Harrison George on Brazil under the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas and in defense of Communist militant Luiz Carlos Prestes.

‘Brazil: A Paradise Ruled by Devils’ by Harrison George from Labor Defender. Vol. 12 No. 4. April, 1936.

The most beautiful city in the world, Rio de Janeiro. Down under the equator, it lies within a circular bay, on a mountainous coast of brilliant green.

As the ship enters the harbor, close beside the 1,000-feet high rock of the “Sugar Loaf,” one must stand transfixed. The bay is rimmed with wide beaches of snow-white sand, bathed by foamy surf of an indigo sea.

Back of the narrow and irregular plain, where the city buildings raise up along palm-lined avenues, there lift the verdant encircling hills, rugged in silhouette, and projecting a giant spur called “El Corcovado” through the city directly to the waters of the bay. There, in the tumbled hills above the city, locking down upon thousands of roofs of gay-colored tile, one breathes an air heavy with the perfume of myriad flowers.

The most beautiful city in the world. But governed by devils in human form.

Getulio Vargas, the feudal-fascist dictator “president,” who has sold the destinies of all Brazil, a smiling land greater than the whole United States, and the lives of its 43,000,000 people, to imperialism.

The chief of the political police, Seraphim (an ironically angelic name for a fiend such as he) Braga, he of the evil pock-marked face, hated throughout Brazil by millions for his tortures and murders.

An ample supply of lesser devils, armed to the teeth, backed by troops and martial law to strangle the cry of the people for bread, for land, for liberty.

These are they who hold, in jail and at their mercy, the man most loved of the Brazilian people, Luis Carlos Prestes. These are they who have imprisoned, without trial and in violation of the very Constitution written by Vargas, 17,000 workers, peasants and soldiers, in fetid jails and island prisons all over Brazil. These are they who regularly torture and murder political prisoners, who only yesterday threw in prison Abel Chermont, a member of the Federal Senate, because he dared arise in the Brazilian Senate and openly denounce, in name and detail, the assassinations by the police.

These are the fiends who, after torturing my son for two long months to wring from him a “confession” of things that he could not know, finally murdered him on March 5, and, along with his mangled body, thrown to the street beside police headquarters, gave out the lie that he had “committed suicide.”

Street cars carry the workers of Rio de Janeiro to their jobs at the docks. The street cars and docks are the property of foreign imperialists. The workers load coffee and manganese ore onto the ships. Foreign ships.

The coffee was raised on great plantations belonging to British banks, transported to the sea on railways owned by British banks, bought by the American coffee trust and loaded on American ships. The manganese ore belongs to Morgan’s steel trust, from its vast mining concessions in the State of Minas Geraes.

The Chicago packers own enormous packinghouses, and great ranches filled with cattle. When the poor workers of Rio de Janeiro or Santos, or of any of 288 cities, fail to pay their electric light bill, it is Morgan’s company that shuts off the supply.

A brilliant labor journalist, the father of a young American citizen recently murdered by Brazilian police describes what is happening in Brazil today and why.

It is Henry Ford, the despot of Detroit, who, deep in the jungle of the mighty Amazon, holds thousands of workers in peonage amounting to slavery (12 cents a day top wages, to be spent at company stores), on a vast rubber plantation of 150,000 acres. By written agreement, Brazilian law does not apply in “Fordlandia.” It is ruled with club and gun of Ford’s private army. Hundreds of striking workers were shot down there late in 1930. Hundreds die there yearly of starvation and disease.

Imperialism owns Brazil. It owns the government of Getulio Vargas. It owns Vargas and his police. It is responsible for the lives of every political prisoner. Again and again, helpless in their chains, it has killed them.

With a hatred, deep and unquenchable, the people hate the imperialism that robs and oppresses them. To throw it off, they organized the National Liberation Alliance, undoubtedly supported by the big majority of the people, and lead by the man whose name is breathed with love and admiration by every toiler in all Brazil–Luis Carlos Prestes.

And precisely because the great majority of the people support the National Liberation. Alliance; exactly because Prestes is the idol of the people; and because the people were moving to overthrow the rule of Vargas and imperialism–Vargas struck last November. Struck first; struck savagely, prodding the people to a partial but desperate revolt, then drowning it in blood, filling the prisons of all the land with the best sons of the people.

Seventeen thousand workers, peasants and soldiers in prisons! Sleeping on the stone floors, covered with vermin. For food (save the mark!) beans and farina, farina and beans. Threatened with the ready guns of brutal guards. Tortured, mangled and killed at the will of the political police. Hundreds indicted and facing “trial” by courts martial, with the suspension of the constitutional prohibition against death sentences. To quote the daring speech of the now arrested Abel Chermont, made in the Senado Federal the 3rd day of March:

“The blackjack is officially authorized as a questioner, and Chinese tortures, practised without ceremony but with savage perversions, are the common and repeated methods. The police have savagely beaten a great number of persons who have fallen into their hands, those who are political prisoners. But the barbarity did not end with tortures and beatings. Captain Jose de Medeiros, after arrest by the police, has been found dead his body filled with bullet wounds, his hands and feet crushed and soldier Absquardo Martins, two assassinations for which I accuse the police in whose hands they were.”

The courageous Senator Chermont is now himself in such police hands. He and those recently arrested add new names of Brazil’s best to those already in prison. The list is long, too long for this space. But a few among them are:

Caio Prado, economist and historian; Captain Agildo Barata, General Miguel Costa, ex-governor of Sao Paulo; Nelson Coutinho, former Secretary of Justice, a novelist and journalist; Paulo Lacarda; Cabral Filho, prominent engineer; Francisco Mangabeira the son, and Joao Mangabeira the brother of the former Minister of Foreign Affairs.

But why go on? The illustrious names are many. But, think of the poor and the humble workers, peasants and soldiers, the 17,000 of them! Think of him that commands the undying love of them all–Luis Carlos Prestes, now in the claws of the savage police, who torture and aim and kill without mercy!

Think of all this, and do not remain passive! My son is dead, but Prestes and his comrades, the great and the humble, may be saved!

It depends upon you to make the consulates of Brazil in every city resound with the cry–Release Prestes! Release Ewert!

My son is dead, but the manner of his death, and the connection of U.S. Ambassador Gibson with his murder, are justified demands that Congressman Marcantonio has raised in the U.S. Congress, and which you should support by a rain of demands upon your own congressmen for investigation. Act now, today, lest, before you act, Prestes may be murdered!

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1936/v12-%5B10%5Dn04-apr-1936-orig-LD.pdf