The Brazilian Exile Experience
Remaking Identities
by
Denise Rollemberg
Translated by
Timothy Thompson
The story of the Brazilian exile experience (1964–1979) from the perspective of the
exiles themselves highlights the loss of roots and references and the discovery of new possibilities. The quotidian side of exile involved doubt, certainty, distress, emptiness, fear,
insanity, death, difficulty with documents, work, study, reconstruction of pathways—in
short, a redefinition of identity imposed by day-to-day life. At the same time that the exile
experience meant the removal and elimination of the “generations” of 1964 and 1968, it
also meant their survival: it was the locus of free thought, critical inquiry, learning, and
enrichment, 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’s description of her experience
with Muslim women in Algeria (interview, Rio de Janeiro, April 4, 1996) seems
like a scene from a surrealist film:
The bathhouse was enormous. The women were naked, around them in the corners were the tiled shelves where hot and cold water came out. The steam. The
water comes up from the floor. You sit on the floor to bathe yourself. You scrub and
use a gourd to rinse off. It’s a collective bath, all the women together, the water
runs along the tiled floor. It’s a terrifying sight. The women are green, tattooed.
They tattoo themselves according to their status: mothers, grandmothers . . . they
keep tattooing their bodies, telling a story. A few old women were tattooed all
over their backs and arms. The tattoos don’t show because the women are
always covered. It’s horrible . . . since they don’t get any sun, they look ugly and
pallid. . . . I just kept taking it all in. . . . Some women go around with pumice
stones 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 the
oil. 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 the
ability of men and women to change the world through their own intervention. After the glory of being exchanged for the U.S. ambassador through a
Denise Rollemberg is a professor of contemporary history at Fluminense Federal University
and a member of its Nucleus of Contemporary Studies. Her research focuses on Brazil’s civilmilitary 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 the
author’s Exílio: Entre raízes e radars (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1999).
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue XXX, Vol. XX No. X, Month XXXX X-X
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07302948
© Latin American Perspectives
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revolutionary action, followed by guerrilla training in Cuba in preparation for
a return to Brazil to rejoin the armed struggle, Maria Augusta found herself in
a strange situation. She was in Algeria waiting for her organization to authorize her return, but their authorization never arrived, nor would it. The guerrilla struggle had been undermined, repressive forces had scored a series of
victories, and her organization had vanished. Many years would pass before
her desire to return to Brazil could be fulfilled. In the meantime, the experience of exile would have to be lived out day to day in the face of both objective 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 their
exile as a break with reality, the uprooting of the universe of references that
had given meaning to their armed struggle (on the concept of “generations”
as used here, see Sirinelli, 1987; 1989). The defeat of a personal and political
project, uneasiness vis-à-vis other countries and cultures, difficulty in adapting to new societies that often infantilized them, lack of recognition in the new
roles available to them—all of this subverted the image that the exiles had had
of 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 refusing to obtain them, working and studying, remaining politically engaged or
abandoning militancy, contributing to art and culture, and negotiating emotional and family life.
The story of day-to-day life in exile is therefore a story of constantly renewed
culture shock, of discomfort with the other and especially with oneself because
of 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 that
meant the end of a journey for some and the discovery of new possibilities for
others. It is a story of inglorious and futile effort to maintain an identity. And it
is a story of redefinition and reconstruction of identity that extended throughout 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 with
the character traits and personalities of each individual. Social status proved
equally important: whereas some exiles were recognized as professionals or
public personalities and never lacked institutional invitations to proceed with
interrupted projects, others needed to impose their presence and fight for visibility and material survival, often undertaking activities that had nothing to do
with their expectations and for which they were overqualified. Personal
resources made a difference: some could count on reserves of money and family
help, while others could not. Age, too, interfered: in general, the younger exiles,
who had accumulated and solidified less “baggage,” were more flexible in the
face of adversity, but those exiles who could claim some measure of notoriety
were also the older ones. Knowledge of the language and the degree of difficulty
in learning it also made a difference. The company of family members, meanwhile, could represent an element of security and support or an overload of
responsibility. The phases of exile were also decisive: the reference points of each
period could open horizons or eliminate hopes, facilitating or not one’s confrontation with concrete realities. Finally, belonging to a party or organization or
embracing a definite political stance—or being able to redirect one’s militancy
toward a professional project—in general helped give meaning to life in exile.
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
3
In sum, an exile’s crisis of identity might involve a network of complex
questions, including psychological ones, questions that affected each individual in a particular way. There are wry accounts such as Darcy Ribeiro’s: “To
suffer 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 even
suicide. Between these two extremes there were innumerable individual experiences. One recurring issue raised by the majority of my sources, whether to
assert or to question its relevance, was the psychological aspect of exile. It is
necessary, therefore, to reflect on how the crisis of identity influenced these
two generations—to consider the way in which the disorientation provoked
by exile contributed to the redefinition of a prior political project, beginning
with the reconstruction of the exiles’ own sense of identity. In a letter dated
November 16, 1976, César Benjamin, in Sweden, calls attention to the question
in 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 the
air, a drama of which we’ve been the protagonists for several years, but in a different 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, which
is to say historical. Here, however, the end of a cycle is clearly visible: the same
drama whose foundations were laid when we broke away, with vigor but little
vision, from our class in 1969, going full speed ahead without it, arrives today at
its final act, which for some might last a whole lifetime of profound identity crisis that, needless to say, opens the (difficult) possibility of reconstruction. The
sad thing is watching this current drama: if its foundations were laid and developed in Brazil, it became mixed up there with the heroic and utopian (in the
sense of the antithesis of pettiness) and tended toward the epic, which sustained
us and gave a sense of beauty; but here, for many, all that’s left of the drama is
tragedy, or even farce. The crisis of identity seen in the faces of people without
homeland or class, without a link between past and present to be projected forward, living in a static eternity devoid of meaning (it’s appropriate that I’m reading The Magic Mountain right now), the crisis of identity, I repeat, if strong and
severe, opens up at the same time the possibility of regaining identity on
another, broader level, deeper and more human because chosen. There’s a challenge involved in it. I believe that many won’t overcome it, but those who do
survive 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 discipline,” “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 urban
and 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 an
unskilled foreign worker in the German chemical industry. Under the attentive, omnipresent, and controlling watch of the German Democratic Republic,
he had only the worst tasks assigned him.
