The Press: Battler Below the Border

In Rio de Janeiro, where there are more than 25 dailies, one newspaper editor towers over all others. Energetic, chunky Carlos Lacerda, 39, crusading editor and publisher of the city’s Tribune da Imprensa (Press Box), is South America’s most vigilant spokesman for press freedom. In his battles for a free press below the border, Lacerda, who has twice been elected secretary of the Inter American Press Association, has earned a reputation among newsmen as “Latin America’s 20th century Tom Paine.” “He has done more for public morality in Brazil,” says one of Rio’s leading citizens, “than any other man.” He has also been jailed eight times, beaten by thugs and sprayed with gunfire. Last week Editor Lacerda’s crusading journalism won him Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Award,* given to those who make the biggest contribution toward furthering understanding between the Americas.

An Easy Position. The tribute was well earned. Lacerda has been fighting with his fists, his booming voice and his pen ever since he started out as a reporter on a daily in Rio at 14. Grandson of a Brazilian supreme court justice, Lacerda worked closely with Brazil’s Communist Party, which two of his uncles had helped start, often led student strikes and demonstrations against the government. In 1935, with the police on his trail, he was smuggled to his grandfather’s mango farm in the false bottom of a coffee truck. Four years later he broke sharply with the Communists after he outspokenly questioned the authority of top Reds.

Informed on by the Reds, Lacerda was jailed by the police for two weeks. When he got out, he was hired by Press Lord Assis Chateaubriand. He was soon running “Chato’s” news service, did so well that at 28 he was named editor of O Jornal, Chateaubriand’s biggest and best morning paper. Lacerda dumped canned government propaganda editorials in the wastebasket, regularly broke the ironhanded censorship of Dictator Vargas. “You put me in a difficult position [with the government],” Chateaubriand told Lacerda one day. Snapped back Lacerda: “I put you in an easy one. I resign.” Lacerda became a columnist on Rio’s Correio da Hanha, and, says he, “we demoralized censorship by ignoring it.”

A Great Honor. In 1945 Lacerda, a bitter antiCommunist, took out after the Reds’ “poor but honest candidate” for the presidency, punctured his chances of rolling up a big vote by pointing out that he owned 30 Rio apartment houses. When he launched an attack on strong-arm generals in the new government—which had replaced the dictatorship—five thugs beat him up on the street. Later he was cornered by hoodlums in the elevator of his apartment, escaped in the scuffle with only a cheekbone cracked. As his popularity spread, his voice became familiar over a Rio radio station and he was elected to the city council. But the radio station was taken over by a politician, and his paper showed signs of backing down from the kind of fights Lacerda thrived on, so he quit both.

Lacerda then persuaded 3,400 contributors to buy $50 shares to launch his own paper, Tribuna da Imprensa. When Dictator Vargas came back as President, after five years out of power, Lacerda gave him no peace. He exposed Communist infiltration in the foreign office, forced the government to start to clean house. A fierce opponent of Brazil’s national security law, making it an offense to attack “agents of public order,” Lacerda violated the law by printing Page One stories accusing police of graft. He was carted off to jail, said boldly: “I feel it is a great honor to be accused of violating the security law, which is a copy of a Fascist law decreed in Italy by Mussolini.” Four days later the Senate changed the law.

Voice of the Government. Lacerda’s fiery editorials run as long as 1,200 words (“I don’t have time to be brief”), and he doggedly strikes at corruption or any attempt to muzzle the press. Recently he began attacking the government, which has formally decreed press freedom, for underhandedly backing a paper, Ultima Hora (TIME, Aug. 17). Lacerda exposed the paper’s link with the government, campaigned against it in his paper and on radio and TV until Ultima Bora’s editor was forced to resign. (Another result of the battle: circulation of Lacerda’s paper jumped fourfold—to 45,000—and he became one of Brazil’s most popular radio and TV personalities.)

In Lacerda’s office, his telephone rings all day with tips and offers to help to carry on his crusades. That is just the way Lacerda wants it. Explains one publishing friend: “Carlos has all the elements of the true hero. And he will probably end up the way heroes do—either he will win or he’ll get shot.”

* Founded to honor the memory of his wife in 1939 by Boston’s Godfrey Lowell Cabot, 92, father of John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. The other three 1953 winners: Crede H. Calhoun, New York Times Panama correspondent; Ismael Perez Castro, director of Ecuador’s El Universe; Arturo Oscar Schaerer, editor of Paraguay’s La Tribuna.