Comando de Libertação Nacional

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The Comando de Libertação Nacional ( COLINA , Portuguese : Command of National Liberation ), informally known as Comandos , was a Brazilian underground movement founded in 1967 that operated as an urban guerrilla . Their goal was to overthrow the military dictatorship established in 1964 by military and terrorist means.

Structure and use

COLINA was founded in 1967 by a splinter group of the Partido Socialista Brasileiro in the state of Minas Gerais , which was banned in the wake of the 1965 coup . There were also socialist -oriented sympathizers from the military . It is still unclear today what strengths the group actually had. It also included the then student and former President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff .

The group preferred to rob banks to secure funding for the purchase of weapons , equipment , etc. Although guerrilla activity in the countryside was apparently originally planned, practically all of its operations took place in urban centers. Although it is unclear whether COLINA had any contact with Carlos Marighella's Acção Libertadora Nacional (ALN, Portuguese: National Liberation Action ), she used methods as defined by Marighella in his Mini-Manual do Guerrilheiro Urbano ( Rio de Janeiro 1969), which later also was adapted by the West German RAF .

COLINA caused a brief stir internationally with the murder of the West German military attaché , Major in the Bundeswehr, Eduard von Westernhagen (born approx. 1923). A three-man COLINA commando , consisting of João Lucas Alves, Serenio Viana Colon and José Roberto Monteiro, shot von Westernhagen on July 1, 1968 in Rua Engenheiro Duarte in the Gávea district of Rio de Janeiro in the immediate vicinity of his apartment as he was on the way for a course at the Brazilian staff academy Escola Superior de Guerra . Amílcar Baiardi was also involved in the planning. A few days later, COLINA announced that the victim was mistakenly shot. Von Westernhagen was mistaken for the Bolivian captain Gary Prado Salmón , who attended the same course as von Westernhagen and who was viewed by the assassins as the murderer of Ernesto Che Guevara .

Alves was caught by the police in November 1968 and tortured to death while in custody . In January 1969, succeeded the Police of Minas Gerais to arrest several members of the group, so Viana Colon, allegedly in his cell suicide committed, and Murilo Pezutti placed in Rio in a barracks died as a result of torture. Amílcar Baiardi survived the underground struggle and was apparently given amnesty in 1988 after the end of the military dictatorship .

The remnants of COLINA joined forces in July 1969 with the Vanguardia Popular Revolucionario (VPR, Portuguese: Revolutionary People's Avantgarde ), which was recruited from the communist splinter party Partido Obrero Comunista , and formed the Vanguardia Armada Revolucionario Palmares (Portuguese Revolutionaries Armed Avantgarde Palmares ).

literature

  • Political reasons for the attack in Rio? In: Die Welt from July 5, 1968, p. 3.
  • Bundeswehr officer murdered in Rio , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 3, 1968, p. 3.
  • Walter Drück: The military-political situation in South America , in: Wehrkunde. Journal for all military issues. Organ of the Society for Military Studies e. V. , XVIII. Vol., 1969, No. 1, pp. 19-23.
  • Fritz René Allemann : Power and Powerlessness of the Guerilla , Munich (R. Piper & Co.) 1974, ISBN 3-492-02006-2
  • Alves / Detrez / Marighel [l] a: Smash the prosperity islands of the III. World. With the manual of the guerrillas of Sao Paulo , Reinbek bei Hamburg 1971, pp. 39–84.

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