An icon of Brazilian culture dies: Silvio Santos was both a household name and dictatorship supporter
Brasil de Fato
Silvio Santos died on Saturday (17) in São Paulo. He was 93 years old.
The death was confirmed on social media in an SBT, Silvio Santos’ channel post. The presenter and businessman had been hospitalized for a month due to the flu.
Santos, whose real name was Senor Abravanel, was born in 1930 in Rio de Janeiro. He was a street vendor and radio announcer before making a career in television.
He founded TVS, which later became Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão: the SBT. (Brazilian Television System in a rough translation). The presenter ran the Silvio Santos Program on the network for over five decades. Taking advantage of his presence on TV, Silvio Santos expanded his business to other areas and became one of the wealthiest men in the country.
It was 2020. With the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic still ongoing – not even the elderly had been vaccinated -, then President Jair Bolsonaro (Liberal Party) attended the luxurious 90th birthday party of Silvio Santos, the owner of SBT, one of Brazil’s biggest TV channels.
The affinities between Silvio and the former president were obvious. Silvio Santos’ son-in-law, Fábio Faria, was Bolsonaro’s Minister of Communications between 2020 and 2022.
In addition, prominent names from SBT, such as presenter Ratinho and Silvio Santos himself, have supported the former president – now ineligible – and have used their TV shows as a platform for the Bolsonaro family since at least his election (in 2018). Government funds have also made a difference: the Bolsonaro government has reduced the difference between the funds given to Globo – Brazil’s biggest media conglomerate – and SBT.
At the time, Brasil de Fato listed reasons why a president should avoid paying homage to Silvio Santos. Since then, the list has grown, with the dispute over a plot of land in downtown São Paulo with Teatro Oficina, a famous theater company. Read below about the controversies:
1 – Benefitted from the dictatorship
SBT was born in 1981 out of the relationship between Silvio Santos and his former colleague from the Paratroopers School Délio Jardim de Matos, then Minister of Aeronautics of João Figueiredo’s military government.
“Figueiredo gave me the channel,” Silvio admitted on a TV show in 2018.
Before receiving the concession, Silvio Santos already benefited from a good relationship with the Brazilian dictatorship. In 1972, he bought 70,000 hectares of land in Barra do Garças, in the Araguaia region of Mato Grosso state, during the government of dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969-1974), one of the most violent of that period.
At the time, Mato Grosso was governed by cattle rancher José Fragelli, from Arena, the party that supported the regime (at the time, Brazil had only two parties: Arena and MDB). According to the news website De Olho nos Ruralistas, he used to facilitate selling land to companies and people “sympathetic to the regime”.
2 –Supporter of the dictatorship
To keep the concession, confront Globo’s dominance and balance access to advertising funds, Silvio Santos made explicit statements supporting military presidents and their ministers. SBT was known for its “popular” programs and represented, for the military, a direct way to communicate with the working class.
In February 2020, during the Bolsonaro administration, Silvio Santos decided to recreate the show “A Semana do Presidente” (The President’s Week), broadcast during the dictatorship with details about the routine of the military who ruled the country. The idea was suspended after criticism of its “sycophantic” nature.
A similar episode had already occurred in 2018, in the context of Bolsonaro’s election, when SBT broadcast jingles with the colors of the Brazilian flag (green, yellow and blue) during commercial breaks.
One of them showed the dictatorship’s slogan, “Brazil, love it or leave it”, a hallmark of General Médici’s government.
The TV jingle caused outrage and was taken off the air the same day.
3 – Prone to censorship
On May 23, 2020, the most searched topic on social media and debated throughout the country was the video of Bolsonaro’s ministerial meeting, which revealed the authoritarian character and lack of decorum of the federal government team.
Revealing phrases such as “let the cattle through” and “jail the tramps at the Supreme Court” were uttered at that meeting by the minister of the environment, Ricardo Salles, and the minister of education, Abraham Weintraub, respectively.
As the content greatly compromised the government’s image, SBT suspended its main news program, SBT Brasil. There was no warning or explanation to the public about the decision.
The National Forum for the Democratization of Communication (FNDC, in Portuguese) took a position on the case the following day. According to the organization, that episode of censorship harks back to “the darkest days of the military dictatorship established in the country with the coup of 1964.”
