PRESTES SENTENCED IN ABSENTIA
luis Carlos Prestes, up until recently the head of the Brazilian Communist party and now in exile in Moscow, was condemned in absentia June 7 by a military tribunal in Sao Paulo to thirty years in prison. Thirty other persons, accused with him of "subversion," were likewise condemned. Only one was present, Luis Tenorio Lima. He was given a thirty-year sentence.
At the end of World War II, Iuis Carlos Prestes headed a big Communist party. Instead of struggling for power, he followed the line of "peaceful coexistence," a position he’ refused to change a even. after the experience of the Cuban Revolution. » nS
His class-collaborationist line helped pave the way for the April 1964 counterrevolutionary coup d'état. Since that time little has been heard from this once major figure in Brazilian politics.