From O Proletariado
Organ of the Central Committee
of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil
Year 1, No. 5, Sept. 1995

Manuel Lisboa

A life dedicated to the cause of socialism

"A complete revolutionary, part of the people that raised him, that forms its heroes, martyrs and leaders. A man of the people, builder of the Revolution... Camilo and the other Camilos are an indication of the force of the people; they are a most developed expression of what a nation can give for the defense of the most pure ideals, with the hope of realizing the most noble objectives..." This text written by Ernesto Che Guevara pays homage to Camilo Cienfuegos, hero of the Cuban Revolution, and to the other Camilos who existed, exist and will come forth in Brazil, in America and the world.

The Brazilian people have produced many Camilos in their history and Manuel Lisboa de Moura stands out among them. Born on February 21, 1944, in Maceió, Alagoas. Concerned with social problems he began, while still an adolescent, his political activities leading the Student Union at his Seondary School, the former Licée Alagoano, today the State Secondary School. He was the leader of the Union of Secondary Students of Alogoas (UESA) and, at 16 years, he joined the Communist Youth. In 1962, he broke with the PCB because it adopted the positions of the XXth Congress of the CPSU, which betrayed the process of the construction of socialism in the USSR and Marxism-Leninism. Together with Diógenes Arruda and Maurícío Gabrois he reorganized the Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B).

The fascist military coup of 1964 found Manuel Lisboa studying medicine at the Federal University of Alagoas - UFAL. Thousands of communists, patriots and democrats were taken prisoner, killed, exiled. Manuel Lisboa, at that time already an outstanding communist leader, had his house invaded by a gang of men armed with machine guns who tried to capture him. They did not succeed. He went to Recife and then to Rio de Janeiro, going underground to be able to continue the struggle against the dictatorship, for democratic liberties, for national independence and for socialism.

Considering that the leadership of the PC do B made a [merely] formal defense of Stalin and of scientific socialism and developed a practice that was, in essence, revisionist and bureaucratic, Manuel Lisboa broke with that party and, in February of 1966, together with Amaro Luís de Carvalho (Capivara), Selma Bandeira and other leaders, founded the Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR).

He was the principal leader of the PCR, the soul of the party. His leadership was consolidated naturally, by his theoretical capacity and practical dedication, firmness and revolutionary temperament. Understanding, concerned with comrades, simple, Manuel Lisboa was in fact the model to be followed, a new man of which Che Guevara spoke. Manuel was as well the principal editor of the newspapers Struggle, Workers Struggle, Popular Resistance and Ideological Struggle (a journal), instruments for the cohesion of the militants and of orientation for their work of organizing the popular movement.

An Example of Coherence, Resistance and Bravery

"It is for this that we are with "Che" and other such fighters, firmly prepared to give our lives to expel Yankee imperialism from our country and to crush its internal agents, thus taking a decisive step towards a classless society." Manuel Lisboa, in an article on the occasion of the death of Che, in the journal Struggle, No. 3, October, 1967.

Manuel Lisboa was kidnapped on August 16, 1973, in a public square located in the barrio of Rosarinho, in Recife, in a joint action by the police of Pernambuco and Sao Paulo, coordinated by the torturers Luiz Miranda and Sérgio Paranhos Fleury. He was still seen alive by other militants more or less ten days after his capture, his body covered by burns and semi-paralyzed. On September 5, 1973, an official note of the government of the fascist military dictatorship was published in the papers 'informing' them that he had been killed the previous day in a shootout with the police of Sao Paulo, together with two other leaders of the PCR - Emanuel Bezerra and Manoel Aleixo.

"They are going to torture us to death. But we will not denounce our comrades. They will not be able to affect our dignity, our honor as Revolutionary Communists. Worse than torture and even death is betrayal. Socialism and Communism will triumph. This they can not prevent" - these words were affirmed by Manuel two or three days before his death, with his body torn apart in front of the torturers and the worker of the Torre factory, Maria do Carma Tomaz, who survived the carnage of tortures of Doi-Codi.

