Socialism in Brazil
In 1906, the Independent Workers Party (Partido Operário Independente) was founded; it created a "popular university", which had Rocha Pombo, Manuel Bomfim, and José Veríssimo as teachers.
This group launched Evaristo de Morais to the House of Representatives and published two newspapers, Folha Nova (The New Leaf) and Tempos Novos (New Times), both short-lived.
[1] The foundation of the Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro – PCB) in 1922 and its rapid growth suffocated the dozens of anarchist organizations which had played an important role in staging major strikes during the previous decade.
Also during that period before the 1930 Revolution and Getúlio Vargas' rise to power, Maurício de Lacerda launched the short-lived United Front of the Left (Frente Unida das Esquerdas), whose purpose was to write a draft socialist constitution for Brazil.
[1] The political agitation of the period included a movement in the tenente revolts context led by future communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes.
Prestes was invited by Vargas to lead the military efforts of his uprising against the São Paulo oligarchy, but he refused; he was against an alliance between tenentes and dissident oligarchs.
Benário was eventually killed at the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in 1942; she had given birth at the facility a few years earlier and her daughter, Anita Leocádia Prestes, was handed to Brazilian authorities by the Nazis at age one.
In 1937, Vargas imposed a Fourth Constitution for the country, the so-called Polaca, after his government denounced that international military forces were trying to make a "socialist revolution" in Brazil, in what became known as Cohen Plan.
Written by Justice Minister Francisco Campos, the Polaca was inspired by the authoritarian April Constitution of Poland, and was intended to consolidate the executive branch over the legislative and judiciary, implementing what became known as the Estado Novo regime.
In 1946, Luís Carlos Prestes became the first self-proclaimed communist Senator of Brazil, a feat which would only be repeated sixty years later, when Inácio Arruda was elected to represent Ceará.
The factionalization of the PCB accelerated after a new Manifesto was approved in 1958, proposing new ways of achieving communist goals, linking the establishment of socialism to the broadening of democracy.
He would, however, rule the country de facto only in 1963, after a referendum ended the parliamentary system approved by the Congress to prevent the Military Forces from overthrowing him from office due to his progressive views.
The creation of bipartisanship in 1965 by a presidential decree allowed moderate left-wing politicians to join the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro – MDB), the party of consented opposition to the military regime.
The slow redemocratization process initiated by Ernesto Geisel in the second half of the 1970s yielded its first gains on the following decade, when socialist and communist parties were once again able to organize freely and stand their own candidates.
PT is a result of the approach between trade unionists of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), intellectuals, artists, Catholics influenced by liberation theology, and the old Brazilian left.
In 1988, rubber tapper, unionist and environmental activist Chico Mendes, a member of the PT and an icon of the struggle for preservation of the Amazon rainforest was assassinated in his house in Xapuri, Acre.
In April 2018, Former President Lula was arrested[13] as part of the large-scale anti-corruption Operation Car Wash under charges of money laundering and corruption, just months before that year's general election, of which he was the frontrunner.
[14] Under Brazil's Clean Record Law, candidates who have been convicted by a decision of a collective body are ineligible to run for eight years, and so the arrest effectively ended Lula's candidacy.
The Haddad-d'Ávila ticket would lose the general election to far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, marking the strong shift in brazilian politics since Lula's realigning victory in 2002.