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The removal of one’s universe of references makes exile seem like emptiness, 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 impossibility
of 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 Benjamin
describes 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 as
a struggle for life, as resistance against death:
Being in exile is like seeing time pass outside you. Things happen without your
participating in them, without your being inside them. So you have to make a
tremendous effort to keep yourself on a par with reality through conversation,
visiting, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, et cetera. You need to
make 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, the
past for Vera Sílvia Magalhães (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 and
March 14, 1999) meant her search for herself, and it imposed itself as essential
to 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 German
ambassador], 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 riddled 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 revolutionary project, but then what? How do you build another project? You’re
already tangled up in it to such an extent. . . . Many people gave up, it’s true,
didn’t even go to training in Cuba, but in my case it was like this: I have to survive this 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 Guarany
describes the disorientation he experienced while living in Chile. Because he
felt alienated from the political process then unfolding, he reverted to his past
as a guerrilla, rejecting his new identity as a refugee (1984: 112):
I clung to the past, to the “glories” I had lived through, practically demanding
reverent respect for the hero I must have been. Refusing to accept the mediocrity
of the present, I re-created a reality known only to myself and my ghosts, a reality that we alone relived through the delusions I was dragged back to each night.
There, on a bench in the city square, in the still of the night, I began to recover
my identity. I stopped being just some dupe [cabide de roupas] who had to put
up with the vulgar language of the thieves [cogoteiros] and hookers of the
Mapocho.
Exile is frequently associated with uprooting, destabilization, solitude: “I
would wake up suffocated, telephone everyone, write like a madman, look
people 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
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
5
solitude of exile triggered in him the memory of the solitude he had experienced in prison—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. When
I 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, obsessively. They tried to find each other but said nothing, and if they said anything I
have the impression it was only rarely. . . . It was the fear of solitude, a solitude
that 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 fall
into 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, is
a society of solitary individuals. Ignorant of social codes, the exile feels particularly 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 many
marriages. Amidst the loss of reference points and the difficulties of personal
reconstruction, attrition proves inevitable. At the same time, we also hear of
relationships maintained precisely because of the exile experience—because
of the need to preserve something stable against the instability, to cling to
someone familiar against the unknown.
The way in which the French infantilized the exile community makes Naná
Verri Whitaker (interview, Paris, November 30, 1995) remember the “terrible
moments of despair” when faced with arrogance and pretended superiority:
“The reputation of France as a land of asylum is just a veneer.” Even individuals on the left who had offered to help them make the transition assumed an
air of superiority: “It’s as if they had said, ‘We’re doing you a favor. We can
help you.’ It was never a relation of equals.”
There was also the double face of refugee aid institutions: on the one hand
solidarity, housing, food, work, clothes, and documents and on the other hand
the infantilization inherent to the welfare dynamic. Between necessity and
humiliation, exiles were rebaptized as refugees without ever being able to recognize themselves in the new role assigned to them. It is not for nothing that
we hear of the disagreeable sensation of going to receive a handout. The words
of Sebastião Hoyos (interview, Geneva, January 10, 1996), for example, reveal
the depth of resentment toward the Swiss system of asylum: “There is assistance in Switzerland for refugees, but you have to beg for it. The regulations
for obtaining assistance are designed to humiliate people. I refused to accept
it. I’m proud to say that I never benefited from assistance. I have always
worked 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 subsistence, especially when compared with the expectations that prior militancy
had created (Costa et al., 1980: 331):
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The experience of prison was much more enriching than that of exile. What I’m
about 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 the
time 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 simply that she was an exile or refugee but that she was a foreigner: “The Italians
think that if you’re a foreigner they can do whatever they want. We were mistreated, I was cheated in every way, something that happens frequently with
foreigners. The way people were treated was terrible.” Her story is one of
scams, thefts, insults, harassment, and humiliation in Rome.
The loss of one’s native language means the loss of self-expression, the loss
of 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’t
mastered, I ended up saying things with much less emotion than I could in
Portuguese.” The feeling he experienced in Chile was reinforced in Sweden:
I was able to say the most offensive things to people without getting very
involved 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 behind
it is much more shocking than when it lacks emotion. You’re much more “objective” when you haven’t mastered the language.
Herbert Daniel also registers how significant the absence of one’s native
language becomes: “The greatest problem of exile is the loss of language.
Losing your language means losing your soul” (Carvalho, 1981: 23). Language
is a basic reference point of social identity; the lack of language redefines identity and triggers metamorphosis. The capacity for expression and comprehension dwindled or suddenly disappeared, especially for those living in
countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Germany where language learning
took time and 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 living
abroad were “out of practice” and therefore should not offer opinions, much less
make decisions about the course of the armed struggle. On the contrary, they
were to wait for instructions from the “homeland.” This was particularly the case
during the first phase, when exiles were still polarized around vanguard organizations 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 loss
of the right to intervene and express an opinion, the idea being that only those
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
7
engaged in revolutionary practice could speak out. There was a tremendous disregard for theory, discussion, debate, and anyone who tried to influence the
organization 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 time when the grip of repression had grown tighter, a new
appreciation for exile as a space for rejoining the fight. Members’ reading of
Lenin’s exile writings, through which he had sought to influence the struggle
from abroad, redefined the exile experience for them.