In truth Manuel Lisboa was killed at 29 years of age, in the full vigor of his human condition and with the most elevated consciousness, of his himself, his fellow man and of humanity, to the end a true Communist. A man of truth. A Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, resolute, dedicated professional revolutionary.

Manuel was killed under the most brutal and cruel tortures and received six shots of mercy to his heart at the dependencies of the Headquarters of the IV Army (today the Military Command of the Northeast), by agents of the DOI-CODI, and then transferred to Sao Paulo, where he was buried secretly in a common grave together with Emanuel Bezerra dos Santos, his comrade in arms, in the cemetery of Perus.

The laboratory of the Catholic University of Campinas, Sao Paulo, made the identification and found the death certificates signed by the coroner of Sao Paulo Harry Shibata, a known collaborator with the organs of political repression of the dictatorship.

The brutality of the mercenary executioners only showed their defeat faced with Manuel, who did not give any information to the class enemy. He proved in practice the truth of what is learned in the speech which Comandante Che made to the Tricontinental in Havana in 1967: "... What do the dangers or the sacrifices of a man or a people matter, when what is at stake is the destiny of humanity? Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear, and another hand reaches out to take up our arms, and other men come forward to join in our funeral dirge with the roar of machine guns and new calls for battle and for victory."

Manuel Lisboa Lives!

"No people can know freedom without paying with the lives of many of its sons." Manuel Lisboa, in an article published in the newspaper Popular Resistance No. 1, December, 1969, paying homage to Marighela on the occasion of his death.

The new men do not die, they only disappear physically. Manuel Lisboa de Moura continues to live in the schools, cane fields, factories, shanty-towns, where there are workers in struggle, exploited, deprived.

Manuel Lisboa lives in the PCR, which is being reconstructed throughout the country; our militants who take up arms and are giving battle cries for freedom, for social justice, for a Brazil in a world where there is work, housing, health and education for all; where happiness reigns.

Wherever one goes in the filth of the history of the exploitation of man by man, in the struggle for the construction of Popular Power, for Socialism and for Communism, Manuel Lisboa de Moura will always be Present!

A Firm Step Forward

Communiqué

of the Central Committee

The Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party held, at the end of August, a plenary meeting at which it unanimously recognized the necessity to deepen the internal political-ideological struggle to transform the practice of all the militants into a revolutionary communist practice, assuming the firm and decisive form of democratic centralism based on iron discipline.

The process which we are living of the construction of the Revolutionary Party demands the inflexible application of democratic centralism, the only form of guaranteeing the quantitative and qualitative development of the Party, and of guaranteeing the ideological, moral and political education of the militants advancing the process of proletarianization with a fusion into an integral form of the personal with the revolutionary life, breaking with the petty bourgeois vices and style of living, adopting a correct form of living, serving the class and the broad popular masses.

Today, when we are seeing the discernment of a new revolutionary epoch in which the struggle for the seizure of power by the working class supported by the popular masses has been placed on the agenda, this demands that the genuinely revolutionary parties combat theoretically and practically all the opportunists currents which betrayed Marxism-Leninism, including those speaking in its name, and assume their place in the vanguard of the working class and the people.

With the decision to exclude all those who have not shown conditions for militants, the CC decided to expel from the ranks of the Party Luiz Ferreira, ex-member of the CC who, with his ideological-political vacillation, with his boasting, individualism and weakness, expressed his inability to follow the road of revolution and the characteristics typical of the vain petty bourgeoisie with himself, broke democratic centralism, violated the norms of revolutionary discipline. The practice of sectarianism passed to factionalism and from open factionalism to lies and betrayal.

With this decision the Party takes a great leap forward in its proletarianization and in its revolutionary commitment of, based on the working class, to construct and develop the revolution to liquidate imperialist domination, to overthrow the reactionary power, to destroy the bourgeois State and construct socialism in Brazil, serving the world revolution.

DOWN WITH OPPORTUNISM, REFORMISM AND REVISIONISM!

DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM AND THE GOVERNMENT OF FAMINE AND NATIONAL BETRAYAL!

LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM!

REVOLUTION OR DEATH!

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