Brasília - On March 31, 1964, a military uprising overthrew the legal government of Brazil and began to curtail citizen rights and liberties as they cracked down on leftists. The president, Jõao Goulart, and many other politicians and prominent Brazilians, fled the country. Others would be forced into exile by the military government. The press was censured, the legislature subdued and the judicial system muzzled. But at the same time, militants rose up to challenge the dictatorship. Here are the stories of two of the people who stood up to the repression.

Labor leader, Santo Dias, was assassinated by the police on October 30,1979. At the age of 37 he was shot in the back as he participated in a picket line at the Sylvania factory in São Paulo. The author of the shot was a policeman, Herculano Leonel. The wounded labor leader was tossed into the back of a police van and taken to hospital where he died.

Every year since then, on the date of his death, Dias family members and his former co-workers go to the spot where he was shot and paint the following phrase on the ground: "Here the metallurgical worker, Santos Dias, was shot by a PM (military policeman) on October 30, 1979, as he defended the rights of the working class." Then the group goes to his graveside for a ceremony of remembrance.

Dias was born in Bebedouro, interior of the state of São Paulo, in a farming family. He left the farm and went to the big city where he rose to became one of the most prominent leaders of the labor movement in the industrial center of the city of São Paulo. He was a practicing Catholic who worked closely with church groups linked to social projects seeking to improve worker conditions (such as the "Comunidades Eclesiais de Base" and the "Pastoral Operária"). His fellow workers called him Santo - Saint. He was one of the prinicipal architects of labor resistance to the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.

Iara Iavelberg was born in 1944, the first child of a Jewish family. She seems to have always been precocious, studious and interested in social problems. At the age of 16 she married a doctor, but the marriage was not happy. Later she entered the University of São Paulo and majored in psychology. By the time of the military uprising of March 1964, she was involved in leftist organizations and had become a communist. With the coup d'état, she became an active militant working against the military dictatorship. Then she met Carlos Lamarca.

Iara, herself an important member of the movement opposed to the dictatorship, became Lamarca's mistress. He was, according to the military government, "the country's most dangerous subversive," and they pursued him relentlessly because he had been one of their own. Carlos Lamarca had enlisted in the army in 1955, gone to officer's training school and risen to be a captain by 1967. Along the way he had served for 13 months as part of the Brazilian detachment in the UN Peace Force in Suez, in 1962-63, and he had also become a communist. At the beginning of 1969 he deserted the army, taking weapons and ammunition with him, and sending his wife and two kids off to Cuba. Ironically, at the time he deserted the army Lamarca was training bank employees how to use guns. At that time, a rash of bank robberies were occurring in Brazil as anti-government militants used them to fund their activities. Lamarac would soon be involved in those activities - he was to lead various bank robberies for the militants.

The Lamarca-Iavelberg romance was not easy. The forces of repression were constantly on their heels. They had to be on the move always. In mid 1971 the two of them had gone north to the state of Bahia (it was too dangerous for them to remain in the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo area). Iara stayed in the state capital, Salvador, while Lamarca headed into the interior of the state.

On August 20, 1971, the forces of repression caught up with Iara in an apartment building in Salvador. What actually happened is the source of continuing controversy. According to the police, she committed suicide. A note from the Ministry of the Army says she was machine- gunned by a sergeant, named Rubem Otero. According to fellow militants, she was taken alive and died later while being tortured. The facts are that her body was turned over to her family only a month after her death, in a sealed coffin they were ordered not to open.

For 32 years the body of Iara Iavelberg was buried in the suicide area of the Jewish cemetery in São Paulo. Last year, at the request of the family, a court ordered her body exhumed and examined to determine the cause of death.

Iara's lover and fellow militant, Carlos Lamarca, was ambushed and killed by the police in the backlands of Bahia, a month after her death, in September, 1971.

Agência Brasil
Reporter: Débora Xavier
Translator: Allen Bennett
12/3/2004

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