Bolsonaro cuts Madonna, condoms, and coups from university exam

Brazil’s national university entrance exam (Enem) came to a close this weekend with its second day of testing. The main access point to higher education for Latin America’s biggest country, this year’s Enem saw the smallest number of enrolled students since 2005.

The 2021 exam was surrounded by controversy, with threats of government interference and censorship, and a wave of resignations within the Enem testing body. Since taking office in January 2019, Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has pledged to interfere in the Enem, calling for the removal of “ideological questions” and promising that the exam would begin to have “the face of [his] government.”

At the beginning of November, 37 employees of the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (Inep) — in charge of organizing and applying the Enem — tendered their joint resignation. They said that the government bullied them into removing exam questions that displeased the Bolsonaro administration.

Madonna too “controversial” for Enem exam

The criteria for removing or inserting questions into one of the world’s biggest university entrance examinations are somewhat nebulous. Recently, monthly magazine Piauí gained access to an internal Inep document complaining about the censorship of a series of...