“The episode is yet another in a series of interventions in the journalism sector by SBT’s ‘owner’, Silvio Santos, who solemnly ignores the fact that it is a public concession, which would legally oblige him to comply with a series of requirements preventing TV from being used for the benefit of personal political interests,” concludes the FNDC statement.
4 – “Sex, money or power?”
Silvio Santos made this question in 2016 to a five-year-old kid during one of SBT’s shows.
The case was the subject of an inquiry by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF, in Portuguese). “Children and teenagers have the right to respect and dignity as people in the process of development and as subjects of civil rights, which includes the inviolability of psychological integrity, including the preservation of image,” says the text from the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in São Paulo.
Also according to the MPF, free expression of thought is not an absolute right, and the “right to reply proportionately to the offense, in addition to compensation for material, moral or reputational damage” is guaranteed.
Regarding the episode, SBT said that “the minor’s mother filed a lawsuit for compensation against SBT in defense of her individual and very personal interests,” and that “there was no diffuse undermining of children’s rights.”
Experts also criticized the show “Miss Childhood”, broadcast at the time by Silvio Santos. Girls between seven and ten paraded, often in bathing suits, and received praise from presenters and judges.
5 – Accusations of racism
In December 2019, Silvio Santos was accused of racism when he took a musical prize away from a Black contestant, contradicting the audience’s choice, during the show Quem você tira
State co-deputy Jesus dos Santos, from the Activist Caucus, filed a lawsuit against him in the São Paulo state courts. The document also mentions three previous cases in which he believes Silvio was racist.
Silvio Santos made fun of the accusations during an edition of his show on December 15 of that year.
6 – Suspicions of corruption
The presenter’s name was one of the top trending topics on social media as soon as financial operator Adir Assad’s plea bargain came to light, claiming he “laundered” around BRL 10 million (US$ 1,84 million) for the Silvio Santos Group through fraudulent sports sponsorship contracts in the late 1990s.
In August 2019, the Silvio Santos Group told the press that it would not comment on the case because it did not know the content of the plea bargain.
7 – Sexism
Sexist statements and comments about women’s looks also cause outrage in a country that records one femicide every 7 hours.
“I can see from here that you’ve put on a bit of weight,” he said to stage assistant Helen Ganzarolli during the Jogo dos Pontinhos show. “Do me a favor: don’t get fat, because you’re the only muse I have.”
Statements such as “after Luciano Huck married Angélica, he gave her a makeover and she became beautiful” are also common, as are “jokes” about women’s clothes on stage.
Silvio’s sexist stance has drawn criticism even from his own family. His daughter and fellow presenter Patrícia Abravanel went so far as to say on air: “I don’t like to see my father playing the old pervert men, talking about sex. Whenever a beautiful woman comes along, he’s eating her up with his eyes. He shouldn’t.”
8 – #EnoughWithHarassment
On November 10, 2018, during the Teleton show, Silvio Santos said live that he would rather not hug singer Cláudia Leitte because he would get “horny”.
At the 2016 Teleton, he had jokingly refused to dance with singer Anitta.
“Yes, I felt embarrassed,” said Claudia on social media. “When we go through episodes like this, we see an example of what happens to many women daily, in many places. It’s rampant and cruel. It hurts us and makes us afraid. The provocation is disguised as a joke, and people laugh because they’ve got used to it. It seems normal to us.”
The following day, the hashtag #ChegaDeAssédio (Enough with Harassment, in English) was one of the most commented topics in the country, and dozens of artists took a stand in solidarity with the singer.
Silvio Santos refused to apologize.
9 – Silvio Santos vs Teatro Oficina
Next to Teatro Oficina, downtown São Paulo, there is a plot of land that is the subject of a dispute between the TV presenter’s group and the theater company, which wants to turn the site into a public park. Silvio Santos had other plans: the construction of apartment towers. The legal battle over the site has been going on for more than 40 years.
The dispute involves the preservation of the Oficina building, which is listed as a heritage site, and the investment plans that were put forward by Grupo Silvio Santos (GSS).
In February of this year, the theater underwent, in absentia, a change in the structure of its building, carried out by the GSS.
At the time, the theater company reported that it was faced with the closure of the arches of the building, which would constitute “an illegal act” and “symbolic and real violence against material and immaterial heritage listed in the three instances of protection (municipal, state and federal).”
