Dec 20th 2024 | Nº. 148

Editorial

Facing the further devaluation of the Brazilian real, Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, asserted on Wednesday, December 18 that the recent surge in the US dollar could be a result of speculative attacks by investors aiming to weaken the currency. The dollar hit R$ 6.20 this week, continuing its upward trend despite the Central Bank’s attempts to stabilize the market with currency interventions. Haddad, who has successfully proposed an overhaul of the country’s tax system and has put various cost containment measures on the table to signal the government’s seriousness in meeting its fiscal targets, emphasized that the government is focused on maintaining stability, and highlighted that further adjustments could be needed to balance the national budget.

Market analysts and investors worry about Brazil’s mounting debt and seem to believe the government is not doing enough to close a deficit that makes the fiscal outlook worse. For its part, the government notes that almost every measure of the economy that affects most people day-to-day—employment, purchasing power, inflation—is actually quite positive. The narrative surrounding President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s stewardship of the economy is critical as he begins the final two years of his term. With those political considerations in mind, former President Jair Bolsonaro barred from running again in 2026, held a strategic meeting in Brasília on Tuesday, December 17 with opposition lawmakers and members of the Centrão (Big Center), the powerful, informal bloc of generally conservative parties that often play a pivotal role in forming governing coalitions. The gathering, which included some members from parties who currently hold cabinet positions in Lula’s government, aimed to discuss plans for opposing Lula’s administration in the lower house of Congress in 2025.  

At the national level, São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, widely considered the most viable Bolsonaro-backed candidate on the right, confirmed this week that he plans to seek re-election in 2026 rather than challenge Lula. In a recent interview, Tarcísio expressed his commitment to continuing his work in the state, noting that he would also support a center-right candidate in the presidential race, potentially backing Bolsonaro despite his current ineligibility. Tarcísio emphasized that his priority remains São Paulo, where he plans to make significant contributions before focusing on national politics in the next election cycle. This comes on the heels of a major new poll taken in early December by Quaest indicating that Lula's approval increased slightly to 52%, while his disapproval also rose to 47%. Although the economic outlook remains mixed, with 68% of respondents reporting a decline in purchasing power, optimism about future employment opportunities has surged, with 43% noting it is easier to find a job than a year ago. With two years to go, the poll found Lula in strong political position, which could keep some potential challengers at bay.

Highlights

• Democracy vs. dictatorship. This week, the Datafolha Institute published the results of a survey that measures Brazilians' opinions on various topics related to the defense of democracy. The survey shows that 69% of the population consider democracy to be the best form of government, while 8% say they accept a dictatorship. The percentage of those who support democracy fell by ten percentage points compared to the 2022 survey. In addition, 52% of those interviewed believe that former president Jair Bolsonaro attempted a coup d'état to prevent Lula from taking office, while 39% do not believe this. Finally, 62% are against an amnesty for those involved in the failed coup d'état attempt on January 8, 2023, when far-right militants invaded the headquarters of the Three Powers in Brasília. Another 33% say they are in favor of amnesty for those involved. So far, 300 people have been convicted for these acts, and the Federal Police have presented an investigation that sheds light on the involvement of Bolsonaro and his ministers in the coup plot.

• Military Justice. The Superior Military Court – the highest court responsible for judging military crimes in Brazil – decided to reduce the sentence that had been imposed in the first instance on eight military personnel, including soldiers, corporals, sergeants and lieutenants, who fired 62 shots at a family's car in Rio de Janeiro in April 2019. The driver of the vehicle, Evaldo Rosa, was shot dead. His father-in-law, his wife and their son, who was 7 years old at the time, escaped alive. Luciano Macedo, a can collector who tried to help the family when he was passing by, was also shot dead in the same action. All of the military personnel involved will serve sentences of at least three years; all of them under house arrest. The prison time is ten times less than that provided for in the sentence that had been given in the original trial. Edvaldo's wife, as well as human rights organizations and a civilian member of the court, drew attention to the racial nature of the crime, connected to the fact that men, Black people, the poor, and people living in the outskirts of the city are, statistically, the preferred targets of state violence in Brazil.

• Contested investigation. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes extended the controversial “fake news investigation” by 180 days, which was opened in March 2019 and has been extended and expanded several times since then. The initial focus of the investigation was the “Hate Cabinet” – a group formed by sons, advisors, and supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro who, from within the presidential palace, organized massive disinformation campaigns and attacks on political opponents. Over the past five years, however, the investigation has faced criticism for having expanded its scope too broadly and for extending itself unusually over time. Some of these criticisms come from legal experts concerned about the rigor of the procedural rules. Others, however, come from far-right military officials interested in undermining the Supreme Court to avoid legal accountability, under the pretext of defending freedom of expression.

