I’m Still Here brings Brazil’s dictatorship past to the surface

“Did we really do it?” Tessa Moura Lacerda asked her mother, in disbelief, standing outside the government office on a rainy August morning in 2019.

In their hands, the document they fought for years to hold – his father’s death certificate, now correctly stating his cause of death.

It reads: “An unnatural, cruel death inflicted by the Government on a needy person.” […] in the dictatorship established in 1964″.

Tessa’s father, Gildo Macedo Lacerda, died under torture in 1973 at the age of 24, during the most brutal years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

For more than 20 years, at least 434 people have been killed or disappeared, and thousands more have been imprisoned and tortured, the World Truth Organization has found.

Gildo and Mariluce, Tessa’s mother who was pregnant at the time, were arrested on 22 October 1973 in Salvador, Bahia, where they lived for fear of persecution.

They were part of the left wing that wanted democracy and wanted to end military rule.

The regime targeted opposition politicians, union leaders, academics, the media and virtually anyone who dissented.

Mariluce was released after being questioned and tortured, but Gildo disappeared.

He is believed to have died six days after his arrest, at a military base in the nearby state of Pernambuco.

Former inmates told the agency that they saw Gildo in the prison, being led into an interrogation room where they heard screams that kept them awake at night.

The agency also found documents showing his arrest.

But the newspapers at the time said that he was shot on the road after an argument with a member of his political group.

The government likes to plant fake news in newspapers that are widely read in Brazil and around the world.

Gildo’s original death certificate, issued after a 1995 law allowing families to apply for a missing person’s certificate, left his cause of death blank.

His remains, believed to be in mass graves with other political dissidents, have not been identified.

Tessa, who has never met Gildo, said her father’s death was a constant presence in her life.

When he grew up, his mother slowly told him more about him until he was old enough to know the brutal details of how he died.

But the lack of official approval, and the fact that the family did not bury him, affected him deeply.

“Her disappearance, the absence of her body, raised a number of questions,” Tessa told BBC News

“When I was a child, I thought maybe he wasn’t dead. I had a feeling that he might have escaped, which I’m not sure my mother knew.”

Now, being an adult, he said he still feels that something is “broken” inside him.

For many years, she had nightmares, she couldn’t sleep in the dark, and when she became a mother, she suffered from the fear that her children would face some kind of problem.

“It’s like I remember this fear,” he said

“People may think it’s strange, like something supernatural, but it’s not.

“It hurts. I was born with it.”

Until she was 18, Tessa’s birth certificate did not list Gildo as her father, and the family had to go through a long battle to prove that he was.

This made correcting his father’s death certificate a priority.

“It’s part of my accomplished career,” he said.

“Not only in memory of my father, but in the name of all the others who disappeared, were killed or tortured during the dictatorship.”

In December, Brazil announced that it would prepare certificates for all known victims to acknowledge the government’s actions in their deaths.

Until now, only a few families like Tessa were able to work with the special commission, which was dissolved in 2022 by the then President, Jair Bolsonaro, and reinstated by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2024, to be part of it. their documents have been changed.

“I am working on the legalization of accounts and records,” the head of the Supreme Court of Brazil, Luís Roberto Barroso, said.

In recent weeks, a national discussion has been sparked on this violent history after a new film by BAFTA-winning director Walter Salles brought to light the reality of the dictatorship.

I’m Still Here, from the book of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, tells the story of the author’s mother Eunice and the fight for justice after her father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, was tortured and killed.

Eunice waited 25 years to get her husband’s death certificate.

He had no access to the family’s bank accounts without it, and had to rebuild his life.

She died in 2018 without knowing what happened to her husband in his last hours, and without burying him.

Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice in the film, won the first Best Actress Golden Globe award in Brazil last week for his role in the film – and many are hoping to see him on the list of Academy Awards nominees later this month.

He told BBC News that he admires Eunice.

“She is a woman who did not spend a minute of her life seeking fame… She wanted her husband’s death to be recognized.

“Although the world is changing, the absence has not been cured,” he added.

“How do you tell these families: ‘Forget it. Sweep your dead under the carpet?’

Although I’m Still Here is mostly about the dictatorship, it resonates with Brazilians today.

Brazil is very divided, and its politics is very divided.

Recent years have seen a rise in extremism and efforts to rewrite the narrative surrounding the dictatorship.

In 2016, a group of protesters attacked Congress calling for a return to military rule. Three years later, Bolsonaro’s education minister ordered that the history books be reviewedresisting the overthrow of the democratic government in 1964 was a coup.

Bolsonaro, a former army chief, said he praised the old dictatorship and held events commemorating the coup at the time he was in office.

Recently, Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies they have been accused of trying to take over the government after losing the 2022 presidential election.

The former president did not publicly accept his defeat and his supporters, who refused to accept the results, they disrupted Congress, the palace and the Supreme Court on January 8, 2023.

Salles told the BBC the current political climate in Brazil was why it was the right time to make the film.

“The wonderful thing about books, music, movies and art is that they are tools to prevent forgetting,” he said.

Brazilians closely related to the story have described leaving the theater in tears after watching the film.

Marta Costa, whose aunt Helenira was killed in 1972, said she wanted to run away.

“You think your family has been shut down and abused in this way,” he told BBC News.

“When Eunice tells her story, she also tells mine. When I tell my aunt’s story, I also tell hers. You can’t separate one from the other,” he said.

Marta is making a documentary about Helenira and her years of protest, but there is much that the family still does not know about her disappearance and death. Helenira’s body was also never found.

“It is a cursed legacy, because we must continue to pass the baton from generation to generation, until we can ensure that its memory is preserved, that history is told as it happened.”

Helenira’s family will now, 52 years after her murder, receive a certificate acknowledging that her death was very painful.

Its importance, Marta says, cannot be overstated.

“The day we receive this certificate, it is as if the government recognizes its responsibility and apologizes.

“It’s the first step to being able to get back on track.”

Although the certificates are moving forward, Tessa and Marta say the bereaved families have a long way to go in the fight for justice.

The amnesty law, which is still in place, means that none of the military commanders who were in power at the time or those accused of torturing and killing those who were accused. Many are already dead.

There has been no apology from the government or the military.

“Brazilians need to recognize this history so that the death was not in vain,” said Tessa.

“If we don’t try to get rid of this history, to accept our pain,” said Marta, “we will always be at risk of it happening again.”

The scars of totalitarianism, in Tessa’s words, are a global problem.

But for him, regarding Marta and Eunice, it is also personal history.

“I will not stop fighting until the end of my days,” he said.

“I will bury my father.”

I’m still here watching UK movies on 21 February 2025