“On April 1, 1964, I woke up in the morning, turned on the radio, and there was news that a somewhat furious citizen had started to come down from Minas Gerais and that a coup was being carried out. The first feeling was one of enormous frustration. There was a rise of the left, a very strong movement. It was like a cold shower falling on all the hope that had been growing. It was a great sadness collapsing. Damn! We were going forward and we are going back!” Words of the architect, visual artist, professor Sérgio Ferro, 85, to TUTAMÉIA. One of the creators of the Arquitetura Nova group, he recalls the brutality of the military coup, talks about his trajectory and the current moment, in an interview recorded on February 13, 2024. “This feeling of retreat, of loss, of frustration has happened several other times in my life. Recently, we had a near coup, after a real and institutional coup, and my feeling was the same. After Lula's government and Dilma's governments, suddenly, once again, there was misery, loss, regression, stupidity, evil and violence. Unfortunately, as Marx said, history repeats itself and this time it repeated itself twice in tragicomedy”, he states. Sérgio Ferro says: “We fell from this kind of ascending line of hope with a sudden, dull blow in the opposite direction. It was kind of surreal. We knew that there was a very intense right-wing climate, but it seemed to us like desperate voices. The right was very ridiculous, petty. It was a very bad moment in our lives, in the lives of an entire generation”. “On April 2nd and 3rd, there were already cases of people being dragged off the streets, arrested in the Northeast, there was already raw, gratuitous violence against people they arrested. A regime of raw, military, horrific violence had already been established. This was immediate. In the days that they took power, they took power with blatant violence, blatant and destined to be known. The knowledge of this violence frightened us to react”. “One of the things that we least imagine is that the revolution, first, is sudden. Everyone knew that it would be imaginable. But, in practice, this did not transform into a clear, sharp awareness. None of us believed that a coup was possible. And the coup really happened like a joke, the first act: the parade of the idiot miner”. “The second act, right after that, reverses. What began as a kind of military parade turns into disgusting raw violence. It is very difficult to bear this rupture, this cut between lively, joyful hope, hope for life, followed almost without interruption, in one day, in one night by the opposite: cruelty, evil, torture, total disregard for legality. It was not easy to live. And the Communist Party was like a dizzy cockroach, not knowing what to do”. “For the first time in my life I felt fear. You are afraid of your fellow man. It is not the devil, an imaginary thing, it is someone who is right in front of you”. Sérgio recalls that the coup quickly reached USP. The School of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU) was the subject of a military investigation. “Military men came to FAU, still on Maranhão Street. They entered and set up shop in the room where Flávio Mota taught and I was his assistant; then, in the room where I taught. And they started calling professors to answer completely idiotic questions: ‘Are you a communist? Do you have contact with Russia?’. Completely absurd things. We, the younger ones, had no hierarchical position to defend. I lied a lot. I said nothing”. “That was not the case with [Vilanova] Artigas. He was already a very influential member of the Communist Party. Artigas faced the interrogation with great dignity. He revealed who he was, what he did, what he thought. And he left the architecture school under arrest. Imagine the shock, the violence, seeing your teacher being taken away by those people you had heard about, those imbecile military men of the highest order.” “It was pure brutality. Soon lists of fired and suspended professors, among other intellectuals, began to appear. Artigas was arrested and taken to a prison ship. He was later released, always with extraordinary dignity. The university institution, unfortunately, practically did not react.” The testimony is part of a series of interviews about the military coup of 1964, which is turning sixty years old. With the motto “What I saw on the day of the coup,” TUTAMÉIA is publishing more than two dozen videos this March with characters who lived through that moment, such as Almino Affonso, João Vicente Goulart, Anita Prestes, Frei Betto, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, Ladislau Dowbor, José Genoíno, Roberto Amaral, Guilherme Estrella and Rose Nogueira. Subscribe to TUTAMÉIA TV and visit the TUTAMÉIA website, https://tutameia.jor.br, a journalistic service created by Eleonora de Lucena and Rodolfo Lucena. Access this link to join the AMIG@S DO TUTAMÉIA group, exclusive for the dissemination and distribution of our journalistic production: http