Brazilian Exile.pdf

8/12/2019 Brazilian Exile.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/brazilian-exilepdf 1/26

http://lap.sagepub.com/ Latin American Perspectives

http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/4/81The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07302948

2007 34: 81Latin American Perspectives Denise Rollemberg

The Brazilian Exile Experience : Remaking Identities

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

Latin American Perspectives, Inc.

can be found at:Latin American Perspectives Additional services and information for

http://lap.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://lap.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/4/81.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Jun 28, 2007Version of Record>>

at UNIV DE SAO PAULO BIBLIOTECA on February 20, 2012lap.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://lap.sagepub.com/


http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/4/81


http://www.sagepublications.com/


http://www.latinamericanperspectives.com/home.html

http://lap.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts


http://lap.sagepub.com/subscriptions


http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav


http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav


http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/4/81.refs.html

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml


http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/4/81.full.pdf







http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/4/81.refs.html





http://www.latinamericanperspectives.com/home.html






The Brazilian Exile Experience

Remaking Identities

by

Denise RollembergTranslated by Timothy Thompson

The story of the Brazilian exile experience (1964–1979) from the perspective of theexiles themselves highlights the loss of roots and references and the discovery of new pos-sibilities. The quotidian side of exile involved doubt, certainty, distress, emptiness, fear,insanity, death, difficulty with documents, work, study, reconstruction of pathways—inshort, a redefinition of identity imposed by day-to-day life. At the same time that the exileexperience meant the removal and elimination of the “generations” of 1964 and 1968, italso meant their survival: it was the locus of free thought, critical inquiry, learning, andenrichment, the locus of resistance and transformation, the negation of negation.

Keywords: Political exile, Brazil, Civil-military dictatorship, Brazilian leftist movements

The exile Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro’s1 description of her experiencewith Muslim women in Algeria (interview, Rio de Janeiro, April 4, 1996) seemslike a scene from a surrealist film:

The bathhouse was enormous. The women were naked, around them in the cor-

ners were the tiled shelves where hot and cold water came out. The steam. Thewater comes up from the floor. You sit on the floor to bathe yourself. You scrub anduse a gourd to rinse off. It’s a collective bath, all the women together, the waterruns along the tiled floor. It’s a terrifying sight. The women are green, tattooed.They tattoo themselves according to their status: mothers, grandmothers . . . theykeep tattooing their bodies, telling a story. A few old women were tattooed allover their backs and arms. The tattoos don’t show because the women arealways covered. It’s horrible . . . since they don’t get any sun, they look ugly andpallid. . . . I just kept taking it all in. . . . Some women go around with pumicestones for scrubbing. . . . They scrub your body with the stone. With only one

bath per week, your body gets very oily, so they scrub hard to get rid of all theoil. That whole scene just kept churning, churning, churning. . . . Once I fell

down and passed out.

Culture shock was inevitable for this young middle-class woman, who belonged to a generation that defied order and convention and valorized theability of men and women to change the world through their own interven-tion. After the glory of being exchanged for the U.S. ambassador through a

81

Denise Rollemberg is a professor of contemporary history at Fluminense Federal Universityand a member of its Nucleus of Contemporary Studies. Her research focuses on Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship and leftist movements. Timothy Thompson is a doctoral candidate in

English at Boston College and a freelance translator. This article is adapted from a chapter of theauthor’s Exílio: Entre raízes e radares (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1999).

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 155, Vol. 34 No. 4, July 2007 81-105DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07302948© 2007 Latin American Perspectives








revolutionary action, followed by guerrilla training in Cuba in preparation fora return to Brazil to rejoin the armed struggle, Maria Augusta found herself ina strange situation. She was in Algeria waiting for her organization to autho-rize her return, but their authorization never arrived, nor would it. The guer-rilla struggle had been undermined, repressive forces had scored a series of

victories, and her organization had vanished.2 Many years would pass beforeher desire to return to Brazil could be fulfilled. In the meantime, the experi-ence of exile would have to be lived out day to day in the face of both objec-tive and subjective issues.

After feeling that they had been at the center of things in a conjuncture of intense political turmoil, the “generations” of 1964 and 1968 experienced theirexile as a break with reality, the uprooting of the universe of references thathad given meaning to their armed struggle (on the concept of “generations”as used here, see Sirinelli, 1987; 1989). The defeat of a personal and politicalproject, uneasiness vis-à-vis other countries and cultures, difficulty in adapt-

ing to new societies that often infantilized them, lack of recognition in the newroles available to them—all of this subverted the image that the exiles had hadof themselves and triggered a crisis of identity. The results of this crisis could

be seen in a range of everyday situations: struggling for documents or refus-ing to obtain them, working and studying, remaining politically engaged orabandoning militancy, contributing to art and culture, and negotiating emo-tional and family life.

The story of day-to-day life in exile is therefore a story of constantly renewedculture shock, of discomfort with the other and especially with oneself becauseof the conflict between what one used to be—or had wanted to be—and what

one had actually become. It is a story of disorientation, of a crisis of values thatmeant the end of a journey for some and the discovery of new possibilities forothers. It is a story of inglorious and futile effort to maintain an identity. And itis a story of redefinition and reconstruction of identity that extended through-out the phases of exile and for many continued even after returning to Brazil.

Several factors played into the experience of daily life in exile, beginning withthe character traits and personalities of each individual. Social status provedequally important: whereas some exiles were recognized as professionals orpublic personalities and never lacked institutional invitations to proceed withinterrupted projects, others needed to impose their presence and fight for visibil-ity and material survival, often undertaking activities that had nothing to do withtheir expectations and for which they were overqualified. Personal resourcesmade a difference: some could count on reserves of money and family help, whileothers could not. Age, too, interfered: in general, the younger exiles, who hadaccumulated and solidified less “baggage,” were more flexible in the face of adversity, but those exiles who could claim some measure of notoriety were alsothe older ones. Knowledge of the language and the degree of difficulty in learn-ing it also made a difference. The company of family members, meanwhile, couldrepresent an element of security and support or an overload of responsibility. Thephases of exile were also decisive: the reference points of each period could openhorizons or eliminate hopes, facilitating or not one’s confrontation with concreterealities.3 Finally, belonging to a party or organization or embracing a definitepolitical stance—or being able to redirect one’s militancy toward a professionalproject—in general helped give meaning to life in exile.

82 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES








In sum, an exile’s crisis of identity might involve a network of complexquestions, including psychological ones, questions that affected each individ-ual in a particular way. There are wry accounts such as Darcy Ribeiro’s: “Tosuffer banishment one needs a great deal of character, something I don’t have.I suffered in my own way, without exaggeration” (1977: 13). But for others

daily life was an unbearable drama that led, in the extreme, to insanity or evensuicide. Between these two extremes there were innumerable individual expe-riences. One recurring issue raised by the majority of my sources, whether toassert or to question its relevance, was the psychological aspect of exile. It isnecessary, therefore, to reflect on how the crisis of identity influenced thesetwo generations—to consider the way in which the disorientation provoked

by exile contributed to the redefinition of a prior political project, beginningwith the reconstruction of the exiles’ own sense of identity. In a letter datedNovember 16, 1976, César Benjamin, in Sweden, calls attention to the questionin all its contradictions and ambiguity:

Paris is a party, but for many it’s also a party that’s over. There’s a drama in theair, a drama of which we’ve been the protagonists for several years, but in a dif-ferent way now. Our luck, good or bad, I don’t know, but our strength, certainly(though it becomes the weakness of many), comes from being collective, whichis to say historical. Here, however, the end of a cycle is clearly visible: the samedrama whose foundations were laid when we broke away, with vigor but littlevision, from our class in 1969, going full speed ahead without it, arrives today atits final act, which for some might last a whole lifetime of profound identity cri-sis that, needless to say, opens the (difficult) possibility of reconstruction. Thesad thing is watching this current drama: if its foundations were laid and devel-oped in Brazil, it became mixed up there with the heroic and utopian (in thesense of the antithesis of pettiness) and tended toward the epic, which sustainedus and gave a sense of beauty; but here, for many, all that’s left of the drama istragedy, or even farce. The crisis of identity seen in the faces of people withouthomeland or class, without a link between past and present to be projected for-ward, living in a static eternity devoid of meaning (it’s appropriate that I’m read-ing The Magic Mountain right now4), the crisis of identity, I repeat, if strong andsevere, opens up at the same time the possibility of regaining identity onanother, broader level, deeper and more human because chosen. There’s a chal-lenge involved in it. I believe that many won’t overcome it, but those who dosurvive will have something to say.

