Last November, just hours before a social gathering for Haitian immigrants in the town of Itajai in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, event organiser Andrea Muller received a chilling message.
“Cancel the Haiti exhibition or we will commit a massacre,” read the subject line of the email, seen by Reuters.
“Santa Catarina is a land of WHITE PEOPLE, FOR WHITE PEOPLE,” the anonymous sender wrote, signing off with the Nazi salute “SIEG HEIL.”
Ultimately, the event went ahead without any problems and with police present. Yet the email, which police in Santa Catarina are still investigating, is indicative of a small but rising number of cases of neo-Nazism in Brazil that have increased as far-right politics flourished during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-2023 term.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, was widely criticised for his long-standing defence of Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, his anti-democratic attacks on the country’s voting system in last year’s election and policies that critics say endangered the country’s Indigenous peoples.
Brazil’s Federal Police said the number of investigations opened into alleged incitement of neo-Nazism had jumped since 2019, with a “significant increase” this year.
Brazil’s 1989 racism law punishes the use of symbols linked to Nazism and speech considered “apologies for the regime of Adolf Hitler” is not protected under freedom of expression statutes in Brazil.
Read the article by Steve Grattan in Sight Magazine.