Paulo Freire e a Operação Limpeza

This paper analyzes repression and resistance to the 1964 coup in Brazilian universities. To understand this first repressive cycle, called "Operation Cleaning", the case of the University of Recife, currently the Federal University of Pernambuco, was examined, focusing on the investigation of Paulo Freire and his collaborators of the Paulo Freire method of literacy, developed at the Service of Cultural Extension in partnership with the Popular Culture Movement (1960-1964). The methodology of this work dialogues with the contributions of the history of education from a sociocultural and political perspective, using mainly techniques from historical biography, in an approach that we call rhizohistory. The documentary corpus covers hemerographic and institutional sources and reports from national and regional truth commissions. The results reveal that professor Paulo Freire and his collaborators were the main targets of human rights violations in the educational and university environment in the state of Pernambuco in 1964, also highlighting the dynamics of resistance articulated by university professors in the procedural plots of the nascent military dictatorship.