THE LOSS OF THE SPEAKING SOUL

In East Germany, the “gray country,” the “architecture and the color of the buildings,” “the difficulty with the language,” “the schedule,” “the disci-pline,” “the rigid control,” “the totalitarian system,” the weather, the habits,the customs—all so different from Contendas do Sencorá in the interior of Bahia, where he was born—contributed to the daily life of Delce Façanha(interview, Niterói, August 24, 1995) from 1974 to 1983. The hope that urbanand rural guerrilla warfare would change the course of history and prevent so

many other Northeasterners from going down a path like his—a path marked by poverty and need—would disappear in the face of his strict routine as anunskilled foreign worker in the German chemical industry. Under the atten-tive, omnipresent, and controlling watch of the German Democratic Republic,he had only the worst tasks assigned him.

Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE 83








The removal of one’s universe of references makes exile seem like empti-ness, absence, interval. Notions of space and time lose their clarity; past

blends with present, superimposing the country of origin on the country of destination in an effort to maintain what no longer exists. In the impossibilityof maintaining it, many were left with the agonizing sensation of lost time:

“More than time are the lost sensations, the sensibility, the way of facing life—I miss it all. Lost time because of being here and not there,” as César Benjamindescribes it (letter, September 23, 1977). “Being out of place” coalesced with“being out of time.” Miguel Arraes (1979) speaks of the search for lost place asa struggle for life, as resistance against death:

Being in exile is like seeing time pass outside you. Things happen without yourparticipating in them, without your being inside them. So you have to make atremendous effort to keep yourself on a par with reality through conversation,visiting, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, et cetera. You need tomake an effort to live because, on the contrary, when you’re outside of time you

don’t live.

In the midst of the difficulty of redefining a political and life project, thepast for Vera Sílvia Magalhães (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 andMarch 14, 1999) meant her search for herself, and it imposed itself as essentialto her very survival:

I went to training in Cuba propelled along by my own story. I wasn’t in control, because I left with the group [of 40 political prisoners exchanged for the Germanambassador], with all of my friends. I didn’t know exactly if the revolution

would be possible in Brazil again or not, or at which point in history. I was rid-dled with doubt. But when you arrive at a certain point, especially at that age . . .I had reached my limit. I thought that I had given all I could to building a revo-lutionary project, but then what? How do you build another project? You’realready tangled up in it to such an extent. . . . Many people gave up, it’s true, did-n’t even go to training in Cuba, but in my case it was like this: I have to survivethis sadness, this pessimism. How? By reclaiming the most vital thing in me,which was my revolutionary project. So I had to go on.

Recalling his memories of armed struggle and exile, Reinaldo Guaranydescribes the disorientation he experienced while living in Chile. Because he

felt alienated from the political process then unfolding, he reverted to his pastas a guerrilla, rejecting his new identity as a refugee (1984: 112):

I clung to the past, to the “glories” I had lived through, practically demandingreverent respect for the hero I must have been. Refusing to accept the medioc-rity of the present, I re-created a reality known only to myself and my ghosts, areality that we alone relived through the delusions I was dragged back to eachnight. There, on a bench in the city square, in the still of the night, I began torecover my identity. I stopped being just some dupe [cabide de roupas] who hadto put up with the vulgar language of the thieves [cogoteiros] and hookers of theMapocho.

Exile is frequently associated with uprooting, destabilization, solitude: “Iwould wake up suffocated, telephone everyone, write like a madman, lookpeople up. It gave me great pleasure to know the details of lives told in letters,”says Juarez Ferraz de Maia (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995). The solitude









of exile triggered in him the memory of the solitude he had experienced inprison—the weeks passed in solitary confinement.

For Maria Valderez Coelho da Paz, exile produced a “fear of solitude”( pânico da solidão) (Costa et al., 1980: 348):

Foreign countries and exile are an exercise in solitude. They were for me. WhenI lived with Brazilian friends it was great at first. . . . But later the house began to be overrun by people who were trying to find each other, compulsively, obses-sively. They tried to find each other but said nothing, and if they said anything Ihave the impression it was only rarely. . . . It was the fear of solitude, a solitudethat manifests itself more clearly when one’s points of reference are far removed.. . . After a while I began to refuse the imposition. And furthermore I wanted to

be alone, to be able to be by myself. If you can’t find peace and quiet, you fallinto that crazy rhythm, or you go crazy yourself.

But solitude is hardly a problem that affects only exiles. In the opinion of

Emília Viotti da Costa, U.S. society in general, in which she spent her exile, isa society of solitary individuals. Ignorant of social codes, the exile feels par-ticularly marginalized in this universe and consequently extremely solitary(Costa et al., 1980: 397).

The emotionally destructuring effect of exile is blamed for the end of manymarriages. Amidst the loss of reference points and the difficulties of personalreconstruction, attrition proves inevitable. At the same time, we also hear of relationships maintained precisely because of the exile experience—becauseof the need to preserve something stable against the instability, to cling tosomeone familiar against the unknown.

The way in which the French infantilized the exile community makes NanáVerri Whitaker (interview, Paris, November 30, 1995) remember the “terriblemoments of despair” when faced with arrogance and pretended superiority:“The reputation of France as a land of asylum is just a veneer.” Even individ-uals on the left who had offered to help them make the transition assumed anair of superiority: “It’s as if they had said, ‘We’re doing you a favor. We canhelp you.’ It was never a relation of equals.”

There was also the double face of refugee aid institutions: on the one handsolidarity, housing, food, work, clothes, and documents and on the other handthe infantilization inherent to the welfare dynamic. Between necessity and

humiliation, exiles were rebaptized as refugees without ever being able to rec-ognize themselves in the new role assigned to them. It is not for nothing thatwe hear of the disagreeable sensation of going to receive a handout. The wordsof Sebastião Hoyos (interview, Geneva, January 10, 1996), for example, revealthe depth of resentment toward the Swiss system of asylum: “There is assis-tance in Switzerland for refugees, but you have to beg for it. The regulationsfor obtaining assistance are designed to humiliate people. I refused to acceptit. I’m proud to say that I never benefited from assistance. I have alwaysworked here.”

The process of infantilization was especially painful for those forced into

unskilled labor, and finding a way out, whether through political means, work,or study, proved difficult. In this way, exile seemed reduced to mere subsis-tence, especially when compared with the expectations that prior militancyhad created (Costa et al., 1980: 331):









The experience of prison was much more enriching than that of exile. What I’mabout to say might seem absurd, but I felt much more alive there than I feel here.Because in prison, for better or worse, I felt that I was acting. In exile, most of thetime I feel as if I’m just surviving, and that’s all. . . . Exile is very, very belittling.Everything is reduced to survival! In exile you have very little choice in anything!

The account of Nanci Marietto (interview, Rocca Priora, Italy, January 20,1996) is also striking in this sense. According to her, the problem was not sim-ply that she was an exile or refugee but that she was a foreigner: “The Italiansthink that if you’re a foreigner they can do whatever they want. We were mis-treated, I was cheated in every way, something that happens frequently withforeigners. The way people were treated was terrible.” Her story is one of scams, thefts, insults, harassment, and humiliation in Rome.5

The loss of one’s native language means the loss of self-expression, the lossof emotion, as Luiz Alberto Sanz (interview, Rio de Janeiro, September 14,1995) describes it: “Speaking a language that isn’t mine and that I haven’tmastered, I ended up saying things with much less emotion than I could inPortuguese.” The feeling he experienced in Chile was reinforced in Sweden:

I was able to say the most offensive things to people without getting veryinvolved in what I was saying. It seemed it was a different person talking. . . .When I began to master the language, I was able to put emotion into what I said,and that’s when things got really bad. Offensive language with emotion behindit is much more shocking than when it lacks emotion. You’re much more “objec-tive” when you haven’t mastered the language.

Herbert Daniel also registers how significant the absence of one’s native lan-guage becomes: “The greatest problem of exile is the loss of language. Losingyour language means losing your soul” (Carvalho, 1981: 23). Language is a

basic reference point of social identity; the lack of language redefines identityand triggers metamorphosis. The capacity for expression and comprehensiondwindled or suddenly disappeared, especially for those living in countriessuch as Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, where language learning took timeand aggravated the exile’s isolation vis-à-vis others and the world.

MYTHS OF ORIGIN AND DESTINATION

THE MYTH OF THE HOMELAND

During exile there emerged what Daniel Aarão Reis Filho refers to as the“myth of the homeland,” the assumption among militants that those livingabroad were “out of practice” and therefore should not offer opinions, much lessmake decisions about the course of the armed struggle. On the contrary, theywere to wait for instructions from the “homeland.” This was particularly the caseduring the first phase, when exiles were still polarized around vanguard organi-zations and exile itself had been devalued as a time and place of resistance:

For those particular leftists, anyone arrested or exiled was out of “practice”according to their definition of the word. This meant a loss of status and a lossof the right to intervene and express an opinion, the idea being that only those









engaged in revolutionary practice could speak out. There was a tremendous dis-regard for theory, discussion, debate, and anyone who tried to influence theorganization from abroad.

