Prison for Punning | Blogger Jailed for Satire

The Coluna de Herzog is the aesthetically clueless, rhetorically pyrotechnic political ravings of Carlos Santos of Mossoró

One of the most interesting books I have read lately was a dry, scholarly study of the “festive” press of São Paulo around the turn of the XIXth century.

Between shilling for railroad shares, slandering poltical opponents for hire, and committing some very witty atrocities against proper Portuguese, the papers of the time could be well be the papers of today — as could be the “honor laws,” a local version of our SLAPP suit allowing a private citizen to redeem his honor by bringing criminal libel charges against his adversary.

Comunique-se | O portal da comunicação, reports.

Journalist Carlos Santos, from Mossoró, in Rio Grande del Norte, was sentenced to four months in jail for text published on his blog and considered offensive by the mayor, Fátima Rosado of the DEM-PFL.

Curious, given that the DEM-PFL purports to represent some sort ofanarcolibertarian ultraright and has made press freedom one of the issues it yells loudest about.

The sentence was, hoevver, reduced to R$7,020 in donations to charity.

Pay it to the BCLU. Not that there seems to be one.

Carlos Santos is the defendant in  27 cases brought by the mayor, seven of which have already been tried. Santos was convicted in three, found innocent in another three, and the seventh was dismissed.  In all the articles in question, the journalist questioned the mayor’s managerial and administrative competence and criticized relatives of hers. In his defense, he says that Fátima is only a placeholder for the person who really runs the city, here brother and chief of staff, Gustavo Rosado of the Green Party.

Amazing, how the Green Party became a party of the Right in so many countries in the last decade. There is a certain affinity between its call for strong measures and the authoritarian bias of the parties that embrace its ideology, I would guess.

In the last elections, the Greens mounted a semi-successful bid to paly the divide et imperans gambit during the first round of the elections.. Its vice-presidential candidate was the CEO of Natura, a Brazilian version of the Body Shop.

“If we lived in a civilized nation; this sleazeball would rot in jail, if we were fundamentalists, he would have his hands amputated. In a fascist regime, he would be made an example of in front of a firing squad,” said one article, published in 2009.

The journalist was convicted over several articles, the first titled “zonked out on Valium and living in virtual reclusion”, the second “Our ‘real mayor” pays the price for her lack of education,” “and “the holy pontiff of the  Songamongaist Sect of the Sky Blue Realm reforms church ritual”. Aantos was sentenced to about six weeks in jail for each before the sentence was reduced to R$ 2.040,00 in donations for each, according to Congresso em Foco.

The The Hill of Brazil editorialized against the political persecution of the blogger.

About ten days ago, Carlos Santos appealed the sentence and applied to the Supreme Court for an urgent ruling..

Judge Welma Maria Ferreira de Menezes of the  Mossoró Criminal Tribunal, the texts published offended the honor of the mayor. Among other things, the blogger criticized the fact that the town had been governed for 63 years by the same family, the Rosados.