The house where the politician, guerrilla and poet Carlos Marighella and his companion in life and struggle, Clara Charf, lived, in the neighborhood of Nazaré, in Salvador, will be the headquarters of the Instituto Carlos Marighella, a space for cultural activities and political training. The transformation of the place was announced this Monday (4), during an event that paid homage to him at the address where he was murdered, in Alameda Casa Branca, central region of São Paulo, by agents of the military dictatorship.
The project has been requested for years by activists and entities representing civil society, such as the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). The event took place at Armazém do Campo, in the Campos Elíseos neighborhood, in the capital of São Paulo.
Born in Salvador, Carlos Marighella founded Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN), which he also led as national leader. He was the main leader of the armed struggle against the military dictatorship, which subjected him to torture, imprisonment and exile. He began his activism, when he was still an engineering student, for the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), as highlighted by the Resistance Memorial.
Co-founder of ALN, alongside Marighella and other leaders, radio broadcaster and politician José Luiz Del Roio ended up tasked with safeguarding the memory of the events that he and his fellow fighters lived and witnessed. He, who also joined the PCB early on, became one of those responsible for recovering part of the party’s collection, removing it from the sight of military repression bodies. He was successful, with the help of the acronym, sending the collection to Milan, Italy, where he founded the Archivio Storico del Movimento Operaio Brasilliano. Currently, the original documents are under the custody of the São Paulo State University (Unesp).
Present at the event and in an interview with Brazil AgencyDel Roio says that he stores in his mind a multitude of memories, most of them linked to what predominated in his life: militancy.
“What comes back most, really, are extreme moments. Extremes of victory and extremes, above all, of falls and deaths of comrades. The issue of the death of comrades, the fallen, always leaves a mark, because you don’t know if you had a direct or indirect responsibility and you cannot do the injustice of forgetting them”, he says.
Highlighting his career as a radio broadcaster, a role that allowed him to carry out a large number of interviews, and as a person responsible for looking after archives of the working class, Del Roio declares himself “a memory operator”. “I’m very happy like this. Of course, age worries me, my memory starts to have lapses. But that’s part of it. I like having lapses. If I didn’t have lapses, I’d be dead”, he says.
“Now, memory does not have to be individual, but collective. You have to transform your memory, the great moments, which help in the construction of society, it has to be collectivized. All those white-haired people who are here, I I’ve known them for 60, 75 years. Some were arrested, others weren’t. Our memory is collective, totally collective, something quite impressive. if we move forward to build the great memory of Brazilian society. Otherwise, you don’t have Brazil, you don’t have memories. You have a flag, but you don’t have Brazil”, he declares.
Who was Carlos Marighella
Marighella was tortured for the first time in 1936, at the age of 24, having his feet burned with a blowtorch. He remained in prison for a year, until he received amnesty. Then, he moved to São Paulo. After that, he was imprisoned for six years and, with the end of the Vargas dictatorship, he was amnestied and elected deputy to the National Constituent Assembly in 1946, but was then impeached, like other PCB parliamentarians. In 1952, he joined the Executive Committee of the PCB Central Committee, and, the following year, he was sent to China.
In 1964, the year of the coup that deposed President João Goulart and established the civil-military dictatorship, Marighella was found by police officers in a cinema in the Tijuca neighborhood, in Rio de Janeiro, and resisted arrest, being shot at close range. At the time, his distancing from the PCB leadership was already underway and what ended him was his participation in the 1st Conference of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS), alongside leaders such as Ernesto Che Guevara, used as justification for his expulsion from the party.
Through the document “Pronunciamento do Agrupamento Comunista e São Paulo”, from February 1968, he announced the emergence of an organization in favor of armed struggle as an instrument to combat the arbitrariness of the dictatorship. Thus, in July of that year, the National Liberation Action (ALN) emerged, which in the coming months would register the first urban guerrilla operations in Brazil.
One of the references most associated with Marighella is the kidnapping of the United States ambassador, designed by the Guanabara Communist Dissidence (which gave rise to the October 8th Revolutionary Movement – MR-8), which asked for support from the ALN. He was executed on the night of November 4, 1969, by agents from the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS/SP), after an ambush, in which he was unable to defend himself. However, the official version says that there was a shootout between the communist militant and DOPS/SP police officers.
