Eduardo Reina is a writer whose fiction turned out to be true.
It began with a hunch and a bit of imagination: Eduardo Reina, a journalist and long-time researcher of the Brazilian dictatorship decided to write a novel about the kidnapping of a child during the Brazilian military regime.
There was no record of this kind of violence ever happening in Brazil, not in the National Truth Commission or any other published report. But he had a feeling that such violence had in fact taken place, and from that feeling wrote a fictional story.
The novel, Depois da Rua Tutoia (Beyond Tutoia Street), led people to come forward about real cases of kidnappings in their families. These stories were previously uninvestigated and unreported, existing only in personal memories and oral histories.
Here is Eduardo Reina’s story of fiction crisscrossing reality, tugging on a thread in marginal history to bring something terrible and important to light.
Artememoria: Tell me about how you came to write Depois da Rua Tutoia.
Eduardo Reina: I decided to write a novel telling the story of the Brazilian dictatorship kidnapping babies. It’s a story that doesn’t get discussed here. In Latin America, and principally in South America, we know about child kidnappings taking place in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, and Bolivia. I’ve always asked myself, what about Brazil? There were 500 cases in Argentina. It’s impossible that there wasn’t a single case here in Brazil. I said, I’m going to write a novel, a fictional book based on history to bring attention to that question.
So I wrote the novel and it came out in April of 2016. Since then, I’ve been very lucky. People started to seek me out, people who had been kidnapped and their families. And the result is that because of this fictional novel, I’m not writing a reported nonfiction book that tells the stories of 19 people who really were kidnapped by the Brazilian dictatorship.
Artememoria: Why did you decide to write fiction rather than investigate the topic journalistically?
Reina: Because I didn’t have any information to go on. I either imagined or intuited that the Brazilian dictatorship kidnapped children. I’ve studied the history of dictatorship since college. I focused on this topic, historically speaking, ever since 1985 when I graduated with a degree in journalism. I researched the period and read a lot about it. And all of that culminated here, in a novel that led to testimonies about what really happened.
Artememoria: Describe a bit more of what really happened. What did people tell you?
Reina: The first person who sought me out was the daughter of a woman, Rosângela, who had been kidnapped in Rio de Janeiro. The daughter came to me and said, “I read your book and it seemed really similar to what might have happened to my mom. Could you help me find her biological parents?” I agreed, and that’s how it started. I began my investigation with that case.
The starting point of Rosângela’s story is her birth certificate. Everything about it was fake, from the birthplace to the birthdate. How do I know? Because I went to the address listed on the birth certificate, 160 Marquês de Abrantes St. in the Flamengo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. The building has functioned as a welfare institute for public servants in the state of Rio since 1958. The name changed over time, but it’s always been the same institution. It’s an agency called Rioprevidência. And the birth certificate said she was born there.
Two witnesses signed the birth certificate. One, named Paulo, signed the birth certificate saying he was a professional driver, which is not the case. Rosângela’s entire adoptive family was in the military. I went to the find the building that Paulo listed as his home address. It doesn’t exist. The side of the street where his house should have been, the odd-numbered side, is actually the Guanabara Bay. On the even numbered side of the street, directly across from where his address would have been, is the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Children and Youth. I then looked up who the second witness was in the archives at the national library in Rio. That witness was a notary. I later discovered that not only was he a notary, but he was also a very close friend of the father of Rosângela’s adoptive father, and owned the apartment building in which Rosângela’s adoptive parents lived. Rosângela’s adoptive father was a solider, and her adoptive grandfather was a sargeant. Her adoptive great uncle was a general who served as a military doctor under the dictatorship.
So that’s how it went. I also found 11 cases in the Araguaia River Basin connected to people who had been part of the guerrilla resistance in the region, local residents, and guides who cooperated with guerilla fighters. Of the 19 total cases, 11 are connected to the guerilla movement in Araguaia.
