Reactionary Violence in I’m Still Here (2024) by Walter Salles
This text is based on a short talk given by Henrique Furtado (UWE Bristol – RPRN co-convenor) as a part of a special viewing of the Oscar-winning film I’m Still Here (2024) hosted at the Watershed Bristol on the 26/03/2025, during a specialist panel and Q&A session on the film. The text contains spoilers on the film.
I am afraid the story I’m about to tell does not have a happy ending.
Rubens Paiva wasn’t the only victim of the military regime. We know today that circa 700 state agents were responsible for the deaths of 434 political dissidents. But sadly, this type of violence did not cease with the end of the authoritarian regime. Rubens disappeared in 1971. Since then, more than 1,345 political leaders have been assassinated. Cases of political violence – the threat of violence and intimidation towards a political objective – are not isolated events, but part of a wider story of violent crime.
In the early days of re-democratisation, Brazil witnessed a 200 per cent increase in homicide rates. By the mid-1990s, members of Doctors Without Borders concluded that 90 per cent of residents of Rio de Janeiro’s slums showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. To give you a rough idea, from 2003 to 2011, the number of homicides in Brazil reached the figure of half a million people. This is 1.5 times higher than the overall casualties of the Iraq War that took place during the same period. In 2014 alone, the figure of 60,000 equalled the number of US soldiers lost in Vietnam. In 2016, the figure was comparable to the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. I could continue the whole night, but I ran out of comparisons. Today, Brazil has 2.7% of the world’s population but 20.4% of the world’s share of homicides.
More importantly, the state continues to torture and kill. Over the past eighteen years, police officers assassinated at least 26,858 people. This is a level of lethality on average 4.6 times higher than that of the US police forces, to name a more visible case. State killing continues to be justified as the necessary part of new ‘wars’ (e.g., the war on drugs, the war on organised crime, and God save us all, the “war on woke”). These crimes disproportionately (not to say almost exclusively) target Brazil’s black working-class population. Now how many black characters did you see in the film?
Which leads me to a final point. In the first 30 minutes of the film, before the nightmare begins, you see hordes of middle-class families, besides the Paivas, enjoying the sun and their leisurely time in the fashionable south zone of Rio in the 70s. They were dancing, playing ball, singing, parading their enviable bodies and sunbathing during one of the most violent and brutal periods of political repression. Don’t let the example of the Paivas blind you, most of these families were strong supporters of the military regime, which was meant to save them from communism. Today, the middle-and upper-classes continue to preach state-sanctioned murder as a public security policy, perhaps the difference being that they no longer frequent the beach but choose to do so from their private pools and gated communities instead. The literature calls this phenomenon “populism of fear”, where fear of the other is weaponised towards approval for state sanctioned murder. But populism is a highly misleading term, for there is nothing popular about it, except for the profile of victims. The far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro is the latest and most unfortunate child of this grotesque death cult.
Now, to end my contribution, I would just like to give you some data:
- Crimes of the dictatorship
- 80,000 cases of political persecution
- 20,000 cases of torture
- 10,000 cases of forced exile
- Between 434 and 10,000.
- Inquiries:
- Special Commission for the Disappeared (1995-2007)
- Amnesty Commission (2001)
- National Truth Commission (2012-2014)
- Reparations: R$2,7B roughly $500M (in comparison to the$85M in South Africa)
- Indictments and Arrests:
- Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra (indicted but deceased before conviction)
- Police Inspector Alcides Singillo (indicted but deceased before conviction)
- Carlos Alberto Augusto (aka Machine-Gun Carlinhos), convicted to serve 2 yearsin 2021.