Former senator for Rio de Janeiro, Paulo Duque, died this Wednesday (26) at the age of 92. In 2002, he was chosen as the second alternate to Senator Sérgio Cabral (PMDB), elected for the term from 2003 to 2011. With Cabral's resignation, elected governor of Rio, and with the leave of absence of the first alternate Regis Fichtner, chosen to head one of the portfolios in Cabral's government, Paulo Duque assumed the Senate seat in January 2007.
In 2009 he was chosen president of the Senate's Ethics and Parliamentary Decorum Council. In July 2010 he left his position as senator with the return of Regis Fichtner. Former senator Paulo Duque was married to Consuelo Tarquínio Duque and had two children. The burial will be this Thursday (27), at 14 pm, at the São João Batista cemetery, in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Paulo Hermínio Duque Costa was born in Rio de Janeiro, then the Federal District, on October 2, 1927, son of Hermínio Duque Estrada Costa and Maria Portugal Milward de Azevedo Duque Costa. His father, a well-known symbolist poet, was a police chief in Rio Preto (MG) and a lawyer for the Rede Mineira de Viação (Minas Gerais Railway Network). His mother was one of the founders and president of the regional directorate of the Republican Party (PR), an employee of the City Council, wrote articles on urban studies in the magazine Cultura Política, and actively participated in the campaign for the oil monopoly.
His family lived in Rio Preto until 1935, when they moved to Rio de Janeiro and Paulo Duque was enrolled in the boarding school of the Salesian College Santa Rosa. He later studied at the Lafayette Institute and, in 1945, joined the Brazilian Air Force (FAB), which he left the following year. He completed his secondary education at Colégio Resende.
In 1950, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law of Rio de Janeiro, now the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), completing his studies in 1954.
Later that year, he ran for city councilor in the Federal District under the PR party banner, but was not elected. He ran again in the election for the Constituent Assembly of the newly created state of Guanabara in 1960 and obtained the second alternate position.
Nominated by Artur Bernardes Filho, Paulo Duque was appointed president of the Companhia Nacional de Álcalis during the Jânio Quadros administration (1961). In the 1962 election, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the State of Guanabara (ALEG) under the PR party banner. During that legislature, he was the rapporteur for the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) on the Rio da Guarda Beggar Killers, which investigated the killing of beggars during the Carlos Lacerda administration.
With the establishment of the two-party system in 1965, he joined the National Renewal Alliance (ARENA), the party supporting the military regime established in 1964. He was chief of staff to the Secretary of Education of Guanabara during the Negrão de Lima administration.
In the 1966 election, he ran for re-election but was unsuccessful. Shortly after his electoral defeat, he presented a bill to the Assembly to merge the State of Guanabara with the State of Rio de Janeiro. This bill did not gain support, and eight years later, Paulo Duque would witness the implementation of the idea by the Geisel government. The electoral failure also led him to join the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) – a party opposed to the military regime.
In the 1970 elections, he ran again for state deputy under the MDB banner, obtaining an alternate position. In 1974, he was elected state deputy for the MDB and, in the drafting of the Constitution of the new state of Rio de Janeiro in 1975, he distinguished himself as president of the Special Commission on Internal Norms of the Constituent Assembly. During this period, he was part of the support group for the former governor of Guanabara, Chagas Freitas, in the dispute he waged with Amaral Peixoto for control of the MDB in Rio de Janeiro. With Chagas's nomination for state governor in 1978, Paulo Duque became one of his greatest allies in the Assembly.
He was successively re-elected as a state deputy from 1978 to 1994, following the end of the two-party system and the reorganization of the party under the banner of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB). In the 1989 state Constituent Assembly, Paulo Duque was the leader of the PMDB caucus and of the majority.
In 2000, he was Undersecretary of Consumer Protection in the government of Anthony Garotinho (1999-2002). In the 2002 election, he was part of the ticket headed by Sérgio Cabral, who was running for a Senate seat, as second alternate. In 2007, he assumed the mandate of senator for the state of Rio de Janeiro after the resignation of Cabral, who had been elected governor of Rio de Janeiro in 2006, and the leave of absence of Regis Fichtner Velasco, the first alternate, who had been appointed Chief of Staff of the government of Sérgio Cabral.
In the Federal Senate, he served as a member of the committees on Foreign Relations and National Defense, Human Rights and Participatory Legislation, and Education. In 2009, he became the second vice-leader of the majority bloc. He was also elected president of the Senate's Ethics and Parliamentary Decorum Council. His performance on the Ethics Council was controversial because he dismissed eleven requests to open proceedings against the president of the House, José Sarney, one against the leader of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), Arthur Virgílio, and another against Senator Renan Calheiros.
Paulo Duque married Consuelo Tarquínio Duque and had two children. His wife was a city councilor in Maricá (RJ) between 1997 and 2000.
In 1998, the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) published the book Paulo Duque, from the "Conversing about Politics" collection, containing testimonies given by him to the Carioca and Fluminense Political Memory Center of the Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary History of Brazil (Cpdoc).
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