Uncovering long lost letters written during Brazil’s military dictatorship
Journalism’s dirty secret isn’t always nepotism. Sometimes, it’s luck! This couldn’t hold any more true for the Lisbon-based journalist, researcher and writer Lucas Figueiredo—an expert on Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1964-85)—when dozens of yellowed envelopes with stamps from foreign post offices landed on his table under mysterious circumstances during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Sometimes, I spend years unsuccessfully searching for a specific piece of information,” he writes in his reportage for Brazil’s Revista Piauí. “Other times, I spontaneously receive a batch of papers.”
The letters in question belong to former Brazilian exiles who, in the 1960s, traded life under military rule for Chile, Uruguay, West Germany, the United States and elsewhere. Their correspondence was primarily of personal nature (“typical expatriate letters”, Figueiredo notes), detailing their lives away from Brazil: its trivialities, troubles, and discoveries. Figueiredo decided to return these letters to their senders. This task, however, proved more difficult than expected: to evade the military regime’s scrutiny, the exiles had developed an intricate system of codes and cross-references and omitted personal information, such as their last names and places of residence, using first names only: Eduardo, Moacyr, Haroldo, Cantídio, Rubens ….
Among the senders whose identity Figueiredo was able to work out was former politician Almino Affonso, deep into his nineties. “Unlike what I feared, my first contact with Affonso passed without a sign of estrangement, tension or anguish”, writes Figueiredo, “he didn’t consider it an invasion of privacy.” On a rainy afternoon in December 2021, they met for the first time at the politician’s modest home in São Paolo’s Alto de Pinheiros neighbourhood. Over coffee and coconut water, they discussed Affonso’s storied life, including his exile in Chile and affiliation with fellow dissident and politician, the impeached and later murdered congressman, Rubens Paiva, whose wife Eunice’s filmed life-story, Ainda estou aqui (tr. I’m still here), was awarded with an Academy Award for Best International Feature earlier this month. (Figueiredo, mentions that the batch of letters which came into his possession didn’t include any messages to Paiva.)
How did the exchange of letters go? Under the pretence of needing the bathroom, Figueiredo left Affonso with three letters to Cantídio Salvador Filardi, a former colleague from the University of São Paolo’s Law School. “They are letters from Chile, my God!”, he heard Affonso exclaim in surprise through the door. In hindsight, Affonso stated that the letters were probably useless as sources of information for the military regime: “They almost always contained nothing important, they were just emotional support,” stressing that his friendship with Filardi would later survive these lapses in communication as a result of his correspondence being seized by the authorities.
Yet not all of Figueiredo’s exchanges of letters were as successful as that with Affonso. His identification work is ongoing, with the author trying to decipher some of the names in the correspondences. Occasionally, he has traced adjacent family members, as in the case of Paivas’ son Marcelo, a screenwriter whose book about his mother Eunice, Ainda estou aqui, was being adapted for the screen at the time of the exchange. A first contact through a voice note exchange in July 2023 revealed Marcelo’s sorrow about what had happened: “too bad my mother died because she was the one who knew these people well.” A few months after the exchange of letters, Paiva noted: “everyone from that generation is passing away. The story’s fading out.”
Figueiredo’s work continues, however. The letters’ journeys are far from over. Sixty years on they have accompanied Figueiredo on journeys to Switzerland, Portugal, and Brazil. Their final destinations, as yet, have not been reached.
The full original article by Lucas Figueiredo was published in Brazilian-Portuguese on 4 February 2025.
It’s available here: ‘As Cartas Que A Ditadura Escondeu’, Revista Piauí.
Revista Piauí is a Portuguese-language, monthly cultural magazine based in Rio de Janeiro.
