BRAZIL-CHILDREN: ‘Telenovela’ Gets Even more Real

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 10 1996 (IPS) - Having revolutionized the Latin American television soap opera genre, the Brazilian “telenovela” is shifting even further as it daringly dramatises real-life problems.

The “telenovela” is joining the search for missing children.

In March, the private Globo network introduced photographs of missing children on the popular “Heartbreak” telenovela that mesmerizes more than 50 percent of Brazil’s television audience every night.

By the first week of April, 14 children had been found.

The first case was that of Celio de Almeida Garcia. Now 13 years old, his mother — Rosemary Pedrosa — had been looking for him for a decade. The boy’s father had taken him to the remote city of Nova Xavantina, 600 kilometers from Brasilia.

The televised reunion between mother and son brought Nova Xavantina, a town of 18,000, to a standstill. Celio went to live with his mother, a secretary, in Rio de Janeiro.

Tourism operator Flavia Diniz also found her five-year-old daughter Amanda Vieria thanks to the telenovela. Like Celio, Amanda had been spirited away by her father.

Three other adolescents sought by their families were discovered in a brothel in a tourist area of Rio de Janeiro. And a boy and a girl located in shelters for abandoned children said they had run away from home to escape parental abuse.

Beyond finding children and adolescents, the telenovela has spawned a major national movement to confront the problem of missing children, which experts number in the tens of thousands each year in this huge country.

One expert gave a figure of 60,000 some time ago. But Cristina Leonardo, a lawyer and president of the Brazilian Centre for the Defense of the Rights of Children and Adolescents, believes “it could be many more.”

The “Heartbreak” campaign turned the Centre’s downtown Rio de Janeiro office into a national headquarters for locating missing children. Dozens of desperate mothers fill the small, hot office every day. Its two telephones ring incessantly. Hundreds of calls are received.

Requests for help doubled after the telenovela began running photographs. The Centre’s staff of ten psychologists, lawyers and administrative personnel cannot handle the volume of enquiries, Leonardo lamented to IPS.

Rosangela Menezes, owner of a small candy business in Rio de Janeiro, is one of the mothers pleading with the Centre to have a photograph of her 15-year-old son Rafael shown on the telenovela.

Rafael disappeared 16 months ago after going out with some friends. “He was a normal boy with no vices,” said his mother.

“The telenovela is our great hope,” says Menezes. Her opinion is supported by Elizabete Brugnera, an insurance saleswoman who left her two-and-a-half-year-old son with her companion’s family in the southern city of Porto Alegre “so I could work.”

Elizabete tried to locate her child five years later. “I know who he’s with but I don’t know where or under what name because they’ve given him a new identity as an abandoned child,” she explained.

Besieged by such requests from all over the country, Leonardo is urging mothers in other cities to “organize themselves like the ones in Rio did and coordinate efforts between the police and official and private organizations.”

The Globo network dominates the national and international market for Latin American telenovelas and exports its production to more than 100 countries. Critics say that the network’s influence over Brazil’s 150 million people makes it an Orwellian “Big Brother.”

“Heartbreak” writer Gloria Pirez got the idea of including real-life missing children on the programme after writing a fictional episode about a three-year-old kidnapped by a trafficker in illegal adoptions.

Reality and fiction then began to converge. A “Heartbreak” journalist character interviewed Rio de Janeiro’s real-life “Mothers of Cinelandia,” a group of about a hundred mothers who meet every Monday to discuss their common problem of missing children, seek help, and protest police inefficiency.

Leonardo said that another group, “Mothers of the Se,” was being organized in downtown Sao Paulo and a third group, “Mothers of Plaza X,” planned to work in all of the country’s major cities.

By revealing that many children “disappear” voluntarily after suffering parental abuse or to escape the home’s narrow confines, the telenovela and the movement it generated have also educated tens of millions of viewers about family problems.

“Heartbreak” writer Pirez says that the missing children’s photographs will continue to appear until the current series ends but that reunions with found children will no longer be shown.

The Brazilian telenovela differs from those in neighboring countries by including such social issues as abortion, homosexuality, drug use, the environment and domestic violence in its plots.

It also explores the sometimes humorous cultural and social frictions between development and tradition. For instance, “Heartbreak” includes an electronically-initiated romance between a politician-businessman and a gypsy where the Internet plays a leading role.

But in the missing children case, the telenovela has managed to create a genuine social movement.

This experience has prompted the Brazilian Centre for the Defense of the Rights of Children and Adolescents to urge President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to require television broadcasters to air daily public service information on missing people.

That such messages would reach the public is not in doubt. Successful telenovelas in Brazil draw some 70 million viewers to their most nail-biting episodes.