Comrades Exposed

The man Brazilian Communists hate the most is Carlos Lacerda, hard-driving editor of Rio's Tribuna da Imprensa, who has crusaded against the Red menace in Brazil since his days as a bright young columnist. Last week Lacerda was on another anti-Red crusade. Day after day he front-paged photostated evidence--letters, government records, police reports--that Brazil's foreign ministry is infested with Communists.

Listing names, dates and places, Lacerda cited four consuls, two charges d'affaires and three home-office functionaries as Reds. The chief coddler of the Communists, Lacerda said, is Career Diplomat Orlando Leite Ribeiro, "a personal friend of Communist Leader Luis Carlos Pres-tes." After Leite Ribeiro became head of the foreign ministry's administration department in 1951, charged Tribuna, Reds were brought into the ministry and Reds already in the foreign service got remarkable promotions. Items: A woman Communist was hired as a code clerk in the home office, where she is in position to learn diplomatic codes and read top secret messages; a Communist consul in the Dominican Republic was transferred to Greece and made charge d'affaires; another known Communist was jumped from consul third class in El Salvador to charge d'affaires in that country.

So far, only one of the nine named as Reds has answered Lacerda's accusations, and that one got a quick comeuppance. Normelio Ramos, an official in the ministry's economic division, wrote a letter stating flatly that he was "not connected with the Communist Party." Lacerda printed the letter along with a reply: "In 1945 Normelio Ramos was enrolled in a Communist cell . . . His registration for the presidential election of 1945 was as a Communist Party member under the number 5/420. If he wants further details, let him give us a power of attorney so that we can obtain certified copies of the records in his long police dossier."

Brazil's government is hostile to Lacerda, who has thrown verbal punches at many a government bigwig, from President Getulio Vargas down. But his reports were too well documented to be ignored. The foreign ministry replaced the charge d'affaires in El Salvador, recalled an accused consul from London, announced that a three-man commission would be formed to look into Lacerda's allegations.

Another Rio newspaper, Correio da Manha, also brought to light some startling information about Communism in Brazil. The information concerned Amador Cisneiros do Amaral, a government attorney serving as chief prosecutor of a batch of army officers accused of Communist activity. Cisneiros proved to be a most reluctant prosecutor. He belittled the state's own evidence, even refused to admit the authenticity of documents that prisoners themselves had identified. Last week Correio offered an explanation of Cisneiros' reluctance: he has a long history of Communist affiliation. Shortly afterward, Cisneiros' boss announced that the case had been taken out of the reluctant prosecutor's hands.

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