“I’m still here”: Movie opens old wounds in the Acre family that has gone through a similar drama in the dictatorship

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In the same intensity of indignation and anger caused to right-wing extremists, including the followers of former President Jair Bolsonaro, because of the positive repercussion for the awards of the movie “I’m still here” from the Oscar 2025 film academy, a family of Acre, in Rio Branco, returns to live dramas and nightmares in all similar to what is told in the work about the arrest, death and disappearance of Rubens Paiva.

The film tells the story of the widow of engineer and federal deputy Rubens Paiva, Eunice Paiva, played by actress Fernanda Torres, in search of her missing husband, in the struggle to create the five children of marriage and resistance to the military dictatorship-finally, a plot like the life story of Maria Lúcia Melo de Araújo, who turns 90 on April 17, and the federally federal, Cassado Governor of Acre José Augusto de Araújo, killed in 1971, the same year they disappeared with the corpse of Rubens Paiva.

Rubens Paiva was arrested by agents from the Aeronautics Information Center (Cisa) on January 20, 1971. His arrest took place at his residence, located in Leblon, in the south of Rio de Janeiro, without any warrant or legal justification. José Augusto de Araújo died on May 3, 1971, at the age of 41, in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro, where he served a long arrest imposed by the military, after revoking the mandate of Governor of Acre in a military and institutional coup applied by the Major Edgard Pedreira de Cerqueira and state deputies who forged the governor’s resignation, on May 8, 1964.

“I didn’t quite understand why these men came to get my father. I saw my grandparents a lot crying and my mother too ” – Ricardo Araújo, son of José Augusto.

As soon as the Rio Branco Palace left, the couple José Augusto and Maria Lúcia immediately left Acre, so that the former governor was not arrested by the new occupants of power, in the central government and now also in Acre. But the escape from little advanced. Located by the military in Rio de Janeiro, at the house of Maria Lúcia’s parents, where the couple began to live, began to receive subpoenas to attend the headquarters of the Dops (Department of Political and Social Order) and other organs of the dictatorship for long testimonials, which lasted days sometimes.

“I didn’t quite understand why these men came to get my father. I saw my grandparents a lot crying and my mother too. I was about six or seven, but I remember that, ”says today, at the age of 62, civil engineer Ricardo Augusto de Araújo, current regional superintendent of DNIT (National Department of Infrastructure) in Acre. “My mother, for the advanced age and suffering, avoids talking about these episodes, but the film and the repercussion about what is told certainly opened these wounds in the soul,” says the engineer.

Wounds that, even with the couple Araújo away from Acre and Rio de Janeiro, where he housed the house of Maria Lúcia’s parents, did not cease. The former governor responded to several cases with accusations of corruption, subversive conduct and communism. “They said he was a communist because he wanted to do land reform,” recalls Maria Lúcia, even with difficulty talking about a time that, certainly as in Eunice Paiva, much mistreated her.

On the way to the testimonials, there is no information that José Augusto was physically tortured in these descents to the basements of the dictatorship, although it is known today that the headquarters of Dops, located in Lapa, downtown Rio, which is in the process of tipping to be a Human Rights Defense Center, at that time was the scene of torture practices persecuted by the dictatorship, just as they were, between hundreds of Brazilians, José Augusto, José Augusta. and Rubens Paiva. “He arrived ground with sadness. Today, I understand the reason, ”says Ricardo Augusto.

It is possible that, in these comings and goings, the Acrean of Feijó José Augusto and the Paulista of Santos Rubens Paiva, contemporary in everything, with only ten years of age difference (José Augusto was older), have found themselves in the horror of interrogations. If not in the interrogation rooms, it is possible that both bump into the National Congress corridors, as both were PTB militants and federal deputies – alternate in 1958, José Augusto eventually took office in 1960 and, in 1962, was elected because he had also been elected governor of Acre (at the time, the legislation allowed the same candidate to post different positions in the executive positions Legislative). Rubens Paiva was revoked in 1964, in the early days of the dictatorship, by making a statement on a São Paulo radio, proposing that the workers from São Paulo would rise at the time against then -governor Adhemar de Barros, who had supported the military coup. Revoked, he had political rights suspended for ten years and exiled in Europe, but at the end of the decade he returned to Brazil and began to act politically in the resistance to the dictatorship in clandestinity, until he was discovered and arrested by the military who killed him in torture and still disappeared with his body.

José Augusto was arrested for seven months while Convalescia at the Base Hospital in Rio Branco in 1965.

