perspective

When Brazilian journalist Tatiana Merlino watched “The Secret Agent” — one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best picture — it felt like seeing scattered scenes from her own life.

As the movie follows Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura) — a professor fleeing from a vindictive businessman during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), the story skims through old audio tapes and newspapers, reviewed by a researcher looking into how he died. Like her, Merlino also dug into the past to piece together how her uncle, Luiz Eduardo Merlino, a communist activist, was killed by the right-wing regime in 1971. Though it was initially reported as a suicide, the family soon found his corpse with torture marks in a morgue.

“It became necessary to fight for memory, truth, and justice, because these crimes committed by dictatorship agents weren’t punished at that time, and have not been to this day,” says the 49-year-old journalist, who first saw “The Secret Agent” in São Paulo, and made a career from investigating human rights abuses.

“When a country does not come to terms with its past,” she adds, “its ghosts resurface.”

Recent dictatorship-themed movies like “The Secret Agent” and “I’m Still Here,” which won the Oscar for best international film in 2025, were instant blockbusters back home in Brazil. While both films honor those who, like Merlino, still seek justice for the regime victims, their popularity also got boosted by the country’s zeitgeist.

To many Brazilians, these movies served as reminders of what could have been had former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, himself a retired Army captain and a dictatorship nostalgic, succeeded in his 2022 attempt at a coup d’etat.

On Jan. 8, 2023, encouraged by Bolsonaro, hundreds of vandals stormed into the Three Powers Plaza, a square in the country’s capital, Brasília, that gathers the congress, the supreme court and the presidential palace. Neither he nor the vandals accepted the 2022 election — won by the veteran leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as “Lula.”

The uprising followed the same blueprint as the pro-Trump rioters behind the Jan. 6 insurrection in the United States. Although President Trump himself was federally prosecuted for election obstruction, the case was dismissed after his reelection in 2024.

Unlike the U.S., however, Brazil has charged, judged and arrested the conspirators — including Bolsonaro and members of his staff who participated in the coup plot.

“Bolsonaro doesn’t come from Mars,” said “The Secret Agent” star Wagner Moura to the L.A. Times in February. “He’s deeply grounded in the history of the country.”

In 1964, a U.S.-backed coup enacted a violent, 21-year autocracy run by the military, whose effects still resonate today, says Alessandra Gasparotto, a professor at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL).

“It was a dictatorship that worked from a perspective of building certain legitimacy, keeping the congress functioning, but of course, after purging dissent,” explains the Brazilian historian.

“I’m Still Here,” for example, dramatizes the real-life quest of Eunice Paiva, a housewife whose husband Rubens Paiva, a former leftist congressman who had his tenure revoked after the coup, then disappeared in the hands of the military in 1971. To this day, his body still hasn’t been recovered.

In 2014, Bolsonaro, then just a congressman, spit on a bust of Paiva erected to honor his memory during the coup’s 50th anniversary in Congress.

“The cinema of all countries has the role of preserving memory, so if you take a look at the Holocaust, the American Civil War, or World War II movies, it has this role of almost an ally of history,” says writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva, son of Rubens Paiva and author of the book from which “I’m Still Here” is based. “There’s an old saying: History is the narrative of winners, while art is of the defeated.”

In the case of Brazil, the militaries who led the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship got away with torture and murder through a 1979 amnesty law. It was initially enacted to pardon alleged “political crimes” committed by the regime opposition and allow a transition to democracy — but it was also used to pardon the dictatorship’s human rights violations. Then, in the late 1980s, the military oversaw a slow, gradual shift to democracy, stepping down from power only in 1985.

“This new republic had more continuity than novelty, since many politicians who were central to the dictatorship moved to central roles in the democratic government,” explains Gasparotto. “That’s why they built this pact [to forgive the regime’s crimes].”

For that reason, these movies still feel contemporary. “The Secret Agent,” for example, blends past and future through the records analyzed by a researcher, while “I’m Still Here” highlights Eunice Paiva’s post-regime fight for the recognition of Rubens Paiva’s death; without any corpse to officialize his death, he was just deemed disappeared.

When Merlino watched the movie, for example, Eunice reminded her of her grandmother, Iracema Merlino.