In the specific case of the organization to which Daniel belonged, the Movimento

Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (Revolutionary Movement of October 8—MR-8),which included some of the last militants to leave Brazil, there arose, at a timewhen the grip of repression had grown tighter, a new appreciation for exile as aspace for rejoining the fight. Members’ reading of Lenin’s exile writings, throughwhich he had sought to influence the struggle from abroad, redefined the exileexperience for them.

According to Daniel, an “emblematic figure” emerged out of the myth cre-ated around the word “homeland”—a word that, more than simply referringto Brazil itself, signified the armed struggle and the revolution they wouldreturn to. This figure, constantly present in other exile experiences, was that of

the high-ranking militant come to deliver orders to those in exile. Derivingauthority from his connection to the homeland, this individual had no qualms,even if simply for the sake of maintaining his own power, about belittling thosealready in exile, taking advantage of their isolation and filtering, censoring,and manipulating the flow of information.

THE MYTH OF THE SOCIALIST COUNTRY

Exile presented the possibility of life in a socialist country, a possibility thatforced militants to reconsider their own points of reference. The experience

proved decisive in confirming, annulling, or redefining their socialist projects.Maurício Dias David (interview, Paris, March 9 and 15, 1995), seduced by the“utopia of the socialist system,” had gone to study economics in East Germany,where he had received a doctoral fellowship, but managed to remain in Berlina mere six months: “That’s when I broke with communism. I said, ‘I’ve beenfighting my whole life against what I see here, against this society as I see itorganized.’ I made a dramatic break and came to embrace an anticommunistposition much closer to Swedish social democracy. The asphyxia of the country,the controlled, dictatorial system—these had come as a shock.” Prior to thisexperience, Maurício had spent two months in Sweden, and after comparing the

two countries and their systems he opted for the social democracy.Disappointment also marked Delce Façanha’s time in Cuba betweenDecember 1973 and March 1974 while he waited to go on to East Germany.According to him (interview, Niterói, August 24, 1995), the group of nearly 200people that he had accompanied from the Venezuelan embassy in Chile wasnot permitted to move freely in the country, though the government didpromise food, lodging, and health care. Denied contact with the population atlarge, the group was stationed at a hotel nearly 100 kilometers from Havanaand kept under constant surveillance: “I was very disappointed. Of the mini-mal contact that we had with people, I saw that they were only interested in

turning a profit, a common tendency in supposedly socialist countries.”A month after her arrival in Algeria in June 1970, Vera Sílvia Magalhães

(interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 and March 14, 1994) left for Cuba. Butwhat she saw there did little to inspire her. She came in contact for the most









part only with bureaucracy, with “privileged and authoritarian individuals”who gave access only to those approved by the party. The experience left herdisenchanted.

If day-to-day experience in socialist countries could place in check one’spoints of reference, it could also reaffirm them, as the enthusiasm of Márcio

Moreira Alves demonstrates. He was drawn to the same Cuba that to othersseemed so restrictive (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 233):

In Cuba I experienced firsthand and saw with my own eyes what socialism isabout and what it’s possible to achieve in a socialist country. Cuba is Pernambucowith scruples. That’s what it is: Pernambuco with a sense of decency, a propergovernment, and a population that isn’t exploited. And the potential of this trans-formation is so evident that it can really transform a person. Everything youcould imagine having read about is there being put into practice, and this makesfor a much more viable option.

As I see it, I’ve had two points in life when I really learned something. First, I

began to learn after the military coup in 1964. I began to learn what my countryreally was, the real face of Brazil. A face that was hard, violent, and bloody.Later on, I began to learn in Cuba, to learn the possibilities of a life lived in har-

mony, not deprived of basic needs such as food, health care, and education. I began to see that an underdeveloped people could create such a life.

In the same way, the testimony of Roberto Morena, a former militant unionistof the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist party—PCB) exiledin Czechoslovakia, is very revealing. After years living in a country harshlyrepressed under Soviet-style socialism, he embraced an uncritical view of thesystem, one that confirmed his own ideal vision (Uchôa Cavalcanti and

Ramos, 1978: 325):

Living in socialist countries gave us a clear vision of the reality and viability of the revolutionary ideals that we had embraced since youth, even in school, andthat had been strengthened in factories, unions, and the Communist party. Awonderful fulfillment of what we had imagined, proposed, and proclaimed: asociety without factory owners, a society in which men feel secure in the pre-sent and the future, in which social inequalities disappear, in which the possi-

bility of knowledge and culture is both open to and within the reach of thecollective masses and is steadily advancing toward the complete construction of socialism.

THE MYTH OF THE “COUNTRY OF ASYLUM”

The term “country of asylum” is widely employed by institutions and pub-lications concerned with refugees to designate the countries in which theycome to reside. Meanwhile, if the word “asylum” brings to mind the solidarityfrequently expressed through the initial process of reception and social adap-tation, it also conceals or diminishes a reality that is much more complex.Indeed, as we have seen, even solidarity involved contradictions and ambigu-ities. If some segments of society mobilized to receive political exiles, others

identified them as “terrorists” whose stay should be interdicted.According to Herbert de Souza (1979), in some countries exiles were in facttreated as terrorists; he cites the case of Theotônio dos Santos, who upon arrivalin the United States was denied entrance and accused of terrorism on the basis









of information exchanged among police agencies in several countries. In thesame way, Reinaldo Guarany (1980; 1984) witnessed a campaign by the Germanright against receiving Chilean exiles, whom right-wing newspapers referredto as terrorists. Police forces in the very countries that had granted UNrefugee status in fulfillment of the Geneva Convention remained in contact

with the Brazilian police, the institution whose tactics—based on the torture,imprisonment, and assassination of those who opposed the system—hadcaused such outrage throughout Brazilian society. A French professor active inthe Comité France-Brésil, which had denounced the dictatorship, still has aform written in German and Portuguese about the political activities of Brazilian exiles, a document proving that German and Brazilian police had col-laborated. Ricardo Vilas (interview, Paris, November 30, 1995), even though hehad received a visa to enter England, was arrested upon arrival in the countrywith his wife and eight-month-old daughter. They were all detained andmade to spend the night at the airport. Accused of being a terrorist, he was forced

by the police to sign a document in which he requested permission to leave thecountry.

Interviews with several militants exiled in democratic countries, such asWest Germany and France, leave no doubt that the police forces of these coun-tries received information from the Brazilian police and used it to pressure,intimidate, and humiliate those in exile (Daniel Aarão Reis Filho, interview,Rio de Janeiro, 1996).

When Reinaldo Guarany was summoned by the East German police, he dis-covered that they had been keeping a folder with information about him inPortuguese and German. The pettiness of the police and the humiliation they

inflicted were part of day-to-day life in West Germany. During the 1974 WorldCup, for example, some exiles were forced to appear at the police station threetimes a day during the games for fear that they might attempt to assassinatemembers of the Brazilian team. Prosecuted for forgery of documents, illegalentry into the country, and even bigamy, Reinaldo Barcellos and his wife, Dora,were never granted asylum. When Dora committed suicide, the governmentfinally granted asylum to Reinaldo along with others in the same situation.Instead, Reinaldo chose to leave the country (see Guarany, 1984: 132–133).

Miguel Arraes (1979: 6), constantly identified with the government of Algeria, where he remained throughout his time in exile, remembers therestrictions imposed by democratic countries: “For years I was preventedfrom traveling, since the governments of France and England refused to let meenter, for reasons they never explained. When my own children traveled tothese countries to study, they were pulled out of airport lines and subjected tospecial inspection.”

After being exiled in June 1970, Apolonio de Carvalho, who had fought withthe French Resistance, waited two years for a French visa, which during theGeorges Pompidou government had also been denied to four other politicalexiles belonging to his group (interview, Rio de Janeiro, September–October,1986). Authorization was given only after leftist groups and the Socialist partytook action. In the same year, the Swiss government “invited” Apolonio andanother exile, Ladislas Dowbor, to leave the country.

