AND Weekly Editorial – Long live 87 years of the Armed Popular Uprising of 1935

December 4, 2022
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Editorial Staff of AND

01 DECEMBER 2022

Weekly Editorial – Long live 87 years of the Armed Popular Uprising of 1935

Rally of the National Liberation Alliance in Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, 1935

November 27 marked 87 years since the Armed Popular Uprising of 1935 of the National Liberation Alliance (ANL), led by the Communist Party of Brazil (P.C.B.) and under the guidance of Stalin’s Communist International. A great event, the uprising mobilised millions of workers, peasants, small and medium owners, intellectuals, democrats and soldiers, with the programme of wiping imperialist domination and the scourge of semi-feudal latifundia from the country, and marching towards popular democracy, on the road to Socialism. The Uprising set up the first workers’ and peasants’ government in the history of Brazil, specifically in Rio Grande do Norte, but it could not achieve success because of errors in the leadership of the Uprising, of which the central point was not to have relied on the poor peasants as its main force.

Until today, the brilliant daring of the proletariat and popular masses causes terror to the reactionaries, particularly in the Armed Forces. They accuse the insurrectionists of being “traitors” and “cowards”, naturally, adjectives that only fit the reactionaries, but which they seek to project onto their enemies. On the contrary, the insurrectionists were intrepid freedom fighters, who did not allow themselves to silently watch the advance of fascism and the growing misery caused by the perfidious regime of the ruling classes. They fell with dignity, many of them even after having surrendered. They are heroes of the Brazilian people!

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And behold, on the occasion of that date, Hamilton Mourão decided to speak out. He, who since Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat has striven to achieve protagonism in anti-communist chatter and coup blackmail, is certainly encouraged by having parliamentary immunity as a senator elected for the next eight years.

On November 27, Mourão pronounced: “On today’s date, in 1935, traitors of the Homeland made an attempt against the State and the Brazilian people. The attempt of November 27 was the first stab of the International Communist Movement against Brazil. It would not be the last. Let them come, they will not pass!” Days before, he had already boasted: “Today, we are headed for a precipice. Thus, the time has come for the conservative right to organise to fight the revolutionary left. It is necessary to react with firmness, prudence and knowledge…”

We could ask: where was what you now claim as “firmness, prudence and knowledge” throughout the pandemic, when your genocidal government accumulated 689,000 deaths? (A disproportionate amount to the global average of deaths compared to the population; the country ranked 14th in the number of deaths, proportionally, in the world, ahead of Chile, Paraguay and Argentina). How about a word about the 60 Brazilian men and women that your government of rats and parasites left to perish, due to lack of oxygen, in January 2021 in the Amazon?

If we want to talk about a “stab against Brazil”, instead of 1935, we should talk about the genocidal massacres that founded the Brazilian Army, as in the Paraguayan war, in which they did not spare even malnourished children and whose history reveals rampant corruption in the upper ranks of the military. We would still have to talk about the disgraceful massacre that the reactionary army carried out against the Revolt of Canudos, in which it exterminated, in the name of the republic of landlords and in the service of their power, more than 25 thousand men, women, elderly and children who fought for your freedom. We should also talk about the massive bombings launched by order of General Gaspar Dutra, in 1936, which made the entire community of Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto, in Ceará, disappear, since they feared that the communists were acting there. How about talking about the failed coup in 1954, against an elected president, traumatizing the Nation, and another one in 1964, all operated by foreign orders, from your master of the North, Yankee imperialism, of which you are disgusting sycophants? We could also talk about corruption: buying large amounts of aged whiskey, steak, beer. Something to declare about that? Are these the “deep virtues” of the reactionary generals?

The disgraceful situation to which the Nation has been dragged has, in the majority of generals, of all generations, the main responsible, in the last instance. It was you, gentlemen, who maintained and continue to maintain the country in the condition of a mere exporter of raw materials, based on semi-feudal landholdings with glossy facades and under the omnipresent domination of imperialism, mainly Yankee, generalising the exploitation and oppression of the working masses of the countryside and of the city, and the strangulation of the petty and middle bourgeoisie. Finally, from the people, who are the central constitutive element of the nationality against which you work, wrapping your country-sell nature with the patriotic language of the barracks.

General Mourão: from being a bravado in the Masonic plot he tried to carry out to depose the puppet Temer, he became an upstart as vice-president of Bolsonaro’s genocidal government and now comes on the scene as a fisherman of troubled waters. What does he seek now? He seeks to get closer to this anti-communist and coup d’état mass movement, to take it from the Bolsonarist direction and put it under his leadership more in line with the plans of the Armed Forces High Command for a “slow, gradual and secure” coup d’état.

The contradictions of this old order, defended with iron and fire by the reactionary Armed Forces and other canids of the dominant classes, are insoluble within the framework of this old regime. The Democratic Revolution, inconclusive and pending, is again on the order of the day, acclaimed increasingly by the peasants and the poor of the city and countryside, and this fact terrifies the high-ranking militiamen, who soon recall 1935. You can tremble, shout and threaten! The system of oppression and exploitation they are in the pay of is collapsing all over the world towards the tomb of history. It is just a matter of time! Your preventive counter-revolutionary offensive will run up against the powerful wall which the exploited and oppressed masses are already erecting. And no matter how much you shout your anti-communist creed every day, and no matter how many threats and horrors you continue to commit, you will not be able to stop the fury of history and the whirlwind of revolts of the masses of our heroic and suffering people. Your putrid reaction can only struggle violently for survival; however, repression and genocide do not eliminate the popular struggle, but rather feed it, strengthen it and make it grow.