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Prestes and other party leaders did not want these discussions to go beyond the Central Committee. But Agildo Barata, who had been the party’s Treasurer since 1945, had raised most of the funds the party spent thereafter, insisted on a general debate in the party’s ranks. He wrote an open letter calling for such a discussion, but Prestes refused to allow its publication in Imprensa Popular, the Communist newspaper. The editiors of the paper, who sympathized with Barata’s position, published the letter anyway. Soon afterward, unable to get official approval from the party leadership for a wide-ranging discussion of the situation in the Brazilian party, the CPSU, and the international movement in general, Barata sent a letter of resignation from the Party. He received no answer, but was promptly “expelled.”[167]

A number of leaders followed Barata out of the Communist Party, including the entire staff of Imprensa Popular.[168] Their differences with the party were “a break with the totalitarian conception of Communism,” Osvaldo Peralva, one of the dissidents, wrote later.[169] However, they did not establish a rival group, although for some time Barata did publish his own newspaper.[170]

Establishment of Partido Comunista do Brasil

In 1961, the Prestes leadership changed the party’s name from Communist Party of Brazil to Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro; PCB), in a move designed to facilitate its legalization.[171] However, a new split was developing within its ranks.

During the administration of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956—1961), the Communists were given considerably more freedom to act openly than had previously been the case, although the party was not officially legalized. As a consequence, Luiz Carlos Prestes and other leaders, who had been indicted for various alleged crimes when the party had been outlawed, presented themselves before the courts and were exonerated.[172]

With Prestes’s ability to openly direct the Communist Party restored, there quickly developed a split between Prestes and the “directing nucleus.” Osvaldo Peralva wrote that the struggle between them “lasted more than four years, and was becoming worse day by day, until it resulted in a split.”[173]

The Brazilian Maoists’ later interpretation of what occurred in this period was that there developed within Brazilian Communist ranks a group that felt that in his 20th Congress speech, Khrushchev had attacked everything Marxism-Leninism stood for and had accomplished, from Lenin through Stalin, and therefore that group opposed the Khrushchev line. Although at first agreeing with that analysis, Luiz Carlos Prestes ended up joining those who supported Khrushchev.[174] Cecil Johnson suggested that Prestes’s hesitancy to take sides on the issue of Khrushchev’s new line was motivated by a desire to ascertain whether Khrushchev was going to come out on top in the struggle within the CPSU.[175]

The Amazonas-Grabois-Pomar faction controlled “important fractions of the Party in Rio Grande do Sul, the State of Rio and São Paulo,” according to Osvaldo Peralva.[176]

According to Leoncio Basbaum, a historian of the Brazilian Communist movement, the “directing nucleus” was in fact removed from control of the Communist Party as early as 1948, although they remained part of its top leadership.[177] But João Amazonas, one of the “directing nucleus” and subsequently a principal leader of the Brazilian Maoists, claimed, “From 1957, under the direct influence of the XX Congress of the CPSU, there flourished in the Party serious opportunist tendencies which worked to transform it into a social-democratic party. The political line approved in March 1958 and the decisions of the V Congress, in 1960, which removed it from Marxism-Leninism, sought to liquidate the party of the working class.”[178]

The final split between the Prestes leadership and the former “directing nucleus” came in 1961. At the end of that year, according to Osvaldo Peralva, after returning from a trip to the Soviet Union, “Prestes gave the order to expel the leaders of the Amazonas-Grabois-Pomar group. Thus abandoned by Moscow, that group openly passed over to the Chinese side, with which it had been flirting for some time.”[179]

In 1956, after the CPSU 20th Congress, Diógenes Arruda had been one of the Latin American fraternal delegates to that Congress who accepted an invitation to go to China. There, apparently, he was much impressed by the fact that the delegation had a two-hour conversation with Mao Tse-tung and was received by Liu Shao-chi. A few months later, a group of Brazilian cadres was sent to China for “indoctrination.”[180]

Those who were expelled in 1961, and their followers, formally established another party at the Extraordinary National Conference in February 1962. They adopted the old party name, abandoned by the Prestes group, Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B).[181]

Although the PC do B was avowedly Maoist from its inception, the Chinese were slow to extend it official “recognition.” According to Ernest Halperin, “The pro-Chinese Communist Party of Brazil came into being at a time when Peking had not yet decided to split the Communist parties on an international scale.”[182] So, although Mao and other leaders received a delegation from the Brazilian party in March 1963, and occasionally published statements of the PC do B, it was not until October 1964, according to Halperin, that the Chinese clearly recognized the PC do B as their brother party in Brazil.[183]

Ideological Orientation of Brazilian Maoists

The new Partido Comunista do Brasil quickly made clear its ideological orientation. It began to issue a new weekly, Novos Rumos, and published several books. One of these was entitled Marxism As Seen By Its Masters (O Marxismo Visto por Sus Mestres), which included writings of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung.[184]

Clearly, the PC do B felt that the degeneration of the Communist movement had begun with the death of Stalin, whose works and career it frequently praised. For instance, in March 1978, João Amazonas published an article on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stalin’s death that profusely praised the Soviet dictator.

Amazonas wrote that: “There fell to Stalin the honorable task of putting in practice the legacy of Lenin. Under his direction there was carried out the most arduous phase of socialist construction. And he carried this out magnificently. The Soviet Union was transformed radically in every sense, and achieved the level of the most advanced capitalist countries. It proved possible to build, without bosses or imperialist monopolies, a life of progress and social justice.”[185]

Amazonas even praised the Great Purges of the 1930s. He wrote that “Stalin, while enunciating the measures to give impulse to constructive work, confronted those who vacillated and defeated conspiracies hatched in the shadows. He generated a series of experiences in that field of great value to the revolutionary movement. In Russia the attempts to restore the old order were numerous. … When the process of creating the material basis of the regime was already advanced there occurred others, virulent and menacing. They were intertwined with the intelligence services of foreign governments, putting at grave risk the existence of the USSR. Their protagonists were not unknown people but were members of the Party or dressed in the uniform of the Red Army—some with a certain record of service to the country. All were unmasked before public opinion, and went before the people’s tribunals where they confessed their counter-revolutionary plots. Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Toucachevski and others conspired against the socialist regime.”[186]