‘I’m Still Here’ Fights to Preserve the History of Brazil’s Dictatorship

In the late 1970s, the military regime in Brazil was preparing to return the country to democratic rule. Since 1964, the country had been ruled by an undemocratic military government, and after years of popular protest and armed resistance, the military leaders were planning a gradual re-democratization process. 

In more than a decade of dictatorship rule, the military had imprisoned, tortured, and killed scores of people they viewed as dissidents, and in 1979, a newly passed law gave amnesty to political prisoners and exiles whom the dictatorship persecuted. But the amnesty law also pardoned the murderers, torturers, and leaders of the military dictatorship, setting the stage for a 25-year struggle to get the Brazilian government to recognize the victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses of the regime.

With no institutional recognition of human rights abuses committed between 1964 to 1985, the door was open for denial and diminishment of that brutal period in Brazilian history. In right-wing circles, the dictatorship is often viewed as “not that bad,” or as a necessary evil to keep Brazil from opting into communism, a common Cold War talking point. 

It was only in 2011, more than 25 years after the end of the regime, that the Brazilian government instituted a truth commission to investigate the torture and murder that took place during that era. 

The success of I’m Still Here, this year’s Academy Award winner for best international feature, might give the appearance that Brazil is a country committed to remembering its past—but behind the film, there’s a multigenerational, ongoing struggle to keep remembering the victims and the perpetrators of harm during the dictatorship period. 

Families of Victims Insist on Remembering 

After Rubens Paiva was kidnapped and murdered by the regime in 1971, the lack of institutional recognition of his death left his wife, Eunice Paiva (portrayed by Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here), without any access to his bank accounts or estate until until 1996, when the government finally admitted to his murder and issued a death certificate.

In the 25 years since, Eunice has given interviews to magazines, newspapers, and TV broadcasts, calling for the return of her husband’s remains, as well as financial reparations and institutional recognition of the Brazilian state’s human rights abuses. 

In 1994, when Brazil’s democratic president Fernando Henrique Cardoso dismissed Amnesty International’s request for investigations into the human right abuses committed by the regime, Eunice unearthed an old article from 1980, where where Cardoso, then a senator, pressured the federal government to find a solution to the hundreds of disappeared. Paiva’s son Marcelo, a journalist and writer, used the article to urge the president to take action on the matter. 

Two years later, the Special Commission on the Dead and Disappeared was officially launched by Cardoso’s administration, with the objective to recognize the dead and disappeared from 1964 to 1985, attempt to find the bodies of the people identified, and determine recommendations for financial reparations for the victims’ families. The Commission helped identify 434 murdered and disappeared people during the regime.

Beyond this government commission, victims and families of victims have, for decades since the atrocities, been at the forefront of fighting to preserve the memory of the dictatorship as well as the memory of their loved ones. 

The family of metalworker and union organizer Santo Dias, who was shot dead by the military police in 1979 at a picket line in São Paulo, organized a committee for recognition of his murder in the years following his death. In 2023, Dias’ friends, family, and his widow, Ana Dias, honored his legacy of resistance and advocacy for workers’ rights on the 44th anniversary of his murder.

This practice of memory keeping led by family and friends of the victims of fascism is a common practice across Latin American countries. “It is important to say that nobody chooses to fight this war,” says Lorrane Rodrigues, executive coordinator of memory, truth and justice at the Vladimir Herzog Institute. “This struggle is a kind of survival. We have so many Eunices. We have many women who never had the opportunity of telling their stories.” 

The Vladimir Herzog Institute was created to maintain the memory of its namesake—journalist, teacher, and playwright Vladimir Herzog, who was imprisoned and murdered in 1975 by the regime. The institute was founded by his late wife, Clarice, 30 years after his death, to archive his work and promote conversations about him as well as the human rights abuses committed during the regime.

Creating a Methodology for Memory Work

The work of remembering those lost to fascism goes hand-in-hand with demanding investigations, punishment, and reparations for the victims. Rodrigues says the efforts of these families have become instructive for memory efforts in Latin America, citing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, a movement led by the mothers and grandmothers of students who were disappeared during Argentina’s dictatorship. 

