Number 767 on Rua Pio 11, in the Lapa neighborhood, is today the address of a brick-faced townhouse that houses medical offices and goes unnoticed. One would never imagine that the place, where there once stood a single-story house with a porch and an ogival archway entrance, was the scene of a bloodbath.
There, nearly 50 years ago, on December 16, 1976, one of the dictatorship's most brutal acts in São Paulo took place. It is considered the last killing committed by the military regime, coming after those of Vladimir Herzog and Manoel Fiel Filho.
The massacre in Lapa, as it became known, was carried out by military personnel from the DOI-Codi of the 2nd Army and by officers from the Dops, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Rufino Ferreira Neves and in the presence of the notorious detective Sérgio Paranhos Fleury. It targeted members of the central committee of the PCdoB (Communist Party of Brazil), who ended up killed, arrested, or tortured.
The repression agencies had already been surveilling the house, knowing that in those days a meeting would take place with part of the party's leadership — then operating clandestinely — to carry out a critical assessment of mistakes made in the conduct of the Araguaia guerrilla campaign and to discuss a new strategic direction.
Nine committee members took part in the gathering, although two other militants were also on the premises: the driver Joaquim Celso de Lima and the housekeeper Maria Trindade. The meeting took place on the 14th and 15th, and when it ended, already late at night, the participants began leaving the address in pairs to board a blue Corcel driven by Lima so they could return to their hideouts.
At that moment, the repressive operation was launched. Without arousing suspicion, the police followed the car on each of its trips and waited for its occupants to disembark in order to apprehend them away from the driver's sight, as he returned to the house unsuspecting to make another run. In this way, one after another, João Batista Franco Drummond, Wladimir Pomar, Haroldo Lima, Aldo Arantes, Joaquim Celso de Lima himself, and Elza Monnerat were arrested.
In the early morning hours of the 16th, the house was stormed from all sides by government agents. Remaining inside, along with Maria, were the leaders Ângelo Arroyo, a survivor of the guerrilla campaign, and Pedro Pomar, a founding member of the party and a former federal deputy who had had his mandate revoked. The woman was spared, but the two men were gunned down without offering any resistance. Everything happened very quickly.
According to Pedro Estevam da Rocha Pomar, grandson of one of the victims, in his book "Massacre na Lapa - Como o Exército Liquidou o Comitê Central do PCdoB" (Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo), some 50 police officers and soldiers took part in the massacre, and Rua Pio 11 was closed to traffic.
The operation claimed another fatal victim: Franco Drummond, who died under torture at the DOI-Codi headquarters on Rua Tutoia, in the Paraíso neighborhood. The official account of his death — later disproven — claimed he had been struck by a vehicle while fleeing a chase near Avenida 9 de Julho.
All the other militants, with the exception of José Gomes Novaes, who managed to escape, and Manoel Jover Telles, later identified as a traitor, were taken to prison and brutally tortured. An internal inquiry by the PCdoB found that Telles had informed the Army of the dates and location of the meeting.
In his book, Pomar recounts that Telles had been captured and imprisoned a few months earlier in Rio de Janeiro, and had decided to negotiate and cooperate with the repression agencies.
"Lapa also terribly marks the tragedy of the Brazilian left in the 1970s," says Pomar. "The PCdoB was the only organization still structured at that point and had its leadership destroyed by the betrayal of a veteran communist, a man proven and experienced in the struggle, as they used to say in the jargon of the time."
