BRAZIL: Three-Month Mystery

Sessions of the Brazilian Senate had become so dull that one day last week Rio de Janeiro’s big afternoon newspaper Diario da Nolle sent a cub reporter to cover the sitting. He got a red-hot scoop. At 2:25 p.m., he spotted a Senator walking toward a desk halfway back on the left in the Chamber. That, was all he needed. The cub raced for a phone, gave the flash to his office: “Prestes is in the Senate!”

For three months the whereabouts of sad-eyed Senator Luis Carlos Prestes, Secretary-General of Brazil’s outlawed Communist Party (TIME, May 19), had been a mystery. His reappearance was real news. Diario was all ready to come out with a front-page story that he was in Pernambuco. It replated so fast that the inside pages where the first story was continued made no sense.

Prestes asked the astonished presiding officer, white-haired Senator Fernando de Melo Viana, for permission to speak. He talked long enough to fill 16 newspaper rolumns. He denied rumors that he was conspiring against the Government with former President Getulio Vargas, and he praised Dictator Perón’s variety of democracy in Argentina, where the Communist Party is legal.

Nowhere did Prestes explain why he had been absent, or mention rumors that he had been in Russia. The cub reporter and everybody else forgot to ask him where he had been. Best guess was that he had stayed right in Rio, organizing new front parties for his illegal Communists to take over.