According to Erasmo Saenz-Carrete, in 1975, after the attack perpetrated bythe Venezuelan Carlos the Jackal, in which French police officers had been









killed, the French secret police, the Direction de Surveillance de Territoire,subjected political refugees to interrogation, going so far as to “ forcibly enterthe homes of Brazilian refugees.” The following year, Poniatowski, the interiorminister, threatened to expel any political refugee who “created problems forpublic order.” Georges Casalis, a French citizen active in institutions defend-

ing human rights, testified to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal II that because of this episode “very harsh measures of control and intimidation were takenagainst Brazilian refugees, who, notwithstanding, were the beneficiaries of official UN statute” (Saenz-Carrete, 1983: 214, 217).6

The story of the so-called aviators also contributes to a consideration of themeaning of “country of asylum,” an unstable term even with regard to thesocialist countries that militants had idealized. Three young sympathizers of the armed struggle, in order to demonstrate their commitment to LatinAmerican revolution, hijacked an airplane in Brazil and headed for Cuba, thesymbol of their ideals. Once there, they suffered the same fate any hijacker

would who lacked either backing from an organization acknowledged by theCuban authorities or prior authorization from the Cuban government: theywere detained. Not understanding the kind of situation they had gotten them-selves into, they offered to work, their goal being to serve the socialist cause.Cuban officials, accordingly, took them to a quarry, where they did their bestat the arduous task, all for the glory of the revolution. Meanwhile, they beganto find it strange that the other laborers expressed frequent and serious criti-cisms of the system until finally, to their surprise, they discovered that theywere all prisoners. When they proposed the idea of building a stone statue inhomage to Comrade Trotsky, they fell completely out of favor and were left

without documents, plane tickets, or authorization to leave the country. Theymanaged to leave Cuba months later through the intervention of militantswho had arrived for guerrilla training and guaranteed that they were neitherspies nor anything close to it. For the “aviators,” the nickname they receivedfrom these militants, the dream of a “country of asylum” for Latin Americanrevolutionaries had turned into a nightmare (Gabeira, 1980).

DISORIENTATION, EMPTINESS, FEAR, INSANITY

Fear loomed large during exile, arising at different moments and to varyingdegrees: from the militia created during the first nights in Ben Aknoum bymembers of the group of 40 prisoners exchanged for the German ambassador(because they refused to rule out the possibility of further repression fromBrazilian forces) to the presumed presence in Santiago of police chief SérgioFleury, symbol of terror during the dictatorship, which led militants of the AçãoLibertadora Nacional (National Liberation Action—ALN) and the VanguardaPopular Revolucionária (Popular Revolutionary Vanguard—VPR) to plan hismurder (Guarany, 1984: 104).7 The “ghost” of Fleury, in fact, would appear andreappear at different times and in different places, frightening and threatening.Over time, this “paranoia, half true, half delusional, the idea that the secretpolice were watching us and plotting against us, would show itself in otherforms” (Daniel Aarão Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996). There arecountless stories about exiles who suffered psychiatric problems or came to









associate exile with insanity, lost identity—or if not insanity then “drama,”“anomaly,” and “sickness” (Poerner, 1980: 13) or, in the account of Padre Lage(1979: 26), the struggle to recognize oneself:

Man is degraded by exile. My experience involves a permanent struggle to be

myself and nothing else, a struggle against the degradation of being forced intoexile. I don’t know if it’s because the individual in exile has been removed byforce at the acutest point of his capacity to serve the people—uprooted at thepoint of deepest rootedness. But this displacement lasts. This contradiction lasts.

I feel even more Brazilian than I used to, without wanting to associate myself with anything in particular. I feel very Brazilian. I don’t know how. And conse-quently unable to enrich myself with the tremendous culture that a country likethis [Mexico] has to offer. I think that exile drives you crazy. Who knows, am Icrazy already? . . . Maybe that’s what insanity is: when he thinks he’s not himself anymore. I ask myself: “Am I really who I am?” I asked myself that question justthis morning.

In 1976, Vera Sílvia Magalhães (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 andMarch 14, 1994) suffered her first “psychotic attack” during a banal momentof her exile in Paris when she believed someone to be an agent of repression:“It was like an explosion around the void inside me.” The loss of her revolu-tionary project and the impossibility of redefining it led to disorientation:

I don’t know what my real role in this story is anymore. . . . I’ve lost a part of myself. My life now feels truly emptied of the things I used to believe in. I don’t

believe anymore. There’s no use pretending. I’m sure I pay some price for mylack of faith, and I do mean in the religious sense. I don’t have any faith. So I’veended up kind of lost. I’ve accumulated so much inside my own head, experi-ences that I don’t know where to put. I haven’t dedicated myself to anything inparticular since then, other than my son.

Fear of repression together with a sense of longing for home unleashed“extremely severe outbreaks of insanity” in Vilma, exactly when exile pointedto financial security and stability. “The sicker she became, the more homesickand nostalgic for her childhood she felt. She wasn’t able to withstand theshock, and she gave in. Some people go through this and hang on to their san-ity, but others just aren’t able to,” says her ex-husband.8 Free from the finan-cial problems that afflicted other exiles, successful and well adapted in eachcountry that he lived in, he suffered his greatest hardship in the form of hiswife’s illness, from which she “never recovered.”

In the midst of a lack of prospects, the redefinition of identity was often aslow and painful process. Some were unable to overcome the crisis. Frei Titode Alencar and Maria Auxiliador Lara Barcellos, or “Dora,” chose death as theway to put an end to fear, emptiness, and insanity. At 31 years old, Tito, whohad been banished in 1971, hanged himself in a convent near Lyon in 1974.During his three years in exile he had never recovered from the trauma of tor-ture and prison. Convinced as he was that Fleury was pursuing him in France,he found his life a living hell. Rebuilding proved impossible for him, asanother Dominican, Magno José Vilela, reports (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos,1978: 215): “In France, he tried to continue his studies but wasn’t able to. Hewas in an extremely delicate state psychologically, lacking courage, energy, inshort, a way to survive. He lived in sadness until the day he chose to end it









all.” Dora, freed along with Frei Tito, threw herself in front of a subway trainin Berlin in 1976. She was also 31 years old. Not long before her death, she hadundergone psychiatric treatment. In Belgium, Juarez Ferraz de Maia received“letters that were sad, unhinged, and very painful” in which she spoke of soli-tude, anguish, and failure and displayed her lack of faith in men, women, and

the possibility of change (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995). Luiz AlbertoSanz, exiled in Sweden and a member of the group of prisoners that had beenexchanged for the Swiss ambassador, made a film with Lars Safstrom aboutDora’s death titled Quando chegar o momento (When the Moment Comes). Thefilm uses the interview she had given with four other exiles for a documentaryfilmed in Chile, Não é hora de chorar (It’s Not Time to Cry), which was aboutthe suicide of Dora ver Guarany (Guarany, 1980; 1984).

The trajectory of Sebastião Rios also symbolizes the drama of disorientationduring exile. Aformer professor at the University of Brasília, Rios participateddirectly in kidnapping the U.S. ambassador and managed to leave the country

without being arrested. Once established in Argentina he worked to supportthe organization, “preparing” documents for clandestine militants in exile.Later, transformed into a clochard (homeless person), Rios could be found onthe Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.

Even if these are extreme experiences in which the redefinition or recon-struction of identity proved impossible, the analogy drawn by Tomás Tarqüínio(interview, Paris, January 17 and February 26, 1995) comparing exile to a stone-shattered mirror yielding a barely recognizable reflection still synthesizes thesubstance of many accounts.

Togetherness among Brazilians was one way to alleviate suffering. In day-

to-day life, at parties, in political activity, exile “colonies” tried to reproduce aBrazilian environment, sometimes stereotypically through traditional foodand music. Many recall never having eaten so much feijoada as they did inexile, feijoada not being something that Brazilians, especially members of themiddle class, tend to eat every day.9 In general, those who had best adapted tosociety repudiated life in the “colony” and criticized—or even disdained—those who relied on it intensely, accusing them of being introverted, incapableof opening up to the opportunities around them, and ignorant of the countryin which they were living. Those in the colony resented this “autonomous”adaptation, considered it a form of selling out, and identified it with thoseaspects of the country of exile that were the object of their ridicule.

Márcio Moreira Alves (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 230–231) refersto insular exiles as “tribes of cannibals” living

in a small group of Brazilians who only think about Brazil, who only read aboutBrazil, who only relate to their surroundings in a parasitical way in order to takethings, find things, resources for this or that . . . in short, who mooch off of thesociety in which their companheiros are working and fixate on Brazil in a vacuumat the same time that they affirm themselves by lashing out and attacking othergroups of Brazilians who do exactly the same thing.

Life in the “ghetto” (as the exiles called it), however, did play an importantrole. The ghetto was an attempt to alleviate the insecurities of exile, to findprotection from prejudice, to avoid social alienation, and, for many, to survive.Turning to those who shared their story, they sought to recover the past that









had given life meaning, finding self-affirmation in a common culture thatwent far beyond traditional food and, in short, helped preserve identity itself.Throughout history, life in ghettos has been a strategy that groups have seizedupon on seeing their identity threatened or called into question. The ghettotherefore functions as a form of resistance, a negation of negation, a struggle

against fragmentation: “The way we survived in exile was by stickingtogether,” as Vera Sílvia Magalhães (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 andMarch 14, 1994) puts it. Despite the ghetto’s “neurotic environment,” accord-ing to Juarez Ferraz de Maia (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995), “if it had-n’t been for the colony of Brazilians in Belgium, we would’ve lost it.”