“I’m the third generation of my family fighting for memory, truth and justice,” says Merlino. “It started with my grandmother, who passed away, then it was handed to my mother, who’s now very ill, then to me.”

Nowadays, she awaits trial for the third lawsuit attempt of the family to hold her uncle’s torturer, Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, accountable — the two other cases against the accused were dismissed over the years.

Since Ustra’s death in 2015, the Merlino family is now suing his estate for reparations. Yet he still remains a hero to some; in 2016, while Bolsonaro was still a congressman, he shouted a dedication to the memory of the torturer during the voting of the impeachment of Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff — herself one of the victims of Ustra in the 1970s, but among the few who survived.

“These films make connections with the present because understanding the past is important for understanding today’s contradictions,” says Marcelo Rubens Paiva. “What happened before interferes in the conflicts a country lives in today.”

So if authoritarians like Bolsonaro don’t come out of the blue, the same goes for other autocratic leaders, like President Trump.

Although founded on democratic principles, the U.S. itself has a long, muddled history with the concept. The authoritarian turn the country is reckoning with is part of a long legacy of inequality that stemmed from the 246-year institution of slavery. Following its abolishment in 1865 came a near-centurylong period of tension marked by racial segregation that we now refer to as “Jim Crow.”

“With some exceptions, the South was governed by a then-segregationist Democrat party — with [rampant] electoral fraud, authoritarianism, use of local police for political repression, and no chance for opposition, even [by] moderates,” says Arthur Avila, a history professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended segregation and granted voting rights to people of all races — signed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Southern Democrat who broke away from the party’s history to spearhead progressive domestic policy — the decades that followed were ridden with manipulations of the electoral system. For example gerrymandering, or the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries to favor one political party, is an ongoing, albeit controversial tactic among both Democrats and Republicans.

President Trump himself was federally prosecuted for election obstruction. The indictment alleged that, upon losing the 2020 election, Trump conspired to overturn the results and manipulate the public by spreading false claims of election fraud on social media. It argued that this, in turn, stoked a mob of his supporters into leading the deadly Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol; but the case was dismissed upon his reelection in 2024.

In the lead-up to the midterm elections in November, Trump has pushed for federal control over elections, restrictions on mail-in voting and the addition of citizenship documents to vote, despite an existing federal law that already prohibits noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. (He tried implementing the latter through an executive order in 2025, but it was permanently blocked by a federal court; a voter ID bill called the “SAVE America Act” is currently stalling in the Senate.)

“There’s a strong local authoritarian tradition in the U.S. that Trump himself feeds from,” says Avila.

Besides that, according to Avila, the country faces a growing “de-democratization” process from within. This shows in the rising control and dismantling of institutions by reactionary sectors — including efforts to block professional, educational and athletic programs promoting DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion — from what many critics and scholars have cited as lingering resentment from desegregation, he says.

“We may see it as a slow authoritarian turn in North American politics that didn’t overturn the democratic regime yet,” Arthur considers. “But if this process goes on, and that’s a conjecture, in the next decade the U.S. may become a state of exception that keeps democratic appearances but has been stripped of any democracy’s substance whatsoever.”

As movies such as “The Secret Agent and “I’m Still Here” remind us, a great deal of maintaining a democracy has to do with keeping a good memory.

Aimee Zambrano is a Venezuelan anthropologist, researcher, and consultant who has made significant contributions to the struggle against gender-based violence in the country. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Women’s Studies. She is the founder of the Utopix Femicide Monitor, a platform that collects data on femicides from open sources. In this interview, Zambrano sheds light on the main challenges to advance a feminist agenda in Venezuela.

How has gender-based violence evolved in Venezuela in recent years?

It is difficult to answer precisely because there are no official figures. The former Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, presented some figures, but he did not break them down; rather, he spoke in general terms about a period during his tenure. So it is very difficult to assess what changes have occurred, especially in quantitative terms. 

We undertake a partial registry based on cases that appear in the media, so these are not official figures. But it is enough to see patterns emerging. We have been monitoring since 2019 and saw an increase in femicides in 2020 due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which also led to an increase in all types of gender-based violence, not only in Venezuela but in most countries around the world. In 2019, when we began monitoring, we recorded 167 femicides, then in 2020 we recorded 256. In 2021, there was a decrease and we counted 239 cases. In 2022 and 2023, there were 240 and 201, respectively. In 2024, we recorded 188 femicides, and for 2025, we estimate that the figure will be around 165.

