This week, ordinary Brazilians have been jubilant at the weekend’s news that I’m Still Here pocketed an Oscar — the first ever Brazilian film to do so. Walter Salles’s work, which stars Fernanda Torres and Selton Mello, is a powerful exposition of the human cost paid by those who opposed Brazil’s military dictatorship, with its focus on the family of Rubens Paiva, an opponent of the junta who was tortured and murdered in 1971. I’m Still Here does not focus too deeply into the background of Paiva, a sometime social democratic politician who had lived in Yugoslavia and Paris following the dictatorship’s 1964 seizure of power but returned home to continue family life. It is, ostensibly, a story about the Paivas’ experience of state persecution and their fight for justice — particularly that of Rubens’s wife Eunice, who died at the age of eighty-nine in 2018.
But since the film has sparked widespread discussion about the decades of military dictatorship Brazil endured — and the human rights abuses that occurred under the rule of the armed forces — it is also worth reflecting on the corporate imperialism, mostly directed from the United States, which supplied the butchers, legitimized the regime, and ultimately killed Paiva and his comrades.
After being born in Santos, São Paulo, in 1929, the young Rubens Paiva threw himself into center-left student politics, using his position as a student council leader to endorse Oil Is Ours, an early 1950s campaign to completely nationalize Brazil’s oil industry. As a member of the Brazilian…
Auteur: Charlie Prado
