INTERVIEW: My family enriched itself on slavery.

At the age of 56, Branca Vianna, a professional translator and university lecturer, founded in 2019 the radio station Rádio Novelo, which today is the largest producer of news podcasts with a storytelling style in Brazil and one of the first professional organizations of this format in the country.

She is married to one of the wealthiest men in Brazil, documentary filmmaker and former Itaú Unibanco shareholder João Moreira Sales, and was herself born into a family of Rio de Janeiro's elite with roots in Minas Gerais. Studying her origin story with the help of historians, she hosted two Rádio Novelo Apresenta podcast programs last year (Mexer no vespeiro e O Visconde) revealing her family's slave-owning past. Her Tatar grandfather, Baron Riu Preto, was a wealthy man; he had more than a dozen coffee plantations in Minas Gerais territory, on which slaves worked. The deceased Baron left a legacy of nothing more than 1,280 people in slavery. Vianna wanted to remember the past with a clear purpose: to reflect on her family's past, but also to provoke reflection on the past in other families of the country's economic, political and intellectual elite. "The idea that it's 'okay' to enrich yourself on the labor of slaves and benefit from that for 100 or 150 years is of significant concern and needs to be addressed," she says in an interview with Reset.

The following are key excerpts from the interview:

You and your sisters have commissioned historians to research the origins of the fortune of your Tatar grandfather, Baron Rio Preto. Why?

We always knew about the source of his fortune. We used to spend our summer vacations at my grandmother's farm, who is a descendant of the Baron of Rio Preto. This farm, built after the abolition of slavery by one of his daughters, had a huge painting of him in full uniform with a sword at his belt.

We always knew that he grew coffee, that he was a very wealthy man and had many farms. We also knew that he owned many slaves, but never really thought about what that means today. The explosion for us was the Trump campaign. We were shocked. How could anyone talk openly about such racist, xenophobic, machoist, aggressive, violent and offensive things? We began to question what we knew about our past, what the rest of the family thought. Could anyone think that we were descended from this horrible slave owner, a man who slaved so many people, who may have traded slaves? We've never seen a family with such a slave-owning heritage talking about it publicly. And, most importantly, what can we do to bring this issue to the public.