The military high command established a police and bureaucratic apparatus based on espionage, intelligence gathering and special operations aimed at capturing and interrogating political opponents of the regime through the systematic use of torture.

Paramilitaries linked to federal government authorities carried out false flag operations against civilians and the military with the aim of eroding popular support for the rebels and justifying the deepening of authoritarianism.

For many leftist groups, the 1964 defeat confirmed the mistakes of the pacifist and reformist political line adopted by the PCB, which was blamed for the demobilization of the workers and progressive forces at the time of the coup.

There were divisions led by Carlos Marighella, who created the National Liberation Action (ALN), and by leader Mário Alves, who formed the Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party (PCBR).

POLOP also faced splits, which would later give rise to the National Liberation Command (COLINA), in Minas Gerais, and the Communist Workers' Party (POC) in Rio Grande do Sul.

Based on this perception, historian Daniel Aarão Reis described it as a "utopia of impasse": the Brazilian situation already had "pre-revolutionary" traits, the government had no historical conditions to offer political and economic alternatives to the country, and the popular masses, disillusioned with the reformist programs, tended to adopt more radical positions and moved towards armed confrontation with the revolutionaries.

Groups of MNR militants, almost exclusively ex-subalterns from the Armed Forces, arrived in the region at the end of 1966 and formed a unit of 14 members led by Amadeu Felipe da Luz Ferreira.

[56][57][58][3][59] According to archives of the Superior Military Court revealed after re-democratization, during this period, an extreme right-wing group linked to members of the armed forces began to carry out false flag operations with the aim of manipulating public opinion and justifying the intensification of authoritarianism and repression by the dictatorial regime.

The attack, attributed to the PCBR at the time, was allegedly the work of Alípio de Freitas, a member of the AP, who was in Recife in mid-1966 when Costa e Silva's visit was announced, but denied any involvement in the case even after the amnesty.

On the night of July 1, 1968, COLINA murdered Edward Ernest Tito Otto Maximilian von Westernhagen, a major in the West German Army who had been mistaken for Gary Prado Salmón, one of Che Guevara's executioners.

With the support of the urban middle classes and liberal civil sectors, anchored in the press and conservative parties, Castelo Branco's government acted to reorient the Brazilian economy and institutionalize the authoritarian regime.

The main pre-coup political leaders (Carlos Lacerda, João Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek) organized the Broad Front (Frente Ampla), the student movement reached the streets, attracted attention and earned sympathy from the liberal press and the Congress assembled several Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPIs), such as the one into the denationalization of land in the Amazon and the agreement between Time-Life and Rede Globo.

From the second half of 1968 onwards, influenced by the student uprisings in France in May 1968, the protests reached their peak in the March of the One Hundred Thousand (Passeata dos Cem Mil), on June 26, which was widely supported by society, artists and intellectuals.

The repression, which had intensified in August with the military occupation of the University of Brasilia (UnB), led some students to see the armed struggle as an alternative to opposing the regime, as the large street demonstrations waned.

With the exception of the PCB, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (Partido Operário Revolucionário Trotskista - PORT), the PCdoB, the AP and the short-lived Libertarian Student Movement (Movimento Estudantil Libertário - MEL), all of the left organizations of the period carried out urban armed action.

From the Pernambuco Regional Committee, the PCBR launched a number of actions in the Northeast, such as a robbery of the Banco da Lavoura in João Pessoa in May 1969, assaults on bank branches and gas stations in Recife and the destruction of a stage set up for the authorities at the Independence Day parade.

[103][104][105] On September 4, a joint command formed by ALN and DI-GB kidnapped the American ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick and demanded the release of fifteen political prisoners with safe transfer abroad, as well as the dissemination of a manifesto in newspapers and radio and television stations throughout Brazil.

Especially from the end of 1969, the effects of the recovery of the national economy with the start of the Brazilian miracle became more clearly felt, which made it even more difficult to recruit militants willing to fight against a dictatorship that generated development and harshly repressed its opponents.

The MR-8 also reconstituted its national leadership and benefited from the incorporation of a group of high school students from Bahia led by Sérgio Landulfo Furtado and the entry of José Campos Barreto, or Zequinha, who was involved in the strike agitations in Osasco and had been active in the VPR and VAR.

On this occasion, the Médici government rejected several names from the original list, especially those arrested on charges or convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment and who had taken part in the previous kidnappings.

They founded several sections of the Union for Freedom and People's Rights (União pela Liberdade e pelos Direitos do Povo - ULDP), which developed a moderate program proposing democratic social reforms to solve the problems faced by the local population.

The only exceptions were the September 24, 1972 issue of the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, and an article in Jornal da Tarde published the following day with extensive reports on the army's second campaign in Araguaia.

Among them were Osvaldo Orlando da Costa, João Carlos Haas Sobrinho, André Grabois, José Humberto Bronca and Paulo Mendes Rodrigues, who in 1967 settled on the banks of the Araguaia River to start rural guerrilla warfare.

[180][182] The committee's rapporteur was Ernani Satyro, a deputy from ARENA in Paraíba, who drafted a substitute bill that endorsed the restricted and partial amnesty proposed by the government and rejected the broader alternatives.

In an attempt to prevent the approval of this act, a large part of the MDB decided to support a substitute amendment by Djalma Marinho, from ARENA in Rio Grande do Norte, which extended the amnesty to torturers.

[189][190] In April 2010, the Order of Attorneys of Brazil (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil - OAB) filed a request for a review of the Amnesty Law, which was denied by the Supreme Federal Court (STF) based on the argument that this was a task for the legislature.

However, then-president José Sarney did not authorize its publication, and the project remained underground until some of its fragments were published on the internet by the right-wing group Terrorism Never Again (Terrorismo Nunca Mais - TERNUMA).

Other responses to the leftist narratives were published by former agents of the repression, such as the books Brasil Sempre (1986), by Marco Pollo Giordani, and Rompendo o Silêncio (1987) by Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra.

[213][214][215][216][217] Overall, the military's narrative reproduced the official version of the existence of a supposed communist threat that surrounded Brazil between 1935 and 1974, reiterating elements of the National Security Doctrine and Cold War ideology.

In some cases, as in Ustra's works, these descriptions are permeated by the notion that civil society lacked the necessary recognition of those who "fought terrorism", demonstrating the military's nonconformity with the memory of the victims and their families, which was gaining ground and demanding that the state recognize its responsibility for the disappearance and death of several people during the dictatorship.