Rubens Paiva

Rubens Paiva (December 26, 1929 – January 20, 1971) was a Brazilian civil engineer and politician who, as a Congressman at the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, opposed the implementation of a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1968, for which he was tortured and murdered.

Biography

Early life

Rubens Paiva was born in Santos, São Paulo. He was son of Jaime Almeida Paiva, a lawyer and a farmer, and Araci Beyrodt. He was married to Maria Lucrécia Eunice Facciolla Paiva, with whom he had five children: Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Vera Silvia Facciolla Paiva, Maria Eliana Facciolla Paiva, Ana Lucia Facciolla Paiva and Maria Beatriz Facciolla Paiva.

He graduated from the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, in São Paulo, with a BA in Civil Engineering in 1954. He joined the "Oil is ours" nationalist campaign as a member of the student council. During his college years, he was the president of the Academic Center of the Civil Engineering Students and vice-president for the São Paulo Union of Students.

Political career

Paiva's political career began to rise on October 1962, when he was elected Congressman for the State of São Paulo by the Brazilian Labour Party. He took office in February of the next year and participated in the Investigation Committee created to examine the activities of both the Institute for Social Research and Studies (Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais) and the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action (Instituto Brasileiro de Ação Democrática). Those two organizations were supposedly funding commentators and writers who warned about the "red menace" in Brazil. The Committee discovered that some checks were being deposited in the accounts of military officers; this scheme was sponsoring the upcoming coup d'état. With the 1964 coup, Paiva had his mandate revoked by the junta on April 10, 1964.

Exile and return

After the coup, Rubens Paiva exiled himself in Yugoslavia and in Paris, France. Nine months later, he was supposed to fly to Buenos Aires for a meeting with the deposed leaders João Goulart and Leonel Brizola. During the lay over in Rio de Janeiro though, he said to the flight hostess that he was leaving to buy cigarettes. Then, he boarded on another flight to São Paulo, heading to his house, where his wife and children lived. Paiva moved with them to Rio de Janeiro and returned to work as a civil engineer, but still kept contact with the exiled left-wing militants.

Rubens Paiva founded, alongside editor Fernando Gasparian, the newspaper Jornal de Debates and was the last director of Última Hora in São Paulo, before Samuel Weiner sold it to Octávio Frias' Grupo Folha.

After a visit to Santiago, Chile, in order to help the exiled daughter of his friend Bocaiúva Cunha, Paiva returned to Brazil. On his trip, he was mistakenly identified as a contact of "Adriano", which was the contact of Carlos Lamarca, then the top name on the most wanted list kept by Brazil's dictatorship regime.

Arrest and disappearance

Hoping to catch "Adriano" and thus reach Lamarca, the repression forces invaded Paiva's house in Rio de Janeiro on January 20, 1971. The invasion was conducted by armed men that claimed being members of the Brazilian Air Force.

Since then, Paiva was reported missing. According to documents published by the Brazilian military, the car that was conducting Paiva to the Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna (Center for Internal Defense Operations) prison collided with another and was attacked by unknown individuals that rescued him.

Eunice, Paiva's wife, was arrested and remained incommunicable for twelve days. Eliana, one of the couple's daughter, then a 15-year-old young woman, was arrested for 24 hours. Eunice and Eliana were interrogated in the same DOI-CODI room where people supposedly were tortured. They claim to have seen blood, the feared pau de arara and the portrait of Paiva in the tokens of recognition. They also heard the screams from prisoners apparently being tortured.

While his wife and daughter were being interrogated, Paiva was transferred to the Destacamento de Operações Internas (Department of Internal Operations). Though his body was never found, accounts given decades later to the National Truth Commission by an army doctor and former military officers revealed that Paiva died on the second day after his arrest from injuries related to torture at the army barracks where he had been held.

In a 1971 letter, Eunice wrote, based on witnesses, that her husband was tortured on the same day she was arrested at the III Aerial Zone, located near Santos Dumont Airport, then under the command of João Paulo Burnier, also accused of torturing and killing Stuart Angel.