The Knight of Hope: Brazilian revolutionary who marched 25,000 km
Many people think I'm crazy. Most men who reach a certain age find their senses. In their youth, they are revolutionaries. Then they marry and must look after a family and settle down. But here I am at my age and I still haven't got good sense. — Interview, 1984
Brazilian revolutionary and politician. As chief of staff of the Prestes Column (1925–1927), he led rebels on a 25,000-km march through Brazil, earning the name 'Knight of Hope.' Elected to the Comintern Executive Committee in 1935, he directed the ANL uprising and spent nine years in prison. He served as general secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party for 37 years (1943–1980), leading labour organizing and anti-dictatorship resistance from underground and Soviet exile. Expelled in the 1980s for opposing the party's Eurocommunist turn, he remained a revolutionary Marxist to the end.
Career Timeline
- 1924–1927Chief of Staff, Prestes Column — 25,000 km march through 14 states
- 1931–1934Exiled in USSR; engineer and Marxist study
- 1934Joined the Brazilian Communist Party
- 1935ANL Honorary President · Comintern ECCI member · led armed uprising
- 1936–1945Imprisoned; elected PCB General Secretary (1943)
- 1945–1948Federal Senator; underground after party outlawed (1947)
- 1943–1980General Secretary, Brazilian Communist Party (37 years)
- 1971–1979Soviet exile under military rule; returned with 1979 amnesty
Olga Benário: The Knight of Hope and the German Revolutionary
In late 1934, the Comintern assigned the young German communist Olga Benário (1908–1942) to escort Luís Carlos Prestes on his return to Brazil. Posing as a Portuguese married couple, they crossed the Atlantic. And the cover story became real: they fell in love. After the ANL uprising was crushed in November 1935, both were arrested in January 1936.
An international campaign erupted around the fate of Olga, then seven months pregnant, but President Getúlio Vargas personally signed her deportation order. Filinto Müller, the Rio police chief who had once marched alongside Prestes in the Prestes Column, collaborated with the Gestapo and routed her to Germany on a ship that made no intermediate stops, foiling rescue attempts. In November 1936 she gave birth to their daughter Anita Leocádia in Berlin's Barnimstrasse prison; after fourteen months of international pressure, the child was released to Prestes's mother. Olga was transferred from Ravensbrück to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, where she was gassed in April 1942. The tragedy of the German-Jewish communist and the Brazilian revolutionary remains a symbol of international anti-fascist solidarity and of its powerlessness before the collusion of states.