The Press: Battler Below the Border

In Rio de Janeiro, where there are more than 25 dailies, one newspaper editor towers over all others. Energetic, chunky Carlos Lacerda, 39, crusading editor and publisher of the city's Tribune da Imprensa (Press Box), is South America's most vigilant spokesman for press freedom. In his battles for a free press below the border, Lacerda, who has twice been elected secretary of the Inter American Press Association, has earned a reputation among newsmen as "Latin America's 20th century Tom Paine." "He has done more for public morality in Brazil," says one of Rio's leading citizens, "than any other man." He has also been jailed eight times, beaten by thugs and sprayed with gunfire. Last week Editor Lacerda's crusading journalism won him Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Award,* given to those who make the biggest contribution toward furthering understanding between the Americas.

An Easy Position. The tribute was well earned. Lacerda has been fighting with his fists, his booming voice and his pen ever since he started out as a reporter on a daily in Rio at 14. Grandson of a Brazilian supreme court justice, Lacerda worked closely with Brazil's Communist Party, which two of his uncles had helped start, often led student strikes and demonstrations against the government. In 1935, with the police on his trail, he was smuggled to his grandfather's mango farm in the false bottom of a coffee truck. Four years later he broke sharply with the Communists after he outspokenly questioned the authority of top Reds.

Informed on by the Reds, Lacerda was jailed by the police for two weeks. When he got out, he was hired by Press Lord Assis Chateaubriand. He was soon running "Chato's" news service, did so well that at 28 he was named editor of O Jornal, Chateaubriand's biggest and best morning paper. Lacerda dumped canned government propaganda editorials in the wastebasket, regularly broke the ironhanded censorship of Dictator Vargas. "You put me in a difficult position [with the government]," Chateaubriand told Lacerda one day. Snapped back Lacerda: "I put you in an easy one. I resign." Lacerda became a columnist on Rio's Correio da Hanha, and, says he, "we demoralized censorship by ignoring it."

A Great Honor. In 1945 Lacerda, a bitter antiCommunist, took out after the Reds' "poor but honest candidate" for the presidency, punctured his chances of rolling up a big vote by pointing out that he owned 30 Rio apartment houses. When he launched an attack on strong-arm generals in the new government—which had replaced the dictatorship—five thugs beat him up on the street. Later he was cornered by hoodlums in the elevator of his apartment, escaped in the scuffle with only a cheekbone cracked. As his popularity spread, his voice became familiar over a Rio radio station and he was elected to the city council. But the radio station was taken over by a politician, and his paper showed signs of backing down from the kind of fights Lacerda thrived on, so he quit both.