According to Daniel, an “emblematic figure” emerged out of the myth created around the word “homeland”—a word that, more than simply referring
to Brazil itself, signified the armed struggle and the revolution they would
return to. This figure, constantly present in other exile experiences, was that of
the high-ranking militant come to deliver orders to those in exile. Deriving
authority from his connection to the homeland, this individual had no qualms,
even if simply for the sake of maintaining his own power, about belittling those
already 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 that
forced 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 Berlin
a mere six months: “That’s when I broke with communism. I said, ‘I’ve been
fighting my whole life against what I see here, against this society as I see it
organized.’ I made a dramatic break and came to embrace an anticommunist
position much closer to Swedish social democracy. The asphyxia of the country,
the controlled, dictatorial system—these had come as a shock.” Prior to this
experience, 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 between
December 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 200
people that he had accompanied from the Venezuelan embassy in Chile was
not permitted to move freely in the country, though the government did
promise food, lodging, and health care. Denied contact with the population at
large, the group was stationed at a hotel nearly 100 kilometers from Havana
and kept under constant surveillance: “I was very disappointed. Of the minimal 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. But
what she saw there did little to inspire her. She came in contact for the most
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part only with bureaucracy, with “privileged and authoritarian individuals”
who gave access only to those approved by the party. The experience left her
disenchanted.
If day-to-day experience in socialist countries could place in check one’s
points of reference, it could also reaffirm them, as the enthusiasm of Márcio
Moreira Alves demonstrates. He was drawn to the same Cuba that to others
seemed so restrictive (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 233):
In Cuba I experienced firsthand and saw with my own eyes what socialism is
about and what it’s possible to achieve in a socialist country. Cuba is Pernambuco
with scruples. That’s what it is: Pernambuco with a sense of decency, a proper
government, and a population that isn’t exploited. And the potential of this transformation is so evident that it can really transform a person. Everything you
could imagine having read about is there being put into practice, and this makes
for 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 country
really 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 harmony, 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 unionist of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist party—PCB)
exiled in Czechoslovakia, is very revealing. After years living in a country
harshly repressed under Soviet-style socialism, he embraced an uncritical
view of the system, 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, and
that had been strengthened in factories, unions, and the Communist Party. A
wonderful fulfillment of what we had imagined, proposed, and proclaimed: a
society without factory owners, a society in which men feel secure in the present
and the future, in which social inequalities disappear, in which the possibility of
knowledge and culture is both open to and within the reach of the collective
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 publications concerned with refugees to designate the countries in which they
come to reside. Meanwhile, if the word “asylum” brings to mind the solidarity frequently expressed through the initial process of reception and social
adaptation, it also conceals or diminishes a reality that is much more complex.
Indeed, as we have seen, even solidarity involved contradictions and ambiguities. 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)<B>PLS PROVIDE REF<D>, in some
countries exiles were in fact treated as terrorists; he cites the case of Theotônio
dos Santos, who upon arrival in the United States was denied entrance and
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
9
accused of terrorism on the basis of information exchanged among police agencies in several countries. In the same way, Reinaldo Guarany (1980; 1984) witnessed a campaign by the German right against receiving Chilean exiles, whom
right-wing newspapers referred to as terrorists. Police forces in the very
countries that had granted UN refugee 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—had caused such outrage throughout Brazilian society. A
French professor active in the Comité France-Brésil, which had denounced the
dictatorship, still has a form written in German and Portuguese about the political activities of Brazilian exiles, a document proving that German and Brazilian
police had collaborated. Ricardo Vilas (interview, Paris, November 30, 1995),
even though he had received a visa to enter England, was arrested upon arrival
in the country with his wife and eight-month-old daughter. They were all
detained and made 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 the country.
Interviews with several militants exiled in democratic countries, such as
West Germany and France, leave no doubt that the police forces of these countries 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 discovered that they had been keeping a folder with information about him in
Portuguese 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 World
Cup, for example, some exiles were forced to appear at the police station three
times a day during the games for fear that they might attempt to assassinate
members of the Brazilian team. Prosecuted for forgery of documents, illegal
entry into the country, and even bigamy, Reinaldo Barcellos and his wife, Dora,
were never granted asylum. When Dora committed suicide, the government
finally 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 the
restrictions imposed by democratic countries: “For years I was prevented
from traveling, since the governments of France and England refused to let me
enter, for reasons they never explained. When my own children traveled to
these countries to study, they were pulled out of airport lines and subjected to
special inspection.”
After being exiled in June 1970, Apolonio de Carvalho, who had fought with
the French Resistance, waited two years for a French visa, which during the
Georges Pompidou government had also been denied to four other political
exiles belonging to his group (interview, Rio de Janeiro, September–October,
1986). Authorization was given only after leftist groups and the Socialist party
took action. In the same year, the Swiss government “invited” Apolonio and
another exile, Ladislas Dowbor, to leave the country.
According to Erasmo Saenz-Carrete, in 1975, after the attack perpetrated by
the Venezuelan Carlos the Jackal, in which French police officers had been
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killed, the French secret police, the Direction de Surveillance de Territoire,
subjected political refugees to interrogation, going so far as to “forcibly enter
the homes of Brazilian refugees.” The following year, Poniatowski, the interior
minister, threatened to expel any political refugee who “created problems for
public order.” Georges Casalis, a French citizen active in institutions defending human rights, testified to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal II that because of
this episode “very harsh measures of control and intimidation were taken
against Brazilian refugees, who, notwithstanding, were the beneficiaries of
official UN statute” (Saenz-Carrete, 1983: 214, 217).
The story of the so-called aviators also contributes to a consideration of the
meaning of “country of asylum,” an unstable term even with regard to the
socialist countries that militants had idealized. Three young sympathizers of
the armed struggle, in order to demonstrate their commitment to Latin
American revolution, hijacked an airplane in Brazil and headed for Cuba, the
symbol of their ideals. Once there, they suffered the same fate any hijacker
would who lacked either backing from an organization acknowledged by the
Cuban authorities or prior authorization from the Cuban government: they
were detained. Not understanding the kind of situation they had gotten themselves 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 best
at the arduous task, all for the glory of the revolution. Meanwhile, they began
to find it strange that the other laborers expressed frequent and serious criticisms of the system until finally, to their surprise, they discovered that they
were all prisoners. When they proposed the idea of building a stone statue in
homage to Comrade Trotsky, they fell completely out of favor and were left
without documents, plane tickets, or authorization to leave the country. They
managed to leave Cuba months later through the intervention of militants
who had arrived for guerrilla training and guaranteed that they were neither
spies nor anything close to it. For the “aviators,” the nickname they received
from these militants, the dream of a “country of asylum” for Latin American
revolutionaries had turned into a nightmare (Gabeira, 1980).
