They came for Rubens Paiva one Wednesday lunchtime in January 1971, barging into his beachfront home in Rio and carting him off – to where nobody knew.
“I didn’t have even the slightest idea what was going to happen. Much less that my sister and my mother would be arrested the next day. It was a terrifying feeling,” recalled the engineer and politician’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who was 11 at the time.
