During the night of last Tuesday the 14th, the International Council of Museums (Icom) presented the Brazil Red List at the Museum of the Portuguese Language in São Paulo. Also known as the Red List, it is a publication that summarizes the cultural assets most commonly affected by illegal extraction country and illegal trade in the international market. Brazil is the 20th country or region to have a Red List of Cultural Objects in Danger.
The current culture minister, Margareth Menezes, took part in the event and spoke on the subject.
“This is one of the greatest challenges: combating the illegal trade in our cultural assets,” he said in his speech at the event. In her opinion, this type of human trafficking is one of the most moneymaking in the world.
The minister added: “The frequency with which Brazilian cultural objects are illegally removed from the country, as well as their peculiarities, justified the elaboration of the Brazil Red List. Brazil ranks 26th on the list of countries with the most stolen cultural objects and has a very low recovery rate. The illegal trade in cultural goods is a great loss for Brazil because it affects the witness of our people’s process of civilization. Caring for the memory and strengthening our history is a record of the map of our cultural development”.
Around 974 cultural assets are being searched for theft or misappropriation.
From the same list, only 48 have already been recovered.
Red List of Brazil
It took eight years for the Red List to be drawn up in the country. It included five categories most targeted by traffickers: archaeology; sacred and religious art; ethnographic objects; Paleontology; Books, documents, manuscripts and photographs. Each of these categories contains images that illustrate objects that could attract traffickers, such as: B. indigenous headgear, funerary urns of indigenous communities, ritual objects of African origin and even a terracotta sculpture by Nossa Senhora da Conceição.
The Brazilian Red List has been launched in Portuguese and English and will soon be launched in other languages such as Spanish, Swedish and French. The publication of the same is distributed to the police and customs authorities of the country World so they can identify the Brazilian items most at risk of human trafficking.