The dismantling of the cultural sector

One of the main targets of Bolsonaro Administration is the cultural sector. Besides curtailing artistic freedom, the federal government has undertaken efforts to erode public cultural policies. Their first decision was to dissolve the Ministry of Culture, which became a department within the Ministry of Tourism. This process has taken place through the appointment of unqualified people to leadership positions, moral harassment against civil servants, negligence of cultural structures, delay on analysis and disapproval of rendering of accounts of projects which seek or received grants from laws promoting culture.

The federal government’s main enemy within the cultural sphere was the Culture Incentive Act (also known as Rouanet Act) as well as the artists who benefitted from it. President Bolsonaro already showed some doubt over the act since his electoral campaign days. In April 2019, shortly after passing a bill which greatly reduced investments allowed per project, Bolsonaro called the act a ‘disgrace’ used to finance left-wing governments. The special secretary of culture Mário Frias claimed that the ‘federal government had no obligation to support grown-ups,’ in reference to the money granted by the Rouanet Law. The president has also criticized the acclaimed singers Caetano Veloso and Daniela Mercury, saying that ‘there are people going crazy without the Rounet Act’ and that ‘playtime is over […], whoever wants to play around will have to do so with their own money.’

In the last two years, Bolsonaro administration has passed a bill delimiting the maximum limit of proposals to be analyzed every month under Rouanet Act. Additionally, it did not authorize projects previously approved in partnership with the private sector and did not renew the request for projects from the National Committee of Culture Incentive, which is in charge of analyzing and approving them. Instead, all decisions were concentrated in the hands of the Culture Funding and Incentive National Secretary André Porciúncula, who is also a former policeman. In 2021, the delay to publish projects doubled when compared to the previous year as a product of all those efforts to restrict the Rouanet Act application, which worries professionals in the cultural sector.

The institutional harassment against civil servants and the appointment of unqualified personnel to positions of power is another recent trait of the cultural dismantling. In 2021, Culture department members compiled a report classifying civil servants as ‘leftists’ who should be dismissed. Secretary of Culture Mário Frias was also accused of flagrantly carrying a weapon inside the building. In 2018, Tourism minister Osmar Terra had already dismissed 19 National Arts Foundation (‘Funarte’) civil servants in order to rebuild the team and put people who were ‘loyal to the government’ there. He backtracked from the decision later on. The federal government has also appointed unqualified workers – according to an executive order approved by the president himself – to the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (‘Iphan’), department of Culture, Funarte and the Audiovisual Technical Center (‘CTAv’).

To find out more about episodes of conflict between the federal government and the cultural sector, see the timeline below: