The roots of terror

Comment: Walter Salles delivers a chilling warning about authoritarianism in his latest film I’m Still Here—but ducks the role of the US, writes Gavin O’Toole

Murdered by the military: Rubens Paiva Image: Wiki Commons

Washington likes military coups: they are a convenient, swift, usually effective, but above all opaque—and hence deniable—way of engineering regime change without the messy need to ensure legitimacy through unpredictable elections.

Once installed, military satraps are also easier to control than politicians, given their bent to follow orders and chain of command that ascends hierarchically to a single decision-maker, especially if the empire ensures through inducement that its man at the top remains loyal.

The number of coups supported by the US throughout Latin American history is obscured by those that have most tended to haunt leftwing nightmares—the Chilean coup of 1973, the 1954 coup in Guatemala etc.

However, a Harvard study by John Coatsworth in 2005 itemised at least 41 interventions by the US to change governments in Latin America in slightly less than 100 years, from 1898 to 1994—and direct military intervention in 17 of those.

Although Augusto Pinochet’s bloody seizure of power from Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende has dominated narratives, it was Jorge Videla’s coup in 1976 in Argentina that unleashed the most savage repression.

Videla’s putsch established a military junta—which he led until 1981—that claimed the lives of at least 30,000 people in a “dirty war” who were kidnapped, tortured and disappeared. Declassified documents reveal direct and indisputable US involvement in these abuses.

But putting aside the terror and trauma of the Chilean and Argentine juntas, the most ambitious coup in Latin America—and arguably the most geopolitically significant during that phase of the Cold War—occurred in Brazil in 1964.

Military forces ousted president João Goulart—the last leftwing president of Brazil until the election of Lula da Silva in 2003—to initiate a dictatorship that would last, in various incarnations, until 1985.

Goulart’s main crime had been his refusal to support US plans to invade Cuba—generating the personal animosity of president John F Kennedy.

Washington would subsequently provide the direct support of the US navy and air force to Brazil’s military through the so-called “Operation Brother Sam” in order for the generals to seize power.

This coup was important because it established close relations between capital and the military to create a ruling alliance that emphasised development, while formulating a national security state fashioned on that of the US that would influence the entire sub-region.

National security and anti-communism formed the ideological core of a new model of authoritarian capitalism which combined, in economic terms, rapid growth underpinning the so-called “Brazilian Miracle” with political terror seeking to erase progressive resistance.

The formal death count—at least 434 people were killed or went missing during the Brazilian dictatorship and 20,000 people were tortured, although some activists put the figures much higher—belies the pervasive climate of fear that traumatised swathes of society.

It is that fear, and the arbitrary reach of the thuggish violence carried out by military agents, that is the focus of Walter Salles’ latest film, I’m Still Here, a touching reflection on the tragic case of Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and former congressman murdered by the military.

Deeming Paiva a dissident because of his work to support other victims of the regime, Brazilian air force security agents raided his middle-class home in Rio de Janeiro in January 1971 and took him away—never to be seen again.

His resilient wife, Eunice, the main protagonist in Salles’ story based on the biographical memoir of Paiva’s son Marcelo, Ainda Estou Aqui , endures the pain of his absence with moving resilience, admirable caution in order to protect her children, and great dignity.

We see the younger Eunice, played by Oscar-nominated Fernanda Torres, juggling the needs of her family now bereft of a father while trying to ascertain the truth behind his disappearance.

Eunice herself was imprisoned and tortured by the vengeful and cowardly security forces, but was transformed as a result into a vocal lawyer and activist known as a prominent advocate for the human rights of victims of political repression.

Salles has masterfully recreated the atmosphere of tension in which many Brazilians lived in that period, exacerbated by the purposeful obfuscation of complicit, conspiring authorities amid a complete lack of information that in itself comprised psychological torture.

The film also represents an effective warning about the danger posed in Brazil by far-right politicians flirting with dictatorship, not least Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called “Trump of the Tropics” and Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2023.

Let’s not forget that earlier this month Bolsonaro—a former soldier and unrepentant apologist for the military dictatorship—was formally charged by Brazil's chief prosecutor of leading an attempted coup after his defeat by Lula in the 2022 presidential election.

I’m Still Here is replete with symbolic references to trigger memories of the country’s dark past while pointing out the threats to its democracy in the present.

Yet notably absent in this tale is the critically important role played by the US in Brazil’s horror story. The military coup and subsequent dictatorship did not happen in a vacuum, but formed part of a hemispheric anti-communist strategy directed from Washington.

This absence in Salles narrative is doubly surprising given that history may be repeating itself—revealed most clearly in the parallels between Brazilian politics in recent years to those of the US, and the links between Bolsonaro and his northern doppelgänger Trump.

After all, it is Trump who is most closely associated with plans to overthrow democracy and hang on to power after losing an election; Bolsonaro supported Trump’s election-denial strategy and almost certainly consulted his inner circle about copying it; the US far-right openly aided Bolsonaro’s re-election efforts; and Trump’s media company took the extraordinary step of suing the Brazilian supreme court judge weighing up the charges against Bolsonaro.

But is director Salles playing a double bluff? Is it precisely in this absence that he is alluding—from a Brazilian stage—to the US itself, and warning of the terror that inevitably follows the undermining of democracy from within?

In doing so he may be showing us we can take heart as a global audience from the explosive decision to prosecute Bolsonaro that, when it comes to genuine efforts to defend democracy, means it is Brazil and not the US that today offers global moral leadership.

Journalist Quico Toro said as much writing in The Atlantic, when he drew attention to the admirable steps by Brazilian prosecutors to hold Bolsonaro to account for threatening democracy—but above all to prevent him from doing so ever again.

Toro wrote: “While American prosecutors languidly dotted i’s and crossed t’s, Brazil’s institutions seemed to understand early on that they faced an existential threat from the former president. Fewer than seven months after the attempted coup, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled Bolsonaro ineligible to stand for office again until 2030.”

By contrast, in the US the legal establishment blinked in the face of the threat when the Supreme Court heard a challenge against the decision by Colorado’s top court to render Trump ineligible to run for president.

Toro added: “The justices could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did—ruled that abuses of power and attempts to overturn an election were disqualifying for the highest office of the land. Instead, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand.”

*Please help the Latin American Review of Books: subscribe for just one month ($5) and support our mission to offer readers more.