "which was a true popular war, with profound roots, but not as a model, he said that the Brazilian revolution is to be done with samba, soccer, it is a dark-skinned revolution, you understand?" "Like he was, a mulatto, right?" "And then, in this our first contact, it was interesting because he talked about his preoccupations with the organization's strategy, a bit on the type of conditions we would be facing, emphasized aspects on discipline and that how this was the time to alert" "those who might be under some kind of illusion about its heroic aspects when in reality it was the beginning of a fight in which the probability of the worse happening was extremely high, that he promised nothing except," "for those in this phase of combat, prison, torture and death." "You didn't know where things would lead you." "You began doing small things, take a package, bring it back, go deliver something to someone, take someone someplace." "But, you slowly began to see how few people there were, at least at that moment, and how you have to do more things." "And I remember once when they got 1000 kilos of dynamite and 300 kilos were taken to Carlos's house and my job was to keep turning the boxes, because dynamite is like that, if you don't keep turning it," "you run the risk of having it explode." "So, every other day I'd go into his garage and turn the boxes, and the maid wanted to know what was in the boxes, the powder it left on the floor, right?" "And I was a little frightened, and he'd tell me:" "No, we don't have time to be afraid, you just go and do it." "OK then, I'll go and do it, but really, I was pretty scared." "Marighella's biggest virtue was that he wasn't just theoretic, he didn't sit back in an air conditioned room telling people what they had to do, he went himself, took command of the action." "He commanded the first few activities." "And he was the first one to go in, they held up the place, he walked out, got on a bus, all of it very new, very unusual, right, a robbery like this, and then the next day," "it was funny, that some of the people who had been at the bank said that the leader, the guy who shouted" ""this is a holdup "was somebody who looked a lot like Ciro Monteiro." "Which he really did..." "So we all started making... began making machine guns, hand grenades, but the machine gun was still very crude," "and we took it to use on a job, to test the machine gun, but right in the middle of a holdup, it just fell apart and fell to the floor." "Luckily it was in a supermarket, just people shopping, nobody had a clue about what was going on, and we all scrambled to pick up the pieces on the floor, stick them under our arms..." "I opened the papers and read about a holdup which said:" "Curiously, a machine gun was used in the robbery." "I thought:" "It's us, right?" "Marighella had told me he was planning a holdup around then, so..." "But, with a machine gun, who was it?" "But they didn't connect it to Marighella at first." "Are these cases being looked into separately by the Federal Police Department or do you suspect they have all been planned by the same group?" "The cases are being investigated separately, first because they have..." "they all took place in diverse times." "First there was the American consul, then the Federal Police, later the Public Force Headquarters and the last on Conselheiro Crispiniano, so each case is being treated separately." "Somebody was arrested which led to Marighella's name being associated to the series of robberies for the first time." "When he came out on the cover..." "The Minister of Justice was Gama e Silva at the time and he published a decree naming Marighella public enemy number one and that famous picture of him came out on the cover of Veja magazine," "I don't know if you have it, you probably do." "And he said, let me tell you something you won't believe it, it's so funny." "I stopped at a newsstand just get this and there was a big picture of me hanging there and while I was looking at it a newspaper or something, looked up at the picture and told the newsman "if I found that guy there" "I send him to my place"." "Amazing, at the newsstand." "I had never heard of anything like that." "I worked on this film for years, gathering documents, photos, clues." "He hadn't left much behind, here and there, and when" "I finally began production, Aunt Clara called me and gave me this black briefcase and said" ""it belonged to Marighella, somebody kept it for all these years"." "Inside, I found annotations, newspaper clippings, action plans, maps, escape routes." "A few indications of his movements." "The main tactical unit was here in São Paulo, we had over seventy people." "We'd use almost thirty, forty people in any one assault, as well as the cars, escape routes, protection." "We began to cordon off entire blocks in the city's banking district and we'd occupy the whole place, the stores, bars, take control of the traffic, blocked off everything, including the cars, we'd take police cars that where there," "and there always was, and always heavily armed, and they'd brag "and now we have machine guns", and whatever, and we'd take it all, including the guns of the lower ranking cops," "we'd gather it all up and even hold rallies for the populace, expropriated the banks, not only one, but three or four, you understand?" "All the banks in the area." "Payroll train leaving at 8:25" "We decided to hold up the payroll train, the railway." "I planted the idea, right." "It was my railway," "We knew that the train left the Luz Station, stopped in Lapa for three minutes, and then it went express." "So, when it gets here, at this point, just past Pirituba, you pass this place, you pull the brakes." "Marighella was going to be there to help unload, but these things, which we will have to talk about someday, he wasn't supposed to do that sort of thing, but he'd do them