• Legal abortion. The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that the Regional Medical Council of the State of São Paulo does not have the right to request medical records of patients who have had abortions. A week earlier, a similar decision had already been made against the city of São Paulo. In the understanding of the Supreme Court, there is no plausible justification for the government and the entity that represents the medical profession to have access to this personal information. The decision is a partial victory for the feminist movement and is part of a context in which conservative sectors in Brazil are trying to restrict the right to abortion, even in cases already provided for by law.

• Racial quotas. A medical student at the Federal University of Alagoas was ordered to pay a fine of R$500,000 (US$80,000) for defrauding the racial quota system for admission to higher education. The youth, Fellipe Pereira da Silva Rocha, a white man, registered as Black (preto) in the university entrance exam to gain access to an undue benefit that the government grants to Black, mixed-race (pardo) and Indigenous people in Brazil. The case illustrates not only the personal misuse of a resource that was created to redress historical injustices in the country, but also the defiant behavior of people who question this mechanism, using fraud to challenge the system.

News from the WBO, Organizations and Social Movements

We Are Still Here. In the new edition of the Brazil Unfiltered podcast, the host, James N. Green, interviews Vera Paiva, a professor at the Institute of Psychology at USP (University of São Paulo) and the eldest daughter of Congressman Rubens Paiva, who had his mandate revoked by the military coup of 1964, before being arrested, tortured and killed by the dictatorship. In the interview, they talk about issues related to social psychology and the scars that the crimes of the dictatorship have left in Brazil. Click on the link to watch the program on YouTube or listen to it on the main players.

Amnesty and accountability. The preventive arrest of retired Army General Braga Netto, indicted by the Federal Police on suspicion of involvement in a failed coup attempt, is both “a major novelty and a major challenge for the functioning of the Brazilian justice system,” considering that military officers of the dictatorship (1964-1985) were never brought to trial in Brazil, due to an Amnesty Law passed in 1979, says Paulo Abrão, executive director of the WBO, in an interview given to the Reuters news agency and reproduced by the UOL portal. Read at the link.

Redesca Visit. The Special Rapporteurship on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights (REDESCA) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed its “deep concern about the recurrence of floods in Rio Grande do Sul, which have become frequent events and of increasing intensity.” The rapporteur, Javier Palummo, who visited Brazil from December 2 to 6, called for “restoring local ecosystems and promoting sustainable soil and biodiversity management practices” as a way to “mitigate future risks and strengthen the resilience of communities.” The Brazil Office is one of the organizations involved in organizing this visit. Read the note from Redesca/IACHR at the link.

Crimes of the dictatorship. Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino believes that the Amnesty Law, which was adopted in Brazil in 1979 to prevent agents of the dictatorship (1964-1985) from being held accountable for gross human rights violations, cannot be applied to protect those responsible for crimes involving the forced disappearance of victims. Dino’s understanding is that, as long as the person or body is not found, the crime in question continues to be ongoing and, therefore, is not covered by the Amnesty Law. The subject was the subject of an article published by lawyer and political scientist Manoel Severino Moraes de Almeida, general coordinator of the Dom Elder Camara Center for Studies and Social Action (Cendhec), available at the link.

Recess. There will be no editions of the WBO weekly bulletin during the Christmas and New Year period. The team responsible for producing the newsletter will be on year-end recess. The next edition, No. 149, will be released on January 10, 2025. Aliança Brazil Office wishes all readers a happy end of the year.

Feature Article

Artistic Freedom Requires State Policy Now

By Guilherme Varella*

The violation of freedoms is one of the most noticeable symptoms of a country in democratic crisis. Threats to freedom of the press, academic freedom, and science are the first to be reported in these cases. Protest rights are also often violated. In the case of artistic and cultural freedom, the violation causes even deeper damage. It is in this arena where the dispute over values ​​that underpin a social order occurs. Taming the field of culture and restricting free artistic creation is to corrupt the range of values ​​that buttress a democratic society.

Brazil has recently gone through a democratic crisis from which it is still recovering. It was hit by an avalanche of episodes of the violation of artistic freedom with reverberations still present. Hundreds of cases have come to light since 2016, but especially between 2019 and 2022, the period of President Jair Bolsonaro's administration. This was the period analyzed by the Brazilian Integrated Movement for Freedom of Artistic Expression (MOBILE), which studied, systematized and catalogued 299 cases of censorship, authoritarianism, and the institutional dismantling of culture in the country. Through the Censorship Map, situations were recorded of prior censorship of shows; closing of exhibitions; removal of shows or artists from programs; persecution of artists and hate speech on the Internet; intimidation; instrumentalization and distortion of public cultural institutions; paralysis of agencies, policies and programs; and institutional harassment of public servants working in the field of culture. The State, especially the executive, which should support artists, lent its apparatus to the implementation of censorship. In the period studied by MOBILE, the level, powers, federative entities and institutional forces of the State were the agents responsible for the most diverse types of the violation of artistic and cultural freedom. The data is alarming. Among the almost three hundred cases, 90% were perpetrated by the executive branch (compared to 4% by the legislative and 6% by the judiciary). Of this sample, 70% were episodes of violations committed by the federal executive. The preferred target, around 30% of the registered cases, are expressions of gender, race or sexual orientation or violations motivated by religious or moral issues.

