Marighela, Carlos (1911-69), Brazilian communist who came to the theory and practice of urban guerrilla warfare comparatively late in a life devoted to clandestine activity. A mulatto, he joined the Brazilian Communist party (PCB) in 1929 and was imprisoned in 1932 and 1939-45, eventually becoming a member of the executive committee. He was radicalized by the Cuban Revolution and moved away from PCB orthodoxy, the final break coming in 1967 when he accepted an invitation the party had refused to the Latin American Solidarity conference in Havana and broadcast a call for armed struggle.
He formed the Açao Libertadora Nacional (National Liberating Action) and preached an urban variant of the Guevarist concept of an armed nucleus providing a ‘focus’ for social discontents, enshrined in his rudimentary Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, which became required reading at the US counter-insurgency School of the Americas. Its shortcomings as doctrine and his own as a practitioner were underlined when the repression provoked by his robberies and kidnappings proved to be ruthlessly effective, in particular the conversion to political purposes of the police vigilante ‘Death Squad’. Marighela himself was an early victim, betrayed and killed from ambush in São Paulo on 4 November 1969.
— Hugh Bicheno
