Journalist Raimundo Rodrigues Pereira, who marked the press’ resistance to the military dictatorship, died this Saturday (2), in Rio de Janeiro, at the age of 85.
Born in Exu, a city 431 km from Recife, on September 8, 1940, Pereira trained as a physicist and ended up being taken to it while studying engineering at ITA (Instituto Tecnológico da Aeronáutica), between 1960 and 1964, where he wrote for a student newspaper called O Suplemento.
In 1967, he worked as an editor at Folha da Tarde, an afternoon newspaper that the company Folha da Manhã, which publishes the Sheetowned at the time. At the invitation of journalist Mino Carta, he joined the team that founded Veja magazine, published by Abril, in 1968.
The ABI (Brazilian Press Association) stated that Pereira was “one of the most important names in the history of the Brazilian press and a central figure in the democratic resistance during the military dictatorship”. The cause of death was not disclosed.
The texts in the student newspaper in which Pereira wrote had a negative impact in 1964, the year of the military coup, before his graduation.
That year, he was the target of political persecution, ended up being expelled from ITA and was arrested by the Dops (Department of Political and Social Order) in São Paulo. He spent two months at the Santos Air Base, in Guarujá, on the coast of São Paulo.
After his release, without a job or a degree, Pereira taught mathematics and one of his students invited him to write for technical magazines that led him to professional journalism.
After working at Folha da Tarde in 1967 and participating in the team that founded Veja the following year, Pereira coordinated the magazine’s team that produced one of the country’s first reports on torture carried out by the military dictatorship, using a phrase from an advisor to Emílio Médici who said that the then president did not admit such practices.
The team reported a series of cases, under the pretext of informing the government about occurrences of this type, and published an edition with the word “Tortures” on the cover. The episode is detailed in the book Contracurrent, a biography of Pereira produced in 2013 by students at Faculdade Cásper Líbero.
Pereira also worked in other prominent outlets, such as Realidade magazine, until joining the newspapers Opinião and Movimento, publications of resistance to the dictatorship in the late 1970s.
The Movement circulated between 1975 and 1981, under prior censorship and financial difficulties. Memorial da Resistência, a state museum based in the former Dops of São Paulo, describes the publication as “one of the most important resistance newspapers in the country”.
Pereira’s parents were traders who moved to São Paulo in the 1960s. In recent years, he lived in Rio de Janeiro. The journalist was married to sociologist Sizue Imanishi, who died in 2020, and leaves four daughters.
