**TITLE:** The Communist Uprising
In November 1935, Brazil experienced four days that would leave deep scars on national politics for decades. Between the 23rd and 27th of that month, military personnel linked to the National Liberation Alliance and the Communist Party of Brazil attempted to overthrow Getúlio Vargas’ government through armed uprisings in three parts of the country: Natal, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. The episode became known as the *Intentona Comunista* (Communist Uprising), a name coined by its opponents to brand the movement with the stigma of failure and illegitimacy. However, what unfolded during those days was far more complex than the label suggests.
To understand the Communist Uprising, one must look back a few years and examine the context in which it took root. Brazil in the first half of the 1930s was a tense country, marked by a global economic crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, and the ferment of political movements vying for the nation’s future. Since the 1920s, the *tenentista* movement had produced a generation of military officers dissatisfied with the old oligarchic order, and many of these men found in communist ideology an answer to the contradictions the Republic could not resolve. The convergence of *tenentismo* and communism took on a face: that of Captain Luís Carlos Prestes.
Prestes was a singular figure. A hero of the *tenentista* movement for leading the Column that traversed Brazil’s interior between 1925 and 1927, he had converted to communism and began directing the uprising in direct coordination with the Communist International, the Moscow-based organization that coordinated communist parties worldwide. By his side were international militants, including the German Olga Benário, Prestes’ companion, the Argentine Rodolfo Ghioldi, and the German Arthur Ernest Ewert.
The National Liberation Alliance had been created as a broad-front movement, capable of uniting workers, peasants, and even progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie around anti-imperialist and anti-fascist causes. But in July 1935, Prestes published a manifesto calling on the masses to seize power. The Vargas government responded by declaring the ANL illegal under the National Security Law, eleven days after the text’s publication. The organization went underground, and armed action became the chosen path for the conspirators.
The original plan called for the uprising to begin in the early hours of November 27, 1935. However, local circumstances forced an earlier start in two states. The first spark was lit in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, on November 23. The insurrection overthrew Governor Rafael Fernandes Gurjão, who sought asylum in Chile, and installed a revolutionary popular committee that remained in power for three days. This was the first—and only—communist government to take hold in Brazil and, according to records from the time, also the first in South America. Control was short-lived: without the support of major military garrisons, with the uprising in Pernambuco crushed and troops from Alagoas and Paraíba approaching, the rebels fled Natal toward the Seridó region of Rio Grande do Norte. They were intercepted by loyalist forces in the Battle of Serra do Doutor and captured. The total number of deaths did not exceed twenty.
In Pernambuco, the uprising on November 24 was the most violent of the three. Armed civilians attacked police stations in Olinda and Recife; part of the garrison of the 29th *Caçadores* Battalion rebelled; and communists freed prisoners from a jail in Jaboatão. At Largo da Paz, in central Recife, rebels mounted machine guns atop a church tower to fire on loyalist forces. The gunfight at that location lasted 28 hours. The counterattack was led by Captains Malvino Reis Neto and Afonso de Albuquerque Lima, with support from *caçadores* battalions. In Recife alone, 720 people died, making the Pernambuco uprising the bloodiest episode of those days.
In Rio de Janeiro, the uprising took place on the original date, November 27, targeting the Military School of Praia Vermelha and the Vila Militar. The organizers themselves acknowledged that, given the failures in the other states, the chances of success in Rio were virtually nonexistent. The movement in the capital was interpreted by some historians as an act of loyalty by local conspirators—a refusal to abandon their comrades even in the face of the inevitable.
The consequences of the Communist Uprising were severe and far-reaching. The Vargas government exploited the episode to justify an increasingly hardline regime, which would culminate two years later, in 1937, with the *Estado Novo* coup. Luís Carlos Prestes was imprisoned and remained behind bars for years. Olga Benário, a German citizen, was deported to Nazi Germany and died in a concentration camp. Hundreds of military personnel and civilians were detained, tried, and punished.
The Communist Uprising did not succeed in revolutionizing Brazil, but it forever transformed Brazilian politics. The episode fueled decades of official anticommunism, served as an argument for censorship and repression, and shaped generations of military officers who would treat the event as a symbol of the dangers the left posed to national order. At the same time, for those on the other side, the days of November 1935 remained proof that there were those willing to risk everything for a radically different vision of the country.