NEWS CENTER – Apolônio de Carvalho (Corumbá, February 9, 1912 – Rio de Janeiro, September 23, 2005) was a Brazilian communist militant, also recognized as a combatant of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and as a hero of the French Resistance during World War II in the fight against nazi occupation.
Apolônio de Carvalho was a unique figure in the scenario of Brazilian political life. Few like him have lived with such intensity the “passion” that impelled him, since his cadet years at the Realengo Military School, to engage in the struggle for socialist ideals and against oppressive regimes, with a dedication that manifested itself in all the episodes he experienced: from militancy in the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and the ANL (National Liberation Alliance) to participation in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance against fascism; from the clandestine struggle against the military period in Brazil, as a member of the PCBR, to militancy in the PT, from the moment of the party’s founding until his death.
Apolônio de Carvalho was the son of a soldier from Sergipe and a mother from Rio Grande do Sul. He had contact with politics at a very young age, when he went to military school, as he told the magazine Teoria e Debate in 1989: “At the end of 1933 I was already an officer, I thought it was necessary to change Brazilian society,” he said.
Two years later he helped create the ANL: “a colleague from Rio Grande do Sul, an army captain, told me about the ANL (…) So, I participated in the organization of this popular front”, being considered a traitor, because he no longer shared the values he defended and did not leave his military career.
Arrested in 1936 by the Getúlio Vargas government, he was stripped of his military rank and expelled from the army.
After leaving prison in June of 1937, Apolônio joined the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). According to Apolônio told Teoria e Debate, the ideology of the PCB “was very similar to that of the ANL: against the foreign monopolies, for agrarian reform, for union autonomy, for union liberties, for broad social conquests.” He receives instructions to embark for Spain where, together with twenty other Brazilians, he will fight in the International Brigades on the side of the Republican forces against the fascists led by General Francisco Franco.
SPANISH CIVIL WAR AND THE PARTISAN RESISTANCE IN FRANCE AGAINST NAZISM
Apolônio leaves Spain with the International Brigades in February 1939 and goes to France, where he stays in refugee camps until May 1940, when he manages to escape from the Gurs camp, heading to Marseille. It is in this port city that he joins the French Resistance in 1942, of which he becomes commander of the partisan guerrillas for the southern region, based in Lyon. It is also in 1942 that he meets Renée France Laugery, a 17 year old girl, a communist militant of the Resistance, who would become his companion for the rest of his life. In January 1944, Apolonius and Renée settled in Nîmes, where, in February, they organized an attack on the city’s prison, freeing 23 Resistance militants. In May, they moved to Toulouse. In August, Apollonius led the liberation of Carmaux, Albi, and Toulouse. In November, the couple’s first child, René-Louis, is born. For his courage, Apollonius is considered a hero in France, where he was decorated with the Legion of Honor.
The end of the war finds his family in Paris, from where he embarks the following year for Rio de Janeiro. In 1947, the couple’s second child, Raul, is born. Apolônio, Renée, and the two children go underground, militating between Rio and São Paulo until 1953, when he leaves for a course in the Soviet Union that lasts about four years. In 1955, Renée finds him in Moscow, and in 1957 the family is back in Brazil, living semi-legally, a situation that lasts until the military coup of 1964.
ARRESTED AND TORTURED UNDER MILITARY DICTATORSHIP IN BRAZIL
In the 1960s, he participated in the popular opposition to the military regime. Soon after the coup of April 1, 1964, Apolônio begins to live in deep clandestinity in the state of Rio de Janeiro, far from his family. As a result of disagreements with the Central Committee of the Communist Party (of which he was a member) Apolônio and the Revolutionary Current of the State of Rio left the PCB in 1967. In April of the following year, together with Mário Alves, Jacob Gorender, and other dissidents, Apolônio founded the PCBR (Revolutionary Brazilian Communist Party).
In January of 1970, during the fallout that affected dozens of PCBR militants, Apolônio and Mário Alves were arrested in Rio and Jacob Gorender in São Paulo. All were interrogated and Mário Alves disappeared. In February, his sons Raul and René-Louis are also arrested.
In June, Apolônio and 39 other Brazilian political prisoners arrive in Algiers, exchanged for the West German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben, kidnapped in Rio de Janeiro in a joint action of the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN) and the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (VPR). René-Louis will be released in 1971, exchanged (along with 69 other political prisoners) for the Swiss ambassador, Giovanni Bucher. Raul is released from prison the following year. After that Renée leaves Brazil and the family is reunited in Paris.
During the years he had to stay away from Brazilian lands, he maintains contact with Brazil and articulates with the exiles abroad. She returns to Brazil in October 1979, after the Amnesty in August of that year.
In the late 1970s, he approached the groups then working to create the PT, becoming one of its founders. “We had an immense sympathy for the PT,” he said. “In February 1980, when (the party) is officially launched, we see the first leftist party in the entire century that pleads, as one of its essential features, the conquest of legality.”
He remains in the leadership of the new party until 1987, when he steps down due to medical advice.
“In spite of the limitations of health and age, Apolônio continues to be a militant who will never shy away from debates and the public manifestation of his positions as a convinced socialist. A socialist who knew how to critically combat the distortions of real socialism but that, not for this (or for this very reason), the fall of the Berlin wall or the diversionism of the theories propagated by capital were able to bend.”
Enthusiast of the actions practiced by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), to which he always provided support and with which he was always present, in the face of which he did not give up criticism or hope. For him, a new socialist world was always possible and can always be within reach, as long as we are willing to organize and fight for it.
AN EXAMPLE TO THE BRAZILIAN REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH
Apolônio presents to the Brazilian youth the practical line of the importance of revolutionary internationalism as the responsibility of every revolutionary. Living according to his ideas and dedicating himself to the struggle is the only way to build an alternative to the capitalist system. Today, under a globalized world and system, few take the initiative to live in such a way. However, there are Brazilians who, recognizing the reality of the revolution in Kurdistan and its practices, have come closer to it and have reactivated the internationalist revolutionary spirit that Apolônio lived in an exemplary way!
