More than 1,000 cultural objects in Brazil are currently registered as missing. Many were probably smuggled out of the country and secretly sold to illicit collectors via the black market. So say the authors of a new “urgent” list of Brazilian objects at risk.
During the launch of the Red List at the Museum of the Portuguese Language in São Paulo on February 14, Margareth Menezes, Brazil’s new culture minister and former popular singer, said that stopping the illegal flow of heritage items through Brazil’s borders is one of the “great challenges”.
“This type of organized crime takes our culture away from us,” Menezes said.
Many objects leaving Brazil are ancient and have remained in the country sometimes for millennia. Why is the problem suddenly so pressing?
Renata Motta, president of the Brazilian committee Icom, during the launch of Brazil’s red list
Photo: Ciete Silverio
“The last four years have been very difficult in the cultural field in Brazil,” says Renata Motta, president of the Brazilian national committee of the International Council of Museums (Icom) and director of the Portuguese Language Museum. She refers to former President Jair Bolsonaro’s policy of dismantling Brazil’s culture ministry within a week of taking office in January 2019, a move that “significantly affected Brazil’s cultural security”. Motta said. “We have very good laws, but we struggle to enforce them,” she says. “The Red List comes at a good time because it comes just as we have seen a change in national government.”
Since the contested inauguration of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on January 1, the department has been reinstated. The ministry will organize a seminar in April that will explore how the Red List can be used by Brazilian museums.
“The dismantling of heritage protection has caused unimaginable damage,” Menezes said when launching the list. “President Lula understands this. The ministry is open and supports all tools that will protect culture.
A Red List for a Contested Democracy
A Red List is a visual database that helps local law enforcement officials identify the types of items most likely to be illicitly exported. It is designed to work in conjunction with databases that track items that have already been stolen and is usually initiated by a national Icom committee with the support of the country’s government. Recent red lists published by Icom have been created in an emergency. Icom has focused on conflict zones – the latest published lists have been published for Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The Ukrainian Red List was published in October 2022, six months after Russia invaded the country. It was established in coordination with Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy in response to widespread concern that museums in the east of the country were being systematically looted by invading Russian forces, including , in particular, the looting of the Kherson Regional Art Museum. .
Brazil, on the other hand, is not at war. But populist leader Bolsonaro’s reign has acted as an almighty stress test for the country’s democratically elected institutions. On January 8, Bolsonaro’s supporters reacted to his defeat in the presidential elections by storming the Brazilian Congress, the Supreme Court and the Planalto presidential palace in scenes reminiscent of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol after the vote against former President Donald Trump. Many pieces of Brazilian heritage and historic works of art were vandalized in the attacks. Rogério Carvalho, curator at the presidential palace, said in a statement at the time: “The value of what has been destroyed is incalculable.”
Roberta Saraiva Coutinho, the director of Icom Brazil, tells The arts journal“It’s a political matter. For a red list to work, for it to be taken seriously, you need a ministry of culture that can put pressure on the ministry of justice to talk to the ministry of external relations. When you don’t have a ministry of culture, the whole chain of communication collapses.
Anauene Dias Soares, a heritage crime lawyer, says that while the project has immediate benefits in helping law enforcement and border forces, Brazil’s federal government is still ill-equipped to deal with the scale. of the problem. “Until five years ago, we didn’t have a specific department within the federal system that liaised with organizations like Unesco on heritage trafficking,” she says.
“In some Brazilian states, there are specific departments within the police, but we still don’t have a federal police division responsible for culture,” she adds. “I hope this Red List will help catalyze a renewed effort to combat this type of crime.”
According to a database overseen by the Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, 975 objects belonging to Brazil are currently listed as stolen. A separate database, ID-Art, launched in 2021 and overseen by Interpol, tells an equally grim story. The database lists 385 stolen items, including sacred works of art, objects belonging to contemporary indigenous communities, as well as historical books and manuscripts.
But Brazil’s Red List differs from other lists designed by Icom in one specific way: the preponderance of Paleolithic elements. “In Brazilian paleontology, we see fossils removed regularly, but on a small scale,” says Motta. “It’s not necessarily a big black market operation, but it’s common.”
The most endangered paleontology
Soares says that with 33,000 archaeological sites in Brazil – 4,000 new sites were recorded last year alone – paleontology is Brazil’s biggest area at risk. And there remains little international coordination regarding the return of these items.
“We can see fossils that almost certainly originated in Brazil in European museums but, since there is no documentation, it is difficult to force their return,” says Soares. “It’s the same with ethnographic materials; we know, academically, that they come from Brazil. But we can’t legally prove they were appropriated or stolen.
In May 2022, France returned 998 fossils to Brazil after a nine-year investigation to establish their origin. The paleontological artifacts, which included dinosaur, turtle and crocodile fossils from the Cretaceous era, were discovered at the port of Le Havre in France in a shipping container that arrived from Brazil. They had been transported from a basin near the town of Crato in the northeastern state of Ceará. They have now been returned, but only after being stored in various French natural history museums for nearly a decade. “We would prefer not to go through legal procedures to ensure the return of these items, but to engage in an open dialogue between the institutions,” says Soares. “It’s less of a problem.”
The Red List will not only help Brazil stem the flow of priceless artifacts across its borders, but, Coutinho hopes, will help the country eventually recover some of the items it has already lost.
“The most important role of the Red List is to inform museums and scholars around the world about restitution issues,” says Coutinho. “It tells them that some artifacts should never have left Brazil. If Brazil had a red list 50 years ago, a lot of things could very well have been different.
