Chico Buarque receives the Camões Award that Bolsonaro denied him

Chico Buarque de Holanda (Rio de Janeiro, 78 years old), Brazilian musician and writer, already has his Camões award.

He received it this Monday at the Queluz palace, in Sintra, four years late and with long standing ovations from the guests at the ceremony.

The Camões, which has been awarded by the governments of Brazil and Portugal since 1988 to distinguish literature in Portuguese (an official language in nine countries and spoken by more than 200 million people), is an award equivalent to the Spanish Cervantes.

“If we are here today to repair Chico, it is because democracy has finally won in Brazil.

We cannot forget that the denial of the arts is also a mark of totalitarianism and of the dictatorships that censored Chico himself in Brazil and in Portugal, ”said the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as soon as he began his speech.

Buarque, who was first appreciated as a musician and then as a novelist, was distinguished in 2019 for a literary work that contributes "to the cultural formation of different generations in all countries where Portuguese is spoken," according to the jury.

The four-year delay in the delivery was due to the refusal of Jair Bolsonaro, elected president a few months before the announcement of the award, to sign the diploma.

True to his style of despising anyone who does not agree with him, Bolsonaro responded defiantly when a journalist asked him if he would sign the document: "Is there a deadline?

I will sign it on December 31, 2026."

It would be the last day of his term if he had not been defeated in the elections against Lula.

Chico Buarque, who has always been a fierce critic of the former military, replied:

When the Portuguese government decided to ignore Bolsonaro's ninguneo and call a ceremony in Lisbon to award the prize on April 25, 2020, the pandemic arrived and the event was cancelled.

So Bolsonaro and the pandemic have made it possible to square the circle so that Buarque, the author of books like

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or

, received the award diploma – the 100,000 euros had been given to him before – by the hand of his friend Lula , who took advantage of his five-day state visit to Portugal to participate in the ceremony.

Thus, a promise that the current Brazilian head of state made to the writer the last time he visited him in prison was fulfilled.

“Lula promised Chico that when he got out of jail and became president of the republic, he would go to Lisbon to deliver the Camões to him.

And since I was one of the witnesses of that scene, I am going to Lisbon to certify that the promise is fulfilled", explained these days the Brazilian lawyer Carlos de Rocha, who has traveled expressly to Portugal to see with his own eyes how it materialized. the promise.

De Rocha, who visited Lula daily in prison, was one of the emissaries of the handwritten letters that the politician and his then girlfriend, Janja, exchanged during those almost two years in prison.

"This award is the response of talent against censorship," Lula said in the hall of the Portuguese palace where Emperor Pedro IV of Portugal and I of Brazil were born, and which was attended by friends of the laureate such as the Mozambican writer Mia Couto or the Carminho fadist.

In his speech, Chico Buarque emotionally evoked his father, the historian and sociologist Sergio Buarque de Holanda, who was one of the founders of the Workers' Party, due to the influence he had on both his love of culture and his commitment political, but also made the audience laugh.

"I wondered in these four years if they had forgotten about the award," he joked.

The musician also vindicated his black and indigenous ancestors, "whose names my white ancestors tried to suppress from family history."

“Like the vast majority of the Brazilian people, I carry in my veins the blood of the flogged and the whipper, which helps to explain a little to us,” he stressed before sharing a recent discovery about his roots.

"As a descendant of Sephardic Jews persecuted by the Inquisition, one day I may also achieve the right to Portuguese citizenship as a way of historical reparation," he said with a sneer, alluding to the process that Portugal opened to grant nationality to descendants of Sephardic Jews. Jews expelled from the peninsula in the fifteenth century and which has given rise to numerous irregularities such as the granting of citizenship to the Russian oligarch Román Abramóvich.

Buarque did not quote Bolsonaro, but he did charge against his mandate: "There have been four years of disastrous government that lasted an eternity because time seemed to go backwards."

The writer warned that, despite the new political cycle open in Brazil, "the fascist threat persists" and dedicated Camões to "so many Brazilian artists humiliated and offended in Brazil in these years of obscurantism."