“Did we really do that?” Tessa Moura Lacerda asked her mother in disbelief as they stood outside a government office on a rainy August morning in 2019.
In their hands is the document they fought to keep for years – her father’s death certificate, which now accurately states the cause of death.
It read: “unnatural, violent death caused by the state to a missing person […] in the dictatorial regime established in 1964.”
Tessa’s father, Gildo Macedo Lacerda, died under torture in 1973 at the age of 24, during the most brutal years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
During more than two decades, at least 434 people were killed or disappeared, and thousands were detained and tortured, the national truth commission found.
Gildo and Mariluce, Tessa’s mother who was pregnant with her at the time, were arrested on October 22, 1973 in Salvador, Bahia, where they lived in fear of persecution.
They were part of a left-wing group that demanded democracy and sought to overthrow the military government.
The dictatorship targeted opposition politicians, union leaders, students, journalists and almost anyone who expressed dissent.
Mariluce was released after interrogation and torture, but Gildo disappeared.
He is believed to have died six days after their arrest, at a military facility in the nearby state of Pernambuco.
Former detainees told the truth commission that they saw Gildo in prison, how they took him to an interrogation room from which they could hear screams that kept them awake at night.
The commission also found documents indicating his arrest.
But newspapers reported at the time that he had been shot in the street after a disagreement with another member of his political group.
The government would routinely plant fake stories in newspapers read by huge audiences in Brazil and around the world.
Gildo’s original death certificate, issued after a 1995 law allowed families to request a missing persons document, left the cause of death blank.
His remains, believed to be in a mass grave with those of other political dissidents, have never been identified.
‘As if I remember his fear’
Tessa, who never met Gild, said her father’s death was a constant presence in her life.
Growing up, her mother gradually told her more and more about him until she was old enough to learn the brutal details of how he died.
But the lack of official recognition and the fact that the family never managed to bury him had a deep impact on her.
“His absence, the absence of his body, brought up a series of questions,” Tessa told BBC News.
”As a child, I thought maybe he didn’t die. I had this fantasy that he managed to escape, which I’m not sure my mother even knew about.”
Now, as an adult, she said she still feels that something is “broken” inside her.
For years, she experienced nightmares, could not sleep in the dark, and when she became a mother, she struggled with panic thoughts that something would happen to her children.
“It’s like I have a physical memory of this fear,” she said.
People may find it strange, like something supernatural, but it’s not.
“It’s trauma. I was born with it.”
Until the age of 18, Tessa’s own birth certificate did not list Gild as her father, and the family had to go through a protracted legal battle to prove that he was.
Because of this, correcting my father’s death certificate became an even more important undertaking.
“It’s part of my duty,” she said.
Not only in memory of my father, but in the name of all others who disappeared, were killed or tortured during the dictatorship.
In December, Brazil announced that it would correct the certificates of all recognized victims to acknowledge the state’s role in their deaths.
Until now, only a few families like Tessina have been able to cooperate with the special commission, which was dissolved by then-President Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 and reinstated by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2024, to have their certificates changed.
“It is a legitimate reckoning with the past,” said President of Brazil’s Supreme Court Luís Roberto Barroso.
In recent weeks, a national debate about this violent history has been fueled after a new film by BAFTA-winning director Walter Salles brought the reality of the dictatorship to the surface.
I’m Still Here, based on Marcel Rubens Paiva’s book of the same name, tells the story of the author’s mother Eunice and her fight for justice after his father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, is tortured and killed.
Eunice waited 25 years for her husband’s death certificate.
Without it, she had no access to the family’s bank accounts and had to rebuild her life.
She died in 2018 without knowing exactly what happened to her husband in his last hours and without being able to bury him.
Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice in the film, she won Brazil’s first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress last week for her role in the film – and many hope to see her on the Oscar nominations list later this month.
She told BBC News that she admired Eunice very much.
“She is a woman who has never spent a second of her life seeking recognition for herself… She wanted her husband’s death acknowledged.
“Even though the world is changing, that absence has never been healed,” she added.
“How are you going to tell these families, ‘Just forget it. Sweep your dead under the rug?'”
Despite I’m Still Here being mostly set in the years of the dictatorship, it resonates deeply with Brazilians today.
Brazil is an extremely divided country, and its politics have become extremely polarized.
In recent years, we have seen an increase in extreme rhetoric and efforts to rewrite the story of the dictatorship.
In 2016, a group of protesters stormed the Congress calling for the return of military rule. Three years later, Bolsonaro’s Minister of Education ordered the revision of history textbooksdenying that the overthrow of the democratic government in 1964 was a coup.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has glorified the former dictatorship and held events commemorating the coup during his tenure.
Recently, Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies they were officially accused of allegedly plotting a coup d’état after losing the 2022 presidential election.
The former president never publicly acknowledged his defeat and his supporters, who refused to accept the outcome, they stormed Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court on January 8, 2023.
Salles told the BBC that the current political situation in Brazil is part of the reason why now is the right time to make the film.
“The remarkable thing about literature, music, cinema and art is that they are instruments against forgetting,” he said.
‘This trauma is collective’
Brazilians closely associated with the story described leaving theaters in tears after watching the film.
Marta Costa, whose aunt Helenira was murdered in 1972, said she wanted to escape from the screening.
“You imagine your family was locked up and tortured like that,” she told BBC News.
“When Eunice tells her story, she also tells mine; when I tell my aunt’s story, I tell hers. You can’t separate one from the other,” she said.
Marta is making a documentary about Helenira and her long-term resistance, but the family still doesn’t know much about her disappearance and death. Helenira’s body was also never found.
“It is a cursed legacy, because we must continue to pass the baton from generation to generation, until we ensure that its memory is preserved, that history is told as it really happened.”
Helenira’s family will now, 52 years after she was murdered, receive a certificate confirming the brutal reality of her death.
Its significance, says Marta, is immeasurable.
“The day we get that confirmation, it’s as if the state recognizes its role and apologizes.
“It’s the first step for us to be able to start over.”
Although the confirmations are a step forward, both Tessa and Marta say the grieving families have a long way to go in their fight for justice.
The amnesty law, which remains in force, means that none of the former military officials or those accused of torture and murder have been prosecuted. Many have already died.
There was no official apology from the government or the military.
“Brazilian society must recognize this history that these deaths were not in vain,” said Tessa.
“If we don’t work to clear up this history, to acknowledge our pain,” said Marta, “we will always be at risk of it happening again.”
Early dictatorships, according to Tessa, are a national trauma.
But for her, like Marta and Eunice, it is also a deeply personal history.
“I will not stop fighting until the end of my days,” she said.
– I will bury my father.
I’m Still Here is released in UK cinemas on 21 February 2025
