Júlio De Mesquita Neto, Brazil
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Sat, Apr 1 2000
One of the strongest opponents of the military regimes that governed Brazil between 1964 and 1985, Júlio de Mesquita Neto is famous for almost single-handedly leading the successful battle against censorship in his country.
For nearly half a century, Mesquita Neto worked in the editorial department of the prestigious independent daily O Estado de S. Paulo. He started as a reporter and worked his way up to publisher, a position he held for 27 years.
Mesquita Neto was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on Dec. 11, 1922. In 1947, after graduating from the University of São Paulo’s law and philosophy schools, he joined O Estado de S. Paulo where his father, Júlio de Mesquita Filho, was in charge of the paper’s editorial pages. He worked as a reporter and then editor at various news desks before he was appointed publisher in July 1959. Ten years later, in 1969, he succeeded his father as publisher of O Estado.
Mesquita Neto reformed O Estado’s layout and established a national network to gather news, the major private news agency Agência Estado. These innovations led to the newspaper’s highest levels of circulation since its founding in 1875. His biggest challenge, however, was to preserve the credibility and independence of his paper during the difficult years of military rule.
In December 1968 the promulgation of the Fifth Institutional Act, which granted the president wide-ranging powers to rule by decree, had a devastating effect on O Estado and other important dailies. Magazines and newspapers were required to send their material to the capital, Brasilia, to be examined by a board of censors or were censored on the spot. “A censor named Guerreiro has been physically threatening our colleagues in the newsroom, and it’s worth noting that he’s armed,” read one interoffice memorandum to the director of the daily Tribuna da Imprensa. The “guardians of the state,” as the censors liked to call themselves, cut countless words, articles and illustrations, or banned papers from appearing altogether. This caused irreparable economic damage and forced many papers into closure. Self-censorship was the natural outcome of this harassment.
Because Mesquita Neto refused to practice self-censorship, O Estado was one of the few major dailies to have government censors installed directly in its editorial department. To protest this takeover of his paper and warn his readers of the constant attacks on freedom of information, Mesquita Neto replaced all articles that were cut by the censors with poetry by Luíz de Camões, the famous 16th century Portuguese poet. In a courageous act of defiance, he printed extracts of Camões’s epic poem “Os Lusíadas” in every space where the censors had made their cuts for the following five years.
Although censorship was eventually lifted, Mesquita Neto continued to warn against its possible return. “Freedom of information still remains as a ‘compromise’ by the government, a kind of ‘gift’ and proof of its tolerance. We haven’t been able to witness any initiative which would consider this freedom an actual right which the government has to respect,” he said at the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) conference in Santo Domingo in October 1977. “... On one hand we have the constitution which recognizes the freedom of expression and opposes censorship, and on the other hand, we have a number of laws which can annul in practice all constitutional rights by a simple action of the political power.”
A champion of freedom of expression and of the press, Mesquita Neto was to play an important role in IAPA’s activities. As head of the organization’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information from 1970 to 1971, IAPA president from 1974 to 1975, and in other posts, he used IAPA’s international forums to strongly denounce violations against press freedom, not only in his country but in all of Latin America. His contribution to the defense and promotion of press freedom won international recognition when he was awarded the World Association of Newspapers’ Golden Pen of Freedom in 1974 for his “brave and lonely fight against censorship in Brazil.”
Mesquita Neto died of cancer on June 5, 1996, at the age of 73. His funeral was attended by scores of admirers, including Brazil’s freely elected President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who praised him as one of the strongest opponents of the 21 years of military rule.