[The following article is from the November 14 issue of the Buenos Aires Trotskyist weekly Avanzada Socialista.]
Student leader in Brazil. President in 1968 of the Student Center of the Engineering School, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
As a militant and a regional leader of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro Revolucionario [PCBR - Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party] he participated in the mass mobilizations in Rio de Janeiro in 1968.
For his political activities he was arrested and savagely tortured.
In 1970, he sought asylum in the Chilean Embassy together with Trotskyist intellectual Mario Pedrosa. There he began to make a critique of the ultraleftism and reformist deviations of the Brazilian revolutionary organizations, including a selfcriticism of his own positions.
Once in Chile, he continued to study Brazilian problems and together with other compañeros formed the Grupo Punto de Partida [Starting-point Group, which later joined the Fourth International as a sympathizing organization and published the documents Concerning a Kidnapping and Toward Building the Revolutionary Party in Brazil.
As a Trotskyist militant Comrade Cardoso integrated himself into the class struggle in Chile.
After the coup Comrade Cardoso was arrested on the street by a military unit and disappeared. Despite the efforts of the International Red Cross and the United Nations, and of his wife (who was freed after being arrested with our companero), Cardoso could not be found in any of the concentration camps of the junta, nor in the military posts.
His death has been confirmed by unofficial sources.
Latin American revolutionists demand that the military junta return his body immediately to his family.