In Argentina, there was even a procedural manual in the military for what to do when both parents and children were kidnapped. They divided the children into categories. They said that through age 4, 5, or at a maximum 6 years old, the children could be given away. They could be taken to an orphanage or handed to families sympathetic to the regime. Above that age, they believed that the virus of leftism, of communism, had already contaminated the child, and they recommended killing them. I believe that the same process took place in Brazil. A lot of children in the Araguaia River Basin were taken. I managed to find a few, talk to them, and interview them. But many others remain disappeared to this day.
For example, there was a young boy named Juracy. Now he’s nearly 50 years old and he’s black. His mom, Maria, was a big woman, blond and blue-eyed with light skin. And the military was searching for the child of a man named Osvaldão, the leader of the guerilla movement in Araguaia. They were looking for a black child whose mother had light-colored eyes and was named Maria. So, by mistake, they took Juracy. Another woman named Maria, and Osvaldão’s child, were from an entirely different family. In addition to taking Juracy, they also took Miracy, his brother. They kidnapped them both.
I found Juracy on an island in the middle of the Araguaia River in the state of Tocantins and interviewed him. His birth certificate lists the name of his biological mother, Maria, and Antônio, the soldier who kidnapped Juracy, as his father. From there I went to the city where Juracy was baptized and looked him up in the baptism registry. It listed his name and the name of both of his biological parents. As Juracy had told me, he was kidnapped by mistake. He was taken to Fortaleza and went back to Araguaia when he was almost 30 years old.
I managed to find the half-brother of Osvaldão’s real, biological son. The state took Giovani, who was Osvaldão’s 4-year-old son, Ieda, his 8-year-old half-sister, and the mother, also named Maria. Maria died during the operation to take Giovani.
There’s also the story of Antônio Teodoro de Castro’s daughter. Antônio was part of the guerilla movement in Araguaia. His daughter was kidnapped when she was less than six months old and moved from the Araguaia region to Belém in the state of Pará. She was taken to an orphanage. A lieutenant in the air force had founded the orphanage. A couple that worked in the orphanage adopted her. Her birth was illegally registered in a notary in a city near Belém
Six children whose parents were in the guerilla movement were teenagers when they were kidnapped, and they all were taken to military barracks. The barracks were in Bélem, in Rio de Janeiro, and in Goiás. I was able to find one of them and record his story. His name is José Vieira and I found him in the interior of Pará, in Anapu, a small city on the edge of the Transamazônica highway. He told me about how he was taken to Belém, in the state of Pará, and then to another city where he stayed in a barracks. The army falsified his military reserve documents, saying that he was six years younger than his real age so that he could enter the barracks as though he were to serve in the military.
Artememoria: You mentioned that in Argentina there was a document that formalized these kinds of child kidnappings. Do you think a similar document existed in Brazil?
Reina: No, I don’t think so. I suspect that the kidnapping of babies and children in Brazil served as the basis for the official procedures in Argentina. The kidnappings in Brazil happened before what took place in Argentina, and the different armies in the Southern Cone exchanged information and experiences, practices from one country were passed on to the next. I think that the first stage of the practice of kidnapping children happened here.
A source in the Araguaia region, a local resident that assisted the military in hunting down guerilla fighters, stated that he had an order from the armed forces to kill the children. But local residents often didn’t have the stomach for it, and would instead give them away.
Artememoria: So would you say that the kidnapping process wasn’t very formalized?
Reina: Yes. Also, documentation about the Brazilian dictatorship is very difficult to find. I believe that a lot has already been destroyed. People have access to what has already come to light, and thankfully a lot of information is available in the national library. There’s also a scattering of people who kept some documents, and maybe some day those will also come to light. But now we’re in a race against time. The people who lived through the dictatorship are going to die soon. We need to get their testimonies, to listen to their stories, because if not, these histories will disappear.
It’s necessary to discuss Brazil’s history from various angles, not just from the perspective of the victors of this repressive period in Brazil’s history, and not just from the few victims who have already told their stories. We need many more accounts.
Artememoria: I want to talk a bit more about how you wrote the novel that led to these 19 cases. The beginning of the story takes the form of a series of documents. What was the idea behind that choice?
Reina: They’re fake documents, of course, adapted to the book’s characters. But their structure is real. The documents are there to tell the story of the characters. My goal was to show how the armed forces prepared to arrest the main couple, Verônica’s parents.
In the first edition of the book, those first three chapters come enclosed in a separate piece of paper marked “confidential”. It’s all about how, if you didn’t open those documents and read them, if you didn’t disclose what was confidential during the dictatorship, then you wouldn’t understand the entire story. And that’s exactly how it works. The first three chapters are the basis for the full plot, since they describe the surveillance of political activists and the military’s preparation to imprison and murder them.
I would say you could divide the novel into three parts. There’s the first part, made up of documents, which deals with the preparation for arrest. Then there’s the most intense part of the story, which takes place in prison and involves torture. And then comes the romance, which is about Margot, Verônica’s mother, who fell in love with a doctor who, 20 years later, tries to find her.
That last part is a true story. A woman named Maelise, the niece of a friend of my wife, became a nun and went to Europe. Years later, a former lover went to look for her. I thought about that story and how it would be a beautiful ending to the novel. I didn’t know the details; I only knew what I just described now.
Artememoria: The book’s sections also involve three very different styles of narration. You have the documents, which is the official voice of what was going on, from the perspective of the state, and then you have these more marginal, personal histories. What part of the novel was most challenging to write?
Reina: To be totally honest, none of them. I wrote the book in 110 days. It flowed out as though it had already existed inside of me. I’ve researched the military dictatorship for a long time, so I already had the information. I just sewed it together.
Artememoria: Did a particular journalist or author influence the way you put the book together?
Reina: No specific writers influenced me. But, for example, I worked on a project 30 years ago in which I told the stories of real people in the region around São Bernardo do Campo, near São Paulo. The backstory of Verônica’s dad is actually based on the real story of Betinho, or Herbert de Souza, a sociologist and key player in the leftist movement. In the novel, Verônica’s dad goes to work in a porcelain factory in the city of Mauá, which is part of the São Paulo suburbs, and lives in Jardim Zaíra, which is where the book begins. All of that is information from a true story. So I took what I had already begun in that project and put it into fiction. That’s my influence, if you can call it an influence.
I also believe that it’s very important to write in language that’s accessible to all kinds of readers. So, the first part of the book is really intense and challenging. It’s made up of documents. But I’ve heard from different readers that once the parts about dictatorship are over, they couldn’t put the book down. The story really flowed.
Artememoria: The second part of the book, after the documents, is very hard to get through. You present torture very directly and explicitly. Why did you choose to express and expose violence that way?
Reina: As I said, we need to tell Brazil’s history from different angles. I wanted to write from the perspective of a woman. What women suffered is a part of our history and yet it’s hidden.
When Verônica is being tortured, there’s the line, “children of that breed shouldn’t be born.” That sentence is real. It was said to a woman from Pará named Hecilda Veiga. She had a child, Paulo Fonteles Filho, when she was in prison. He was taken by the regime for 24 hours before being given to his biological grandparents, so you could say that was a temporary kidnapping. But that line, that children of her breed shouldn’t be born, that sentence was really said to her.
This book, it’s fictionalized reality, not a fictional novel.
This interview, translated from the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard, was edited and condensed for clarity.
Eduardo Reina was born in 1963 and is a journalist and writer. He has worked for various newspapers and magazines in the city and state of São Paulo for over three decades, acting in positions such as staff writer, columnist, reporter, editor, managing editor, and editor in chief. He has also worked as a press consultant for organizations, companies, and unions. Through this work, he was awarded the Abril and Estado e Imprensa Sindical journalism prizes. In 2010, his blog won the Estado award and received honorable mention for Journalistic Excellence in the Interamerican Press Society award. He has published various books including the novel Depois da Rua Tutoia (2016) and the collection of detective stories, No Gravador (2003), and has contributed to nonfiction collections including O Conto Brasileiro Hoje (volume 5; 2007) and Contos e Casos Populares (1984).