Red List Brazil: which cultural objects are at risk of trafficking?

On the night of last Tuesday, the 14th, the International Council of Museums (Icom) at the Museum of the Portuguese Language, in São Paulo, launched the Red List Brasil. It will also be known as the Red List and is a publication that brings together the cultural objects most subject to illicit removal from the country and illegal trade in the international market. Brazil becomes the 20th country or region to have a Red List of cultural objects at risk.

The current Minister of Culture, Margareth Menezes, participated in the event and spoke on the subject.

“This is one of the greatest challenges: combating illicit trafficking in our cultural goods,” he said during his speech at the event. According to her, this type of trafficking is one of the most money-moving in the world.

The minister also added: “The frequency with which Brazilian cultural goods are illegally removed from the country, in addition to their specificities, justified the elaboration of the Red List Brazil. Brazil ranks 26th on the list of countries with the highest number of stolen cultural objects and has a very low recovery rate. Illicit trafficking in cultural goods is a huge loss for Brazil, because it interferes with the testimony of the civilizing process of our people. Taking care of memory and strengthening our history is a record of the map of our cultural evolution”.

Around 974 cultural assets are sought after they have been stolen or stolen.

From the same list, only 48 have already been recovered.

Brazil red list

The Red List took eight years to be made in the country. It included five categories that are most targeted by traffickers: archeology; sacred and religious art; ethnographic objects; paleontology; books, documents, manuscripts and photographs. Each of these categories has images that illustrate objects that could attract traffickers, such as indigenous headdresses, funerary urns belonging to indigenous communities, ritual objects of African origin and even a terracotta sculpture of Nossa Senhora da Conceição.

The Brazilian Red List was launched in Portuguese and English and will soon be launched in other languages, such as Spanish, Swedish and French. The publication of the same will be distributed to the police and customs authorities of the world so that they can identify the Brazilian items most threatened by trafficking.

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