Carlos Marighella
Carlos Marighella
From congressman to urban guerrilla theorist: the military dictatorship's enemy number one
“Não tive tempo para ter medo” — "I didn't have time to be afraid" — epitaph on his tomb, designed by Oscar Niemeyer
Brazilian Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, once a federal deputy for the Communist Party, who rejected peaceful resistance to the 1964 military coup and became the theorist and practitioner of urban guerrilla warfare. Leading the Ação Libertadora Nacional he had founded, his Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla influenced revolutionary movements worldwide before he was killed in a 1969 police ambush in São Paulo.
Career timeline
- 1932First arrest for a poem criticizing Bahia interventor Juracy Magalhães
- 1934Left civil engineering studies; joined the PCB
- 1936–1945Repeated arrests and imprisonment, including a long stretch 1939–1945
- 1946–1948Federal deputy for the PCB; lost mandate when the party was outlawed
- 1953–1954Visited China at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party
- 1967Expelled from the PCB over the armed-struggle line
- 1968.02Founded the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN)
- 1969.06Wrote the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla
- 1969.11Shot dead in a DOPS ambush in São Paulo