Partido Comunista Brasileiro

(PCB)

   / Brazilian Communist Party

   The PCB was founded in 1922, inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution. By the late 1950s, however, following the ideas of Nikita Khrushchev, it had adopted a peaceful strategy for achieving socialism. Seeing national capitalism as a preliminary stage, it sought to unite workers, peasants, and the middle class in opposition to the wealthy landowners. Until 1985, it would spend all but brief periods of its existence as an illegal party. Its original name, the Partido Comunista do Brasil (Communist Party of Brazil), led it open to charges that it was a tool of international communism, so in 1961 it took the name PCB to emphasize that it’s a Brazilian organization. In 1962, some PCB leaders, impatient with the peaceful strategy, broke away and formed a party using the original name, the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B, Communist Party of Brazil).

   After the 1964 military coup that toppled the left-leaning government of João Goulart, the PCB suffered in the first wave of repression, Operação Limpeza (Operation Cleanup), when thousands of the regime’s perceived enemies were arrested, many of them tortured. By the late 1960s, when armed guerrilla groups appeared in Brazil-inspired by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and Che Guevara’s efforts in Bolivia—the PCB considered but then rejected the idea of armed struggle. Instead, it opted to work with the legal opposition party, the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB, Brazilian Democratic Movement). This decision helped it survive the most repressive years of the dictatorship (1969–1974), which largely targeted the armed opposition. The PCB was, however, hit by repression in the years 1974–1976, when death squads were still operating and looking for suspected subversives. The two famous victims during this period-the journalist Vladimir Herzog and the trade-union activist Manoel Fiel Filho—were accused of having ties to the PCB. Both were tortured to death in São Paulo, their murders provoking demonstrations and strengthening the opposition.

   The PCB became legal in May 1985, in legislation passed by the civilian government of President José Sarney. But by then the dominant labor party was the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party), created by Luíz Inácio da Silva, or “Lula.”

   See also Ação Libertadora Nacional; Marighella, Carlos.