At the same time, it is true that the ghetto represented a circumscribed uni-verse in which there was no shortage of conflict and contradiction. In the viewof César Benjamin (letter, December 30, 1977), there were two faces to life inthe colony, dissatisfaction with the limits it imposed and difficulty in moving

beyond it: “At this point exile seems like prison: our little group has been pre-

determined for us. . . . Outside the group, the rest is blond-haired and speakssome weird language.”

The ghetto can also be a way of reorganizing people and reformulating afailed political project. Out of this experience came committees denouncingthe dictatorship and calling for amnesty, as well as publications, demonstra-tions, and cultural and political groups and activities. Magno José Vilelaspeaks of the recovery and intensification of contact with the Brazilian com-munity in Paris “not only as a psychological necessity but above all as a polit-ical act. To get together to chat, listen to music, all of that, but also to continuethe political fight” (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 211).

Throughout the 1970s the parties thrown by the colony in Paris becamefamous for ending up as orgies. Luís Eduardo Prado de Oliveira (interview,Paris, October 27 and November 3, 1995) comments on the situation as both apsychoanalyst and an exile: “Orgies played an integrating role. They were away for people to unite before dividing once again. But this left me with animpression of insanity. The Brazilian colony was really insane.” Once againwe see exile, now specifically in the form of the ghetto, associated with psy-chopathy. And the boundaries are indeed tenuous. The projects of vanguardistmilitants, above all during the first phase of exile, seemed delusional even atthe time to those who had pledged to revive the armed struggle in Brazil. Thefollowing episode, which took place in Cuba, is quite apposite.

A former director of a vanguardist organization had developed a plan toreturn to the country and was assisted by a former leader of the Northeasternpeasant leagues known as Zé. Even before 1964 Zé had been brutally beatenin Brazil, and he had been sent to Cuba for treatment. He had remained inCuba because of the civil-military coup, and years later when militants beganarriving from Brazil for guerrilla training he got to know them and befriendedseveral. It was in this way that the former director and the former peasantleader met. With the goal of returning to Brazil, they devised a plan to build a

boat with a false bottom. Stowed away, the guerrillas would enter the countryvia the Amazon rather than via Uruguay and Argentina, whose borders were

better known to repressive forces. The organization dedicated itself to the planand even allocated considerable resources to building the boat (Daniel AarãoReis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996):









This project reveals something of the megalomania, the delusions of grandeur. Asthings unfolded, Zé, who was involved with this ex-director of the organizationin the project, completely lost it. This story didn’t come to me secondhand, I livedit. One day I remember running into [Zé] in Chile. He was very troubled and hada long story to tell backed up by notes that he showed me. The story was com-plicated, and supposedly he had discovered, invented, and designed a special

weapon that could be of great use to the militant left in Brazil. The weapon wasa self-propelled rocket. He even protested bitterly that the Cubans had stolen hisoriginal blueprints but that he had managed, with a great deal of effort, to recon-struct them. I mean, these self-propelled rockets were meant to cause massdestruction in our fight in the cities and in urban guerrilla warfare. At this pointI really came to believe that Zé had “crossed the line,” “gone over the edge.”Afterward I found out, in fact, that this had really been his fate. . . . I don’t tell thisstory to belittle anyone, only to point out one expression of the delusion and devi-ation that militants and leftist organizations had begun to suffer from.

The crisis of identity and values of the left in exile can also be seen in the

armed actions lacking any political outcome that were undertaken in Chile,which revealed a deviation from the ideals and principles of the “vanguard.”Reinaldo Guarany (interview, Rio de Janeiro, August 31, 1995) states that theALN, the organization to which he belonged, had instructed its militants, whohad disembarked in January 1971, that they were neither to accept work nor

become socially integrated but were to await further instructions. At a certainpoint, however, the host government stopped supporting them, and the ALNhad no resources to maintain them. The solution was to undertake “actions of expropriation,” as they were called at the time, and divide the money amongthe participants. At first they targeted doleiros (currency dealers who exchange

U.S. dollars on the black market), who were engaged in illegal activity andcould not complain to the police:

Many Brazilians engaged in a series of actions in Chile—individuals from theVPR, the ALN, and people who set up parallel groups, with or without a politi-cal objective, with people who had decided to get involved just to make a profit.I knew one guy personally who got rich, because after a while he lost interest inwaging armed resistance to obtain money for Brazil. It became a personal objec-tive. He got so rich that he bought a factory and became a businessman.

In fact, however, only a minority of Brazilians exiled in Chile behaved as if thetactics used—and learned—in Brazil to obtain resources for guerrilla warfarecould be unmoored from principles and political objectives.

Actions driven by political objectives were also undertaken, as Guaranyexplains. Brazilian exiles connected to a left-leaning sector of the ChileanPartido Socialista joined together to obtain and send weapons to Brazil,Argentina, and Uruguay. When they were found out, Ângelo Pezzuti, whohad been banished with the “group of 40,” and others involved were arrested.Once again he was tortured, this time by representatives of the socialistUnidad Popular government:

Ângelo Pezzuti was severely tortured, literally broken. The other prisoners aswell. He told me that the difference between what he suffered in Brazil and whathe suffered in Chile was that the policeman, Victor Toro, a member of the PC[Partido Comunista], insisted on torturing him without a mask on. At this point,









groups of Brazilian exiles who were engaged in their own separate actions splitup and left for Europe.

Armed actions undertaken for personal profit demonstrate that a crisis of val-ues was already present during the first phase of exile. Reframed in a differ-

ent context, these actions led to an extreme version of what to a certain extenthad already occurred in Brazil when armed groups had to commit robberysimply to support themselves. But in Chile the cycle of survival became dis-torted, and armed actions came across as caricatures of what they had been

before. Even when political objectives were involved, they were but desperateattempts to prolong the past and carry it into the present, to superimpose theidentity of guerrilla on that of refugee.

The aspect of the exile experience involving self-interested actions is a sen-sitive issue because, even though it is no secret, there remains a certain embar-rassment in owning up to it and making it explicit. Even those who never

participated prefer to avoid the subject, opting for more “elevated” topics.And, as is to be expected, those who were involved in such activities rarely careto bring them up. The “schemes” were diverse, multiplying over the years, andthey, too, were tied to the crisis of values and identity. Some schemers usedtraveler’s checks, declaring the checks lost and spending them simultaneously.Others, when amnesty was declared, invented stories about stolen documents,money, or goods in order to receive indemnity or insurance money. Even exilesin Africa, committed to building socialism in abject countries that had beenexploited by colonizers for centuries, had no qualms about doing business withsectors rather less identified with socialist principles, making money on the

sending of dollars abroad and thus undermining the interests of the govern-ments that had received them.Many stories surrounded the case of the “slush fund” (caixinha) in Chile, an

institution created by Brazilians to assist those arriving from Brazil. The fundincluded a program of scholarships provided by an outside institution toencourage higher education in the exile community. The Brazilians themselves,however, alleged that the scholarships were being used to support militants of particular organizations with no other criteria dictating their disbursement.Informal from the beginning and possessed of few resources, the fund was sooncompletely transformed by a significant donation from the World Council of

Churches in support of the exile community (Amnesty International, 1974: 23).The “council” of Brazilian exiles decided to use it to open a large restaurant thatwould also serve as a function hall and commercial food factory. The idea wasto aid the exile community by augmenting its resources through economicactivity. Because the slush fund existed off the books, 12 legal residents of Chileoffered to accept the money in their names. A movie theater in Providencia, anupscale neighborhood of Santiago, was eventually purchased as the site of therestaurant. When the coup d’état occurred in 1973, the meal-preparation sectionwas in operation and was placed under UN protection. The two principal man-agers of the fund were never arrested—on the contrary, they continued to work

providing food to refugees in the embassies and to prisoners in the NationalStadium. It is difficult to discern exactly what happened, but the managers wereaccused of embezzlement and of working for the information services of theBrazilian government and the Chilean junta.









DOCUMENTS: MAKING IDENTITY CONCRETE

In exile, identity documents assumed particular importance both for resi-dence and for travel. Exiles frequently attempted to obtain and maintain them,whether false or authentic. Each document issued was a motive for great

rejoicing and celebration. Those who lacked legal status depended on them tomove about and interact. Whether an exile had become legalized or was try-ing to do so, documents defined essential facets of daily life, beginning withthe basic permission to establish oneself, work, and have the right to healthcare, housing, food, and so on. Because of this, it was an issue that mobilizedpeople. By refusing or disdaining authentic documents (something that hap-pened often in the first phase), exiles stressed their connection to the revolu-tionary project whose defeat eventually became evident. Resistance to lettinggo of forged documents arose from an effort to preserve the past and a priorsense of identity. Legalization implied a redefinition of identity, which occurred

especially in the second phase of exile.It is symptomatic that Daniel Aarão Reis Filho (interview, Rio de Janeiro,

1996)—who had lived in Chile for two years with documents “acquired” at aparty in Paris—after 30 days in the Panamanian embassy in Santiago awaitingsafe-conduct out of the country remembered to destroy his documents onlyafter he had left for the airport, thereby running the risk of not being able toembark:

In the morning, the buses pulled up to the embassy. They loaded us into the busesand, escorted by Chilean military police and members of the army, we went to the

airport. It was one o’clock in the morning. They insisted that these buses nottravel through the city by day. Then something incredible happened: I wasalready in the bus when I realized that I still had my “special” set of documents:my passport and seven other documents. Now, on the list going to Panama I wascalled Daniel, but in my documents I went by another name, so if I was caughtwith all of those documents the officials would be able to say, “Well, you’re notgoing to embark because you’re not Daniel, you’re so-and-so.” So I had to tear upall the documents and throw them out the window, slowly, because each bus hada paco, a military policeman. I had to keep throwing them slowly out the window

because there were several buses, and I was afraid that if I threw everything outat once this would draw attention from those coming behind us.

