Araújo, son of a prominent labor defense lawyer, had joined the PCB early. He had traveled through Latin America, met Castro and Che Guevara, and been imprisoned for several months in 1964. He joined the armed struggle after the issue of AI-5 by the dictatorship in 1968. In early 1969, he began to discuss the merger of his group with Colina and Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (), led by Carlos Lamarca. Rousseff attended meetings about the merger, formalized in two conferences in Mongaguá, thus leading to the creation of Revolutionary Armed Vanguard Palmares (). Rousseff and Araújo attended these conferences. So did Lamarca, who thought that Rousseff was a "stuck-up intellectual" because she defended revolution through political engagement of the working class, as opposed to VPR's military-based sense of revolution.