What Does the Beginning of a Dictatorship Feel Like?

Oscar winner, 'I'm Still Here,' a film about a real family's resistance to the military junta in Brazil, which held power from 1964 to 1985, shows us what to expect.

I'm Still Here, winner of the Academy Award for best international feature. Alile Onawale/Sony Pictures Classics

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the beginning of a dictatorship feels like. What did it feel like in Russia? What did it feel like in Hungary? Is it happening in the U.S.? How would we know? I’m Still Here, winner of the Academy Award for best international feature, which portrays life under Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-85), offers some practical and sobering insights.

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Dictatorship around the edges

Media, film, and other art forms often glamorize resistance. Intrepid revolutionaries who face off with police in riot gear. Speeches that rouse crowds to action in real time. Rebels who infiltrate a tyrant’s compound. I’m Still Here dispenses with those shiny appurtenances of resistance.

The film respects but does not deify its hero, Eunice Paiva, played by a restrained yet incandescent Fernanda Torres. Based on a real person, Eunice is vulnerable, fearful, and, for long stretches, in the dark and at the explicit mercy of the military, yet her commitment to joy and a relentless pursuit of acknowledgement ultimately wins the day, though at great cost.

At the start of the film, she dances with her husband, Rubens, dines with friends, and organizes a send-off party for her daughter, who is matriculating at a university in England, at Ipanema Beach, a stone’s throw from their well-appointed home. In fleeting moments, however, as she spies something incongruous, like an armored vehicle brimming with soldiers trundling along the beachfront, the shadow of the menace flickers across her face.

The boring reality of resistance (SOME SPOILERS BELOW)

Even when the unthinkable happens, and dour, dusty men in plainclothes escort her husband from their home to an undisclosed location to be questioned, Eunice remains pragmatic, not only seeing to the immediate needs of her children but also to the needs of the men holding her and her family hostage in her own home. Presumably as a method of endearing or at least humanizing herself to them, she and the live-in maid make meals for the men, who laze and leer in the dark corners of the house.

It doesn’t work. The men take Eunice and one of her daughters, with black bags over their heads, to the same black site they took her husband, where they are held in concrete cells and interrogated. Her daughter is released a couple of days following detention, Eunice a few days after that. But Eunice’s husband remains unaccounted for. Thus begins the decades-long administrative struggle to wrest a confession from the Brazilian government.

Two things struck me about how life under dictatorship is depicted in I’m Still Here: 1) the normalcy of day-to-day life, and 2) the boring, procedural reality of resistance.

Eunice’s husband doesn’t blow up bridges. He sends letters and picks up phone calls. Eunice doesn’t topple the dictatorship. She doesn’t get her husband back. Her victories lie in the even-keeled maintenance of her family and ultimately, decades later, after having reinvented herself as a human rights lawyer, in the acquisition of a piece of paper: Rubens’ death certificate.

(SPOILERS END)

history repeats

The movie was intended as a warning, but as the political climate in Brazil shifted, it dawned on the cast and crew ahead of production that the film was increasingly a reflection of modern-day Brazil.

Jair Bolsonaro, far-right former president of Brazil who referred to the 1964 coup as “Liberty Day,” was formally charged just two weeks ago with his own coup attempt following his defeat in 2022. Bolsonaro allegedly hatched a scheme to poison his successor and current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and shoot Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a Bolsonaro detractor. After losing the presidential election, his supporters attacked Congress in 2023, drawing comparisons to the Capitol attack by Trump supporters in 2021.

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Thin line between democracy and dictatorship

The Trump administration exhibits many of the hallmarks of an incipient dictatorship: the gutting of government and installation of loyalists, the beratement and intimidation of opponents in politics and media, the cruel treatment of vulnerable groups e.g. the petty revocation of protections for Ukrainian refugees, the transfer of nonviolent immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, aligning with Putin, another dictator, colluding with billionaires, and on and on. What Trump, Musk, and their retinue of toadies are doing is alarming, but does it rise to the level of dictatorship?