Under his own name he was leaving behind not only Chile but the project of returning to Brazil, the project of guerrilla warfare. He attempted to enroll ina university course in Panama but succeeded only in France, where heobtained refugee status: this change represented the redefinition of an entirelife project.

Until the coup in Chile the organizations maintained sympathizers abroad,in general ex-militants who acted by “acquiring” documents, normally amongBrazilian tourists, and “preparing” them to be used by exiles who lacked legalstatus. They were also responsible for obtaining support and money via con-tacts with governments, organizations, and political parties (Daniel AarãoReis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996; Luís Eduardo Prado de Oliveira,interview, Paris, October 27 and November 3, 1995).

During the second phase of exile, the lack of documents or the precarious-ness of papers issued by Latin American governments led many diplomatic









services to deny visa requests. Humiliating peregrinations in pursuit of acountry to receive them, together with the negligence with which they weretreated, contrasted with the self-image they had created for themselves as rev-olutionaries. Daniel Aarão Reis Filho (interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996) speaksto the absurdity of the situation:

We were stuck in Panama, which wouldn’t give round-trip tickets, only one-way,and many of us, the majority, didn’t have travel papers. It was then that Panamaissued us a travel document, but it was a piece of toilet paper, as we called it, justa piece of paper, not even a decent booklet with a sturdy cover, nothing. It was apiece of paper folded in four with a 3-by-4 photograph, your name, your father’sand mother’s name, your country of origin. So one of us found a market where

booklet covers with the Panamanian seal were sold. To give a more decent lookto that piece of toilet paper, everyone went and bought a cover and stapled thepaper to it. It was just for show [ para inglês ver] because any customs official whoopened it would see that it was just a piece of paper stapled to a cover bought at

a market. It was ridiculous, but at any rate it kept up appearances.

The distress caused by the lack of documents resulted from the militarygovernment’s determination to deny passports to exiles, a decision peculiar tothe Brazilian dictatorship among authoritarian governments of the period(Souza, 1979). Although there was no list of individuals stripped of national-ity, as occurred for example in Nazi Germany, the simple refusal to issue pass-ports left exiles without identification. Even during the coup in Chile, whenforeigners’ lives were at risk, the Brazilian embassy refused to issue passports:“It was the only country to do so. Other countries such as Bolivia showed con-

cern for their nationals in Chile and issued passports so they could leave foranother country. But not Itamaraty,” recalls Maurício Dias David (interview,Paris, March 9 and 15, 1995).10 The Paraguayan embassy, in the middle of thedictatorship of General Stroessner, took in its exiled nationals, explaining thatthey were doing so to save their lives but that they should move on to anothercountry (Reinaldo Guarany, interview, Rio de Janeiro, August 31, 1995).

The accounts of various prisoners detained in the Chilean National Stadiumattest to the presence of Brazilian secret police interrogating Brazilian prisonersand teaching torture tactics to the Chilean police (Tomás Togni Tarqüínio, inter-view, Paris, January 17 and February 26, 1995; Pedro Vianna, interview, Paris

and Créteil, March 22 and 25, 1995; see Rabêlo, 1978). Antônio Câmara Canto,the Brazilian ambassador who supported the coup, also presided over the com-mission of inquiry responsible for the political purge of Itamaraty, which elim-inated diplomats considered leftists.

Didi Rabêlo (1978) and her husband took refuge in the Panamanianembassy; their oldest son, meanwhile, had been detained at the NationalStadium. She tells of the Brazilian embassy’s conduct in refusing to authorizethe departure of their other children for Brazil:

I spent hours and hours at the embassy because the situation was so difficult—

and look at what bastards they were—it was the only place where I could find alittle peace and safety, and I thought that they were going to help me because wewere Brazilians and the children had nothing to do with all of this. I bought somesandwiches, kept the children close by, and sat there and kept asking, trying toconvince them. . . . How the children suffered . . . the ambassador should have









gathered together all the children and taken them to his house. I resisted as muchas I possibly could until, lacking any other option and feeling threatened, Ientered a United Nations refuge with all of them.

Brazilian embassies not only in Chile but in every country occupied by exiles

refused to register the exiles’ foreign-born children. In Chile the UnidadPopular government recognized them as Chileans, but the military junta thatassumed power after the coup annulled all of these records. Few ambassadorsconfronted the military government and took the initiative to recognize theright of children to nationality as did Ítalo Zappa, ambassador to Mozambique.

In many cases Brazilian embassies would not renew the passports of thosewho had left the country. Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva left with his pass-port in 1969 and managed to renew it in London in 1973 through a PCB sym-pathizer at the consulate. But in 1976 his passport expired, and this createdobstacles to travel and participation in international conferences in his role as

a scientist at the Pasteur Institute. Under the premise that it would limit hisfreedom of expression, he never solicited refugee status (Hildebrando, 1990).In France, Luís Eduardo Prado de Oliveira also suffered at the hands of the

Brazilian diplomatic service (interview, Paris, October 27 and November 3,1995). In 1972 he declared the loss of his passport, which he had left thecountry with in 1969, and easily obtained a new one valid for four years. In1974 he was summoned by the consulate, and the consul demanded that hereturn his passport, alleging that he was wanted by the Brazilian police.Although the passport expired in 1976, he was able to obtain another onlyafter amnesty was declared. Since France had renewed his residency visa, he

went six years without leaving French territory.The role of the Brazilian diplomatic service in relation to exiles during thedictatorship remains a research topic to be further investigated.

WORK

Professional activity was an important factor in the exile experience; socialintegration and adaptation were directly tied to the type of work one performed.For many exiles, especially for professionals with degrees and experience, LatinAmerican countries offered the possibility of specialized work in research insti-tutions and universities. Through special projects, the United Nations alsoemployed these professionals. In Chile the Facultad Latinoamericana de CienciasSociales, also tied to the UN, received many intellectuals. Even students who hadleft Brazil before receiving their undergraduate degrees found work in theirareas of study, particularly in administrative positions in the Unidad Populargovernment. In Chile, in fact, exiles from throughout Latin America wereemployed by specialized agencies of the state. The less educated do not seem tohave had great difficulty in finding blue-collar work, and the Allende govern-ment had even created a financing network for those interested in opening small

businesses, including foreign political refugees.Meanwhile, during the first phase of exile, concern with employment was

not even on the table for those still committed to the idea of return. Many became involved in learning a trade that would facilitate their reintegration









among the poor in Brazil in order to foster a “mass movement” (trabalho de mas-sas). To this end, Heliana Bibas and Carlos Henrique Vianna established them-selves in Maipul, a city near Santiago where there was a metalworking center.While there they took courses in machining and lathe operation. The austerelife of a factory worker, waking up early and working eight hours a day, did

not dismay these two middle-class young people fresh from the high-schoolstudent movement. Contempt for “petty-bourgeois values” and idealization of the “working class” were the sentiments that prevailed. Daniel Aarão ReisFilho also spent part of his time in Chile in a carpenter’s workshop trying tofamiliarize himself with the profession. All told, this mind-set speaks to theeffort to preserve the revolutionary project.

In Europe, however, the outlook proved radically different. Only a minor-ity managed to find employment equal to their level of skills. The mostcommon experience was of occupational demotion; educated individuals hadto accept positions scorned by Europeans, reinventing themselves as house-

keepers, babysitters, janitors, hotel doormen, civil construction workers, andso on. As exiles and refugees blended in with economic migrants, the urbanmiddle class that made up the majority of the exile population came in contactwith a very different reality. The meaning of this experience comes through inthe account of César Benjamin (letter, May 31, 1977):

Until last week I was working in a school and kindergarten as a janitor, earningfor a total of eight hours’ work but doing the job in five—that is, from 3 till 8.After repeating the same manual labor every day in a school, an environmentthat I know well as a student and from my daydreams, since childhood, of being

a teacher, I remembered Sinclair’s musings at the beginning of Demian when heis surprised by the discovery of another world that isn’t his world, an “obscure”world (sic) that began in his own home (the maid’s room, the workers’ entrance,wage labor, alienation, etc.), which he had lived with without seeing and whichhe depended on, without realizing it, for the smooth functioning of his “lumi-nous” bourgeois world.11And I couldn’t help seeing myself in those who, like mewhen I was a student, had certainly never stopped to think about why theyalways found their classrooms neat and clean—that there was a person behindit. The gesture of one teacher struck me as very simpatico—she always had herclass of forty put their chairs on top of their desks to leave the room ready forcleaning. And I would always clean her classroom with special care, although Iwas never able to identify her among the school’s teachers.

