In Memoriam

• Date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X15605041
• Published date: 01 September 2015

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 204, Vol. 42 No. 5, September 2015, 272

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X15605041

© 2015 Latin American Perspectives

272

In Memoriam

Maria Helena Moreira Alves

(1944–2015)

Maria Helena Moreira Alves passed away on July 27, 2015, in Havana, Cuba,

where she was receiving treatment for cancer. An internationally recognized

Brazilian political scientist and human rights activist, Alves was a longtime

collaborator of Latin American Perspectives and served as a participating editor.

During the late 1970s she participated in the transnational movement to

denounce the Brazilian military dictatorship through the Brazilian Labor and

Information Center. Between 1983 and 1985 she was the Director of Public and

International Relations of the city of Diadema, São Paulo, the first municipal

government led by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Over the next decade

she taught political economy and Latin American studies at the State University

of Rio de Janeiro. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison, the University of New Mexico, and Amherst College. She lectured at

many other institutions, including the University of California at the Riverside

and Santa Cruz campuses. More recently she was an outspoken critic of police

violence against Rio de Janeiro’s favela residents.

Alves received her doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology in 1982. A revised version of her dissertation, State and

Opposition in Military Brazil (University of Texas Press, 1985), also published in

Portuguese, is a classical study of the Brazilian military dictatorship. In addi-

tion, she co-authored with Philip Evanson Living in the Crossfire: Favela Residents,

Drug Dealers, and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro (Temple University Press, 2011),

which also appeared in Portuguese.

From a prominent carioca family, her mother Branca de Mello Franco Alves

was a member of the Vatican’s Council of Laity and played an important role

in encouraging the Catholic Church’s opposition to the military regime. Her

older brother Márcio Moreira Alves wrote a series of important articles about

torture in Brazil immediately after the 1964 coup d’état. Later as a Federal

Representative of the Brazilian Democratic Movement he gave a speech in

Congress against torture that the military used as a pretext to crack down on

the opposition. Her sister Branca Moreira Alves was a pioneering second-wave

feminist leader in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Alves met her lifetime partner, José Valentin, a Chilean anti-Pinochet activist,

in an international conference of trade unionists in Brazil. They later lived on a

farm on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, surrounded by their dogs, gardens,

and orchards. Maria Helena was known for her warm and ebullient personality

and passionate engagement in politics. She is survived by José Valentin, her

children Michael Stone-Malloy and Christina Malloy, and their children.

—James N. Green

605041LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X15605041Latin American PerspectivesGreen

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