DISORIENTATION, EMPTINESS, FEAR, INSANITY
Fear loomed large during exile, arising at different moments and to varying
degrees: from the militia created during the first nights in Ben Aknoum by
members of the group of 40 prisoners exchanged for the German ambassador
(because they refused to rule out the possibility of further repression from
Brazilian forces) to the presumed presence in Santiago of police chief Sérgio
Fleury, symbol of terror during the dictatorship, which led militants of the
Ação Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Action—ALN) and the
Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (Popular Revolutionary Vanguard—VPR)
to plan his murder (Guarany, 1984: 104). The “ghost” of Fleury, in fact, would
appear and reappear at different times and in different places, frightening and
threatening. Over time, this “paranoia, half true, half delusional, the idea that
the secret police were watching us and plotting against us, would show itself
in other forms” (Daniel Aarão Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996).
There are countless stories about exiles who suffered psychiatric problems or
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
11
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 into
exile. I don’t know if it’s because the individual in exile has been removed by
force at the acutest point of his capacity to serve the people—uprooted at the
point 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 consequently unable to enrich myself with the tremendous culture that a country like
this [Mexico] has to offer. I think that exile drives you crazy. Who knows, am I
crazy 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 just
this morning.
In 1976, Vera Sílvia Magalhães (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25 and
March 14, 1994) suffered her first “psychotic attack” during a banal moment
of 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 revolutionary 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 my
lack of faith, and I do mean in the religious sense. I don’t have any faith. So I’ve
ended up kind of lost. I’ve accumulated so much inside my own head, experiences that I don’t know where to put. I haven’t dedicated myself to anything in
particular 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 pointed
to financial security and stability. “The sicker she became, the more homesick
and nostalgic for her childhood she felt. She wasn’t able to withstand the
shock, and she gave in. Some people go through this and hang on to their sanity, but others just aren’t able to,” says her ex-husband. Free from the financial
problems that afflicted other exiles, successful and well adapted in each
country that he lived in, he suffered his greatest hardship in the form of his
wife’s illness, from which she “never recovered.”
In the midst of a lack of prospects, the redefinition of identity was often a
slow and painful process. Some were unable to overcome the crisis. Frei Tito
de Alencar and Maria Auxiliador Lara Barcellos, or “Dora,” chose death as the
way to put an end to fear, emptiness, and insanity. At 31 years old, Tito, who
had 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 torture and prison. Convinced as he was that Fleury was pursuing him in France,
his life became a living hell. Rebuilding proved impossible for him, as another
Dominican, Magno José Vilela, reports (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978:
215): “In France, he tried to continue his studies but wasn’t able to. He was in
an extremely delicate state psychologically, lacking courage, energy, in short,
a way to survive. He lived in sadness until the day he chose to end it all.”
12
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
Dora, freed along with Frei Tito, threw herself in front of a subway train in
Berlin in 1976. She was also 31 years old. Not long before her death, she had
undergone psychiatric treatment. In Belgium, Juarez Ferraz de Maia received
“letters that were sad, unhinged, and very painful” in which she spoke of solitude, anguish, and failure and displayed her lack of faith in men, women, and
the possibility of change (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995). Luiz Alberto
Sanz, exiled in Sweden and a member of the group of prisoners that had been
exchanged for the Swiss ambassador, made a film with Lars Safstrom about
Dora’s death titled Quando chegar o momento (When the Moment Comes). The
film uses the interview she had given with four other exiles for a documentary
filmed in Chile, Não é hora de chorar (It’s Not Time to Cry), which was about
the suicide of Dora ver Guarany (Guarany, 1980; 1984).
The trajectory of Sebastião Rios also symbolizes the drama of disorientation
during exile. A former professor at the University of Brasília, Rios participated
directly in kidnapping the U.S. ambassador and managed to leave the country
without being arrested. Once established in Argentina he worked to support
the organization, “preparing” documents for clandestine militants in exile.
Later, transformed into a clochard (homeless person), Rios could be found on
the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.
Even if these are extreme experiences in which the redefinition or reconstruction 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 the substance of many accounts.
Togetherness among Brazilians was one way to alleviate suffering. In dayto-day life, at parties, in political activity, exile “colonies” tried to reproduce a
Brazilian environment, sometimes stereotypically through traditional food
and music. Many recall never having eaten so much feijoada as they did in
exile, feijoada not being something that Brazilians, especially members of the
middle class, tend to eat every day. In general, those who had best adapted to
society repudiated life in the “colony” and criticized—or even disdained—
those who relied on it intensely, accusing them of being introverted, incapable
of opening up to the opportunities around them, and ignorant of the country
in which they were living. Those in the colony resented this “autonomous”
adaptation, considered it a form of selling out, and identified it with those
aspects of the country of exile that were the object of their ridicule.
Márcio Moreira Alves (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 230–231) refers
to insular exiles as “tribes of cannibals” living
in a small group of Brazilians who only think about Brazil, who only read about
Brazil, who only relate to their surroundings in a parasitical way in order to take
things, find things, resources for this or that . . . in short, who mooch off of the
society in which their companheiros are working and fixate on Brazil in a vacuum
at the same time that they affirm themselves by lashing out and attacking other
groups of Brazilians who do exactly the same thing.
Life in the “ghetto” (as the exiles called it), however, did play an important
role. The ghetto was an attempt to alleviate the insecurities of exile, to find
protection from prejudice, to avoid social alienation, and, for many, to survive.