The method used is innovative. Unlike the explicit censorship of the dictatorial periods, the mechanisms were now covered with a veneer of formality and institutionality and a (supposed) appearance of legality. The “new censorship” included devices such as the unilateral cancellation of contracts, abusive clauses, budgetary pretexts, undermining of financing lines, disproportionate bureaucratic obstacles, selective denial of accountability, inertia, and emptying of bodies responsible for the progress of projects, etc. This all took place within the discretionary space of the government manager, far from legal controls and oversight of other powers.

Clearly, the political situation has changed. The democratic rupture of the 2016 impeachment was followed by an autocratic government that abolished the Ministry of Culture and launched a crusade against the artistic sector. Its ideological base of support were inflamed to make culture an enemy. In 2023, a government that recreated the Ministry of Culture and committed itself to an agenda of institutional reconstruction and strengthening of the Brazilian cultural sector returned to power. This was undoubtedly a significant change for cultural policies. The big problem is that, today, the protection of artistic freedom is still not a cultural policy. We must protect, promote, preserve and repair.

Artistic freedom is protected as a fundamental right by Article 5, IX, of the Federal Constitution. This provision is supported by several (and historical) international human rights treaties. The combination with Article 220 of the constitutional text guarantees the express prohibition of censorship in Brazil.

It turns out that of all the types of freedom covered by the freedom of expression category, such as scientific and communication freedom, or the right to protest (articles 5, XVI and XVII), artistic freedom is the least developed institutionally, judicially, media-wise and politically. This can be explained by the still incipient field of cultural rights in which it is situated. But it does not justify, in any way, the complete absence of the State as a promoter of a public policy to protect it.

More than protecting, it is necessary to promote artistic freedom through complex government action. As a right, it requires the creation of conditions for integral artistic creation and the full development of cultural expressions. As a freedom, it requires that the State is absent, so that there is no repression of artistic and cultural work.

There is a need for sustained, structured action that outlines guidelines, orientations, and directives for public institutions, and even for the private sector, on how to preserve artistic freedom in contracts, regulations, notices, ordinances, cooperation terms, and agreements, in short, in the institutional framework of cultural law, which will deal with cultural management and production. Such guidelines should be discussed internationally with countries that have gone through (or are going through) similar situations. This also requires Brazil to take a new leading role in the international articulation of cultural rights, as occurred with the debate on the Convention on Cultural Diversity led by Minister Gilberto Gil in the early 2000s.

This policy should propose a theoretical deepening of the topic, as well as its legal maturity, political spread, and institutionalization in the public sector. It should consider the requirements of this right: the holders, the vehicles and vectors, and the context in which artistic freedom should be effectively protected. The topic needs to be specialized in ​​cultural policies and given a locus, which seems to be the National Arts Foundation (Funarte).

The artist as a cultural worker should be the focus (the client or beneficiary) of this policy. Freedom is the main raw material of the artistic creator and should be ensured by the State as a labor guarantee in any political circumstance in the country. Those artists who have seen their work censored and their rights violated must be entitled to compensation. Measures to value the works that have been restricted are essential, as an affirmation of the right to artistic memory and justice in the cultural field. We need a policy to ward off the haunting specter of censorship.

Finally, a public policy for artistic freedom should strengthen artists and their sense of cultural citizenship, keeping them aware of their rights, while remaining proud and fully dedicated to their work. The goal is to prevent them from imposing limits on their work out of fear of reprisals, fear of losing contracts, or financial insecurity. We must avoid the greatest evil that can befall them: self-censorship.

Artistic freedom can be a great new platform that connects all areas of cultural policies related to the arts across the board with a view to realizing rights. It requires a state policy now before any further setbacks.

*Guilherme Varella is a professor at the School of Communication at the Federal University of Bahia . He holds a PhD in Law from USP and was Secretary of Cultural Policies at the Ministry of Culture (2015-16) and technical advisor and Chief of Staff at the Municipal Secretariat of Culture of São Paulo (2013-15). He is the author of the books National Culture Plan: Rights and Cultural Policies in Brazil (Azougue, 2014) and Direito à Folia (Alameda, 2024). 

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.