Numbers of the week: Jan. 18, 2020

This is Brazil by the Numbers, a weekly digest of the most interesting figures tucked inside the latest news about Brazil. Random numbers that help explain what is going on in Brazil. This week: copycat Nazi propaganda by Brazil’s government, GDP projections, record in rifles seizing, troops on social service, the new Brazilian base in Antarctica and two chapters of a water crisis.

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1 sentence from the Nazi propaganda minister

Theater director Roberto Alvim was fired as Brazil’s culture secretary after posting a video on social media to promote a new government prize to fund cultural productions. The presentation was filled with Nazi aesthetics—from the set design, Wagner’s opera Lohengrin playing softly in the background, to the content of his actual speech. Mr. Alvim actually paraphrased none other than Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister. The now dismissed secretary said “Brazilian art in the next decade will be heroic and will be nationalistic; it will be endowed with great depth for emotional involvement and will be equally binding, as it is profoundly united with the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will cease to exist.” 

In Peter Longerich’s “Goebbels: A Biography,” the Nazi media guru is quoted as telling theater directors that “German art in the next decade will be heroic, steely but romantic, factual without sentimentality; it will be nationalistic, with great depth of feeling; it will be binding and it will unite, or it will cease to exist.”

After huge backlash, Mr. Alvim called the incident a “rhetorical...