José Augusto was only arrested in 1965, upon returning to Acre after having the political rights revoked also for ten years. He returned to Acre to one of those testimonials they wanted, in the words of widow Maria Lúcia, to confess that he was a communist and wanted to help implement a left government under this regime, the excuse given by the military to overthrow the Constitutional President João Goulart, a personal friend of Rubens Paiva and José Augusto de Araújo. The revoked governor spent seven months stuck in Rio Branco. Already with fragile health, because of problems in the heart, ended up serving the sentence at the Rio Branco Base Hospital.

“I had to go over the corpses,” said Maria Lúcia when she spoke in the 50th anniversary of the military coup in the Legislative Assembly of the State of Acre (Aleac), when state deputies, on the proposal of Edvaldo Magalhães (PCdoB), returned the former governor’s political rights, in a symbolic gesture in respect of his memory. “The hospital was a horrible thing, a hospital of indigence. When I had to visit my husband, I had to go over the corpses so I could get to the hospital. It was one of the worst phases of my life. What was going on in my head was that I had to fight to get out of it because it was an injustice, and without any support because we were in the dictatorship, ”he said.

José Augusto managed to leave the hospital and his own freedom through a habeas corpus in March 1966 and returned to Rio de Janeiro. In the same year, however, the political rights were revoked for ten years by the dictatorship.

There was another stage of Maria Lúcia’s struggle in relation to her husband’s memory, also in everything similar to what was lawyer Eunice Paiva. Accountant and teacher born in João Pessoa, Paraíba, Maria Lúcia lived in Rio with her parents when she met José Augusto de Araújo, then teacher and student leader. It was love at first sight, as in the case of the Paiva, according to the book and the movie “I’m still here”, written by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the couple’s only son.

Like Eunice Paiva, Maria Lúcia, in theons of helping her husband in confronting the dictatorship, would not only know the horror very closely, but eventually got involved with politics in an attempt to combat the regime. Maria Lúcia, as she left Acre, was no longer intended to return to the state where she was first lady from March 1963 to May 1964, the time that lasted her husband’s mandate. But she ended up going beyond Eunice Paiva, putting her own name in the dispute to replace her husband.

She is the one who counts on this statement of 2014. As José Augusto could not apply, the Allies of Governor Cassado decided to launch the name of Maria Lúcia to a vacancy for the Federal Chamber in 1967. She was pregnant with the second daughter-Maria de Nazareth Lambert Araújo, now 58 years old, the state’s (retired) prosecutor and became deputy governor, in the state-of-the-way, in the state-of-the-man. Tião Viana. The solution to the case of pregnancy was Maria Lúcia to write a letter to the Acre people, announcing to be a candidate for federal deputy.

“When he said I should apply, I said, ‘But José Augusto, I can’t even go to Acre here.’ Because it was already entering the 7th month of pregnancy and he, sick. I sent a letter here, saying his state, as I found myself, and the people would get this letter. I was the most voted candidate. I had twice the second-placed votes, who was former Governor of Acre, ”recalled the former deputy. The joy would last shortly: two years later, she, Maria Lúcia, would also be revoked and would have the political rights suspended for 10 years. She and seven other deputies who had been first ladies in her states and whose husbands had also been revoked.

In 1978, with the recovered political rights, Maria Lúcia applied again, but is not elected. In 1982, with Nabor Júnior’s victory for the State Government, in the final years of the military dictatorship, he is summoned to return to Acre and assume the position of director of Fumbesa (Social Welfare Foundation), today equivalent to a Secretary of State for Social Action. He was in office until he was dismantled to be elected Federal Deputy Constituent in 1986, a position he held until 1990, when he retired.

Speaking about the 50th anniversary of the military coup, she said, “This wound never Sara.” “When I see anything alluding to the 64 ‘revolution’, I turn off the television because it makes me want to run. I say that I have to have overcome it all, but it does not exceed that way, the hurt is inside, the wound continues until the time God takes me, ”he said.

On Sunday night (3), when the world folded to reverence for Brazilian cinema, the art of actors and the country’s literature by giving the statuette to filmmaker Walter Salles as director of the best international film, with a story that resembles the script of her life and everything she lived with her family, the heart of Dona Maria Lúcia returned to bleed and open the living wounds. However, as Eunice Paiva said as she posed for a photograph of her family in front of the house, even in those leads: “We have to smile. We are still here. ”

Yes, Dona Maria Lúcia Melo de Araújo: We’re still here!