There has been a decrease in the number of perpetrated femicides. However, when we look at other forms of violence, such as attempted femicides, we are seeing an increase compared to previous years. This is a warning sign because these are attempts to murder women that leave physical, psychological, and social consequences on both the survivor and her environment. We have also seen an increase in femicides of Venezuelan women abroad year after year. We are also witnessing a large number of cases of sexual abuse, especially child sexual abuse and trafficking, both abroad and in our country. Similarly, here in Venezuela, the disappearance of women is not classified as a type of gender-based violence, but according to various investigations we have carried out, disappearance or abduction, in the specific case of women, girls, and teenagers, is directly related to gender-based violence, and many of these disappearances are associated with femicides where the bodies are hidden, or cases of gender-based violence where the aggressors end up confining the victim. At the same time, we have seen a large number of cases of vicarious violence, where the aggressor inflicts violence on children, family members, or even pets.

So, a decrease in the number of femicides does not mean that other forms of violence are not on the rise. It is also important to talk about political violence. In the context of the July 2024 presidential elections, two femicides occurred and we saw threats against many community leaders by right-wing groups, who persecuted and harassed them. The same goes for media violence, social media, and artificial intelligence. In fact, there need to be changes in the laws so that these new forms of violence can be punished.

How does the lack of official and updated figures from the Venezuelan government affect the implementation of effective public policies to combat gender-based violence?

It has a huge impact. It’s not that there are no figures, but that they are not public. In fact, several public programs such as the Mamá Rosa Plan for Gender Equality and Equity, the various homeland plans, and even the Organic Law on Women’s Right to a Life Free of Violence, mandate that the state must create an observatory for gender-based violence. 

The absence of data means that we cannot measure the efficacy of the public policies that are being enacted. Statistics could also allow organizations to develop proposals, not only legislative ones, but also from women’s groups, which must also participate in the elaboration of these policies.

It is often said that the deterioration of living conditions in Venezuela disproportionately affects women, but what does this mean in practice? Does it also impact the number of femicides?

Yes. We were affected by the rentier culture, the crisis, and economic sanctions. It has been a multifactorial phenomenon. The rentier culture did not change, public policies depended on oil revenues, and a series of US-led unilateral coercive measures were imposed on us that affected all aspects of life. In crises, it is always women’s bodies that pay the price. Currently, we have to work four or five jobs, usually informal ones, to make ends meet. For those of us with children, it is even worse, because we also have the burden of unpaid work in the home. The same is true for the care of the elderly or people with disabilities, which always falls on our shoulders. 

In Venezuela, the vast majority of heads of households are women, who are either alone or part of extended families of women living together and raising children. In addition to this, women are the ones who make up a large part of the social fabric, they are grassroots leaders. At the same time, the country is experiencing a crisis in services, electricity, water, and gas, which further increases the burden of care work. Women have to figure out how to get water for cooking, washing, and bathing their children, how to cope when there is no electricity, or how to cook without gas, especially in the interior of the country, where public services are in a more dire state. 

Does this have an impact on the number of femicides? It does. Violent, aggressive men find themselves in the midst of an economic crisis, where there is unemployment or underpaid work, they become increasingly frustrated, and where do they take out all this frustration? On women, their partners, their families, their homes. It would be interesting to see if GDP figures or periods of high inflation correlate with peaks in femicides. 

With the US attacks on January 3, we saw the kidnapping of Cilia Flores and also the rise to power of the first female president, albeit in an acting capacity, Delcy Rodríguez. How can this be interpreted from a feminist perspective?

The bombing of Venezuela was a flagrant violation of international law, but we also saw how National Assembly Deputy Cilia Flores appeared during the arraignment hearing in New York with bruises on her face and body. Her attorney requested medical attention, which indicates that during the operation she was the victim of violence by the US military. This, of course, is indicative of what foreign powers do when they bomb and invade other countries, especially in the Global South, where they do so to extract natural resources. 