anyway." "Marighella wanted to take part in the action." "Just imagine, that at the time there was this radio station, the Nacional Radio Station, that had the highest ratings at nine in the morning, it could be hear in unison all over São Paulo, especially on the outskirts of town," "because they had this crime program." "So we were able, we had this technician, knew all about radio transmissions and he told us:" "Look," "I have this scheme, we'll go up to the top of the transmission tower, take our recording, and I'll broadcast it from up there, nobody will be able to interrupt it." "And that's what we did." "One is not able to organize a mass uprising in which to defeat the dictatorship and banish imperialism, putting power in the hands of the people, if one does not first recognize the decisive power of the peasants and if the revolutionary combat" "is not dislocated into the countryside." "Dislocating the revolutionary combat to the countryside means that the revolutionary political leaders should be stationed in rural areas from where armed resistance, or guerilla warfare, will be unleashed." "The imagination of leftist groups in Europe, of a part of the European leftwing, was set afire with news concerning the ALN and other organizations that fought and died together." "The case of the kidnapping of the North American ambassador was seen as an offense to imperialism almost impossible to have been carried out." "In my meeting with Sartre, he took Marighella's writings, began to read and said "this I like, at last something direct, no beating around the bush, I'll publish it all in the next edition of Temps Modernes"." "That meant that intellectuals from around the world would read what he wrote." "And he published them in the" "November issue." "Among all the things published by Marighella, that which brought him most recognition was his manual, which Cuban T." "Continental published in various languages and it's a fact that many radical movements from the time were all inspired on this manual." "It was, you could say, considered to be a primer, important for the political and military formation of these groups." "Godard sent a considerable sum, it was important, of course, in production terms it wasn't all that much, but it was important to help us in our fight." "It's a little like living on the razor's edge, but there was this great thing about it, I think, that is, a sense of unbelievable freedom, you didn't owe anything to anybody, total transgression." "Revolution is sacrifice, decision making." "Even in the face of death, because living with dignity, to conquer power for the people, to live freely, construct socialism and progress, all are worth sacrificing one's life for." "And there was the action taken against Chandler as well, who had been torturing people in Vietnam, a high ranking American officer who was here to train..." "You could say, the influence, American interference in Brazilian politics, giving direct training to the officers here on how to torture." "Boilesen's case was a very emblematic," "he was Danish, naturalized Brazilian, who became a very high-ranking officer, nominated director of the Ultra Group who went to the extreme of importing and inventing torture instruments and participating personally in torture sessions." "This was when we were called upon to help the guys in Rio kidnap the American ambassador." "In military terms, we captured and exchanged him for our comrades who were being held by them." "We negotiated with the dictatorship, and were absolutely sure that everything would work out because when we arrived home, a bit after he had been kidnapped, the radio and TV channels were violating censorship and formally reading our manifesto," "which was one of the demands we had made." "Marighella didn't want to be ostentatious, precisely to avoid that the repression forces get too heavy-handed on the militants, but he assumed an attitude which was, how could you say, a basic rule for all communists." "He didn't accuse, didn't denounce the revolutionary initiative of these young men and women, on the contrary, he assumed all responsibility publicly, it was Marighella who had pulled off the kidnapping." "And, in reality, Marighella was right, because the kidnapping brought more repression..." "they turned it up to maximum." "They created DOI-COD, centralizing the entire information system, something that was fatal to us." "We didn't change our tactics but kept on doing the same thing." "They started closing in on us, right." "Everybody getting scared, people being killed, thrown in jail, raiding their homes." "It got to the point where you could notice it." "And the organization growing smaller, because of the arrests, others killed, so people started to turn away." "The CIA's presence, it was no longer a game, of cat and mouse chasing each other around, it had turned into a war, you might call it a scientific war." "They had to finish everyone off, they weren't going to be arresting no one, they were out to kill." "I was always intrigued by this valise, called a capenga at the time, and which Uncle Carlos always carried with him." "He'd come inside the house and immediately set it up high on a shelf so nobody would touch it." "It was a complete mystery to me." "Many years later, my Aunt Clara told me that the valise held an electric shaver, a gun and a capsule of cyanide." "Because he had said that he would never be taken alive again." "And Marighella would say to me, listen, be careful when you go out on the street, me, white like this." "And so I'd cover my face with this cream, almost brown, beige, wear a wig, to be able to go out on the street and, another thing, I couldn't laugh." "That was just incredible." "One day he told me:" "You know you can't laugh while you're on the street." "But why?" "Because your laughter is very characteristic of you." "If anyone looks at