Since the victory in last year’s presidential election, the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been studying the possibility of resuming the requirement for tourist visas for American citizens visiting Brazil.
This requirement has been suspended since June 2019, when former president Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree stating that the Brazilian government would no longer require visas from Americans traveling to Brazil for tourism, business, transit, and artistic or sporting activities, for stays of up to 90 days.
Bolsonaro’s argument was that the measure would stimulate tourism in Brazil. The decision applied not only to Americans but also to Japanese, Australians, and Canadians, who can also travel to Brazil without a visa.
However, Bolsonaro’s decision broke with the principle of reciprocity historically adopted by Brazilian diplomacy because the countries involved do not offer the same benefits to Brazilian tourists.
The visa exemption for foreigners was a long-standing demand from the Brazilian tourism sector, but it never materialized, mainly due to opposition from Itamaraty, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The argument is that the measure, without reciprocity, weakens Brazil’s foreign relations with the countries involved.
Economy versus diplomacy
The Lula government seems to want to prioritize diplomacy. Shortly after the election ended, Lula’s transition team began a study on the effects of the visa exemption for citizens of these four countries and recommended that the government revoke Bolsonaro’s measure within the first hundred days of the new presidency.
The current administration claims that the measure, besides contradicting the principle of reciprocity, has not generated any type of gain for tourism. On the contrary, it represented a significant loss of consular revenues.
However, tourism sector experts argue that the government does not have the database to make this assertion, as the visa exemption was adopted in June 2019 and, in March 2020, global tourism halted due to the Covid pandemic, and has not yet fully recovered.
Moreover, these experts also question when this reciprocity will be possible, especially regarding the United States. The high number of Brazilians attempting to immigrate illegally to the country in recent years is a reason to inhibit any attempt to adopt a visa exemption policy by the U.S. government.
Source: uol.com.br and BBC.com