The challenge of political defeat on the one hand and material survival onthe other forced exiles into work that not only ran completely counter totheir expectations but threw them into a profoundly disorienting role rever-sal. César Benjamin, again, conveys the disconnect between what they hadhoped for and what had actually happened (letter, September 23, 1977):

Swedish society wants me to be an efficient vaktmastare [janitor], and that’s it.Bluftahkapumbt. And in return I have my needs met. As the sportscaster says,“Close call, Deni!” [que perigo, Deni!] Yep, no matter how hard the goalie tries,

there will always be balls he can’t stop. In fact, just being a goalie is a bust fromthe start—the point man [ ponta-de-lança] is what I’d like to be, “bedeviling myopponent’s penalty area” [ zona do agrião]. And the penalty area of this game iscalled Brazil, where the language I speak is spoken.









And further (letter, December 30, 1977):

Our place in society has nothing to do with what we think our identity is or withwhat should proceed from it. But you go on living. Survival isn’t a problemaround here: there’s even central heating. But to make sense of things withoutsacrificing either honesty or intelligence . . . without playing the bureaucraticgame . . . without losing your own sense of who you are . . . without losing yourpoints of reference.

Although cultural differences seem to have afflicted exiles from poorer backgrounds in particular, the basic goods and services furnished to refugeesin both capitalist and socialist countries carried inestimable worth for thosewho had previously lived without these rights. For them, exile often meant animproved standard of living; returning to Brazil, by contrast, would mean astep backward. Even so, the desire to return remained. Damaris de OliveiraLucena, exchanged for the Japanese consul kidnapped in 1970, relates her

enthusiasm for the access to health care, education, food, and housing pro-vided by the Cuban government (Costa et al., 1980: 235):

The change was drastic, since for starters I was only semiliterate. I come from apoor family in the North and was a textile worker for several years, as well as ahousekeeper and an agricultural worker. I wasn’t even able to finish grade schooland so hadn’t mastered my own language. As a poor woman I’d never had accessto education. I came to Cuba sick, traumatized by the brutal assassination of myhusband and the torture that I’d suffered, bringing my three children with me, onethree years old and the other two nine years old. I was admitted to the hospital andreceived all the necessary treatment along with my children. I began to learn my

own language and Spanish as well. A world of knowledge opened up to me. Andat forty-three I finished both grade school and high school and then went on toenroll in a pre-university course. . . . My children, too, received all that a mothercould wish for her children: the best schools, books, toys, health care when they’resick—everything that a normal child needs in order to develop.

For middle-class exiles, the exact opposite occurred in most cases—in Europetheir standard of living declined. It is true that this situation was alreadyfamiliar to militants in the armed struggle, during which they experiencedreduced standards of living in hideouts (aparelhos) or in the countryside. Butthat experience, notwithstanding, involved a very specific context withinwhat was supposed to be the decisive confrontation of the revolution. InEuropean exile few managed to maintain a standard of living correspondingto what they had had in Brazil.

Anina de Carvalho, a lawyer, recalls the initial conditions of exile (Costaet al., 1980: 64):

At first I lived like everyone else, in the maid’s room. The first two where I liveddidn’t even have hot water, or a toilet, or a bathroom. There was a little cold-water sink in the room, but there was no central heating—not to mention theseven stories you had to scale by foot. It was a struggle to get hold of a meal

ticket for the university restaurant—I was really broke.

Her first work experience, as a fashion-show assistant, was “dramatic”:

My job was to help the models put on their belts, suspenders, and pants. In thepsychological condition of someone who had just been exiled, who had lost









everything that was important, you were really in the gutter in every sense,going through financial problems, often without money for food. You felt reallydemoralized having to take a job helping models put their pants on.

Another case involves an exiled woman in Paris who ate meat used as dog

food and, just after the declaration of amnesty, died of stomach cancer.According to Nanci Marietto (interview, Rocca Priora, Italy, January 20,1996), Italians saw refugees as manual labor for domestic work. She callsattention to the inequalities among exiles, which corresponded to a stratifiedset of opportunities: “political figures of a certain stature” found a great dealof support in organizations created on the occasion of the 1973 Chilean coupd’état and in leftist parties like the PC and PS. The rest had to manage as bestthey could. Faced with limited offers of employment in Italy, Nanci, a nursingstudent, worked as a housekeeper during much of her time in exile.

At the same time, however, Europe presented the possibility of scholarship-

funded study. Many exiles completed undergraduate programs and went onto graduate work. Experienced professionals took advantage of the opportu-nity and obtained their doctorates, making use of European universities andlibraries. In Sweden the state gave student loans to those in university courseson the condition of repayment after graduation (as political refugees, exileswere able to claim this right). In other countries such as West Germany,France, and Switzerland, civic institutions, generally tied to churches, grantedscholarships to refugees. At times, however, scholarships were used merely asa means of immediate survival without further application. And the choice tostudy often did not exclude the possibility of unskilled labor, since scholar-

ships did not always provide for every material necessity. Academic degreesgave exiles the qualifications to perform skilled work in Africa or, later on, inBrazil and pointed to the redefinition of a life project.

The forms of work-related assistance varied. Beyond scholarships, theComité Inter-Mouvements Auprès des Évacués paid for technical or profes-sional courses and later helped refugees find work. The UN, through its HighCommission for Refugees (UNHCR), granted loans to exiles who wished tostart some type of business. It was in this way that Enoir de Oliveira Luz,known as Juca, a unionist from Rio Grande do Sul and member of the PCB,opened a Brazilian restaurant, Brasuca, in 1978 in Lisbon (still in operation to

this day). At the same time, however, it seems that Brazilian exiles did notoften resort to the UNHCR for support, perhaps because it represented a rede-finition of identity on a different level from what they had experienced so far.With this initiative the UNHCR blurred the line between refugee and eco-nomic migrant and, in the case of Brazilian exiles, deprived them of the polit-ical characteristics that had determined their identity. Juca’s transformationinto a businessman did in fact radically redefine his sense of identity. He him-self acknowledges (interview, Lisbon, January 27, 1996) that he never felt thedesire to get involved in politics while in Portugal and even opposed the cre-ation in Lisbon of a pro-amnesty committee: “I’ve never been openly active in

Portugal, politically. I don’t want trouble with the Portuguese government.I’ve kept to myself.”

Instances of Brazilian exiles’ managing to become integrated in Europe asskilled professionals are few and far between and include only individuals with









the highest scientific and academic credentials. Some of the better-knowncases include Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva, Paulo Freire, and FernandoHenrique Cardoso. Pereira da Silva, an internationally renowned researcherwho was fired by the University of São Paulo after the First Institutional Act in1964 and by the University of Ribeirão Preto after the Fifth Institutional Act,

continued his career at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Freire, invited to work invarious countries, established himself at the World Council of Churches inGeneva, where he remained for many years. The then-sociologist FernandoHenrique Cardoso served as a professor at the University of Paris X between1967 and 1968. But even Mário Pedrosa—a historic figure of the left andrespected art critic to whom Chile had opened its doors, inviting him to teach atthe Institute of South American Art two days after he arrived and then to curatethe Museum of Modern Art (soon rechristened the Museum of Solidarity)—encountered difficulties supporting himself in France (Pedrosa, 1978).

The decolonization of Portuguese colonies in Africa and the process of

rebuilding them, which began in the middle of the 1970s, created a broad labormarket because of the lack of qualified personnel. Many exiles who had grad-uated from European universities migrated to Africa in a move that charac-terized a third phase of the Brazilian exile experience. The presence of UNprograms in Africa also encouraged Brazilians to relocate to various countriesand contribute to projects in education, communication, and so on. This pro-vided a way out for exiles who had been underutilized in Europe; in Africa,where their contribution was finally valued, they were able to put their skillsto use, learning, improving themselves professionally, and gaining furtherexperience. By choosing to migrate they confirmed the reconstruction of their

life projects.Africa was a labor market not only for members of the middle class who had

earned a degree but for those who had gained professional experience inEurope. José Barbosa Monteiro, black, the son of illiterate peasants, had com-pleted only three months of grade school prior to working for a foundation thatassisted marginalized youths in Geneva, the majority of whom were childrenof economic migrants. After a long exile in Switzerland, he went to Guinea-Bissau to work as an educator (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 113–143).