you and you laugh, they'll know right off that it is you." "Can you imagine that!" "I couldn't even laugh." "But, it was pretty dramatic, we all knew our options, of living or dying, it was an option we faced in our daily activities, and as things got worse, it became clearer and clearer." "We used to talk about it a lot, of not surrendering, of committing suicide, take cyanide, things like that." "He shouldn't have been in São Paulo, this was a serious mistake." "Was he irresponsible?" "I think it had more to do with solidarity." "So many comrades are going to go down." "I want to stop it." "I want to save them before I go." "He was coherent." "No commander, no leader ever directed a movement from outside the country, like he said, even if it means dying, I'll die in my own country, fighting." "One of us was arrested with the telephone number of the Dominican convent in São Paulo scribbled on a piece of paper." "I think it was the stub of a check." "They didn't arrest just one friar or two, it was the entire convent, all taken down to DOPS headquarters, lots of them knew, and those with any kind of connection packed and fled." "And apparently, Marighella knew what had happened." "The police came to my place, around midnight, the "Death Squad", with Sheriff Fleury who burst in very aggressively, thinking he was there, because they came with" "Friar Fernando, and shoved him on top of me when I opened the door." "Or in other words, if anyone reacted he'd get the brunt of it." "And Friar Fernando's face was all swollen up, red, totally red, with bloodshot eyes, handcuffed, his hands were all swollen as well and he showed them to me, like saying," "I couldn't take it, right?" "They took us down to DOPS, in a room filled with people, all under arrest." "And there was this one guy he called "Marinheiro" and Fleury spoke to him, the room full of people, he said: "where's Marighella?"." "Marinheiro turned to him and said:" ""Aren't you the tough guy?" "Go get him!" And Fleury said, "I'll do just that" and started beating up Marinheiro in front of us until he... he even fell on the floor, and he kicked him repeatedly," "in front of all of us, and then said "I'll go get him, today, this is your boss's last day", he turned to us and said" ""Today is your boss's last day"." "Everyone kept quiet." "And then the phone rang, somebody answered it and they all began to shout "he's gone inside, he's gone inside!"." "At home, everyone was watching the game between Santos and Corinthians," "I had already gone to bed, and then I heard my mother shout, and then start to cry out loud." "My older sister came into the room crying and threw herself on the bed." "She said "they've killed Carlos"." "It was horrible, but we had to act normal." "First they called home, and then set a reporter with a car and everything." "I went with this bad premonition." "When I got to the newspaper office, alone, right, I saw an image being formed on a sort of telex machine, of a person, that photo of my father shot, bleeding, there in the car, that Beetle," "and I saw that it was really him." "His unmistakable face, it was him." "NARRATION Marighella" "Behind the mirrored plane, an image, asymmetric by norm, is formed, direct and virtual with the same size in the end." "A better explanation, or at least a more dependable one, can be seen under the figure." "For me, Marighella is one of the heroes of the Brazilian people." "The Saint of Socialism, the atheist saint." "The saint with no god." "I don't like it when they say that Marighella was an adventurer, they say that a lot." "Look, a man who began his social militancy when he was still young, who was the head of a political party as a young man, who read like crazy." "Who directed and wrote in various newspapers and magazines, this all reveals a competent politician." "He could of had utopian ideas sometimes." "He liked to write poetry and gaze up at the stars, but when he did these things, he was always walking down the same hard trail of everyday people, who build their lives every day." "He was no adventurer." "He was one of the best politicians in Brazil in the XX century, he lived a dense life comparable to few." "Did he make mistakes?" "Without a doubt." "I like to say:" "Did the "Inconfidentes" make mistakes?" "You can be sure they did." "What did they do wrong?" "They let spies into their midst, did the Black "Inconfidente"" "tailors from Bahia make mistakes?" "They tried to fight against slavery, the colony and large landowners all at the same time and were all massacred." "Of course they made mistakes!" "When Frei Caneca demanded equality for all those up in the Northeast, they didn't give it to him." "The peasants in Canudos, the peasants in Santa Catarina, they all lost." "What would Brazil be like without them?" "Would it be richer or poorer?" "This nation would surely be infinitely poorer." "Your attention please, Freedom Radio is on the air." "We have Carlos Marighella here in our studios." "This message is for all the factory workers in São Paulo," "Guanabara, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul, including all the rural workers in the countryside." "To create the nucleus of the Liberation Army, a force that" "belongs to the people, our motto is unite the revolutionary forces." "We must all prepare for combat." "The time has come to work for the base, more and more for the base." "Let us call our more willing friends, let us make the decision, even if it be in the face of death, because to live with dignity, to conquer power for the people, to live in freedom," "construct socialism and progress, it is worth the sacrifice." "All of us must learn how to defend themselves." "Improve their stamina by running up and down stairs and embankments." "As we organize our revolutionary uprising, our armed resistance, our guerilla combat, be ready to come with your gun in hand."