RubensPaiva

The engineer and federal deputy Rubens Paiva delivered a speech considered historic on Rádio Nacional on April 1, 1964, urging the population to peacefully resist the military coup that had taken hold of the country the day before. A member of the PTB, he was a defender of the base reforms proposed by President João Goulart, who had been deposed by the coup. A few days later, his mandate was revoked, and the former deputy had to go into exile abroad.

Image description: The image is a sepia-toned photograph. In the foreground, we see a smiling man wearing a straw hat and a white shirt. He is inside a vehicle, with the steering wheel in front of him. The background is light-colored, possibly the interior of a car.

Paiva had returned to Brazil a few years earlier, when, on January 20, 1971, six agents armed with machine guns invaded his house, in Rio, and took him away under arrest. The engineer left home driving his own car. He would never be seen by his family again. Taken to the DOI-CODI, in Tijuca, he was tortured and killed. He was 41 years old and had five children. Eunice, his wife, and their daughter Eliana, just 15 years old, were also detained. The woman remained incommunicado for 12 days, and the teenager, for 24 hours. Today, it is known that Rubens Paiva's murder had less to do with his anti-dictatorship stance than with his work as a congressman. He was part of the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry (CPI) that investigated the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action (Ibad), the organization sponsored by the U.S. State Department that funded politicians and journalists involved in the campaign against João Goulart.

For many years, the military authorities kept up a farce to justify the ex-congressman's disappearance. They claimed that he was being driven by agents when he was allegedly kidnapped by left-wing guerrillas. Only in February 1996, 25 years after his arrest, was Eunice Paiva able to obtain her husband's death certificate.

Image description: The image is a black-and-white newspaper. In the center, there is a photo of a man with a beard and short hair. On the left, the headline reads "WHO KILLED RUBENS PAIVA?" in large, bold letters. The newspaper's background is white, with a few vertical and horizontal lines. The top of the newspaper has the word "SPECIAL" in smaller letters.

Eunice became an icon in the fight against the dictatorship and in the struggle for human rights. She undertook a tireless pilgrimage in search of her husband and earned a law degree to gain more tools to act in movements such as the fight for Amnesty, Diretas Já, and the Constituent Assembly. She died in 2018, on the very day that marked 50 years since the enactment of AI-5. Marcelo Rubens Paiva, one of the couple's children, is a writer and has already penned several texts in which he evokes his father's murder amid the horrors of the Military Dictatorship period.

In 2024, Marcelo's book made it to movie theaters in the adaptation directed by Walter Salles. The film "I'm Still Here" tells the drama of the Paiva family from Eunice's perspective, and was a success unlike few others in Brazilian cinema. With Selton Mello in the role of Rubens, and Fernanda Torres (Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for the role) as Eunice, the film won the unprecedented Best International Feature Film statuette at the 2025 Oscars. The film reignited the debate about the crimes against Rubens Paiva, his family, the population, and the Brazilian State, and about the right to memory in our country.