Turning to those who shared their common story, they sought to recover the
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
13
past that had given life meaning, finding self-affirmation in a common culture
that went far beyond traditional food and, in short, helped preserve identity
itself. Throughout history, life in ghettos has been a strategy that groups have
seized upon on seeing their identity threatened or called into question. The
ghetto therefore functions as a form of resistance, a negation of negation, a
struggle against fragmentation: “The way we survived in exile was by sticking together,” as Vera Sílvia Magalhães (interview, Rio de Janeiro, January 25
and March 14, 1994) puts it. Despite the ghetto’s “neurotic environment,”
according to Juarez Ferraz de Maia (interview, Paris, November 27, 1995), “if
it hadn’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 universe in which there was no shortage of conflict and contradiction. In the view
of César Benjamin (letter, December 30, 1977), there were two faces to life in
the 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 predetermined for us. . . . Outside the group, the rest is blond-haired and speaks
some weird language.”
The ghetto can also be a way of reorganizing people and reformulating a
failed political project. Out of this experience came committees denouncing
the dictatorship and calling for amnesty, as well as publications, demonstrations, and cultural and political groups and activities. Magno José Vilela
speaks of the recovery and intensification of contact with the Brazilian community in Paris “not only as a psychological necessity but above all as a political act. To get together to chat, listen to music, all of that, but also to continue
the political fight” (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 211).
Throughout the 1970s the parties thrown by the colony in Paris became
famous for ending up as orgies. Luís Eduardo Prado de Oliveira (interview,
Paris, October 27 and November 3, 1995) comments on the situation as both a
psychoanalyst and an exile: “Orgies played an integrating role. They were a
way for people to unite before dividing once again. But this left me with an
impression of insanity. The Brazilian colony was really insane.” Once again
we see exile, now specifically in the form of the ghetto, associated with psychopathy. And the boundaries are indeed tenuous. The projects of vanguardist
militants, above all during the first phase of exile, seemed delusional even at
the time to those who had pledged to revive the armed struggle in Brazil. The
following episode, which took place in Cuba, is quite apposite:
A former director of a vanguardist organization had developed a plan to
return to the country and was assisted by a former leader of the Northeastern
peasant leagues known as Zé. Even before 1964 Zé had been brutally beaten
in Brazil, and he had been sent to Cuba for treatment. He had remained in
Cuba because of the civil-military coup, and years later when militants began
arriving from Brazil for guerrilla training he got to know them and befriended
several. It was in this way that the former director and the former peasant
leader 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 country
via the Amazon rather than via Uruguay and Argentina, whose borders were
better known to repressive forces. The organization dedicated itself to the plan
and even allocated considerable resources to building the boat (Daniel Aarão
Reis Filho, interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996):
14
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
This project reveals something of the megalomania, the delusions of grandeur. As
things unfolded, Zé, who was involved with this ex-director of the organization
in the project, completely lost it. This story didn’t come to me secondhand, I lived
it. One day I remember running into [Zé] in Chile. He was very troubled and had
a long story to tell backed up by notes that he showed me. The story was complicated, 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 was
a self-propelled rocket. He even protested bitterly that the Cubans had stolen his
original blueprints but that he had managed, with a great deal of effort, to reconstruct them. I mean, these self-propelled rockets were meant to cause mass
destruction in our fight in the cities and in urban guerrilla warfare. At this point
I 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 this
story to belittle anyone, only to point out one expression of the delusion and deviation 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 the
ALN, the organization to which he belonged, had instructed its militants, who
had disembarked in January 1971, that they were neither to accept work nor
become socially integrated but were to await further instructions. At a certain
point, however, the host government stopped supporting them, and the ALN
had no resources to maintain them. The solution was to undertake “actions of
expropriation,” as they were called at the time, and divide the money among
the participants. At first they targeted doleiros (currency dealers who exchange
U.S. dollars on the black market), who were engaged in illegal activity and
could not complain to the police:
Many Brazilians engaged in a series of actions in Chile. Individuals from the
VPR, the ALN, and people who set up parallel groups, with or without a political 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 in
waging armed resistance to obtain money for Brazil. It became a personal objective. 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
the tactics used—and learned—in Brazil to obtain resources for guerrilla warfare could be unmoored from principles and political objectives.
Actions driven by political objectives were also undertaken, as Guarany
explains. Brazilian exiles connected to a left-leaning sector of the Chilean
Partido Socialista joined together to obtain and send weapons to Brazil,
Argentina, and Uruguay. When they were found out, Ângelo Pezzuti, who
had been banished with the “group of 40,” and others involved were arrested.
Once again he was tortured, this time by representatives of the socialist
Unidad Popular government:
Ângelo Pezzuti was severely tortured, literally broken. The other prisoners as
well. He told me that the difference between what he suffered in Brazil and what
he 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,
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
15
groups of Brazilian exiles who were engaged in their own separate actions split
up and left for Europe.
Armed actions undertaken for personal profit demonstrate that a crisis of
values was already present during the first phase of exile. Reframed in a different context, these actions led to an extreme version of what to a certain
extent had already occurred in Brazil when armed groups had to commit robbery simply to support themselves. But in Chile the cycle of survival became
distorted, and armed actions came across as caricatures of what they had been
before. Even when political objectives were involved, they were but desperate
attempts to prolong the past and carry it into the present, to superimpose the
identity of guerrilla on that of refugee.
