“I am still there” – The candidate for the best film of the Oscars on the murder of a member of the Brazilian Congress by the country’s military dictatorship – concluded with a single sentence which pronounces a punch of historical reality: the five soldiers accused in the murder have never been punished because of laws which granted them amnesty.
Now the film could help change this.
This month, the Supreme Court of Brazil decided unanimously to revise if it should revoke the amnesty of the army officers accused of having killed the Congress member, Rubens Paiva and two others. This followed a decision of December by a judge to recommend the abolition of amnesty protections in a case separate from the era of the dictatorship. In its decision, justice explicitly quoted “I am still there”.
The sudden and extraordinary judicial calculation that the film has caused could have swept legal implications: the law on the amnesty of Brazil, as it did for almost half a century, will it continue to protect those who committed atrocities during the dictatorship?
The fact that the question is raised now shows how “I’m still there” – in addition to its remarkable commercial and critical success – also had a major political impact in Brazil.
And since the film’s release in November, the authorities have revised the victims’ death certificates to specify that they died in the hands of the military and to reopen cold cases to see if they were linked to the military regime.
“Brazil still has many open injuries,” said Mr. Paiva’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose book on the management of his mother’s disappearance inspired the film. “I think this whole movement has made society think, especially young people, on the type of country they want.”
Thanks to the personal history of the test of a family in the hands of the dictatorship, the film has greatly succeeded in crossing political lines and rallying the Brazilians around the common idea of justice, said Fernanda Torres, whose representation of the Eunice, the widow of Mr. Paiva, earned general cheers and the appointment of the best actress of Sunday’s Academy Awards.
“This has not happened for a long time – a cultural phenomenon around which we all agree that it is not fair, that this family did not deserve it, this father did not deserve the fate he had,” said Torres in an interview. “We really live in a moment of revolution,” she added. “Culture has immense power.”
The message of the film was made particularly frightening because it arrived in the midst of new allegations of modern threats against the young democracy of Brazil of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was accused this month of supervising the plans to organize a coup and kill his rival, President Luiz at Acio Lula Da Silva, after having lost the 2022 elections.
This helped extend calls to justice. Caetano Veloso, one of the most prolific singers and songwriters in Brazil, said in an interview that during her last concerts, the huge crowds took the singer of “no amnesty” – a reference apparently to the laws protecting the dictatorship, but also to the new bills that could protect Mr. Bolsonaro.
“I have never seen this,” said Veloso, who was himself imprisoned and exiled during the dictatorship.
Human rights groups estimate that more than 400 people have disappeared and that some 20,000 were tortured in Brazil during the dictatorship. But, unlike Chile or Argentina, where many crimes committed under military dictatorships have led to trials and sanctions, and the stupid people were much higher, Brazil did not continue the responsibility of the atrocities of its army.
Mr. Paiva, a member of the left congress, was expelled from his duties by the dictatorship but continued to resist the regime, and was accused by him of having exchanged letters with dissidents in exile.
In Brazil, the transition to democracy was largely shaped by the military junta herself, who adopted a law of amnesty in 1979 protecting dissidents and military officials of prosecution.
“The amnesty, the way it was done in Brazil, has erased the past,” said Nilmário Miranda, a special adviser on memory and truth to the Ministry of Brazil of Human Rights, who said he was himself a victim of torture. “He treated the authors as their victims, torturers like the tortured.”
Attempts to keep the military responsible for the crimes of the dictatorship over the years have been faced with a solid resistance from the military, which has continued to maintain political bypass even after Brazil’s return to democracy.
But now the film has helped to initiate the most important threat to the impunity that the military has been granted.
In December, judge Flavio Dino quoted the film in a decision to revoke the amnesty given to two colonels accused of having killed political activists during the dictatorship. “I’m still there,” “moved millions of Brazilians,” he wrote. “The history of the disappearance of Rubens Paiva, whose body has never been found or given an appropriate burial, highlights the lasting pain of countless families.”
Judge Dino has approved a legal argument that, in all cases where organizations are still missing, it is a “permanent crime” open to prosecution until remains are found.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court also decided to examine whether it should revoke the amnesty in the case of Mr. Paiva. In 2014, Brazilian authorities accused five men of torture and death; They never admitted a crime. Two of them are still alive and most of them stayed silent, with one to say that he was on vacation during the detention of Mr. Paiva, a complaint refuted by documents from this period.
The decision of the Supreme Court in the case could establish a legal precedent which could affect at least 41 other affairs in the era of the dictatorship.
In a symbolic gesture, a federal organ ordered the revision of 434 death certificates for people killed or disappeared during the dictatorship. Mr. Paiva was the first file to be corrected, not to list any cause of death to invoke the cause as “against nature, violent, caused by the Brazilian state”.
Credit the film, a special government commission also reopened an investigation into the 1976 death in a car accident by former president Juscelino Kubitschek, citing evidence that she could have been orchestrated by the military dictatorship.
“The role of the film was extraordinary,” said Miranda. “Art has this power,” he added, to ensure that “history is not forgotten, so that it does not happen again.”
Mr. Bolsonaro, an army captain with retirement who has often spoken with emotion of the dictatorship, attacked several times “I am still here”, the cast as a political film which demonizes the army and shows only “a side” of history.
“I’m not going to even watch this film,” he said in an interview with the New York Times last month, when he was asked if he would root Ms. Torres on Sunday’s Oscars.
Some supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro also boycotted “I’m still there” and have opposed the efforts to translate the military into court for past crimes.
Mr. Lula, on the other hand, congratulated the film, calling it a “source of national pride” and creating a price Honor Eunice Paiva. This week, the president of Brazil gathered Government ministers and Congress leaders, as well as two of Mr. Paiva’s grandchildren, at the presidential palace for a special projection.
However, even if Brazil counts with its dark past, some fear that justice will come too late. During the decades that followed Brazil’s return to democracy, many of those who committed crimes during the dictatorship – including the majority of Mr. Paiva’s torturers – died without ever being taken into account.
“Better late than never,” said Marcelo Rubens Paiva. “But why did it take so long?”
Flávia Milhorance contributed research.
