[Trending News] The harrowing history behind 'I'm Still Here'—the film that's captured the world's heart

The result was Brazil’s armed forces at peak hubris, emboldened by the so-called “Brazilian Miracle” (five straight years of unprecedented economic growth), the glories of a third World Cup victory, and the United States-led Cold War against global communism.

Médici oversaw the harshest crackdown on democratic liberties to date, including blanket press censorship. When newspapers were not set ablaze or shut down outright, censors lurked in newsrooms to ink out inconvenient truths. Dozens of journalists were jailed or murdered.

These were Brazil’s “Years of Lead,” best known for the nationwide dragnet Médici cast to capture and kill leftist opponents of the regime. The most strident militants took up arms, robbing banks and kidnapping high profile officials—including U.S. ambassador to Brazil Charles Elbrick in 1969—for ransom.

A Black and white photograph shows a young boy standing as a tank is driven on the street. — A boy observes soldiers and a tank during a rally organized by President João Goulart prior to the military coup in 1964. The military dictatorship went on to rule for 21 years, instituting an unprecedented crackdown on civil liberties and a nationwide dragnet to capture and kill leftist opponents of the regime.

Photograph By Domício Pinheiro/Agência Estado/AE, AP Images

Why Paiva’s story in ‘I’m Still Here’ resonates

Paiva was no bomb thrower. A moderate leftist, he had been stripped of his congressional mandate when the miliary took power and steered clear of militant politics ever since. Rather, he was a middle-aged family man, a successful civil engineer, and a well-heeled member of Brazil’s bien pensant. His offense, ostensibly, was to have served as a go-between for Brazilian political exiles in Chile corresponding with relatives and colleagues back home.

Paiva’s remains were never found, nor has anyone been held to account for his murder or forced disappearance— thanks largely to the blanket amnesty for political crimes enacted in 1979.

But the constant drip of pressure from Eunice Paiva helped corrode the moral high ground of a regime convinced of its mission to rescue the country from godless insurrectionists. Without her decades of perseverance and the paper trail she left in her unrelenting campaign to find her husband, Brazilians might never have seen through the flimsy official version of the case—that Paiva was purportedly abducted by terrorists—much less imagined that the state would one day own its role in his violent death.