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that the fight was still going on. In this way the "Prestes Column" was born. Together with his soldiers, he set out on a march in March of 1924 which lasted until July of 1927. In thirty months they crossed 17 states in Brazil, from the south to the north and back to the south. It is one of the most incredible military campaigns, the first example of "movement war", the longest march since the conquest of India by Alexander the Great. They covered 25,000 kilometers on foot and horseback. By comparison, the coast of Brazil stretches for 7,000 kilometers, the Long March of the Chinese covered 12,000 kilometers and the circumference of the earth is 42,000 kilometers. They were pursued day and night by the army and by the cangaceiros, the outlaws of the interior whom the President of Brazil supplied with arms and provisions and transformed into a regular army. The exploits of the Prestes Column became legendary far beyond the borders of Brazil and South America, and reached Europe. How these few hundred men continually managed to escape capture and the ceaseless pursuit of far greater forces, was a story which thrilled the world. In 1927 Prestes decided to end the march and seek refuge in Bolivia. He started: "We have not won, but we have not been defeated." With all of his 630 men, armed only with 90 rifles, he crossed the frontier and handed over his arms to the Bolivian army. He agreed to be engaged by a French company that was building a railway, on condition that all his soldiers would also be given work there. In this way Luiz Carlos Prestes spent a year in Bolivia, together with his soldiers. He had become famous, and the Secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party paid him a visit, as a sign of homage. He remained a few days and left behind some books: Marx, Lenin, Engels. Prestes and his Column, who came from the south of Brazil, had received a shock when they marched through the northeast. This was an area of terrible poverty, where wealthy Landowners kept the population in conditions of near slavery. The encounter with this unknown part of his own country rapidly sensitised Prestes to the social problems. When he and his Column arrived in a town or village, the first thing they did was to take the landowners' deeds of property and the register of debtors from the archives of the municipality and burn them in the central square. Then they opened the prisons and liberated the inmates, most of whom were poor farmers awaiting trial. These actions also strengthened the legend of Prestes as the "knight of hope". In Bolivia, after having read the classics of communism. Prestes decided to go to Buenos Aires where, in 1931, he was contacted by an emissary of the Comintern who proposed that he go to Moscow to be trained as a leader for the future communist revolution in Brazil. Prestes went and dedicated the rest of his Life to this task. Meanwhile, all his soldiers had returned to a normal life in Brazil. Guilhermino Barbosa remained living on the edge of the Bolivian forest. I have gathered all this information in the course of the last

five or six years. Many of the details about Prestes and his Column I owe to Domingo Meirelles, a Brazilian journalist who from childhood had heard the deeds of Prestes narrated by his parents. In the 1970'5, as an adult, he followed the route of the Prestes Column, interviewing those who, fifty years earlier, had participated or had been witnesses to what had happened. He wrote about this pilgrimage in The Night of the Great Bonfires. In his book of almost seven hundred pages, half a page and one photograph are dedicated to Guilhermino Barbosa, the illiterate soldier who from the very beginning had fought with Prestes. When the Column was dissolved, Barbosa remained in the Bolivian forest. With the passing of the years, and as the goverment of Bolivia seemed to him to be more and more unreliable, he moved deeper into the jungle. In the seventies he was still living there, together with his wife and twelve children. He had never surrendered. I would like to close my eyes, cover them with a black blindfold and wait for a night with no moon. Then I would climb onto the roof of my house, and attach a rope that would carry me to the other side of the street, all the way to the bell tower to the church. I would walk on this tightrope, in the darkness, arrive on the other side and discover that there is no bell tower, that it had been demolished many years ago. I always had a precise image of what it was to prepare a production: climbing a mountain. It's an ascent in which I am not alone, you are with me, and we are tied together by a rope. Each one of us has his own rhythm; if one hesitates, all must slow down, and all must speed up if the guide manages to find a better trail, a path that permits faster progress. Each choise must be made so that the entire group does not get pulled down. Each step, each stop, each tiny individual action has consequences for everybody. At times during this climb, it can happen that we have to turn back in order to find the right way towards the peak; sometimes it seems as if we are moving farther away from the summit, but it is only a detour in order to discover a more solid point on the mountainface, a safer support for your boot, a better grip for your hands, in order to move on, still a little higher.