Paulo Markun was a young journalist of 22 years old when he met, then 15 years older. It was 1974, and Vlado worked at Visão magazine, for which Markun — at the time a reporter for Sheet– did some freelance work.
The relationship between the two grew closer that year and the following year, to the point that Herzog invited Markun to be head of reporting when he took over as director of the station, in September 1975.
Months earlier, when Vlado began writing the script for the film “Doramundo”, by João Batista de Andrade, Markun lent his friend his family’s apartment in Guarujá (SP) to guarantee him the peace required by the work.
Both were also members of the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party), and Markun was arrested at DOI-Codi days before Herzog, about whom he was forced to speak, through torture and then in a manuscript — in both cases, he gave public information about his colleague and tried to avoid saying anything that could complicate him.
Vlado was murdered on the same day he was arrested, October 25, 1975, after torture sessions. She invented that she had committed suicide, a hoax that was later debunked.
Markun dealt with Herzog’s story in the biography “Meu Amigo Vlado” (Objetiva, 2005) and, before that, in the book “Vlado – Retrato de um Homem e de uma era” (Brasiliense, 1985), of which he was the organizer.
Now, together with his son Pedro Markun, a digital activist who works with artificial intelligence, the journalist developed a tool that recreated Herzog’s voice and was fed by books, letters, reports and various articles about the character’s life and professional trajectory.
A Sheet tested the tool firsthand with Herzog’s avatar. On the 30th, Markun, on a stage, where he, fellow journalists Caco Barcellos (TV Globo) and Mariana Castro (Fast Company) and the audience will ask questions to the chatbot, at a Sesc event.
The following day, at the same event, Markun participates in the debate “AI, ethics and the construction of historical memory”, with USP professors Eugênio Bucci and Leonardo Foletto.
“We joined TV Cultura on September 3 [de 1975] and the next day a systematic campaign began that the communists had taken over the station, promoted by Wadih Helu, José Maria Marin [políticos aliados à ditadura] and Cláudio Marques [jornalista]. There were little notes in newspapers and such, in a wave that would culminate in Vlado’s arrest, but which had to do with the arrests of journalists who were militants of the Communist Party that took place during that period”, recalls Markun.
For him, the commotion that followed his friend’s murder, with actions that overturned the suicide farce, was crucial to the beginning of the dictatorship’s loosening.
“We already had some freedom of the press, some breathing space. The fact that Vlado was a respected journalist contributed. And there was the conjunction of religious groups [liderados pelo arcebispo dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, o rabino Henry Sobel e o pastor presbiteriano Jaime Wright] and the mobilization of journalists, with the great role of the union president, Audálio Dantas. The so-called perfect storm, in a good way. Vlado became a martyr against his will, but he did”, analyzes Markun.
The biographer remembers his friend as someone who was both disaffected and very professional. “There are journalists who think they are the salt of the earth. He didn’t take himself too seriously, although he took what he did very seriously. He was very rigorous, concerned with journalistic precision, and had an understanding of the process we were going through.”
Politically, Markun notes, Vlado was a left-wing activist “critical of Stalinism and involved in journalistic action that contributed politically within the circumstances, which is what made him accept the direction of journalism at TV Cultura under the management of Paulo Egydio, a dictatorship government. He saw that as a possibility of action.”
Markun remembers an account by Clarice Herzog, Vlado’s widow, who once asked her husband why he had joined the Communist Party. “He said: because I, as a Jew, cannot be a member of the Catholic Church. And there are only two organizations in Brazil today that work efficiently to try to defeat the dictatorship, the Church and the Communist Party, so I am in the Communist Party.”
“And, even in the party, he was never dogmatic, a very enthusiastic activist. He had concerns about cinema, literature, journalism, but he was a committed man.”
And how does Markun think Herzog would face the current world? “I think that today, at more than 80 years old, he would still be willing to do things, think that it is possible for the world to improve, but I would say that he would probably be discouraged in the face of certain records of reality, not only in journalism, but in world politics.”
