Plínio Soares de Arruda Sampaio (26 July 1930 – 8 December 2022) was a Brazilian intellectual and political activist, who was affiliated with the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL). He ran as a candidate for the presidency of the Federative Republic of Brazil in 2010. A graduate of University of São Paulo School of Law in the class of 1954, he was president of the Catholic University Youth and was an active member of Popular Action. He had been a prosecutor, deputy in the 1988 Constituent Assembly and chaired the Brazilian Association for Land Reform (ABRA), an institution that fights for land reform in Brazil. He also directed the weekly newspaper Correio da Cidadania. Beginning of public life Arruda Sampaio was born in São Paulo. He entered public life when Carvalho Pinto was the governor of the state of São Paulo (1959–1963). At this time, he was appointed as the vice director of the Civil State House. In 1959, a year after the election of Carvalho Pinto, Arruda Sampaio became coordinator of the government's action plan, a position he held until 1962. He was also secretary of legal affairs, and between 1961 and 1962 he worked for the city of São Paulo as secretary of interior and justice affairs. In 1962, he was elected congressman by the Christian Democratic Party and became a member of the committee on economics, agriculture and law enforcement and the committee on social legislation in the Brazilian chamber of deputies. At this point, he created a special committee for land reform and proposed a model of reform that aroused the indignation of the country's powerful landlords. After the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état he was one of the first 100 Brazilians to be deprived of their political rights for ten years by the military dictatorship during the first ten days of the new regime. Exile and the Brazilian Democratic Movement Arruda Sampaio was exiled to Chile, where he lived for six years, working at the FAO. In 1970, he moved to the United States, where he worked at the FAO and at the IDB in Washington, before beginning a master's degree in agricultural economics at Cornell University. Returning to Brazil in 1976, he began teaching at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, where he founded the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Cedec) and engaged in the campaign to end the military regime and the amnesty of politicians who