Rubens Paiva

Hoping to catch "Adriano" and thus reach Lamarca, the military forces raided Paiva's house in Rio de Janeiro and arrested him on January 20, 1971. The action was conducted by armed men that claimed to be members of the Brazilian Air Force.

In a 1971 letter, Eunice Paiva wrote, based on accounts by other political prisoners, that her husband was tortured on the same day she was arrested at the III Aerial Zone, located near Santos Dumont Airport, then under the command of [1]João Paulo Burnier, also accused of torturing and killing Stuart Angel.

Paiva's political career began to rise in October 1962, when he was elected Congressman for the State of São Paulo by the Brazilian Labour Party. He took office in February of the next year and became a member of the Congressional Committee created to examine the activities of both the Institute for Social Research and Studies (Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais) and the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action (Instituto Brasileiro de Ação Democrática). Those two organizations were under the suspicion of funding commentators and writers who warned about the "red menace" in Brazil. The Committee also accused some high-ranked military officers of receiving bribery from the two aforementioned foreign entities, in a scheme that supposedly financed the upcoming military coup d'état on March 31st 1964. The Investigation Committee however, never presented any proof of such allegations. After the Brazilian government overthrown in 1964, Paiva, among other politicians, had his congressional position revoked by the junta on April 10, 1964.

In the Czech State Security (StB) archives in Prague, in the folder nº 11,778, entitled 'People of Political and Economic Life in Brazil', there are two letters with official reports on Rubens Paiva. Both reports were written on March 27, 1964 by a Czech communist political police chief and secret agent operating in Brazil, codenamed Moldán.

The recruitment, however, ended up never happening. The StB documents are dated from March 27, 1964 and the military coup d'état in Brazil that put communist militants on the run or in prison took place only four days later.

He graduated from the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, in São Paulo, with a BA in Civil Engineering in 1954. He joined the "Oil is ours" nationalist campaign as a member of the student council. During his college years, he was the president of the Academic Center of the Civil Engineering Students and vice-president for the São Paulo Union of Students.

Rubens Paiva (December 26, 1929 – January 20, 1971) was a Brazilian civil engineer and politician who, as a Congressman at the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, opposed the implementation of a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1968. Due to his involvement with subversive activities, he was apprehended by the military forces and subsequently tortured and murdered.