Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro

(MR-8)

   / 8th of october Revolutionary Movement

   A leftist urban guerrilla organization in Brazil. It was named in memory of the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, who was executed in Bolivia on 8 October 1967. On 4 September 1969, the MR-8 and the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN, National Action for Liberation) kidnapped the U.S. ambassador Charles Elbrick, an event dramatized in the feature film Four Days in September. Elbrick, held in a rented house in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, was released unharmed on 8 September 1969 after the government broadcast the guerrillas’ revolutionary manifesto and released 15 political prisoners, exiling them to Mexico.

   In 1970 the MR-8 carried out armed operations in Rio de Janeiro, but like other guerrilla groups, by 1971 it would be largely eliminated by government death squads. In May 1971, though, it received some new members—the well-known guerrilla leader Carlos Lamarca and other former members of the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (VPR, People’s Revolutionary Vanguard). By mid-May, however, Lamarca was forced to flee when Stuart Jones, the MR-8 leader, was captured. In September 1971, Lamarca was tracked down in the northeastern state of Bahia and killed. The group dissolved in 1972, and its members fled to Chile.