Background
Carlos Frederico Werneck de Lacerda was born in Vassouras on 30 April 1914, the son of Mauricio Paiva de Lacerda and Olga Wemeck de Lacerda. His father was a newspaperman, national congressman, and leading left-wing politician.
Carlos Frederico Werneck de Lacerda was born in Vassouras on 30 April 1914, the son of Mauricio Paiva de Lacerda and Olga Wemeck de Lacerda. His father was a newspaperman, national congressman, and leading left-wing politician.
As a law student at the University of Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Lacerda was one of the organizers of the Communist Youth Federation.
He was jailed briefly in 1937 but was quickly released, and began his newspaper career. He broke with the Communist Party in 1939.
In February 1945, by publishing an interview with an opposition political leader, Lacerda first gained national prominence. When President Getulio Vargas did not punish Lacerda, freedom of the press was reestablished.
The Vargas dictatorship fell in October 1945. In 1947 Lacerda was elected a National Democratic Union (UDN) member of the Rio de Janeiro City Council. He founded his own newspaper. Tribuna da imprensa, as the major critic of those who supported former dictator Vargas. When Vargas was democratically elected president in 1950, Lacerda continued his most violent opponent. He organized the Lantern Club in order to expose the corruption of the Vargas government.
On August 5, 1954, an attempt to murder Lacerda failed, but an air force officer who was with him was killed. This event provoked a major crisis that ended only when President Vargas committed suicide on August 24. The general public felt that Lacerda had been the catalyst in these events, but his effort to get the 1955 election postponed for fear that a pro-Vargas politician would be elected failed.
Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira and Joao Belchior Marques Goulart, former labor minister under Vargas, were elected president and vice president respectively, in October 1955. When Lacerda and Acting President Carlos Luz attempted to carry out a coup against President-elect Kubitschek, they were thwarted by Minister of War Henrique Lott. Lacerda went into temporary exile for a year in the United States.
Throughout the Kubitschek administration, Lacerda became one of the important leaders of the UDN. With the 1960 presidential election approaching, he successfully supported Quadros, even though Quadros was not a member of the UDN, as the only possible candidate to defeat the Vargas forces. Quadros won, and Lacerda won the governorship of the city of Rio de Janeiro, which had been established as the state of Guanabara.
In 1966 Lacerda attempted to create a new political party, the Frente Ampla, an alliance with former Presidents Kubitschek and Goulart. The military reaction was predictable. Lacerda was stripped of his political rights for ten years and he was imprisoned briefly.
Lacerda then left politics and returned to journalism. He also founded a publishing house. He died unexpectedly, after a brief illness.