Censorship under the military dictatorship in Brazil
The 1964–1985 military dictatorship in Brazil engaged in censorship of media, artists, journalists, and others it deemed "subversive", "dangerous", or "immoral".[1][2] The political system installed by the 1964 coup d'état also set out to censor material that went against what it called moral e bons costumes ('morality and good manners').[3]
Two protests against the military dictatorship precipitated the AI-5: the Cultura contra Censura protest against the prohibition of 8 plays in February 1968 and the March of the One Hundred Thousand in June of that year.[1]
On December 13, 1968, the Institutional Act Number Five was announced in the name of "authentic democratic order [...] (and) the combat of subversion and of the ideologies contrary to the traditions of our people", creating conditions under which disclosure of information, manifesting opinions, and cultural and artistic production were subjected to censorship.[1]
The death of journalist Vladimir Herzog in 1975 is considered a turning point in the process of Brazil's re-democratization.[6][7] The military regime promulgated a narrative that Herzog had committed suicide, but evidence indicated that the suicide had been staged, leading to public protest against the military government and its methods of covering up torture, including a weeklong strike by 30,000 university students and professors.[6]
The January 1977 Manifesto dos Intelectuais 'Petition of the Intellectuals' led by Lygia Fagundes Telles, with over a thousand signatures against the dictatorship, was delivered to the Ministry of Justice in Brasília and broke the momentum of the censors.[8]
Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were arrested December 27, 1968—days after AI-5 was announced—under the false accusation of having performed a parody of the Brazilian National Anthem to the tune of "Tropicália" at the Sucata club in Rio de Janeiro.[9][10][11][12][13] They joined a number of Brazilian artists who lived in exile during the military dictatorship.
Some newspapers adopted strategies—such as printing excerpts from Luís de Camões's 16th-century Os Lusíadas or cake recipes calling for a 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of salt—to indicate to readers that the content in those sections had been censored.[15][16] So much material was censored from O Estado de S. Paulo between December 1969 and January 1975 that it printed all 8,116 verses of the Lusíadas twice over.[16]