Talking with friends, I have realized that many of us feel violated, as women, by everything that has happened. Now the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, has a very difficult task: to take the reins of the state with a gun to her head. It takes a lot of courage to face this. In addition, after the bombing, Trump’s threat to her was very direct: do what I want or you will be worse off than Maduro. It is difficult to take on that role and have the responsibility of preventing more lives from being lost. 

In the current context, what are Venezuela’s main challenges in terms of the feminist agenda? You have suggested, for example, the need to create a structural feminist emergency plan. What would that look like?

The first thing is to define what that feminist agenda is, because in Venezuela there are different grassroots movements and organizations with different political stances, and polarization sometimes makes it very difficult to unify the points. Sometimes we try, but the efforts can get fragmented again due to specific political events. I would say that there is the issue of gender violence and also the decriminalization of abortion in Venezuela, as common ground that unifies many of us. We also demand a justice system that has a gender and feminist perspective because the current one is built from an androcentric, patriarchal perspective; that is, it is a justice system created by men and for men. An amnesty law is currently being implemented, so this has to be included in it. 

By a feminist emergency structural plan, we mean that the Ministry for Women and Gender Equality should not be the only institution responsible for public policies relating to women and the LGBTIQ+ population. It should rather involve the entire state. I am not saying anything new because this already appears in the Organic Law on Women’s Right to a Life Free of Violence and also in the Mamá Rosa plan, which was supposed to culminate in 2019, but almost nothing that was stipulated ended up being implemented. All ministries, all affiliated entities, all state institutions, including governors’ and mayors’ offices, must address gender issues, and a robust budget is needed for this. For example, the Ministry of Communication must run ongoing campaigns in the media and on social networks about the different forms of violence and the telephone hotlines and websites where incidents can be reported. The Ministry of Housing must focus on creating shelters for victims. The Ministry of Education must review the curriculum to include gender studies, comprehensive sexuality education, and different types of violence, as well as implement protocols for care in schools, high schools, and universities. In addition, all state officials have a duty to educate themselves on the issue.

How do you assess the retreat of the state in certain areas and the growing “NGOization” leveraged by Western funding?

It’s complex because initiatives, activities, marches, etc., require resources, and many of our organizations don’t have them. In addition, there is another factor at play here, which is the proliferation of religious groups, especially Pentecostal evangelicals, who have grown significantly in Venezuela, have a presence within the state and within political parties, and are also very wealthy, which allows them to carry out campaigns, mobilizations, etc. Feminist movements face many obstacles because most of us also have to work several jobs and take care of our homes and communities. So it is difficult to keep up with evangelical and conservative right-wing groups. 

I think we need to identify who the enemies are, who targets our rights, and then assess the contradictions and coordinate women’s and feminist movements. I make the distinction because there are women’s organizations that do not necessarily identify as feminist. But we have to grow, see what issues unite us, and begin a series of actions. I always make this call: despite our political differences, let’s try to unite around an agenda that unites us all.

How does social media influence the proliferation of violence, and gender violence in particular?

I believe that violence has always been present, but now it is exposed because some forms of violence that we used to consider normal or common have been explained or denormalized. In addition, social media and the internet allow us all to learn about different cases in different parts of the world. But, on the other hand, we have the issue of anonymity and lack of accountability, meaning that people can say outrageous things, threaten, insult, and commit violence facilitated by technology. Social media also allows virtual groups to come together to commit violence, and there are also certain influencers on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok spreading crazy ideas. Guys like El Temach in Mexico, who speak to you from their machismo, what some call “toxic masculinity” but I call “the healthy descendant of patriarchy.” 

There is also another point here: the algorithm. For example, a teenager starts searching for content about exercise, and soon after, the algorithm will introduce them to these influencers, thus creating mass communities such as incels, which organize themselves through forums like Reddit. This also breaks down the entire social fabric of face-to-face interactions, and people end up isolated but believing they are “accompanied on social media.” All of this leads to disorders such as anxiety and depression. In addition, teenage girls and women become caught up in the aspirational idea of having a certain type of body, aesthetic violence, etc. In short, I’m not saying this from a moralistic point of view, but social networks have encouraged a lot of violence. Besides, who owns these networks? What ideology do they profess? What are they using them for? We have to investigate so we can arm ourselves and fight this battle.