The aspect of the exile experience involving self-interested actions is a sensitive issue because, even though it is no secret, there remains a certain embarrassment 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 care
to bring them up. The “schemes” were diverse, multiplying over the years, and
they, too, were tied to the crisis of values and identity. Some schemers used
traveler’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 exiles
in Africa, committed to building socialism in abject countries that had been
exploited by colonizers for centuries, had no qualms about doing business with
sectors rather less identified with socialist principles, making money on the
sending of dollars abroad and thus undermining the interests of the governments 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 fund
included a program of scholarships provided by an outside institution to
encourage 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 soon
completely 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 that
would also serve as a function hall and commercial food factory. The idea was
to aid the exile community by augmenting its resources through economic
activity. Because the slush fund existed off the books, 12 legal residents of Chile
offered to accept the money in their names. A movie theater in Providencia, an
upscale neighborhood of Santiago, was eventually purchased as the site of the
restaurant. When the coup d’état occurred in 1973, the meal-preparation section
was in operation and was placed under UN protection. The two principal managers 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 National
Stadium. It is difficult to discern exactly what happened, but the managers were
accused of embezzlement and of working for the information services of the
Brazilian government and the Chilean junta.
16
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
DOCUMENTS: MAKING IDENTITY CONCRETE
In exile, identity documents assumed particular importance both for residence 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 to
move about and interact. Whether an exile had become legalized or was trying to do so, documents defined essential facets of daily life, beginning with
the basic permission to establish oneself, work, and have the right to health
care, housing, food, and so on. Because of this, it was an issue that mobilized
people. By refusing or disdaining authentic documents (something that happened often in the first phase), exiles stressed their connection to the revolutionary project whose defeat eventually became evident. Resistance to letting
go of forged documents arose from an effort to preserve the past and a prior
sense 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 a
party in Paris—after 30 days in the Panamanian embassy in Santiago awaiting
safe-conduct out of the country remembered to destroy his documents only
after he had left for the airport, thereby running the risk of not being able to
embark:
In the morning, the buses pulled up to the embassy. They loaded us into the buses
and, 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 not
travel through the city by day. Then something incredible happened: I was
already 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 was
called Daniel, but in my documents I went by another name, so if I was caught
with all of those documents the officials would be able to say, “Well, you’re not
going to embark because you’re not Daniel, you’re so-and-so.” So I had to tear up
all the documents and throw them out the window, slowly, because each bus had
a 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 out
at 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
in a university course in Panama but succeeded only in France, where he
obtained refugee status: this change represented the redefinition of an entire
life project.
Until the coup in Chile the organizations maintained sympathizers abroad,
in general ex-militants who acted by “acquiring” documents, normally among
Brazilian tourists, and “preparing” them to be used by exiles who lacked legal
status. They were also responsible for obtaining support and money via contacts with governments, organizations, and political parties (Daniel Aarão
Reis 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 precariousness of papers issued by Latin American governments led many diplomatic
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
17
services to deny visa requests. Humiliating peregrinations in pursuit of a
country to receive them, together with the negligence with which they were
treated, contrasted with the self-image they had created for themselves as revolutionaries. Daniel Aarão Reis Filho (interview, Rio de Janeiro, 1996) speaks
to 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 Panama
issued us a travel document, but it was a piece of toilet paper, as we called it, just
a piece of paper, not even a decent booklet with a sturdy cover, nothing. It was a
piece of paper folded in four with a 3-by-4 photograph, your name, your father’s
and 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 look
to that piece of toilet paper, everyone went and bought a cover and stapled the
paper to it. It was just for show [para inglês ver] because any customs official who
opened 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 military
government’s determination to deny passports to exiles, a decision peculiar to
the Brazilian dictatorship among authoritarian governments of the period
(Souza, 1979). Although there was no list of individuals stripped of nationality, as occurred for example in Nazi Germany, the simple refusal to issue passports left exiles without identification. Even during the coup in Chile, when
foreigners’ 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 concern for their nationals in Chile and issued passports so they could leave for
another country. But not Itamaraty,” recalls Maurício Dias David (interview,
Paris, March 9 and 15, 1995). The Paraguayan embassy, in the middle of the
dictatorship of General Stroessner, took in its exiled nationals, explaining that
they were doing so to save their lives but that they should move on to another
country (Reinaldo Guarany, interview, Rio de Janeiro, August 31, 1995).
The accounts of various prisoners detained in the Chilean National Stadium
attest to the presence of Brazilian secret police interrogating Brazilian prisoners
and teaching torture tactics to the Chilean police (Tomás Togni Tarqüínio, interview, 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 commission of inquiry responsible for the political purge of Itamaraty, which eliminated diplomats considered leftists.
Didi Rabêlo (1978) and her husband took refuge in the Panamanian
embassy; their oldest son, meanwhile, had been detained at the National
Stadium. She tells of the Brazilian embassy’s conduct in refusing to authorize
the 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 a
little peace and safety, and I thought that they were going to help me because we
were Brazilians and the children had nothing to do with all of this. I bought some
sandwiches, kept the children close by, and sat there and kept asking, trying to
convince them. . . . How the children suffered . . . the ambassador should have
18
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
gathered together all the children and taken them to his house. I resisted as much
as I possibly could until, lacking any other option and feeling threatened, I
entered 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 Unidad
Popular government recognized them as Chileans, but the military junta that
assumed power after the coup annulled all of these records. Few ambassadors
confronted the military government and took the initiative to recognize the
right of children to nationality as did Ítalo Zappa, ambassador to Mozambique.
In many cases Brazilian embassies would not renew the passports of those
who had left the country. Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva left with his passport in 1969 and managed to renew it in London in 1973 through a PCB sympathizer at the consulate. But in 1976 his passport expired, and this created
obstacles to travel and participation in international conferences in his role as
a scientist at the Pasteur Institute. Under the premise that it would limit his
freedom 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 the
country with in 1969, and easily obtained a new one valid for four years. In
1974 he was summoned by the consulate, and the consul demanded that he
return his passport, alleging that he was wanted by the Brazilian police.
Although the passport expired in 1976, he was able to obtain another only
after 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 the
dictatorship remains a research topic to be further investigated.
WORK
Professional activity was an important factor in the exile experience; social
integration and adaptation were directly tied to the type of work one performed.
