Exciting Place

Brazil's Communists, with a year of legal existence to celebrate, were out to celebrate it in downtown Rio. The Dutra Government, alarmed by mounting strikes and mass demonstrations (TIME, May 27), was just as intent on putting Rio's 150,000 unruly partisans in their place. Rio's police chief, somber Jose Pereira Lira, ordered them to meet in the remote beachside suburb of Ipanema. The Communists refused, scattered thousands of handbills calling all proletarians to downtown Carioca Square.

TIME Correspondent Donald Newton arrived a half hour early, and took up his stand before a restaurant on the square, the Taverna Carioca. A hot wind, the kind cariocas call a suicide wind, blew down from the mountains and put everyone on edge. In the crowded square hundreds were lined up to catch streetcars home. The cops were there already.

Then Communists flooded toward the square by the thousands, chanting the national anthem like a samba. Their banners said: "We want bread," "We are for democracy," "Break with Spain." At the square they met the mounted police who, faces tight with fear, forced them back. Then, reported Correspondent Newton, "a man mounted on others' shoulders told the crowd, 'They cannot stop the meeting. This is still a democracy.' "

"Two seconds later it was anything but. Shots rang out. and we ducked behind a steel door in the restaurant. One shot went through the restaurant window, others took stone hunks off the building. As soon as I could get back to a peeking position, I saw several people being taken away in wagons. Others lay on the ground.

"Over at the streetcar queue police fired into the air, driving commuters into a panic. Police got excited and clubbed Commies and non-Commies alike. Ambulances were almost as thick as taxicabs. Right in the middle of all this I ran into an American named Weeks who had just arrived. 'My,' said Mr. Weeks, 'Rio is an exciting place.' "

Cost of the excitement: three killed, some 32 wounded. Communist Leader Luis Carlos Prestes sought asylum in a foreign embassy. The next day, the Government forbade Communist meetings.

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