Alfredo Sirkis (1950–2020)

Alfredo Hélio Syrkis—known publicly as Alfredo Sirkis—was a Brazilian writer, journalist, environmentalist, urban administrator and politician. Across five decades, his life passed through the central conflicts of modern Brazil: resistance to military dictatorship, exile and democratic return, the emergence of green politics, the transformation of Rio de Janeiro, and the effort to make climate policy a national and international priority.

At a glance

Early life and student activism

Sirkis was born in Rio de Janeiro on December 8, 1950, the only child of Polish Jewish immigrants. He became politically active while attending the Colégio de Aplicação of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In 1967 and 1968 he helped organize secondary-school students and participated in the mass demonstrations against Brazil’s military dictatorship, including the March of the One Hundred Thousand.

The dictatorship sharply intensified repression after the Institutional Act Number Five of December 1968. Like a number of young activists of his generation, Sirkis moved from public student organizing into clandestine resistance. In 1969 he joined the Revolutionary Popular Vanguard, or VPR, whose best-known leader was former army captain Carlos Lamarca. Living underground under the name Felipe, Sirkis took part in operations intended to exchange foreign diplomats for political prisoners held and tortured by the regime.

He participated in the planning and support of the 1970 kidnapping of West German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben and acted as an interpreter during the ambassador’s captivity. Later that year he helped guard Swiss ambassador Giovanni Enrico Bucher. During a vote among the kidnappers, Sirkis and José Roberto Gonçalves de Rezende opposed killing Bucher when negotiations stalled. Lamarca ultimately rejected the proposed execution, and the ambassador was released after seventy political prisoners were sent into exile. Sirkis later described this period in Os Carbonários, treating it as personal testimony rather than a heroic legend.

Exile and journalism

Sirkis left the VPR and Brazil in 1971. During eight and a half years of exile he lived in France, Chile, Argentina and Portugal. He worked as a journalist, sometimes using the name Marcelo Dias, and contributed to publications including Libération, Le Monde diplomatique, Expresso, República, Diário Popular, Jornal Novo and Cadernos do Terceiro Mundo.

In 1973 he reported from Santiago on Salvador Allende’s government for the recently founded Libération. He was in Chile during the military coup of September 11 and escaped to Buenos Aires, where he continued working as a correspondent. He later settled in Lisbon. These years supplied material for A Guerra da Argentina, an essay on Argentine political history, and Roleta Chilena, his memoir of the first years of exile.

The 1979 Amnesty Law allowed Sirkis to return to Brazil. He resumed journalism at magazines including Veja and IstoÉ, wrote for major Brazilian newspapers, and later developed scripts for television and cinema. His first post-return memoir, Os Carbonários, became a bestseller and received the 1981 Jabuti Prize. Its account of youth under dictatorship helped inspire the 1992 television miniseries Anos Rebeldes.

From revolutionary politics to green politics

After returning, Sirkis distanced himself from the Marxism of his guerrilla years and became an early advocate of political ecology. He worked with environmental movements concerned with the Amazon and urban quality of life, collaborated with Chico Mendes, and helped organize the Salve a Amazônia demonstration shortly before Mendes’s murder in 1988.

In 1986 Sirkis was among the founders of Brazil’s Green Party. He served as its first secretary-general and as national president from 1991 to 1999. Elected to Rio de Janeiro’s City Council in 1988, he became the chamber’s most-voted councilor and later won additional terms. As a legislator, he helped create protected areas at Prainha, Bosque da Freguesia, Lagoa de Marapendi and elsewhere. He drafted environmental provisions for Rio’s municipal constitution and master plan and authored the environmental tax-incentive measure known as the Sirkis Law, which helped make the civil-society Global Forum possible during the 1992 Earth Summit.

He ran for president of Brazil as the Green Party candidate in 1998, using the campaign principally to bring the party’s environmental program into national debate. He also stood for mayor and senator, and returned to Rio’s council in 2008. In 2009 and early 2010 he helped coordinate Marina Silva’s presidential campaign. His account of that campaign became O Efeito Marina.

Environmental and urban government in Rio

Sirkis served as Rio de Janeiro’s municipal secretary for the environment from 1993 to 1996. His administration expanded community reforestation across forty-seven hillside favelas, established an environmental unit within the Municipal Guard, advanced sanitation and lagoon restoration, and negotiated settlements that converted contested land into public parks and protected areas. It also built the foundation of what became Brazil’s largest urban bicycle network at the time.

