Folha de São Paulo reported that Gabeira's lack of contrition may have contributed to the continuing refusals.

[7] Years later, in a 2009 Ragga interview, Gabeira called the kidnapping a mistake, and acknowledged positive views of the United States, saying Brazil had much it could learn from and admire about the U.S.[8] Fernando Paulo Nagle Gabeira was born February 17, 1941, in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, to Lebanese immigrant parents.

Gabeira started his journalism career young, contributing to magazines and newspapers in Juiz de Fora while still in high school.

[9] After a short stay in Belo Horizonte in the 1960s, Gabeira moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked for the Jornal do Brasil, a prominent carioca newspaper.

[10] In 1969, the Ação Libertadora Nacional, the main armed leftwing organization in Brazil, and the MR8, to which Gabeira belonged, orchestrated the kidnapping of U.S.

Just after Gabeira's return from exile, a photo of him wearing a very small knitted swimsuit on Ipanema beach became a national scandal.

[14] In 1979, Gabeira wrote the book O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, about his participation in the armed struggle against the military regime in Brazil (1964–1985) and his subsequent exile in Europe.

The book won the Jabuti Literature Prize in the biography/memoirs category in 1980 and was made into the film Four Days in September by filmmaker Bruno Barreto in 1997.

In 1981, he launched Entradas e Bandeiras, a book in which he chronicles his return to Brazil and his abandonment of Marxist ideology, shifting to fight for issues such as ecology, pleasure, and sexual freedom.

In 2006, he launched Navegação na Neblina, under a Creative Commons license, addressing the 2005 "Bloodsuckers Scandal," in which elected and governing officials stole money meant to buy ambulances.

In 2017, he released Democracia Tropical: Caderno de um Aprendiz, in which he recounted Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, as well as an overview of the prior thirty years of Brazilian democracy.

[15][16] His surname was aportuguesado (Portuguese language equivalent to anglicization) from the transliterations Jabara or Gebara (in Arabic: جبارة).