I'm Still Here

Eunice Paiva is a woman of many lives. Married to congressman Rubens Paiva, she was by his side when he was impeached and exiled in 1964, after the coup that installed a military dictatorship in Brazil. A housewife and mother of five children, she had to raise them alone when, in 1971, her husband was arrested, tortured and murdered by agents of the dictatorship. For decades the military insisted on a distorted version of events, in which Rubens Paiva was killed as he fled with guerrillas resisting the regime. It took Eunice nearly thirty years to finally receive answers, even if incomplete, about what actually happened to Rubens Paiva. During her quest for the truth, amongst her pain, Eunice reinvented herself. She went back to school, became a lawyer and a global leader in the defence of indigenous rights. Meanwhile, she never stopped searching for the truth. Never cried in front of the cameras either. In this masterful book, Marcelo Rubens Paiva creates an emotional portrait of Eunice, his mother, and for the first time traces the dramatic story of what happened – and what may have happened – to his father, who “died by decree, thanks to the Law of the Disappeared, twenty-five years after he died from torture”. By talking about Eunice and her last fight, against Alzheimer’s, he also talks about memory, childhood and family, as well as one of the most terrible moments in recent Brazilian history.