Since winning the presidential election last year, the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has studied the possibility of resuming tourist visas for American citizens visiting Brazil.
This requirement has been suspended since June 2019, when the former president Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree determining that the Brazilian government would no longer require a visa from Americans traveling to Brazil for tourism, business, transit, and artistic or sports activities, for stays of up to 90 days.
Bolsonaro’s argument was that the measure would stimulate tourism in Brazil. The decision was valid not only for Americans, but also for 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 contemplated countries do not offer the same benefits to Brazilian tourists.
The exemption of visas for foreigners was an old demand of the Brazilian tourism industry, but it had never gotten off the ground, mainly because of opposition from Itamaraty, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The argument is that the measure, without reciprocity, weakens Brazil’s external affairs with the contemplated countries.
Economy versus diplomacy
The Lula government seems to want to favor diplomacy. As soon as the election ended, Lula’s transition team began a study on the effects of the visa waiver for these four countries’ citizens, and recommended that the government revoke Bolsonaro’s measure within the first hundred days of the new presidency.
The current Administration says that the measure, in addition to going against the principle of reciprocity, did not generate any type of gain for tourism. On the contrary, it meant a significant loss of resources from consular income.
However, experts in the field of tourism claim that the government does not have the database to make this statement, since the visa waiver was adopted in June 2019 and in March 2020 world tourism ceased because of the Covid pandemic, and it hasn’t totally resumed yet.
Furthermore, these specialists also question when this reciprocity will be possible specially in relation to the United States. The high number of Brazilians trying to illegally immigrate to the country in recent years is a reason to inhibit any attempt of adopting a visa waiver police by the US government.
Source: uol.com.br and BBC.com