Lamarca, Carlos

(d. 1971)

   Brazilian army captain who, in January 1969, defected to the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (VPR, People’s Revolutionary Vanguard), an urban guerrilla organization. He was one of the “big three”—the guerrilla leaders most prominent in the armed opposition to Brazil’s military dictatorship. The others were Joaquim Câmara Ferreira and Carlos Marighella. A marksman—his army job had been to train bank guards to shoot-Lamarca brought to the VPR a large stock of weapons. Six months after joining, Lamarca led the VPR in a guerrilla “expropriation”—a robbery to fund operations. The guerrillas knew the location of a 500-pound safe owned by Adhemar de Barros, the corrupt former governor of São Paulo and a supporter of the military coup of 1964. Barros kept it at his mistress’s house in Rio de Janeiro. Posing as federal agents, the guerrillas stormed the house and appropriated the safe, which yielded $2.5 million in U.S. currency. In early December 1970, Lamarca led the kidnapping of Giovannia Enrico Bucher, the Swiss ambassador, who was held for 40 days and released. The VPR received as ransom the release of 70 specified prisoners, whom the government exiled to Chile. By the early 1970s, government death squads had all but eliminated the VPR and other guerrillas, having gathered information about them through torture and government infiltrators. Marighella had been ambushed and killed in 1969, and in October 1970 Ferreira had been captured and tortured to death. Lamarca, urged by his comrades to flee the country, instead left the VPR for the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (MR-8, 8th of October Revolutionary Movement), aiming to build a rural guerrilla presence. But in mid-May, after the capture of MR-8’s leader, Lamarca fled to the northeastern state of Bahia with his mistress, the guerrilla Yara Iavelberg. They were pursued by death squads. Iavelberg, pregnant with Lamarca’s child, fled to Salvador, the state capital, where, quickly tracked down and surrounded, she shot herself. Lamarca fled to the state’s interior, where he was tracked down in mid-September 1971 and shot.