For many exiles, especially for professionals with degrees and experience, Latin
American countries offered the possibility of specialized work in research institutions and universities. Through special projects, the United Nations also
employed these professionals. In Chile the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias
Sociales, also tied to the UN, received many intellectuals. Even students who had
left Brazil before receiving their undergraduate degrees found work in their
areas of study, particularly in administrative positions in the Unidad Popular
government. In Chile, in fact, exiles from throughout Latin America were
employed by specialized agencies of the state. The less educated do not seem to
have had great difficulty in finding blue-collar work, and the Allende government 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
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
19
among the poor in Brazil in order to foster a “mass movement” [trabalho de
massas]. To this end, Heliana Bibas and Carlos Henrique Vianna established
themselves in Maipul, a city near Santiago where there was a metalworking
center. While there they took courses in machining and lathe operation. The
austere life 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 highschool student movement. Contempt for “petty-bourgeois values” and idealization of the “working class” were the sentiments that prevailed. Daniel
Aarão Reis Filho also spent part of his time in Chile in a carpenter’s workshop
trying to familiarize himself with the profession. All told, this mindset speaks
of the effort to preserve the revolutionary project.
In Europe, however, the outlook proved radically different. Only a minority managed to find employment equal to their level of skills. The most
common experience was of occupational demotion; educated individuals had
to accept positions scorned by Europeans, reinventing themselves as housekeepers, babysitters, janitors, hotel doormen, civil construction workers, and
so on. As exiles and refugees blended in with economic migrants, the urban
middle class that made up the majority of the exile population came in contact
with a very different reality. The meaning of this experience comes through in
the account of César Benjamin (letter, May 31, 1977):
Until last week I was working in a school and kindergarten as a janitor, earning
for 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 environment
that 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 he
is 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 which
he depended on, without realizing it, for the smooth functioning of his “luminous” bourgeois world. And I couldn’t help seeing myself in those who, like me
when I was a student, had certainly never stopped to think about why they
always found their classrooms neat and clean—that there was a person behind
it. The gesture of one teacher struck me as very simpatico—she always had her
class of forty put their chairs on top of their desks to leave the room ready for
cleaning. And I would always clean her classroom with special care, although I
was never able to identify her among the school’s teachers.
The challenge of political defeat on the one hand and material survival on
the other forced exiles into work that not only ran completely counter to their
expectations but threw them into a profoundly disorienting role reversal.
César Benjamin, again, conveys the disconnect between what they had hoped
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 from
the start—the point man [ponta-de-lança] is what I’d like to be, “bedeviling my
opponent’s penalty area” [zona do agrião]. And the penalty area of this game is
called Brazil, where the language I speak is spoken.
20
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
And further (letter, December 30, 1977):
Our place in society has nothing to do with what we think our identity is or with
what should proceed from it. But you go on living. Survival isn’t a problem
around here: there’s even central heating. But to make sense of things without
sacrificing either honesty or intelligence . . . Without playing the bureaucratic
game . . . Without losing your own sense of who you are . . . Without losing your
points of reference.
Although cultural differences seem to have afflicted exiles from poorer
backgrounds in particular, the basic goods and services furnished to refugees
in both capitalist and socialist countries carried inestimable worth for those
who had previously lived without these rights. For them, exile often meant an
improved standard of living; returning to Brazil, by contrast, would mean a
step backward. Even so, the desire to return remained. Damaris de Oliveira
Lucena, exchanged for the Japanese consul kidnapped in 1970, relates her
enthusiasm for the access to health care, education, food, and housing provided by the Cuban government (Costa et al., 1980: 235):
The change was drastic, since for starters I was only semiliterate. I come from a
poor family in the North and was a textile worker for several years, as well as a
housekeeper and an agricultural worker. I wasn’t even able to finish grade school
and so hadn’t mastered my own language. As a poor woman I’d never had access
to education. I came to Cuba sick, traumatized by the brutal assassination of my
husband and the torture that I’d suffered, bringing my three children with me, one
three years old and the other two nine years old. I was admitted to the hospital and
received 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. And
at forty-three I finished both grade school and high school and then went on to
enroll in a pre-university course. . . . My children, too, received all that a mother
could wish for her children: the best schools, books, toys, health care when they’re
sick—everything that a normal child needs in order to develop.
For middle-class exiles, the exact opposite occurred in most cases—in
Europe their standard of living declined. It is true that this situation was
already familiar to militants in the armed struggle, during which they experienced reduced standards of living in hideouts (aparelhos) or in the countryside.
But that experience, notwithstanding, involved a very specific context within
what was supposed to be the decisive confrontation of the revolution. In
European exile few managed to maintain a standard of living corresponding
to what they had had in Brazil.
Anina de Carvalho, a lawyer, recalls the initial conditions of exile (Costa
et al., 1980: 64):
At first I lived like everyone else, in the maid’s room. The first two where I lived
didn’t even have hot water, or a toilet, or a bathroom. There was a little coldwater sink in the room, but there was no central heating—not to mention the
seven 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 the
psychological condition of someone who had just been exiled, who had lost
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
21
everything that was important, you were really in the gutter in every sense,
going through financial problems, often without money for food. You felt really
demoralized 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 calls
attention to the inequalities among exiles, which corresponded to a stratified
set of opportunities: “political figures of a certain stature” found a great deal
of support in organizations created on the occasion of the 1973 Chilean coup
d’état and in leftist parties like the PC and PS. The rest had to manage as best
they could. Faced with limited offers of employment in Italy, Nanci, a nursing
student, worked as a housekeeper during much of her time in exile.
At the same time, however, Europe presented the possibility of scholarshipfunded study. Many exiles completed undergraduate programs and went on
to graduate work. Experienced professionals took advantage of the opportunity and obtained their doctorates, making use of European universities and
libraries. In Sweden the state gave student loans to those in university courses
on the condition of repayment after graduation (as political refugees, exiles
were able to claim this right). In other countries such as West Germany,
France, and Switzerland, civic institutions, generally tied to churches, granted
scholarships to refugees. At times, however, scholarships were used merely as
a means of immediate survival without further application. And the choice to
study often did not exclude the possibility of unskilled labor, since scholarships did not always provide for every material necessity. Academic degrees
gave exiles the qualifications to perform skilled work in Africa or, later on, in
Brazil and pointed to the redefinition of a life project.
