Young opponent of the 1964 dictatorship, member of the late Brazilian Communist Party, councilor, deputy, prominent minister of two governments, executor of a campaign that displeased ruralists and the , leftist with confidence in the Army, right-wing coup leader for the , behind-the-scenes operator.
Died this Sunday (18) at the age of 73, at the DF Star hospital, in Brasília, Raul Belens Costa Jungmann Pinto brought with him the epithets above and more. His political chameleon-like malleability and negotiating skills were admired by allies and despised as a lack of coherence by detractors.
Jungmann has been a staple of national political news since the 1990s, when he became the face of the government’s agrarian reform (). His trajectory until then had been in the left field, starting at home.
His father, Sylvio Jungmann da Silva Pinto, was a journalist in Recife, where Raul was born in 1952. After the 1964 coup, his activism on the left led him to leave the city and migrate to São Paulo, but his son remained in the capital of Pernambuco.
He joined the former MDB in 1974, but as part of the group of communist militants of the party that sheltered the formal opposition to the regime. In 1976, he began studying psychology at the Catholic University, but did not graduate, preferring political activity.
In 1980, with the opening that would lead to the end of the dictatorship five years later, he joined the now legalized Communist Party of Brazil and spent the decade working as a consultant and directing NGOs.
Jungmann joked that he liked to send stickers on WhatsApp to interlocutors that took him back to that time, like various versions of Soviet leader Lenin in funny poses.
He truly entered public life in 1990, when he took over the Planning Department of his state. Three years later, he arrived in Brasília. From 1993 to 1995, he was number 2 at the Ministry of Planning. He caught the attention of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, head of the Treasury until 1994, with whom he began to talk frequently. President, the toucan invited him to head the .
In the organization, he gained a reputation as a tough negotiator with land grabbers, being elevated in 1996 to the post of minister responsible for agrarian reform, where he remained until 2002. He arrived in the wake of the Eldorado do Carajás (PA) massacre in the countryside.
He was effective in terms of settlements carried out, which, added to his origins on the left, made him be painted as an enemy by ruralists in Congress. As for the landless, always in conflict to put pressure on FHC,
In 2002, he was elected deputy for the PPS, successor to the PCB that he had helped to found with Roberto Freire, also from Recife, one of his political godfathers, from whom he distanced himself. His party supported the first government, but Jungmann preached independence.
He became an animal from Brasilia once and for all, with a long stint in the Chamber (2003-11 and 2015-16). He was what journalists call a “good source”: always accessible and with varied dialogues, even when out of power.
Part of this came from his birth, part from the years of his relationship with the then director of Globo in the capital, Silvia Faria. Before that, he was married to Patrícia, with whom he had children Bruno and Júlia.
He loved telling stories and starred in some of them — the time he famously broke up a fight between a PT deputy and a colleague in the office building, a future minister, who exaggerated his sexual antics.
Between the two periods in Brasília, he had a brief stint as a councilor in Recife. In the Chamber as a substitute, he approached the then vice-president Michel Temer, whom he already knew from the Chamber.
He actively participated in the opposition to the President of the Planalto, and signed one of the requests that his friend (Supreme) deemed valid as head of the PT’s Civil House, seeking to escape the clutches of Operation Lava Jato.
He himself appeared on the famous list of bribes paid to politicians by the former Odebrecht, but the case ended up closed.
However, he did not vote for Dilma because he was a substitute. Temer called him to the thorny mission of commanding the Defense. He became close to the powerful Army commander of the time, Eduardo Villas-Boas, who was involved in politics under Bolsonaro.
It happened, admitted Jungman under the Temer government. At his side, General Sérgio Etchegoyen, who occupied the Institutional Security Office and would be his partner in private initiatives, gained weight.
After his first year in office, Jungmann received an even thornier pineapple to peel in 2018: he was transferred to the newly created Ministry of Public Security, with the mission of public security in Rio.
The results were disappointing, as he himself said privately, and under his watch there was the (PSOL) and its driver, the most notorious political crime in recent years.
Jungmann complained about the slowness of the police and Justice, infiltrated by what he calls — the militias, drug trafficking and their representatives in politics.
He left the government and played a very active role behind the scenes during the four years of turmoil embodied in (), whom he never supported. His knowledge of the intricacies of the barracks, the Supreme Court, Congress and the Planalto made him a kind of informal firefighter during crises.
From then on, its influence ebbed and turned to the private sector. He never abandoned the theme and, in one in 2021, he drew the risk of a coup scenario very close to the events of January 8th.
In 2023, he assumed the presidency of the mining companies’ association, with the dual mission of destigmatizing the sector in the environmental area and accompanying those in Brumadinho (MG). He operated actively in the field until the end of his life on the case in London.
In mid-2024, bothered by two hernias, he underwent a series of tests and discovered tumors in the pancreas and peritoneum. During treatment, he took over the coordination of conversations about the new legal regulations for the military, something unfinished José Múcio (Defense).
He underwent six months of chemotherapy, which robbed him of vitality and his sense of taste, one of his rare complaints. He switched to hormones and showed occasional improvements, but, throughout 2025, the treatment became palliative. He leaves his children and Natalie, with whom he lived in Brasília.
