The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil, Jacob Blanc, 2024, Duke University Press
Luis Carlos Prestes is one of the most remarkable characters in Brazil’s history, but outside the country many might be forgiven for not recognising his name.
The army captain from Rio Grande do Sul gave his identity to an event that speaks of the epic scale of political ambition and resistance in Latin America—the Prestes Column.
This 15,000km long march from 1924–27 by rebel soldiers throughout Brazil’s vast interior has become the stuff of legend, a failed military uprising that evolved into a chase but ultimately became a statement of possibility.
While the ideology of the column was diffuse and largely confined to instrumental aspects of the political process in that period—to topple President Artur Bernardes and engineer a series of reforms to the machinery of the First Republic, from secret ballots to a balanced division of power between the institutions of government—the march became a foundation story.
The itinerant and mendicant rebels did not achieve any of their original anti-oligarchic goals, but fought off repeated sorties by better-equipped federal forces and local militias to become known as the “Undefeated Column”, eventually finding refuge in Bolivia.
The heroic and monumental scale of their marathon has thereby assured them a place both in folk history and the nationalist pantheon, even if on the ground as they traipsed across Brazil they did not treat locals with the reciprocal camaraderie of later guerrilla movements.
But as Jacob Blanc notes in his outstanding history of this formative event, it also served a role that arguably would have much greater long-term consequences for Brazil, South America and beyond—as an incubator of political formation and ideology.
The Prestes Column would set in motion the cogs leading to the 1930 revolution that would bring Getúlio Vargas to power, and many of the former tenentes who participated went on to become leading political figures in this period, in his government, in opposition, and later even in the Cold War military regimes.
Vargas, a controversial dictator who is not easy to position on the ideological spectrum of that era—he copied fascist tactics in creating his authoritarian Estado Novo yet joined the Allies in the defeat of Nazism and enacted social reforms—set the terms of later Brazilian populism.
More importantly, however, Prestes himself became a Marxist and would go on to lead the Brazilian Communist Party from 1943 to 1980, paying a high price for his conversion. He was jailed by Vargas, whom he saw as a continuation of the oligarchic rule of the First Republic.
Prestes’ embrace of Marxism probably occurred during his exile in Bolivia—explaining why at times he has been compared to Che Guevara, who later lost his life in that country—and the Brazilian rebel gained mythical popular status as the “Knight of Hope”.
As Blanc writes: “In the lore of Prestes’s rise as one of Latin America’s most famous Communists, his march through Brazil’s interior became a much-celebrated, if often-exaggerated, story of political awakening, a precursor of sorts to Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries.”
Signature themes on the left in Brazil today—from land reform to nationalisation—can be traced back to Prestes’ Brazilian Communist Party even if it only ever existed in competition with the more successful later Workers’ Party (PT), whose growth accelerated its decline.
Finally, and the main focus of Blanc’s study, the Prestes Column brought Brazil’s “interior” to national attention at a key moment in the country’s modern formation—unwittingly, it has to be said, because the rebels had never intended to march across the country in such a way.
Tracing the spiralling route of the marchers across 13 states—then, two thirds of the entire country—from the south through the central plains to the northeastern sertão and back again, one is struck by the scale of this trek (landmarks upon which were visited by the author). It is truly vast, the equivalent of marching from Britain to Australia (if you could walk on water, which Prestes may have done, if the mythology is anything to go by).
As Blanc says, this achievement offers an ideal case study for charting an interior history of modern Brazil, as it exemplifies how its inner regions and their people have long been seen by coastal elites both as “backward” but also of almost limitless, unmet potential.
The author sketches out an approach to studying the interior that has implications for scholarship outside Brazil—in both spatial and narrative terms.
He writes: “It is a way to understand an interior space as both a physical landscape comprising a wide range of topographies and populations, and also as an imaginative landscape adaptable to a range of different perspectives.”
In this way, Blanc seeks to answer why, despite its failure, the Prestes Column became so celebrated. The answer is as much symbolic as it is political.
Prestes ferocious rivalry with Vargas—two towering figures—shaped the terms in which the country’s interior were subsequently discussed in a pivotal period in Brazilian developmental debate where elites of all stripes always had one eye on the hinterland.
And the column’s legend, like the journey itself, has been open-ended, with no obvious conclusion, exerting as intoxicating a figurative appeal on the present and Brazil’s hopes for the future as it has on how it understands its past. In short, the march goes on.
As Blanc writes: “Premised on notions of the interior as both backward (an affliction to be overcome) and untapped (capable of contributing to the nation), invocations of the column became a way for people across Brazil and abroad to express their hopes and grievances.”
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Categories: Bolivia, Brazil, South America