Challenges for the Brazilian Left by Frei Betto

Within the sector of the Brazilian left which did not take up arms there was a certain tone of "didn’t I say so?" when the other sector started to fall apart, with the kidnapping of the American ambassador Charles Elbrick, in Rio [de Janeiro] in September 1969. History almost always makes abrupt turns in our analysis of current conditions, in our forecasts, in our gloomy predictions clothed in heavy overcoats of supposedly scientific concepts. Who is the intellectual or political leader who foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall?

"Didn’t I say so?" exclaimed the Trotskyists when the crimes of Stalin came to light, denounced by Krushchev. And pro-Soviet elements toasted with vodka on seeing the gang-of-four, in China, unleash the "cultural revolution", a wave of ideological fundamentalism which planted terror in the name of "authentic proletarian communism". Its Latin American version was the Shining Path, in Peru, which assassinated compañeros that "wavered ideologically".