Tiradentes Revolutionary Movement (1961–1962)

The militants spent a year in the camps, dispersed throughout the regions of Brazil, but there was little effective military preparation due to internal disputes and lack of resources.

During this same period Clodomir de Morais was arrested and documents linking Cuba to the guerrilla movement were found in the wreckage of Varig Flight 810, which crashed in Peru.

Despite its small size, the guerrilla attempt made repercussions in the national press, was taken seriously by authorities in the United States, and contributed to the decline of the Peasant Leagues.

[3] The term "by force", not necessarily excluding "by law", could mean immediate change of the social structure, armed revolution, or collective action through marches, strikes, and land invasions.

[8] Cuba was a reference for having had a revolution focused on agrarian reform,[9] occurring in a country, like Brazil, with an "agrarian-exporting society based on latifundium, monoculture and pre-capitalist labor relations in the countryside.

[10] His experience opened the way for criticism of the orthodoxy of Latin American Communist Parties, for whom the revolution would have a first bourgeois-democratic stage, without the need for armed struggle, and the peasants would not play a central role.

So also thought a small part of the Brazilian left, inspired by Maoism and Guevarism, and the right, for whom this radicalization justified the 1964 coup d'état as a defense of legality.

[18] The inspiration in the Cuban Revolution came not from the peasants – who were largely illiterate, did not see themselves as participants in the Cold War, and were focused on disputes over land and better working conditions – but from Francisco Julião, the Communist Party, and other figures on the left.

[19] Created in Ouro Preto on 21 April 1962, by Francisco Julião,[20] the MRT was a political organism of the Peasant Leagues, but with a broader base of support than the countryside.

[21] Its members were intellectuals and journalists initially engaged in publicizing Julião's work, and then in the guerrilla nuclei,[22] whose founding dated back to the end of the previous year.

This has already been questioned, as the organization of the camps would not have been possible without his connivance and he spoke in defense of revolutionary solutions, outside the institutions, thus worrying his political enemies and the security agencies.

According to Clodomir, the MRT consisted of a "small group of asphalt intellectuals that artificially tried to infiltrate the guerrilla scheme and assault the Leagues' military devices".

In the case of Dianópolis, he states that the nucleus was supported by the population, including the freemasons from Barreiras, Natividade and Rio da Conceição, composed of merchants and landowners.

[33] Besides the Cuban issue, the financing of the guerrilla came, according to Clodomir, from the bourgeoisie and landowners revolted by "the coup tendencies that had manifested themselves since the death of Getúlio Vargas" and "the intervention of American imperialism in our economy".

The Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS) of Rio de Janeiro knew in May 1962 of the sending of Leagues militants to train in Cuba.

[41] But the "export of the revolution" was a real effort, called for by all Latin American revolutionaries through the Second Declaration of Havana, "an event that sounded like a battle cry" in February 1962.

In Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, the Peasant Leagues were the only option to apply this policy, since the other organization willing to start a guerrilla war, the Polop, would only do it in urban areas.

Goulart felt betrayed, as he had been favorable to Cuba at various times, but to avoid a diplomatic incident, he handed the material to the Cubans, and thus it ended up in the wreckage in Lima.

[35] According to Tarzan de Castro, he wrote with Cuban diplomat Miguel Brugueras del Valle a detailed diagnosis of the precarious situation of the guerrillas.

According to rumors, it came from Cuba through a businessman in Dianópolis;[49] Clodomir de Morais denied the financing in a statement, explaining that the funds came from Brazilians;[48] in another, he said he received financial support not from the government in Havana, but from the National Association of Cuban Farmers (ANAC), as well as from the World Federation of Trade Unions and workers' organizations from socialist countries.

The structure was compartmentalized and only the military commanders – Adauto Freire da Cruz, Mário Luiz de Carvalho, Ozias Ferreira and Adamastor Bonilha – knew the location of all the camps.

The preparations were inefficient: the ambition of the guerrillas ran into obstacles due to their precocity and spontaneity,[12][57] lack of structure, material means and financing, surveillance by the organs of repression,[58] centralizing direction and negative repercussions of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Political proselytizing was then done, leading to the creation of approximately 13 Peasant Leagues in the region,[64][65] and social services (medicine and a school) and jobs were offered.

[64][65] According to Adauto Monteiro da Silva, the little training that occurred was in jungle survival techniques, and the camp served groups of more than ten militants, who would spend a few months there before being exchanged for others.

[69] According to Flávio Tavares, the device was discovered when the head of the Smuggling Repression Service, José de Seixas, suspected that refrigerators had been sent to the area with no electricity.

[53] The Peasant Leagues, by political necessity, denied any relation with the guerrilla war and condemned the army and the police for their actions in Dianópolis and in the arrest of Clodomir.

[74] The inquiry into this arrest provocatively accused a connection with Julião, the USSR embassy, the PCB and Luís Carlos Prestes, which was not plausible considering the divisions within the left.

The unions, focused on the wage question and not on agrarian reform, were also supported by the Catholic Church and the Communist Party and quickly weakened the Peasant Leagues.

[78] The guerrilla device in Dianópolis, with its small number of people involved, had repercussions disproportionate to the threat it actually represented, being seen as an indication of the imminence of a socialist revolution.

The Diário Carioca denounced that the accusations would be part of a plan of psychological terrorism, with the participation of the governor of Guanabara Carlos Lacerda, to destabilize the imminent holding of the referendum on parliamentarism.