“They have a fundamental role in policies about memory in Latin America and, I think, internationally,” Rodrigues says. “The legacy that these women have left behind in Latin America allows us to think in a much broader context of policies of memory, truth, and justice. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo movement that pressured the Argentine government so that investigations and forensics around the dictatorship are not carried out by state agents, for example.” 

This movement, started in the 1980s and echoed by women in their respective countries struggling against fascism and its afterlife, created a “methodology for the search of the disappeared,” says Rodrigues. “The questions these women made in the ’80s generate methodological and social implications so we can think through what policies of memory and justice look like in Brazil. These questions lead us to ask: What does a reparation process look like for a victim?”

When Marcelo Paiva decided to write a book about his mother’s experience surviving and fighting the dictatorship, Eunice was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, a disease she lived with for 12 years. Marcelo’s book, which was eventually adapted into I’m Still Here, originated from his decision to write down his mother’s memories as she was losing them because of her illness.

“I would not have written this book if my mother didn’t have Alzheimer’s,” Marcelo said in a 2015 interview. “She was the spokesperson of the family, she knew the details, she had an emotional intelligence that was superior to all of us. I even told her about the book, and I think she knows about it… but today, her moments of lucidity are few.” 

As he interviewed her during her spurs of lucidity, she would tell him: “I’m still here.” The phrase has traveled far since the first publication of the book in 2015, geographically and in meaning, making visible the presence of victims and families of victims of the regime as living, breathing, and still waiting for justice. 

In 2011, then President Dilma Rousseff created the Truth Commission, a government organization that specifically investigates human rights abuses of the military regime. The commission gathered testimonies, documents, and evidence that helped reconstruct instances of torture, forced disappearances, and murders carried out by the regime. 

While the commission did not have power to punish any of the perpetrators, the commission used the testimonies of victims to form a 976-page report published in 2014 that shed light on the gravity of what took place from 1964 to 1985, even naming 377 people involved in human rights violations. The report exposed the details of what and who had been pardoned by the Amnesty Law passed in 1979. 

One of the victims of these crimes was Rousseff herself, who was arrested and tortured in 1972 when she was only 22, for her role in armed resistance. Nearly 40 years later, as a democratically elected president, Rousseff’s launch of the Truth Commission has directly educated new generations about the impacts of the dictatorship. 

When writing the book about his family, Marcelo Paiva drew from the findings of the Truth Commission. “Because of the Truth Commission, I had the information necessary to write the book I’m Still Here, and now we have this stunning film,” Marcelo tweeted in January. “And Dilma [Rousseff] paid a high price for the necessary recovery of memory.” 

From Policy to Film

As multigenerational efforts have become an award-winning feature film, the question of amnesty for fascists past and present continues to haunt Brazilian politics. Amnesty is a particularly loaded question in 2025; the right-wing rioters who invaded the country’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace a week after left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated in 2023 are currently being prosecuted and sentenced. 

As of March, 434 people have been found guilty and sentenced for their participation in the coup d’état. Much like the fascists Brazil has seen in the past, the rioters were led by former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, to “save” Brazil from communism and socialism. In 2025, as I’m Still Here showcases the human impacts of the dictatorship and the impunity of its crimes, Bolsonaro and his allies are asking for amnesty—even before several of them have gone to trial. 

According to Rodrigues, this is the legacy of Brazil never having an institutionalized process to recognize the crimes committed by the military regime. In Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, the people responsible for torturing and murdering political dissidents were held responsible through public trials, but Brazil never formally conducted any punitive processes. 

“We have barely understood the amnesty that was given in the ’80s, and in 2025 people understand that amnesty could be applied in the same way,” Rodrigues says. “So there’s a lack of an effective accountability process in the ’80s.” 

In March, a panel of Brazilian Supreme Court judges accepted the charges against Bolsonaro and seven close allies for attempting to stage a coup d’état in 2023, marking the first time military members will ever be tried for anti-democratic activity. After decades of intergenerational struggle calling for consequences for the destruction of Brazilian democracy, the tide is finally turning. 

“I’m Still Here has created a unique moment for Brazil, a moment for us to look at this topic with more care and not to apply the same amnesty or the same norms that were applied in the ’80s,” says Rodrigues. “It’s an incredible moment.”