Carlos Marighella

Carlos Marighella (5 December 1911 – 4 November 1969) was a Brazilian politician, writer, and Marxist–Leninist militant. He rejected nonviolent opposition to the country’s military dictatorship and instead created the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN), a Marxist–Leninist urban guerrilla group that carried out bank robberies and notable kidnappings. Police killed him in an ambush in 1969. His best-known work on revolutionary tactics is the *Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla*.

Born in Salvador, Bahia, to an Italian immigrant father and an Afro-Brazilian mother descended from enslaved Hausa people from Sudan, Marighella grew up in a Catholic home but became an atheist in his early twenties. He left engineering studies in 1934 to join the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and moved to Rio de Janeiro to help reorganize it.

He was first arrested in 1932 for writing an insulting poem about the local police chief. In 1936, during Getúlio Vargas’s presidency, he was jailed again for subversion by political police under Filinto Müller, formally charged and tried, and acquitted in 1937. He was recaptured in 1939 and remained jailed until a 1945 general amnesty that included political prisoners. The next year he was elected a federal deputy for the PCB in Bahia, but lost his seat in 1948 when the party was outlawed. He then went underground and held various leadership roles within the party. Invited by the Chinese Communist Party, he visited China from 1953 to 1954 to study the Chinese Communist Revolution. In May 1964, after the military coup, he was shot and arrested by political police at a Rio movie theater, but was released by court order the following year.

In 1966, Marighella wrote *The Brazilian Crisis*, advocating armed struggle against the dictatorship, and resigned from the PCB’s national leadership. In August 1967, he attended the 1st Conference of Latin American Solidarity in Havana against party orders, where he wrote *Some Questions About the Guerrillas in Brazil* in memory of Che Guevara. The PCB expelled him in 1968, and he founded the ALN in February of that year.

The political police blamed Marighella and nine others for the killing of Charles Rodney Chandler, as reported by *Folha da Tarde*. In September 1969, ALN members, working with the Revolutionary Movement 8th October (MR-8), kidnapped U.S. ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick.