Partido Comunista do Brasil

(PC DO B)

   / Communist Party of Brazil

   The PC do B was founded in 1962 as a splinter organization of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB, Brazilian Communist Party). The founders, objecting to the peaceful strategy of the Moscow-line PCB, adopted the ideas of the Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse-tung. In 1966, it took up arms against the military dictatorship, but unlike other Brazilian guerrilla movements, which were largely urban, the PC do B thought peasant participation crucial to success and opened a rural front. It selected a site in the Araguaia River region, a tropical rain forest in the northern state of Pará. There, 69 guerrillas settled, working with the peasants and gaining their trust.

   In 1972, the guerrillas were discovered by military intelligence. Besieged by army troops untrained in counterinsurgency, the guerrillas, now calling themselves the Araguaia Guerrilla Forces, won the early battles. The army withdrew, returning with counterinsurgency teams, which waged a “dirty war” against both the militants and the peasants. Although the teams were well equipped—they had an airport, a heliport, five barracks, and an interrogation center—it wasn’t until 1975 that the last of the militants had been eliminated. The 69 militants were among the missing (desaparecidos) until April 1996, when O Globo, a Rio de Janeiro newspaper, published photos—leaked from a military archive—of the slain guerrillas. Information accompanying the photos described the deaths and disclosed the sites of mass graves, where 25 bodies were later exhumed by government forensic teams.