‘I'm Still Here': The Brazilian story of forced disappearances by the military dictatorship

• Posted 12 December 2024 4:30 GMT
• Written by Fernanda Canofre
• Read this post in Malagasy, русский, Português

Poster of ‘I'm Still Here’. Image by Alile Dara Onawale/Videofilmes.

If you've seen anything about ”I'm Still Here” (“Ainda Estou Aqui”), the Brazilian film about a forced disappearance during the military dictatorship (1964–1985), you would have come across the photo above.

A screenshot from the film and the image of its official poster shows Rubens Paiva with two of his five children and his wife, Maria Eunice, on a beach in Rio de Janeiro. While Paiva and the children smile, facing the camera, Eunice looks in a different direction and frowns. Army trucks are passing by the street nearby, and their lives are about to be forever changed.

Paiva is one of the 434 dead and disappeared people in Brazil, according to the National Truth Commission. In January 1971, security forces took Paiva from his home to be interrogated by the police and drove him in his own car. He never came back, and his body was never found.

The film, directed by Walter Salles, is based on a book with the same title written by Rubens Paiva's son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and recounts his family's everyday life in the 1970s and how they faced the days following his father's absence, setting a special focus on his mother, Eunice. His parents are played by actors Selton Mello and Fernanda Torres.

It tells a story of the present past, in the same year as the 60th anniversary of the coup d'état that started the dictatorship, and while national headlines report about a military plot to attempt a new coup that would impede Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva‘s inauguration after the 2022 elections.

The movie passed 2 million viewers in Brazil alone, more than the national audience for blockbusters such as Wicked, and is Brazil's submission for the Oscars.

A true story

Rubens Paiva's abduction is an emblematic case from one of the harshest eras for human rights violations in Brazil. According to his son, Marcelo, the National Truth Commission (CNV) installed during the government of Dilma Rousseff — herself a former political prisoner and guerrilla fighter — gave him important elements for his book.

About two years prior to Paiva's forced disappearance, the regime issued the act that would toughen the repression in December 1968: the Institutional Act Number Five, AI-5. The suspension of civil rights was expanded, and ”it enabled institutionalization of arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing by the regime,” as summarized on Wikipedia.

When the coup d'état overthrew João Goulart's government, Paiva was one of the Congressmen who had their mandates revoked. An engineer and father of five children, he had been elected by the state of São Paulo two years before with Goulart's party. On April 1, 1964, with the coup underway, he spoke at the National Radio, defending the president and calling São Paulo's government ”fascist” for supporting the coup.

Paiva went to exile but returned to Brazil a while later and carried on with his life alongside his family.

On January 20, 1971, at 41 years old, he was taken from his home, in front of his wife and children, to be interrogated — never to return. Eunice and their 15-year-old daughter were also taken right after, but they didn't see him at the army facility where they were held. ”I'm Still Here” focuses on how his wife coped with this moment and his brutal and sudden disappearance, without telling much about his fate, in the same way Eunice couldn't get any answers for decades about what happened to her husband.

Past uncovered 

More details were revealed years later through hearings at the Truth Commissions, which began in 2012. São Paulo's state commission was even named after Paiva.

In 1986, Cecilia de Barros Viveiros de Castro, a woman who was detained at the Galeão Airport after visiting her son in Chile, told the police she recognized Paiva in a car when she was being taken to be interrogated. Letters from people exiled there were found with her and another woman, one of them addressed to Paiva.

Six months after Paiva was taken, in June 1971, the military regime issued a document that was read by a Congressman at the National Congress, claiming they were driving Paiva to a location to identify the house of the person responsible for bringing the letters, but the car was intercepted, a shooting took place, and he fled with a group.

As the National Truth Commission's report stresses, this version of the story and the denial of knowing his whereabouts were repeated by the military over the years despite contradictions.

Official records and testimonies given to the Truth Commissions made it collapse. Coronel Ronald Leão told CNV that Paiva arrived at the 1st Army DOI (Department of Information), and he was then interrogated and tortured. An eyewitness said the commander responsible for the place was made aware Paiva wouldn't survive the torture sessions.

Former Colonel Paulo Malhães, also in a deposition to the CNV, said those who died at the hands of the repression were usually not buried to avoid leaving any trace. He went on to describe their methods to hide the corpses: they would erase the features of victims, remove teeth and fingerprints, and cut their stomachs to avoid gas so the bodies wouldn't float on the water after being thrown at rivers or the sea.

About Paiva, Malhães said he did receive the mission to hide the body but couldn't conclude it because of other tasks. After Malhães’ assassination in 2014, his widow came clean, saying he told her Paiva was thrown into a river.

The same year, 43 years after Paiva's abduction, five military officers were accused by the Federal Public Prosecution of killing and concealing his corpse. The case stalled at the Supreme Court, with three of the accused men dying since then without ever being judged.

Past present

At the same time that Rubens Paiva's story fills movie theaters with Brazilians learning more about the state terrorism that shattered lives and families, news about another coup attempt, also involving military officers, made the past even more present.

On November 21, the Federal Police indicted former president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people for attempting a coup that would have ruptured the rule of law to keep him in power after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's election win in 2022. Among the accused, 25 are military or former military, including Bolsonaro himself.

According to the investigation's 884-page report that was released to the public, the former president led the criminal organization that plotted the coup d'état. The document says, as reported by AP:

The evidence collected throughout the investigation shows unequivocally that then-President Jair Messias Bolsonaro planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organization aiming to launch a coup d’etat and eliminate the democratic rule of law, which did not take place due to reasons unrelated to his desire.

The case will continue its legal process with the federal prosecution.

In 2014, a statue honoring Paiva's memory was placed at the National Congress. Bolsonaro, a congressman at the time who grew up in the same region where the Paiva family had a farm, showed up at the ceremony and spat on it in front of Paiva's family members.

In an interview while promoting the film, director Walter Salles said:

You know, when we started this, we thought that we were making a film to somehow reflect a bit of our past that hadn't been captured by the camera. And then we realized that it is also about our present, and may be also about our future.