Here’s the problem with that question. It assumes there’s a hard line between democracy and dictatorship. There isn’t. It’s a gradual slide that gets steeper and steeper. Aspiring dictators often work within the confines of a democracy in order to dismantle checks and balances systematically.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, walked such a path. His takeover wasn’t by military might but by the strategic rejiggering of the country’s political machinery, a closer analogue to a potential Trump dictatorship. What makes this brand of dictatorship so insidious is that, at a glance, it looks like a democracy.

People love dictators

There’s another problem with the dictator question. Many people still like Trump. Some really love him. That’s doesn’t line up with our image of a dictator. Dictators are universally reviled, right? Wrong. Many dictators are popular. Putin’s favorability numbers are very high, if they’re to be believed, but that doesn’t change the fact that Putin’s opponents have often turned up poisoned or dead. Orbán is popular. Bolsonaro, an aspiring dictator, was popular.

Here’s the final problem with the dictator question. Many people’s immediate lives haven’t changed much during Trump’s second term, not yet, that is. Sure, eggs are more expensive, and there may be consequences from the trade war, but have things really changed all that much? My life hasn’t. There aren’t armored vehicles barreling through my town. I haven’t been whisked away, black bag over my head, to an undisclosed location to be interrogated and tortured because of my Substack.

Starting with the vulnerable

The thing about dictators, though, is that they target the vulnerable first. Trump can get away with treating noncitizens and migrants like animals because they have no recourse. He can cart them away to Guantánamo Bay, forgoing due process, because who will defend them?

People like me, with personal connections to the plight of immigrants, might be outraged, but many Americans don’t care, don’t think about it, or, worse, approve of the abuse and torture of noncitizens. Out of sight, out of mind. This feeling of normalcy, far removed from the front lines of persecution, can lull those living under a blossoming dictatorship into complacency. Meanwhile, their own rights wither over time until one day they, too, are wholly subject to the administration.

Eunice Paiva managed to find some justice in the end, but it took her decades, and theirs was a family of means. What about those without the same resources? The tens of thousands who disappeared, the names we don’t know. They were kidnapped and tortured in unseen places as millions of others went on with their lives. I’m Still Here demonstrates how life under a dictatorship can feel normal…until it doesn’t.

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Plaza de Godoy y Cruz Plaza, Mendoza, Argentina licensed via Adobe Stock

Los desaparecidos

I’m Still Here called to mind a similar military junta that took place in Argentina, where most of my family lives, from 1976 to 1983. They called it La Guerra Sucia (“Dirty War”), during which anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 people disappeared — los desaparecidos.

My mother and my sister spent a brief interlude in Argentina at the start of this regime (1976-77). I asked my mom what it was like. Was it different from the Argentina she grew up in? Did she witness anything horrible? No, it was mostly the same, she said, with a couple of exceptions.

There was one time when my grandmother warned her not to go outside because the army was in the neighborhood prowling for dissidents. She was told about a brother of a friend of a friend who was taken, never to be seen again, but she didn’t know him. My mother’s day-to-day life was normal.

She spent much of her time helping her mother with the family business, a butcher shop-cum-bodega, and filling out the paperwork for her mother’s retirement. Meanwhile, she was also applying for visas to return to the United States, where my father remained (a story for another day).

Every weekend, my mother would visit her in-laws, la abuela Maria and el abuelo Felipe. On these trips, she took my sister to Plaza de Godoy y Cruz, where my sister would run and play and swing on the swings. Those were nice moments, my mom told me.

Almost a decade later, back in the United States, my mother read Nunca Más (“Never Again”), a book that documented the fates of the thousands of desaparecidos. In this book, she learned that not far from the plaza where my sister played and my mother enjoyed a respite from her administrative duties, people were being tortured in a secret detention center.

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