The Worrying Growth of neo-Nazi Cells in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Roberto Alvim was eventually exonerated from his position as National Secretary of Culture after the release of his video with quotes and aesthetics that referred to Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda.

He was not the only one to bring back memories of one of the darkest periods in history. The scandal coincides with the moment when there is a worrying growth of the neo-Nazi cults in Brazil.

In an updated mapping in late 2019, anthropologist Adriana Dias of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) identified 334 neo-Nazi cells in Brazil, most of them in São Paulo and the southern states.

A 1989 law provides for imprisonment of two to five years for those who advocate Nazism. In one of the most recent incidents involving this issue, a music festival was canceled which would have taken place on January 18th at the ‘Caverna do Dragão’ bar, in the city of Canoas, in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul. It would have been nothing more than a meeting of neo-Nazis excited about the Hitlerist greeting and backed by heavy metal.

Following a denunciation of the event, the owner of the bar was summoned by the police and claimed she had canceled it after finding out about the group’s motivations. “I was upset with the repercussions, it hurt me a lot,” says Valéria Vigonozas.

The number of explicit cases of anti-Semitism and displaying of Third Reich symbols has increased in the United States and Europe, even where the legislation is strict and penalizes its perpetrators, as in Germany.

According to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, anti-Semitic crimes are about to peak in 18 years in New York City, where the largest Jewish community in the Americas is located.

In France, the National Consultative Committee on Human Rights found 541 acts of anti-Semitism in 2018 – an increase of 74 percent over the previous year. In Germany, there were 1,646 attacks in the same period, and 1,652 in the United Kingdom, according to the Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“The rise of right-wing populist governments, with clearly discriminatory discourse to minorities like the LGBT community, has also contributed to empowering these groups,” says David Magalhães of the Far-Right Observatory.

“There is an ideological climate more favorable to these cells, once prostrate and cursed, but which are now exhuming the worst of humankind,” he adds.