A wiry Marxist revolutionary who kidnapped the US ambassador to protest Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1969 could become Rio de Janeiro’s next mayor.
Fernando Gabeira still can’t get a US visa, but he got a ringing endorsement from the daughter of the diplomat he held at gunpoint for four days.
“I think it’s fantastic,” said Valerie Elbrick, daughter of former US ambassador Charles Elbrick. “I’m excited and fascinated by it. I’m certainly sympathetic with his party and with his views.”
The 67-year-old motorcycle-riding congressman favors legalizing marijuana and gay marriage and defends the right of prostitutes to safely ply their trade.
If elected in Sunday’s runoff, Gabeira would join a growing number of former revolutionaries holding powerful government posts in Brazil. The president’s social communication minister, Franklin Martins, also took part in Elbrick’s kidnapping, and chief of staff Dilma Rousseff, a likely presidential contender in 2010, played a leading role in the armed resistance to the 1964 to 1985 dictatorship.
Gabeira says he evolved from guerrilla to politician long ago. In an interview, he said armed revolution — like the dictatorships spawned by the Cold War across Latin America — “is now behind us, in the last century.”
Gabeira was the mastermind of the 1969 kidnapping. The event was dramatized in the 1998 movie, Four Days in September, starring Alan Arkin as the ambassador, which was based on a book Gabeira wrote.
Elbrick died in 1983. His daughter, a writer who was 26 when her father was kidnapped, said she long ago forgave Gabeira after she learned of the brutality of Brazil’s military regime.
Gabeira and his group released the ambassador in exchange for 15 imprisoned leftists, but the US government still considers him persona non grata and he can’t get a US visa — a point the US embassy would not comment on.
Gabeira is running as the Green Party candidate against 39-year-old Eduardo Paes of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, which is aligned with the Workers Party of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The respected Ibope and Datafolha polls show the two in a tight race.
If elected, Gabeira pledged to work to end the long-running violence in the city’s slums, where renegade militias and police engage in combat against drug traffickers, and police invasions involving hundreds of officers firing at will have racked up civilian deaths.
The UN estimates the Rio police were responsible for 20 percent of last year’s murders — killings typically registered as “resistance followed by death.”
The phrase is shorthand for extrajudicial executions, the UN said.
Gabeira also called for public works projects like sewage systems and other basic services to improve living standards for the poor.
“By having the state present in these communities, we can bring about a transformation and we can eliminate the importance of the drug traffickers and the militias,” Gabeira said.
Still, reining in police and vigilante militias could be highly unpopular, since Rio residents fear the violence spilling beyond the slums. And the mayor has no direct say over the police, who are under state control.
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