Press Censorship in Brazil

By Edgar Miller

Although Brazil’s military government dropped efforts to censor The Associated Press and other international news agencies, it slapped full censorship on the Brazilian news media.

It was a massive undertaking. At that time Brazil’s two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, had more than 15 daily newspapers each. Newspapers in many smaller cities often had two or more dailies.

Many news organs agreed to self-censorship and abided by government restrictions on what they could print.

Major papers in São Paulo and Rio, such as O Estado de São Paulo and Folha da Tarde, São Paulo, and O Globo, Jornal do Brasil, and Ultima Hora in Riorefused self-censorship. Censors were assigned to newspapers to make sure nothing critical of the new government was printed.

O Estado, Brazil’s equivalent to The New York Times, had no choice but to accept the censors but banned them from the newsroom. The censor had to work in the composing room and see  the news stories only when proofs of the completed pages were rolled.

At first, when the censor ordered them to cut an article, the paper’s editors simply left a blank white space, showing readers that a major article had been cut out. But the authorities intervened and said the paper had to print something else in the censored space.

O Estado complied, putting in stories on gardening, flowers, recipes, and other unlikely topics for the front page and main news section. That still told readers that news articles had been cut.

Other papers followed suit, but the censorship only tightened.

In addition to censoring the press, the military government banned protests and any sort of political discussions that did not agree with their policies and began controlling the curricula in schools to eliminate so-called communist or leftist content.

The one exception to the censorship was O São Paulo, the newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of São Paulo. Brazil was a predominately Catholic country, and the church was almost as powerful as the military with the general population. The Archdiocese of São Paulo was then the largest Catholic diocese in the world.

Above all, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, the archbishop of São Paulo and one of the nation’s leading critics of the government’s human rights abuses, was a leader who would not be silenced. Apparently the generals feared that arresting him or having him assassinated, as happened to El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero onMarch 24, 1980, would cause a popular uprising.

Dom Paulo, as he was known, was threatened and cajoled by the generals, but he stood firm. The conflict between the cardinal and the generals came to a head in October 1975.

I had just returned to Rio as bureau chief after a two-year stint in Puerto Rico as chief of Caribbean Services, when a story came out of São Paulo about the arrest of a prominent 37-year-old Brazilian journalist, Vladimir Herzog. Herzog, at the time, was editor-in-chief of TV Cultura and a professor of journalism at the University of São Paulo. He previously had worked at O Estado de São Paulo newspaper and for the BBC in London. He was born in what is now Croatia. His Jewish parents immigrated to Brazil in 1940 to escape Nazi persecution.

Herzog frequently had been critical of the military dictatorship and was wrongfully accused of belonging to the outlawed Brazilian Communist Party.

The day following his arrest, the military announced that he had committed suicide by hanging himself from the bars of a window in his cell. He most likely had died from being tortured.

His death caused an uproar across the country, but especially in São Paulo, then South America’s largest city.

Dom Paulo announced that he was going to celebrate an ecumenical mass for Herzog.

Years later, he told me that General Ednardo Dávila Melo, then the commander of the 2nd Army, had urged him to cancel the mass, arguing that it was inappropriate to have a mass in a Catholic church for a Jew. Arns said he told him he could have a Mass for anybody he wanted and reminded the officer that Jesus was a Jew.

I flew down to São Paulo to cover the mass. By the time I got to the church, the huge square outside was filled with people and surrounded by an armed military force including armored vehicles. Snipers were posted around the square. I managed to get into the church which was packed to more than its 8,000-person capacity. I stood in the back because there were no empty seats.

At the altar with Cardinal Arns were several other priests and two rabbis, one of them American-born Henry Sobel, chief rabbi at the main synagogue in the city.

Many in the church also tried to dissuade Arns, fearing that he would be assassinated.

I was standing near the cardinal at the front of the church after he processed out after the mass. A priest told him it was too dangerous to go outside to bless the estimated 30,000 people in the cathedral square.

 “I have to go out and bless my people,” he said, walking out to the cheers of the throng as he gave them his blessing.

The heavily armed soldiers made no move to stop the archbishop. And the crowd was orderly and to my recollection nobody was injured.

Many believe that the uproar caused by the murder of Herzog was the beginning of the end of the military dictatorship even though the generals would rule for another 10 years.

According to Sobel, “It was the catalyst of the eventual restoration of democracy. His death will always be a painful memory of a shady period of repression, a perpetual echo of the voice of freedom, which will never be kept silent.”

These jail “suicides” had become so common by the that instead of saying somebody committed suicide Brazilians would say they were “suicided.”

While the current administration in Washington has not dared to impose direct censorship on the media, President Trump has done his best to discredit journalists and commentators who disagree with him, labeling their stories and commentaries as “fake news” and disparaging individuals at news conferences and other places.

He has also banned news organizations he doesn’t like from attending events at the White House and traveling on Air Force One. This ban includes The Associated Press, since 1848 the recognized as the news organization with highest standard of journalistic reporting and ethics in the world.

His efforts thankfully have not stopped AP and others from reporting accurately what is happening in this country.