In sum, the circumstances of exile imposed the redefinition and reconstruc-tion of identities. Even though ties with the former project might be more orless maintained, a revision of values proved inevitable as part of a process thatdecisively reoriented the course of the Brazilian left.

Until the Chilean coup of 1973 a Latin American revolution was consideredpossible, and the possibility was fundamental in defining the identity of those inexile. In the meantime, even during the first phase of exile there were signs of unfolding transformations. Many sought out other paths. Some failed to find analternative. The third phase was marked by even greater distance from the for-mer project and a more serious involvement with life in the country of residence.

As in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, exiles underwent essential transformations,though they always maintained the primordial mark of exile, which “‘stuck’to us like our own skin” (Daniel Aarão Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro,1996). Still, although wrapped up in circumstances of time and place, of “des-tiny” in Ovidian terms, there remained, in the meantime and at all times,space for the free “will or initiative of human beings” (Velho, 1994: 8).









NOTES

1. Names mentioned or quoted without further bibliographic information refer to interviewsconducted by the author in the 1990s, the details of which appear in parenthetical citations. Taperecordings of the interviews (with a total of 37 interviewees), excluding those recorded withFlávia Castro, were donated to the Laboratório de História Oral e Imagem (Laboratory of Oraland Visual History—LABHOI) of Fluminense Federal University and the Arquivo EdgardLeueroth (Edgard Leueroth Archive—AEL) of the University of Campinas. Only the interviewswith Daniel Aarão Reis Filho and Tomás Tarqüínio have been transcribed, and the transcriptions,likewise, have been donated to the LABHOI and the AEL.

2. In total, organizations of armed resistance carried out four kidnappings of foreign diplo-mats. Their demand in each case was the release of political prisoners. The first kidnappingoccurred on September 4, 1969, when the Dissidência Estudantil da Guanabara (StudentDissident Movement of Guanabara—DI-GB) and the Ação Libertadora Nacional (NationalLiberation Action—ALN) captured U.S. ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick in Rio de Janeiro. Inexchange for his freedom, 15 political prisoners were released, and a guerrilla manifestodenouncing torture and political imprisonment was distributed by the Brazilian news media.

This action, of great impact both in Brazil and abroad, was the high-water mark of the armedstruggle. Although the organizations considered it a great success, it provoked an intensificationof government repression for which the revolutionaries proved unprepared. At the beginning of November, in the midst of a series of arrests and assassinations, Carlos Marighella, head of theALN and the principal leader of the urban guerrilla resistance, was killed. On March 11, 1970,the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (Popular Revolutionary Vanguard—VPR) kidnapped the Japanese consul Nobuo Okushi in São Paulo. Five guerrillas were then released. The third action,on June 11, 1970, involved the capture of West German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben inRio de Janeiro. Here the VPR and ALN obtained the release of 40 prisoners. In the final action,carried out on December 7, 1970, Swiss ambassador Giovanni Enrico Bucher was captured by theVPR and the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (Revolutionary Movement of October 8—MR-8, the name that the DI-GB had assumed during the first kidnapping). This action involved

40 days of very tense negotiations, since the government had rejected certain names on the listdelivered by the guerrillas. In the end, 70 prisoners were freed. At this point, it became clear tothe organizations that this had been their last “diplomatic” kidnapping. Daniel Aarão Reis Filho,historian, ex-militant, and author of several books and articles on the armed struggle, argues thata better word to describe this type of action would be “capture” and not “kidnapping,” since thelatter, as defined by the dictatorial regime, carries a criminal connotation.

3. I divide the Brazilian exile experience into three phases. The first phase is bracketed by theBrazilian civil-military coup of 1964 and the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973, which over-threw the government of Salvador Allende. During this phase, leftist militants viewed their exileas provisional and believed that they would soon return to Brazil. For the most part, theyremained in Latin America, first in Montevideo and then in Santiago, which became the “capi-tal” of the first phase. The second phase was one of diaspora. After a series of coups and dicta-

torial takeovers throughout Latin America, remaining on the continent became difficult, and theidea of a speedy return disappeared from the horizon. This was a period marked by the need toadapt to the realities of new countries of exile, learn other languages (not simply Spanish), jointhe labor force, and cope with the loss of a personal and political project. The majority of exileseither abandoned political activism or were forced to redefine it significantly, experiencing akind of internal exile within their external one. They also began to embrace positions that hadhitherto been ignored or treated as secondary by Brazilian leftist movements, including positionsassociated with democracy. During this phase, Paris became the new Brazilian exile capital. Thethird phase, contemporaneous with the second, is one of “migration in exile.” With the inde-pendence of former Portuguese colonies in Africa, many exiles left Europe to promote socialismin these countries. During the second phase, many had studied in and obtained degrees fromEuropean universities. Unsatisfied in jobs as hotel doorpersons, janitors, and so on, they sawopportunities for skilled labor and political activism in the construction of socialism in Africa.Redefined, revolution once again became the order of the day during the third phase.

4. Published in 1924 by German writer Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain is set in a luxury-class sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. The protagonist, who has come to visit his ailing cousin,









remains there for seven years in a state of enchantment until the outbreak of World War I.—Translator’s note.

5. We find Nanci in a small city set in a rocky hill near Rome living with her Italian husbandand three adolescent children adopted as infants in Brazil.

6. See also Casalis (1976). In his testimony Casalis mentions additional attacks on LatinAmerican refugees in Paris. On the Russell Tribunal see Rollemberg (1999: Chap. 8).

7. Information about Fleury’s presence in Chile had been given to the ALN and VPR by theChilean PS, but the reports were never confirmed.8. The interviewee requested that I not reveal the name of the person in question: “Vilma”

is a pseudonym.9. Feijoada is a rich stew of black beans seasoned with salted pork (traditionally trimmings

such as ears and trotters), dried beef, and sausage. Originally an improvisation by African slaves,it has become Brazil’s “national dish.”—Translator’s note.

10. The Palace of Itamaraty is the seat of Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Relations.—Translator’snote.

11. Published in 1919 by German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse, Demian portrays the psy-chosocial awakening of its protagonist, Emil Sinclair, who begins to question conventionalpieties after his encounter with fellow student Max Demian.—Translator’s note.

REFERENCES

Amnesty International1974 Chili. Bruxelles.

Arraes, Miguel1979 Entrevista. Pasquim 9 (535): 4–6.

Carvalho, Herbert de and Herbert Daniel1981 Entrevista. Pasquim 13 (643): 22–23.

Casalis, Georges1976 “Déclaration de Georges Casalis, le 13/01/1976, à la suite de l’intervention de la délé-gation argentine devant le Tribunal Russell II (3ème session) sur ‘Le réfugiés politiques’”(TBR. II. R. Cart. I).

Costa, Albertina de Oliveira, Maria Teresa Porciúncula de Moraes, Norma Marzola, andValentina da Rocha Lima (eds.)

1980 Memórias das mulheres do exílio. Vol. 2. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.Gabeira, Fernando

1980 O crepúsculo do macho. 13th edition. Rio de Janeiro: Codecri.Guarany, Reinaldo

1980 Os fornos quentes. São Paulo: Alfa-Ômega.1984 A fuga. São Paulo: Brasiliense.

Hildebrando, Luiz1990 O fio da meada. São Paulo: Brasiliense.Lage, Padre

1979 Entrevista. Pasquim 11 (533): 24–26.Pedrosa, Mário

1978 Entrevista. Pasquim 9 (469): 4–8.Poerner, Arthur José

1980 Entrevista. Pasquim 11 (571): 13–15.Rabêlo, Didi

1978 Entrevista com a família Rabêlo. Pasquim 10 (473): 12–15.Ribeiro, Darcy

1977 Entrevista. Pasquim 9 (426): 8–15.

Rollemberg, Denise1999 Exílio: Entre raízes e radares. Rio de Janeiro: Record.Saenz-Carrete, Erasmo

1983 Les cadres socio-politiques de l’adaptation des réfugiés latino-américains en France,1964 to 1979. Ph.D. diss., Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III.









Sirinelli, Jean-François1987 “Effets d’âge et phénomènes de génération dans le milieu intellectuel français” and “LesKhagneux et normaliens des années 1920: un rameau de la ‘génération de 1905’?” inGenerations intellectuelles. Les Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Present, no. 6.1989 “Génération et histoire politique.” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire, no. 22.

Souza, Herbert de

1979 Entrevista. Pasquim 10 (519): 10-12.Uchôa Cavalcanti, Pedro Celso and Jovelino Ramos (eds.)1978 Memórias do exílio, 1964 / 19??: De muitos caminhos. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Livramento.

Velho, Gilberto1994 Projeto e metamorfose. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.


Date post:	03-Jun-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	fabiolucascruz2960
View:	212 times
Download:	0 times

Brazilian Exile.pdf

Documents