Does Brazil Still Need a Revolution?

As I walk to the Memorial of Resistance in São Paulo a few days before the election, I wonder whether a revolution is no longer necessary in Brazil. The memorial is symbolically located in what used to be the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), the state’s organ to suppress political resistance to the government. During the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, the DOPS hunted down and tortured the regime’s opponents, including my grandfather, killed through electric shocks in 1970. In the memorial’s crowded auditorium, the Commission for Amnesty of the Ministry of Justice solemnly apologizes for the crime committed by the Brazilian state and declares my grandfather a “hero of the Brazilian people.” There’s plenty of symbolic recognition—a political biography has just been released; in the town hall, he’s made an honorary citizen of São Paulo; a plaque will soon be unveiled in Jaboticabal, the city where he was born; and a street was named after him in Rio. What sometimes gets lost, I feel, in the eulogies and emotional recollections, is that today’s Brazil is not the Brazil he fought for—first through the Communist Party, which he joined in 1931, and then as a leader of the armed struggle against the military regime from 1967 to his death. His lifelong project was a socialist revolution. One can disagree with that mission, but one shouldn’t feel embarrassed calling it by its name. Many key figures in the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) were fellow combatants of his in their youth. They include José Dirceu, Lula’s first chief of staff (one of the political prisoners set free in 1969 in exchange for the American ambassador Burke Elbrick, whose abduction my grandfather helped to organize); Carlos Minc, Lula’s minister of the environment (one of the political prisoners set free in 1970 in exchange for the German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben); and Paulo Vernucchi, Lula’s minister of human rights, who represents the government at the ceremony in the Memorial of Resistance and recalls setting up a clandestine meeting for my grandfather under his code name of “Walter.”

And then there is, of course, Dilma Roussef, who will succeed Lula as the president of Brazil. Like my parents, she became a member of a militant Marxist group as a student. But while they managed to escape to Europe as the repression turned violent at the end of the 1960s, Dilma was captured and tortured and spent two years in prison. Only with the amnesty of 1979 did she get her political rights back, the same year my parents left Germany to return home. Now in their sixties, the ex-guerrillas have become part of Brazil’s political establishment: center-left politicians, who, I often hear, have since sobered and matured. But how immature were my grandfather’s ideals, I wonder, and how much “pragmatic” compromise would he agree to today?

As far as I can tell there is not ...