The Minister of Culture, Margareth Menezes announced today (19) that the Ministry of Culture and the federal government will support Carnival in different parts of Brazil, decentralizing promotion laws and encouraging companies and society to invest more in culture via incentive laws . After attending the opening of the carnivals in Salvador and Recife, the minister made a statement earlier this Sunday night in Rio de Janeiro, where she will accompany the first night of the parade of the Special Group samba schools.
“We have made a commitment that, from now on, we will increasingly seek to make companies and society more aware of the advantages of investing in the country’s culture. We will enable actions that bring in the necessary resources. The decentralization of culture promotion laws and the dialogue that we will establish with companies to attract more support and investment in actions in the cultural sector are already goals outlined in the ministry”.
The minister pointed out that culture incentive laws play a fundamental role in Carnival, and that samba schools would have great difficulty organizing their parades without them. Margareth Menezes announced that Mangueira and Unidos da Tijuca presented projects to receive federal support via the incentive law, and will receive funds.
“Starting next year, we want to extend this possibility of support to the most diverse regions of the country”, she said, who defended the economic importance of the carnival.
“This is absolutely not just a moment of distraction for the people. The Brazilian carnival has already shown what it came to for a long time. Our carnival is a great platform for job opportunities and a vector for generating jobs and income much greater than we can imagine”.
The minister said that Carnival plays an important role in the recognition of Brazilian culture and identity around the world, and that it is necessary to take greater advantage of it. At the end of her speech, she took the opportunity to sing one of the most famous samba-plots of the Rio de Janeiro carnival, “É Hoje”, composed for the 1982 parade of the União da Ilha do Governador.
“My joy crossed the sea / And anchored on the catwalk / It made a fascinating landing / At the greatest show on Earth. Long live Carnival in Rio de Janeiro!”
Embratur
The president of Embratur, Marcelo Freixo, also participated in the event and defended that the development of Brazil cannot give up its culture and the joy of carnival, a potential in which few countries in the world can match Brazil.
“Carnival is a moment of celebration of life, where the Brazilian people will recover their joy. It’s two years of the pandemic and four years of the destruction of any cultural project in the country, doing a lot of harm to the image of Brazil abroad and to our spirit in here,” he said. “This is the first carnival after the pandemic and after the pandemonium, and we will have the chance to make the most beautiful carnival in our history, because we deserve it”.
Freixo pointed out that Carnival generates gains for entrepreneurs in the hotel and service sector, as well as for self-employed workers such as taxi drivers and street vendors.
“Thanks to science, thanks to the vaccine, thanks to health professionals, we are alive and we are going to Carnival, because Carnival is life, it’s employment, it’s work, it’s income, it’s development and that’s what Brazil needs”.
Rio de Janeiro’s secretary of culture and creative economy, Danielle Barros, thanked the minister for her presence at the Rio de Janeiro carnival and said that the state and municipality had been working without federal support to promote the carnival.
“In recent years, we’ve been doing carnival alone in Rio de Janeiro. Just the city hall and the state government. And it’s too big a party to be left in the hands of the city hall and the state government. One hand was missing. And your presence here is a sign that this hand arrives to help us, and that next year we are sure that we will have a carnival together with the Ministry of Culture, and deliver an even more powerful carnival, if it is that this is possible”.
