March of the Prestes Column
A Novel of Brazil's 25,000 Kilometer Rebellion

About this book:

They called themselves the *tenentes*—young lieutenants with rifles, ideals, and a death wish for Brazil's corrupt oligarchy. In July 1924, they seized São Paulo, daring the coffee barons to crush them. The government answered with artillery, reducing working-class neighborhoods to rubble. Rather than die in the ruins, the rebels vanished into the night, boarding trains and marching into the vast, red-dusted interior. What began as an urban coup became something far more dangerous: a 25,000-kilometer odyssey through jungle, swamp, and sertão, chased by federal armies, stalked by hunger and disease, transforming a mutiny into a legend.

From the iron rails of Bauru to the brown waters of the Paraná, from the caatinga's thorn scrub to the Bolivian border, the Prestes Column wrote history in blood and blistered feet. Colonel Miguel Costa forged a ragged column into a mobile fortress. Lieutenant Juarez Távora turned ambush into art. And somewhere on the horizon rode Luís Carlos Prestes—the "Knight of Hope"—turning a retreat into a crusade that would haunt Brazil's conscience for generations. They never took Rio. They never toppled a president. But they marched farther than any army in the Americas, and the country never forgot their footsteps.

*March of the Prestes Column* plunges you into the mud, the heat, and the desperate calculus of guerrilla war—where a trainload of ammunition weighs more than a manifesto, and the only supply line is the sympathy of peasants who have never seen a ballot box. Meticulously researched and fiercely told, this is the epic of Brazil's long march: a rebellion that failed to seize power but succeeded in shattering the myth that the interior belonged to the powerful. For readers of *War and Peace*, *The War of the End of the World*, and *Matterhorn*—the South American campaign you've never read, but will never forget.