Towards the final months of finishing this book, I still hadn’t found out who Francisco Correia was. I decided to try one last time. I contacted some of the pioneering scholars of the field: Denise Rollemberg, Marcos Napolitano, Marcelo Ridenti, Maurice Politi and Anthony Pereira, but nobody could say for sure. A running theory was that it might have been Francisco Correa Weffort, a Brazilian professor of political science who served as Brazil’s minister of culture between 1995 and 2002, but he hadn’t spent any significant amount of time in Europe during the dictatorship.

Then, an answer arrived, first from former exile Tullo Vigevani, and then, a few hours later, from an archivist at the Centro de Documentação e Memoria, the collection managed by José Luiz del Roio, who I had interviewed in 2016. ‘Francisco Correia is one of the most brilliant and important people in the contemporary history of the Left in Brazil and overseas’, the email began. Of this I was sure. It only takes looking back over the pages of this book to realise the impact and reach of his efforts. And then, the answer was revealed: ‘It was the codename that José Luiz del Roio used in clandestinity, when he was in Europe.’

José Luiz was seemingly amused by the whole conversation, ‘they told me this Francisco Correia guy was a terrorist.’

I spoke to José Luiz one last time before submitting the book. I was eager to hear from ‘Francisco Correia’ himself, and to ask him what he thought of my work. This second encounter was very different from the first. In 2016, I went to Brazil to carry out interviews and explore the country’s archives. One of the first places I visited were the CEDEM archives at the State University of São Paulo, UNESP, home to collections of important events in Brazil’s social and political history, particularly relating to public education and social movements. Sat down in his office, overlooking the Praça da Sé, José Luiz and I spoke about Brazilian exiles and their political activism overseas. An archivist walked me through the centre’s collections and set me up with the gloves I needed to handle the delicate materials.