Brazilian authorities warn The rise of neo-Nazi groups after that, andIn November, a Haitian migrant conference in the town of Itajai received a message calling for the event to be cancelled, warning that they faced a “carnage” if they did not comply.
“Cancel the Haiti exhibit or we’ll have a massacre,” read the subject line of an email seen by the agency. Reuters.
“Santa Catarina It’s a white man’s landfor white people,” the anonymous sender wrote, ending with the Nazi salute “sieg heil.”
at last, The event went smoothly And there are police present.However, Santa Catarina State Police are still investigating the email, indicating that Low but growing number of neo-Nazism cases in Brazil This has increased under former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-2023 term as far-right politics have flourished.
“Any leadership that gives direct credit to Bolsonaro … is wrong,” he said.
Ex-army captain Bolsonaro widely criticized He has long defended Brazil’s 1964 military dictatorship By 1985, he had launched undemocratic attacks on the country’s voting system in last year’s election, as well as policies that critics said endangered the country’s indigenous people.
Brazil’s federal police say number of investigations open for alleged incitement to neo-Nazism It has been rising since 2019, with a “significant increase” this year.
Brazil’s 1989 Racism Law Punishment for using symbols related to Nazism Speech seen as an “apology for Adolf Hitler’s regime” is not protected by Brazil’s free speech statute.
Police say 21 investigations have been launched Suspected of making, selling, distributing or brandishing swastikas So far this year, there has only been one in 2018, when Bolsonaro was elected, “for the sake of promoting Nazism.”
Some experts say the figures do not reflect the national scale of the problem.april a day later a 25 year old man Killed four children with an ax in kindergarten In the state of Santa Catarina, Attorney General Flavio Dino ordered the police Investigating possible neo-Nazi groups operating Go beyond state lines.perpetrator They wear armbands with swastikas Among the two school attacks in Brazil this year.
Brazil’s National Jewish Association CONIB said it had noticed “an unprecedented increase in the number of extremist groups, Most of them are open neo-Nazis. “
Researchers at Unicamp University in São Paulo state have tracked a more than 10-fold increase in the number of neo-Nazis in Brazil since 2015. In a YouTube video presenting their discovery, the Unicamp researchers said, Bolsonaro “facilitated” the increase of such cells.
While others question the scale of these discoveries, no one doubts that the numbers are growing.
Guilherme Franco de Andrade, an expert on far-right issues at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in central-western Brazil, said, Neo-Nazism is clearly a growing problem.
But he is wary of blaming the former president for everything.Instead, he said its growth was likely more associated with growing conservatism Compared to Bolsonaro after years of a bribery leftist government.
A spokesman for Bolsonaro did not respond to a request for comment.
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