Free Tropic of Chaos by Christian Parenti Page B

first woman president.
    Not all the revolutionaries had such illustrious careers. The dictatorship met the Left with the extreme violence of death squads, torture, and incarceration. More broadly, it applied a sweeping national security law that allowed the detention of anyone who gave off the slightest whiff
of bohemia—long hair and a guitar could get one arrested. A very complete history of the repression exists thanks to the Catholic Archdiocese of São Paulo, which assembled a secret team of lawyers to illegally copy and publish documents from 707 secret military-tribunal cases, involving 7,367 defendants. 11 The purloined dossiers show that torture and murder were widespread, and when a synthesis and summary was published as Brasil: Nunca Mais , it became a sudden bestseller. 12
    While some elements of the revolution later rose in politics, other lumpen cadre became the first-generation leadership of Comando Vermelho (other gangs later formed by splitting off from the CV). As Ben Penglase writes, “In a fairly direct sense, the Comando Vermelho was the bastard child of the dictatorship’s attempt to repress armed political opposition.” 13

From Guerrillas to Gangs
    Behind bars, the political radicals of Galeria B of Cândido Mendes Prison organized themselves and then united with the general-population inmates. The common criminals saw how the political prisoners maintained unity and, through it, had strength and a higher standard of living. The jailed radicals were “sharing any food or money that they received from outside the prison and enforcing strict discipline that banned inmates from attacking or stealing from each other, practices which were common in the prison. The political prisoners also joined together to defend any political prisoner who had been assaulted by guards or by other prisoners and to demand better conditions.” 14
    The first written account of this history was Four Hundred Against One, the memoir of William da Silva, who as a young prisoner helped start the CV. He describes how the first “red” prison gang was the Falange LSN, which in 1979 killed off the leaders of several rival apolitical organizations, assumed control of the whole prison, became the Comando Vermelho, and then imposed new revolutionary rules. These, according to da Silva, included “death to anyone who assaults or rapes fellow prisoners; conflicts brought from the street must be left outside of prison; violence only to attempt to escape; constant struggle against repression and abuse.” 15

    This discipline and unity was soon extended to the favelas. The notion was to support returning prisoners and control the communities, including the drug trade, in preparation for a revolution in Rio and beyond. The CV functioned as a political organization and a beneficent society for prisoners and ex-convicts. It reached into communities, armed in the name of self-defense and revolution, and started taxing the drug trade. 16 The first generation of radical CV leaders was soon wiped out, and by the mid-1980s Comando Vermelho had become just another drug gang, albeit very big and well organized.
    As the CV was beginning its rise, Brazil’s larger political economy began a process of brutal, neoliberal transformation. It was the concatenation of the early stages of the catastrophic convergence taking form: political violence met a new wave of poverty.

Neoliberal Brazil
    It was 1983, the lapels were still wide, the sideburns long, and the protesters furious. Newly unemployed industrial workers—thousands of them—marched down São Paulo’s streets. Screw the military government! These people had reached their limit. Some chanted, “The people united will never be defeated,” but others just screamed, “We’re hungry!”
    As the Comando Vermelho was moving into the favelas , the Brazilian economy was falling to its knees; the protests were a symptom of that.