Authoritarianism, control and vigilance: Jacob Gorender on the aim of the repression (1940-1980)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate through analysis of documents of repressive nature, the elements highlighted by the Military Justice to establish the trace of persecution of the intellectuals among other social sectors which dared to challenge the Dictatorship. The complete mapping, involving the combat strategies against the “communism”, including the knowledge of the political parties and their military staff, was accumulated by police and military sectors along the 20th century. We intended to follow, through these records, the political trajectory of the intellectual Jacob Gorender. As a journalist, he got involved in the discussion about the Brazilian participation in the World War II, joined the FEB in 1943. Before that, however, Gorender became a communist, recruited by Mario Alves in 1942. In the early 60’s, he acted as a militant and coordinator of PCB, when he decided to join PCBR, founded in 1968. The historian, in the beginning of the 1964 Strike, with his life already devastated by the Information and Security Community, experienced marginalization, imprisonment, torture and censorship of his writings among other abuses that also reached his closest friends, political companions and family members. The crossing of this amount of information with the memorial documents helps to understand the political repression tricks and the different Revolutionary projects in course.