“I’m going there. Later, you prepare dinner for my nephews, I’m going to be here at eight o’clock.”
It was an ordinary Tuesday, that February 4, 1975, the day that Alagoas Jayme Amorim de Miranda disappeared in. PCB militant (Communist Party of Brazil), he left the house where he lived in the Catumbi neighborhood to deliver documents and was never seen again.
The journalist and lawyer, born in 1926 in, was the victim of Operation Radar, which aimed to murder the main leaders of the party.
His wife, Elza Rocha de Miranda, 87, recalls that the last dialogue between the two had no farewell air. “And dinner was made, the boys went to our house. To this day he didn’t come back. I was waiting all this time and never had any information,” he laments.
With four young children, then 14, 13, 9 and 4 years old, Elza found himself in a similar situation to that of Eunice Paiva, portrayed in the movie and book of the same name. ” She spent six more months in Rio de Janeiro and returned to Maceió after completing a hairdresser course, as she had no profession.
Elza received Sheet In the apartment where he lives in the neighborhood of Jatiúca, in Maceió. He made a pineapple juice and asked to put lipstick before being photographed. Smile as he remembered the husbands of her husband and the nine times they had to move only in the state capital to escape repression.
The cry came lightly, and she cleaned her tears as they descended, as if it should not show fragility. “This is a subject that I don’t like to talk about. When I watched the movie, I felt such a big anguish that it seemed like there was something wanting to get out of me. I was never crying. It was very hard to go through it with Four children, “he recalls.
Unlike Eunice, Elza and her children had no contact with the officers. Like Eunice, Elza went after information about her husband’s whereabouts everywhere she could. He was in barracks, police stations and hospitals, sent letters to the military and President Ernesto Geisel. He knew her husband would not be alive, but confirmation only came on February 7, 1996, when he received the death certificate.
In these just over 21 years, the family has mobilized and began to actively participate in movements linked to the missing political, as well as battle for the redemocratization of Brazil.
There was still hope that Jayme would return in 1979, when the Amnesty Law was. “We thought he could not be corresponding for fear of facing some consequence,” recalls Olga Miranda, 64, the couple’s eldest daughter.
The couple’s children only learned of their father’s activities after his disappearance. Until then they stared at all normally, although the routine keeps them from staying a long time in one place.
The Quartet of Children has, besides Olga, Yuri, 63, Jayme, 59, and André, 54. Their reactions varied, and Elza had to try to get around each mishaps.
“Once Jayme saw in a newspaper the news of his father’s disappearance and read. He said, ‘If my father was arrested, then I’m going to die.’ A child thinking about these things and didn’t even know anything. I managed to convince him that he was An old news, not new. The Olga dreamed of her father.
Once Jayme saw in a newspaper the news of his father’s disappearance and read. He said, ‘If my father was arrested, then I will die.’ A child thinking about these things and didn’t even know anything. Olga dreamed of her father. Once, she took water and started knocking over the sink because she had heard in a dream that her father was thirsty
Details about the death of Alagoas were revealed in the book “Dogs” (Alameda Editorial, 2024), by journalist Marcelo Godoy. The work is based on interviews with former DOI-Codi agents (Information Operations Detachment-Internal Defense Operations Center).
According to these testimonials, after being arrested, Jayme was taken to an abandoned nightclub in the city of Avaré (SP), where he was kept in captivity for 20 days. At the scene, he would have been brutally tortured and, after his death, his body would have been quartered and thrown into a river – the same hypothesis was already pointed out in the case of Rubens Paiva.
Jayme and Elza’s grandson, Thyago Miranda, 38, says these details were not passed on to his grandmother because of cruelty.
Jayme’s death certificate must be changed by March, after resolution of the CNJ (National Council of Justice), December 2024, to determine that.
The document should inform that death occurred not due to a natural cause, but rather violently, caused by the state, “in the context of systematic persecution to the population identified as political dissident, during the dictatorial regime established in 1964”.
The National Truth Commission identified, in a report released in 2014, 434 missing persons or killed by the dictatorship.
“We still have the hope that there will be punishment to the military involved in this case. Two of them have already been identified and reported by the Federal Prosecutor, but has not advanced because of the amnesty law. If Minister Flávio Dino’s thesis on the concealment of the corpse Being a continued crime is validated, we will have these punishments, “says Thyago.
In December last year, Dino, Minister of the Supreme Court (STF), argued that the Amnesty Law does not extend to corpse concealment crimes on the grounds that it is a permanent crime. The position will still be debated by the court plenary.