From 2001 to 2006 he served as secretary for urban planning and president of the Pereira Passos Municipal Urban Planning Institute. His team prepared strategic projects for revitalizing Rio’s port area, worked on the reconstruction of Circo Voador, and facilitated projects including Cidade do Samba and Vila Olímpica da Gamboa. It also established neighborhood protections and an urban-regularization office that worked in sixty-one favelas to provide rules and guidance for legal construction.

For Sirkis, urban ecology was not a decorative addition to government. It joined transport, housing, land use, sanitation, public space and conservation. He developed that argument in Ecologia Urbana e Poder Local and returned to it throughout his public career.

Congress and climate diplomacy

Sirkis was elected federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro in 2010 and served from 2011 to 2015. In Congress he chaired the Joint Committee on Climate Change and served as a vice-chair of the Chamber’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee. He opposed efforts to weaken Brazil’s Forest Code and organized international climate discussions alongside the 2012 Rio+20 conference. In 2014 he chose not to seek reelection.

His climate work increasingly connected municipal experience, national legislation and international negotiations. He joined Brazilian delegations to numerous United Nations climate conferences, including the Paris conference that produced the 2015 agreement. He promoted the economic valuation of mitigation and the idea of positive carbon pricing: rewarding verified reductions rather than treating climate policy only as a cost or penalty.

In 2015 he founded Centro Brasil no Clima, a nonpartisan climate-policy think tank. From 2016 to 2019 he served as executive coordinator of the Brazilian Forum on Climate Change, bringing together government, business, academia and civil society. The forum organized the Ratifica Já! campaign supporting Brazil’s rapid ratification of the Paris Agreement and worked on proposals for implementing the country’s nationally determined climate commitment.

Writer

Sirkis published memoir, political history, fiction, urban analysis and climate policy. His ten-book bibliography ranges from A Guerra da Argentina and the memoirs Os Carbonários and Roleta Chilena to the family-based novel Corredor Polonês, the science-fiction novel Silicone XXI, and later works on urban ecology, electoral politics, megacities and decarbonization.

Writing linked the distinct stages of his life. The memoirs preserved the moral ambiguity and danger of resistance and exile. His urban and environmental books translated administrative practice into political argument. His final book, Descarbonário, drew together roughly thirty years of climate advocacy and appeared in 2020.

In his own words

Sirkis combined persistence with an irreverence that survived the many transformations of his politics. During his 1998 presidential campaign, he told Eco21: “I am a fighter for difficult causes.” Asked about the modest electoral result he might face, he answered that it would be “onward”—and that he remained “perfectly Zen” about it.

The same interview distilled his belief in practical local government: “Who can solve the problems of education, health, the urban and peripheral environment, transport and part of public security is local government: municipalities articulated with organized civil society.” These quotations are translated from Portuguese.

Death and memorials

Alfredo Sirkis died on July 10, 2020, aged sixty-nine, after his car left the Arco Metropolitano road in Nova Iguaçu. He was traveling to visit his ninety-six-year-old mother, Liliana, who was isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to see his son Guilherme.

His ashes were placed in Rio’s Dois Irmãos natural park, where he had supported reforestation and helped establish the protected area. At the memorial, his family planted a pink jequitibá in the newly inaugurated Friendship Grove; the park also received the Ana and Alfredo Lookout and an expanded official name honoring Sérgio Bernardes and Alfredo Sirkis. Niterói’s Parque Orla de Piratininga was named for him in recognition of his environmental work. The Climate Reality Project renamed its Green Ring Award in his honor.

Presenting the first Alfredo Sirkis Memorial Green Ring Awards in July 2020, Al Gore remembered him as someone who “lived a full and fascinating life” and approached climate, the Amazon and Brazil “with great enthusiasm.” The award continues to recognize exceptional climate communicators and activists.

Sirkis left his wife, Ana Borelli, his children—Anna Syrkis, Guilherme Syrkis and Noah Syrkis—and a public legacy that resists a single label. He was at different moments a student organizer, clandestine militant, exile, reporter, novelist, councilor, administrator, parliamentarian and climate negotiator. The connecting thread was a willingness to revise his own politics while continuing to act on the belief that democratic institutions could be made more courageous, practical and ecologically responsible.

Interviews and archives

Sources

This biography is an original synthesis based primarily on the Portuguese Wikipedia article and the English Wikipedia article, whose text is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Dates, public offices and bibliography were cross-checked against the Chamber of Deputies and Open Library. His words and political positions draw on the Eco21 interview, while memorial details were checked against the City of Rio de Janeiro. Sources accessed August 12, 2026.