Brazil begins 2026 by internationally celebrating works that revisit the crimes of the military dictatorship and reaffirm the importance of memory, truth and accountability. But while films about the period win Golden Globes and Oscars and official speeches extol the commitment to human rights, the Brazilian Army works to keep documents related to the murder of former deputy Rubens Paiva confidential.
In the wake of the repercussions of “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent”, public authorities highlighted the need to not forget the regime’s crimes. The President of the Republic and the First Lady himself and created by the AGU (Attorney General of the Union), in honor of the widow of the murdered politician.
It was in this context that he requested access to the functional records of the soldiers accused of torturing and murdering Rubens Paiva. As is systematically the case, the Army denied the request. In July 2025, the Comptroller General of the Union (CGU) issued a ruling recognizing the clear public interest in access to information and ruling out any allegation of risk to institutional security and the need to protect privacy in cases of human rights violations.
The control body gave the Army a period of 30 days to hand over to us the full functional files — documents whose extracts (summaries drawn up by the Army itself) already With them, we discovered that the five accused were promoted after the murder; three received formal praise and all ended up transferred to the reserve, with the right to retirement and a pension for their families.
In August 2025, the CGU reevaluated the arguments and maintained the favorable understanding of transparency, signaling a definitive outcome for the case. On the eve of the delivery of the documents, however, at the turn of the year, the Army turned to the AGU to request a “conciliation”. The Attorney General agreed to analyze the request and temporarily authorized the suspension of sending the information.
In an interview with the column, Marcelo Rubens Paiva asked: “Why not tell the story? What secret do you have to hide?” Bringing it to the present, he states that this positioning “does not match the role that the Armed Forces played in other important moments in history”, including the Second World War.
With the process now at the AGU, it is necessary to assess whether a public institution has the right to create an award in honor of the struggle of a widow of a political assassination and, with the other hand, deny society the right to know. More than speech, the defense of human rights involves commitment and action; the rest, as Millôr would say, is a warehouse for dry goods.
It is necessary to remember that, as we have already written here, while we talk so much about the so-called “100-year secrecy”, the military continues. Documents like the ones we have been seeking for over a year are public and easily accessible on the Transparency Portal for practically all public administration, with the exception of the Armed Forces. The question, therefore, needs to be raised again: And, above all, whether the institutions in charge of supervising them will enforce the supremacy of democracy. It is high time to put an end to this institutional anomaly.
We count on the Attorney General’s Office of the Union, currently under the command of President Lula, who made a public commitment to transparency and the memory of the dictatorial period, to reaffirm the basics of the republican State: there are only three Powers and the Army is subject to the same rules and institutions that govern the other Executive bodies.
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