The Prestes Proposals

The Brazilian Communist Party has been outlawed since 1947, but it still has some 60,000 members. Its newspapers are illegal, but are tolerantly allowed to publish. Its boss, Luis Carlos Prestes, has been hunted by the cops for seven years. Last week the missing chieftain published in the outlawed press some instructions for the illegal party.

Prestes, who once led 1,200 men in a two-year battle with 30,000 soldiers in Brazil's backlands, learned Communism in Moscow. Now, abandoning his former out-and-out revolutionary line, Prestes declared that there is only one Red test for Brazilian policy: Is it anti-U.S.?

Brazil, said Prestes, is only a colony of the U.S. Even the U.S.-Brazil Joint Commission's plan for better roads and ports is just a trick for the U.S. to get war materials out of the country. Nationalists and others interested in building up a Brazilian economy free from yanqui rule should take heed, said Prestes, to these proposals: 1) annulment of all treaties with the U.S., 2) confiscation of all capital and enterprises belonging to "American monopolists," and 3) cancellation of Brazil's debt to the U.S.

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