Luís Carlos Prestes (January 3, 1898 – March 7, 1990) was a leader of the 1920s tenente rebellion and the Communist opposition to the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil.

Known as the "Knight of Hope" - title of a biography written by Jorge Amado - Prestes helped organize the failed tenente rebellion of 1922, a revolt by the largely middle class officer corps and poor conscripted servicemen against the agrarian oligarchies that dominated Brazil's Old Republic (1889–1930). As he was sick with typhoid fever, he was not able to fight on the day of the rebellion. From 1924 Prestes was one of the leaders of the insurrectionary movement, leading the Coluna Prestes Prestes' column on a 25,000 km (15,534 mi) march through the rural Brazilian countryside, aiming not to defeat the enemy forces of the Federal government, but keep the column in being and continue to threaten the enemy.

The tenente revolt heralded the end of the politics of coffee and milk and coronelism and the beginning of social reforms. Years later, in 1930 the Revolution of 1930 would bring down the Old Republic. Joined by many moderate tenentes, but not Prestes, the Revolution of 1930 installed Getúlio Vargas as provisional president. Although the tenentes sympathized with him, Vargas was a far more conservative figure. As the tenentes wanted Prestes to join Vargas, Prestes decided to meet him in Porto Alegre and explained his idea of socialist revolution for around two hours. Vargas was highly impressed by him, and even donated 800 contos de réis, around 400,000 USD, but Prestes viewed Vargas as the leader of a bourgeois revolution, and decided to donate most of the money to the Latin American branch of the Comintern, which financed the group for a few years. Another part of the money was given to the tenente Siqueira Campos, who died in a plane crash while flying from Argentina to Brazil. His body was discovered three days later, but the money was never found.

Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento (September 29, 1943 – August 18, 1989) was a Colombian journalist and liberal politician who ran for the presidency of Colombia on two occasions, the first time representing the Liberal Party in 1982 which he lost to Belisario Betancur. These adverse results encouraged him to focus his aspirations in his political movement called New Liberalism that he had founded in 1979. The movement was initially the offspring of the mainstream Colombian Liberal Party but, with the mediation of former president Julio César Turbay, Galán returned to the party in 1987 and intended to win the party nomination for official candidate.

Galán declared himself enemy of the dangerous and influential Colombian drug cartels, mainly the Medellín Cartel led by Pablo Escobar (who had been part of his New Liberalism Movement) and Gonzalo Rodríguez aka "El Mexicano", that were corrupting the Colombian society at all levels. Galán supported an extradition treaty with the United States.

After receiving several death threats, on August 18, 1989 Galán was shot to death by hitmen hired by the drug cartels during a public demonstration in the town of Soacha, Cundinamarca. At the time he was comfortably leading the polls for the forthcoming 1990 Presidential election. His murder investigation remains partially unsolved.

José Eugênio Soares, best known as Jô Soares (born January 16, 1938 in Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian comedian, talk show host, author, theatrical producer, director, actor, painter and musician. Soares was born in Rio de Janeiro. After being educated in Switzerland and the United States, Soares returned to Rio and worked at TV Rio in 1958, writing and performing in comedy shows for the station. He acted as an American in Carlos Manga's O homem do Sputnik. In 1970, Soares started working at Rede Globo.

In 1988, Soares moved to SBT, where he hosted a talk-show, Jô Soares Onze e Meia ("Jô Soares Eleven Thirty"), until 1999. In 2000, Soares took his show's format (very similar to David Letterman's) back to Rede Globo, where it was then called Programa do Jô, and presents the program until the present day.

He is known for his knowledge of culture and literature, and for speaking English, Spanish, Italian and French besides his native Portuguese.

His first novel O Xangô de Baker Street was written in 1995 and has already been published in several other countries; it was made into a film in 2000. He has put out various jazz CDs. He has also produced many plays including a recent version of Richard III.

Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda.

Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal colour of hope.

On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.