Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Brazilian Neo-Nazi Gets 3 Years For Baring Swastika Tattoo at Jewish Students

A Brazilian judge sentenced a man to 35 months in jail for giving Jewish students a Nazi salute and exposing his swastika tattoo.

Luciano Silva Barreto of Rio de Janeiro’s criminal court sentenced Luiz Vinicius Consenzo, 25, after convicting him of a racist crime, according to a Jan. 22 report by CONIB, the umbrella organization of Brazil’s Jewish communities.

Consenzo committed the act in front of a Jewish community center, the Clube Israelita Brasileiro, on December 3, 2010, at a party held there by Jewish students from the Federal Univesrity of Rio De Janeiro.

He left the scene but police managed to track him thanks to photos taken by the center’s president, Cezar Benjor.

Benjor and police investigators compared the photos to pictures of known neo-Nazis, and were able to identify Consenzo by the tattoo, according to a report on Ultimo Segundo, a news site.

Consenzo was the administrator of a community of neo-Nazis on the Brazilian social network Orkut. A complaint against him was filed by the Jewish Federation of Rio de Janaeiro, or Fierj.

Last month the television station Terra reported that prosecutors in Porto Alegre were preparing to charge four people with “Nazi crimes” for the first time in Brazilian history.

The four, Luzia Santos Pintos, Fabio Roberto Sturm, Laureano Vieira Toscani and Thiago da Silva, are accused of attacking, along with 10 additional gang members, four Jews on the street in Porto Alegre in 2005.

According to Terra, they are suspected of using knives and batons to severely beat their alleged victims.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.