Let's talk a little bit about Marighella, what do you know about him?

This week, Brazilians celebrated the 52nd anniversary of the assassination of Carlos Marighella by agents of the Brazilian military dictatorship. He led the urban armed resistance to the dictatorial regime arising from the 1964 coup d'état that was fomented, financed and supported by the White House in Brazil.

Marighella had been a federal deputy and was a prominent left-wing political leader. My father (communist since the late 1940s) had sporadic contacts with him in São Paulo in the final phase of his life. My father's admiration for Marighella's courage was great. Whenever he spoke of the cowardly murder of this political leader, my father was sad.

The memory of the murder of this left-wing leader comes at a delicate moment. The release of the film about Marighella's trajectory in movie theaters was censored by Bolsonaro. The masterpiece of Brazilian cinematography is on the internet:

An important chapter in Marighella's life not recorded in the film took place outside Brazil after his death. The Guerrilla Manual he wrote, translated and published in Europe on the initiative of Jean-Paul Sartre, was widely used by the Baader-Meinhof guerrillas.

Seized by German police officers, Marighella's work was studied, commented on and cited hundreds of times in the book, Modern Irregular Warfare, by Friedrich August Von Der Heydte (published in Brazil by Biblex). No Brazilian military has ever been mentioned in Europe. Interestingly, despite not having military training, Marighella is studied extensively by Brazilian officers charged with fighting subversion (whatever that means in the 1950s ideology when they were frozen).

One of the biggest concerns of the Brazilian leftist leader was precisely the privacy of leftist cells, the compartmentalization of information and the use of encrypted communications. This was also the biggest concern of the internet platform that crippled the US diplomatic/military information system (WikiLeaks).

Marighella's work not only ensured the success of the Baader-Meinhof operations, overcoming surveillance and repression techniques used by the Germans and Europeans (inspired by Nazi military manuals), but it can also be the object of reflection at the present time.

Marighella's lessons are very useful today. Adapted, they can be used to bypass the minefields created by “surveillance capitalism” and authoritarian governments that use the internet to control populations and sabotage democracies. I say this thinking specifically about the SNI (acronym for the infamous highly capillary information system that existed in the Brazilian military dictatorship) which is being rebuilt by Bolsonaro.