Rubens Paiva occupation engineer
Exile and return
Shortly after the coup, Rubens Paiva voluntarily left Brazil for self-exiles in Yugoslavia and in Paris, France. Nine months later, he was supposed to fly to Buenos Aires for a meeting with the deposed left-wing leaders João Goulart and Leonel Brizola. During the lay over in Rio de Janeiro though, he said to the flight hostess that he would be momentarily leaving the plane to buy cigarettes. Instead, he boarded on a flight to São Paulo, heading to his house, where his wife and children lived. Paiva then moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro and returned to work as a civil engineer, while continuing to collaborate with and assist exiled left-wing militants and guerrilla members inside and outside the Brazilian territory.
Rubens Paiva founded, alongside editor Fernando Gasparian, the newspaper Jornal de Debates and was the last director of Última Hora in São Paulo, before Samuel Weiner sold it to Octávio Frias' Grupo Folha.
When returning from a trip to Santiago, Chile, where he had been helping the exiled guerrillera daughter of his friend Bocaiúva Cunha, Paiva was mistakenly identified as a contact of "Adriano", which was the contact of Carlos Lamarca, then the top name on the most wanted terrorists list kept by Brazil's dictatorship regime.
job profession career vocation employment