The forms of work-related assistance varied. Beyond scholarships, the
Comité Inter-Mouvements Auprès des Évacués paid for technical or professional courses and later helped refugees find work. The UN, through its High
Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), granted loans to exiles who wished to
start 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 not
often resort to the UNHCR for support, perhaps because it represented a redefinition of identity on a different level from what they had experienced so far.
With this initiative the UNHCR blurred the line between refugee and economic migrant and, in the case of Brazilian exiles, deprived them of the political characteristics that had determined their identity. Juca’s transformation
into a businessman did in fact radically redefine his sense of identity. He himself acknowledges (interview, Lisbon, January 27, 1996) that he never felt the
desire to get involved in politics while in Portugal and even opposed the creation 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 as
skilled professionals are few and far between and include only individuals with
22
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
the highest scientific and academic credentials. Some of the better-known
cases include Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva, Paulo Freire, and Fernando
Henrique Cardoso. Pereira da Silva, an internationally renowned researcher
who was fired by the University of São Paulo after the First Institutional Act in
1964 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 in
various countries, established himself at the World Council of Churches in
Geneva, where he remained for many years. The then-sociologist Fernando
Henrique Cardoso served as a professor at the University of Paris X between
1967 and 1968. But even Mário Pedrosa—a historic figure of the left and
respected art critic to whom Chile had opened its doors, inviting him to teach at
the Institute of South American Art two days after he arrived and then to curate
the 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 labor
market because of the lack of qualified personnel. Many exiles who had graduated from European universities migrated to Africa in a move that characterized a third phase of the Brazilian exile experience. The presence of UN
programs in Africa also encouraged Brazilians to relocate to various countries
and contribute to projects in education, communication, and so on. This provided 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 skills
to use, learning, improving themselves professionally, and gaining further
experience. 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 in
Europe. José Barbosa Monteiro, black, the son of illiterate peasants, had completed only three months of grade school prior to working for a foundation that
assisted marginalized youths in Geneva, the majority of whom were children
of economic migrants. After a long exile in Switzerland, he went to GuineaBissau to work as an educator (Uchôa Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1978: 113–143).
In sum, the circumstances of exile imposed the redefinition and reconstruction of identities. Even though ties with the former project might be more or
less maintained, a revision of values proved inevitable as part of a process that
decisively reoriented the course of the Brazilian left.
Until the Chilean coup of 1973 a Latin American revolution was considered
possible, and the possibility was fundamental in defining the identity of those in
exile. 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 an
alternative. The third phase was marked by even greater distance from the former 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 “destiny” 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).
Rollemberg / BRAZILIAN EXILE
23
NOTES
1. Names mentioned or quoted without further bibliographic information refer to interviews
conducted by the author in the 1990s, the details of which appear in parenthetical citations. Tape
recordings of the interviews (with a total of 37 interviewees), excluding those recorded with
Flávia Castro, were donated to the Laboratório de História Oral e Imagem (Laboratory of Oral
and Visual History—LABHOI) of Fluminense Federal University and the Arquivo Edgard
Leueroth (Edgard Leueroth Archive—AEL) of the University of Campinas. Only the interviews
with 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 diplomats. Their demand in each case was the release of political prisoners. The first kidnapping
occurred on September 4, 1969, when the Dissidência Estudantil da Guanabara (Student
Dissident Movement of Guanabara—DI-GB) and the Ação Libertadora Nacional (National
Liberation Action—ALN) captured U.S. ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick in Rio de Janeiro. In
exchange for his freedom, 15 political prisoners were released, and a guerrilla manifesto
denouncing 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 armed
struggle. Although the organizations considered it a great success, it provoked an intensification
of 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 the
ALN 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 in
Rio 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 the
VPR 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 list
delivered by the guerrillas. In the end, 70 prisoners were freed. At this point, it became clear to
the 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 that
a better word to describe this type of action would be “capture” and not “kidnapping,” since the
latter, 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 the
Brazilian civil-military coup of 1964 and the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973, which overthrew the government of Salvador Allende. During this phase, leftist militants viewed their exile
as provisional and believed that they would soon return to Brazil. For the most part, they
remained in Latin America, first in Montevideo and then in Santiago, which became the “capital” of the first phase. The second phase was one of diaspora. After a series of coups and dictatorial takeovers throughout Latin America, remaining on the continent became difficult, and the
idea of a speedy return disappeared from the horizon. This was a period marked by the need to
adapt to the realities of new countries of exile, learn other languages (not simply Spanish), join
the labor force, and cope with the loss of a personal and political project. The majority of exiles
either abandoned political activism or were forced to redefine it significantly, experiencing a
kind of internal exile within their external one. They also began to embrace positions that had
hitherto been ignored or treated as secondary by Brazilian leftist movements, including positions
associated with democracy. During this phase, Paris became the new Brazilian exile capital. The
third phase, contemporaneous with the second, is one of “migration in exile.” With the independence of former Portuguese colonies in Africa, many exiles left Europe to promote socialism
in these countries. During the second phase, many had studied in and obtained degrees from
European universities. Unsatisfied in jobs as hotel doorpersons, janitors, and so on, they saw
opportunities 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 luxuryclass sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. The protagonist, who has come to visit his ailing cousin,
24
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
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 husband
and three adolescent children adopted as infants in Brazil.
6. See also Casalis (1976). In his testimony Casalis mentions additional attacks on Latin
American 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 the
Chilean 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’s
note.
11. Published in 1919 by German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse, Demian portrays the psychosocial awakening of its protagonist, Emil Sinclair, who begins to question conventional
pieties after his encounter with fellow student Max Demian.—Translator’s note.
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