We're Still Here

But what will it cost us if we refuse to look back?

Carla and I have difficulty picking a movie to watch; we have such different tastes. She has no interest in science fiction, or aliens, or space movies. (She’s never seen Star Wars!) But she loves true crime, spy thrillers, and anything with Jason Statham or Denzel Washington. I mean, who can blame her?

On a couple of occasions, we’ve picked films from Brazil, which I love because she can feel comfortable listening in her first language. I stay focused on the subtitles, learning a little more Portuguese, and realizing that our worlds aren’t so different.

Recently, we watched Ainda Estou Aqui, or I’m Still Here.

It is the first Brazilian film to win an Academy Award, which it did in 2025 for Best International Feature. Fernanda Torres won a Golden Globe for her leading role.

FILM PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD

It tells the true story of Eunice Paiva. Her husband, Rubens Paiva, was a former congressman whose seat was stripped after Brazil’s 1964 military coup. He kept living his life in Rio, working as an engineer, quietly helping people the regime wanted to disappear. In January 1971, men claiming to be officials took him from his home in front of his family. He was tortured and killed within days. His body was never returned. Eunice was held for nearly two weeks, then released into a silence the state expected her to accept.

She did not accept it. She went to law school in her late forties, became a fierce advocate for Indigenous land rights, and spent twenty-five years forcing her own government to admit, on paper, that it had killed her husband.

Here is some background on what kind of government that was:

A 1964 coup removed the elected Brazilian president, João Goulart. The United States backed that overthrow. Through a contingency plan called Operation Brother Sam, the Johnson administration positioned a naval task force off the Brazilian coast, fuel and ammunition ready, to support the generals if they needed it. They did not. The coup succeeded on its own, and Washington recognized the new regime almost immediately.

What followed got worse over time. In December 1968, the regime handed itself Institutional Act Number Five, which erased the last legal limits on its power. Brazilians call the era that followed the anos de chumbo, the years of lead. The state ran torture centers like the DOI-CODI, the same apparatus that killed Rubens Paiva.

Brazil’s National Truth Commission, which reported in 2014, put numbers to the damage. It documented 434 people killed or forcibly disappeared, 191 killed outright and the rest vanished without a trace. It found that more than eight thousand Indigenous people died as a direct result of state action, and judged the real Indigenous toll to be far higher. It named 377 agents as responsible. More than twenty thousand people were tortured.

Not one of those agents has ever gone to prison. A 1979 amnesty law, passed by the dictatorship on its way out the door, still shields them. That is the part to sit with. Brazil wrote down exactly what happened, then arranged to punish no one for it.

Brazil was not alone. Across the Southern Cone, the “disappeared” became a method. Take a person, hold them in secret, leave no body. The family cannot mourn, cannot bury anyone, cannot prove a crime occurred.

In Argentina’s Dirty War, the junta perfected it. Soldiers drugged prisoners and threw them from planes into the ocean, the death flights. They stole babies born to women in captivity and gave them to other families to raise. Human rights groups count as many as thirty thousand people who vanished this way. The grandmothers and mothers of those children still march in the Plaza de Mayo, decades on, holding photographs of faces the state tried to erase. In Chile, official truth commissions later counted tens of thousands tortured under Pinochet. The absence was the point. It was designed to make grief impossible and accountability harder.

In the film, there is one scene that washed over me.

It is 1996. Eunice has finally won the death certificate she spent decades chasing. Reporters surround her at the courthouse. One of them asks, “After the return of democracy, doesn’t the government have more urgent issues than fixing the past?”

“No,” she says.

“I think it’s absolutely necessary to compensate the families and do the most important thing, clarify and judge all crimes committed during the dictatorship. Otherwise, they will continue to be committed with impunity.”

END OF PLOT SPOILERS

It would be comforting to think every Brazilian agrees with her. They do not. Former president Jair Bolsonaro called a torturer a hero, the colonel who ran one of the regime’s most notorious interrogation centers. He has said the dictatorship’s error was torturing when it should have killed. Forty years after the generals left, Brazil still struggles to look its own history in the eye, because powerful people would rather it didn’t.

As I watched the film’s third act, the familiarity of this washed over me.

Most of the deepest problems in the United States come from a past we never finished. Our history books say we ended slavery, but we let racism get woven into our institutions, through redlining, through housing, through a justice system that still sorts people by color, and then we act surprised when the pattern repeats. We allowed the South to raise statues to men who took up arms against the United States, most of them put up not in mourning but during Jim Crow and again as a backlash to the civil rights movement.

Germany did the opposite. After the war, it did not build monuments to its worst people. It honored its victims instead, turned camps into places of memory, and set small brass stones into its sidewalks so that you cannot walk through a German city without reading the name of someone the state murdered. No reckoning is perfect, but we can see what a functional one looks like when a country decides to grow up.

We are not doing that. We are going the other way.

Right now in America, agents are taking people off the street and out of their homes for what they said. A lawful permanent resident named Mahmoud Khalil was held for months without a criminal charge, on a government theory a federal judge found likely unconstitutional and far too vague to justify locking a man away. He missed the birth of his first child while he sat in a detention center in Louisiana.

He is not the only one. Mohsen Mahdawi, another Columbia green-card holder, was arrested at his citizenship interview, handcuffed by masked agents as he signed the paperwork to pledge allegiance to the Constitution. The judge who ordered him released compared the moment to the McCarthy era. Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts, was taken off a Somerville sidewalk by plainclothes agents and flown to that same Louisiana facility, held six weeks over an op-ed she co-wrote in her student paper. A federal judge in Boston later ruled that the policy of arresting scholars like her violated the First Amendment.

These are not isolated mistakes. By the government’s own count, more than a thousand students have had visas revoked or legal status terminated, and the Secretary of State has said he signs the revocations daily. The mechanism is older than this administration, and Eunice Paiva would have recognized it from fifty years and a continent away. You make a person disappear from their ordinary life, and you dare the rest of us to look away.

So no, we have no more important thing to do. There is no version of a healthy USA that is built on top of graves that we pretend aren’t there.

If we want to still be here, in any sense worth the words, we reckon honestly with what is happening right now, while it is happening. And we vote for the people who understand that accountability is an absolute priority.

Carla still won’t watch Star Wars.

That’s fine.

She already knows the work we rebels must do.

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The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America, with recipes along the way.

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Sources

• I’m Still Here (2024), film overview and awards — Wikipedia

• The true story behind I’m Still Here and Eunice Paiva — Time

• Rubens Paiva, life and disappearance — Wikipedia

• The 1996 courthouse scene and Eunice’s reply — Official screenplay, Sony Pictures Classics

• U.S. backing of the 1964 coup — Peoples Dispatch

• Operation Brother Sam and the U.S. role — Brown University Library, “We Cannot Remain Silent”

• Argentina’s Dirty War, the death flights, and the disappeared — Wikipedia

• Bolsonaro praising the dictatorship’s torturer — France 24

• Brazil’s continued resistance to reckoning — Global Voices

• Structural racism in U.S. institutions — National Institutes of Health / PMC

• Confederate monuments and the German contrast — The Washington Post

• German remembrance versus American memory — St. Andrews Law Review

• Mahmoud Khalil’s detention and release — Courthouse News

• The court challenge to Khalil’s detention — ACLU

• Mohsen Mahdawi arrested at his citizenship interview — PBS NewsHour

• The judge’s comparison to the McCarthy era — CBS News

• Rümeysa Öztürk detained over an op-ed — NPR

• Boston court ruling that the arrests violated the First Amendment — ACLU of Massachusetts