After its failure, he led a band of rebel troops, known as the Prestes Column, on a three-year, 14,000-mile trek through the remote Brazilian interior in a futile attempt to stir peasant opposition to the Government.

Imprisoned after a violent uprising in 1935 and sentenced to 30 years in prison for ordering the execution of the teenager Elza Fernandes,[4] he was released after World War II and later served briefly as a senator.

In late 1927, the secretary-general of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party; PCB), Astrojildo Pereira, went to Bolivia to meet Prestes.

Ironically (given Prestes' future political path), the tenente turned down Pereira's recommendation, remaining in Bolivia until late 1928, when he went to Argentina[8] and found work as an engineer.

He attempted to create the League of Revolutionary Action, a "third path" that differed from the Liberal Alliance and the First Republic, but the movement failed to gain enough adherents to be sustainable.

At the end of 1934, he left the Soviet Union to return to Brazil, accompanied by his soon-to-be wife, Olga Benário, an agent of the Communist International assigned to provide security for him.

[8] Getúlio Vargas, who had by this time become Brazil's legally recognized president (no longer merely ad interim), thus looked to a form of authoritarian government.

He endeavored to suppress his enemies on the left, led by Prestes, through violence and state terror in order to survive with his coalition intact during the agitated years that began in 1934.

[citation needed] While former tenentes and colleagues such as Eduardo Gomes, Juracy Magalhães, and Juarez Távora were increasingly moving rightward, Prestes had soured on the Vargas government after supporting his rise in 1930.

[8] As a result of Vargas' increased political power, the Brazilian Congress branded all leftist opposition as "subversive" under a March 1935 National Security Act.

Vested with its new emergency powers, the federal government imposed a crackdown on the entire left, with arrests, torture, and summary trials.

In July the government moved against the ANL, with troops raiding offices, confiscating propaganda, seizing records, and jailing leaders.

The authoritarian regime, like its fascist counterparts in Europe, responded by imprisoning and torturing Prestes and violently crushing the communist movement through state terror.

Vargas, seeking to co-opt Brazil's fascist movement and paramilitary, known as "Integralism" and led by Plínio Salgado, tolerated a tide of anti-Semitism, and may have targeted Prestes' wife to appease his new supporters.

[9] After Vargas began abandoning fascist-style autocracy in 1945, following his rapprochement with the World War II Allies in 1943, political prisoners were released.

Under the presidency of João Goulart (1961–1964), a protégé of Getúlio Vargas, and another gaúcho from Rio Grande do Sul, the closeness of the government to the historically disenfranchised working class and peasantry and even to the Communist Party under none other than Luís Carlos Prestes was equally remarkable.

The experience of the failed tenente rebellion and Vargas' suppression of the communist movement left Prestes, and some of his comrades, skeptical of armed conflict for the rest of his life.

His well-cultivated skepticism later helped precipitate the permanent schism between hardline Maoists and orthodox Moscow-influenced militants in the Brazilian Communist Party during the early 1960s.

By the mid-1970s, the dictatorship, having effectively eliminated the other armed leftist movements, turned its sights on the PCB, targeting and killing some of its top leaders, but by that point, Prestes had been in exile for a number of years.

While many could and did acknowledge Prestes's historical importance to the left in Brazil, they felt that, at over 80 years old, he was no longer the appropriate leader, and he was removed from his position as secretary-general of the PCB.

In his final days, nearly penniless, Prestes was largely supported by architect Oscar Niemeyer, a long-time communist sympathizer and designer of many buildings in Brasília.