Image description: The image is a black-and-white illustration. At the center is a human figure with a smiling face and large eyes, wearing formal attire. The figure holds a microphone in its right hand and raises its left arm in a victory gesture. In front of it, there is a small figure of a smiling man holding a newspaper. In the background, there are several speech bubbles with text in Portuguese.Edição do Pasquim de 12/11/1973
O Pasquim is the first name that customarily comes to mind when talking about alternative press in Brazil. Its birth was a kind of dodge around censorship, undertaken by a group of intellectuals that included Jaguar, Tarso de Castro, Sérgio Cabral, Henfil, Claudius, Ziraldo, Carlos Magaldi, and Murilo Reis, joined by columnists such as Paulo Francis, Ivan Lessa, and Sérgio Augusto. It was an intelligent response to the suffocating atmosphere that took hold of the country after AI-5, in 1968. It's no coincidence that O Pasquim began circulating in June 1969, at the height of the Dictatorship.
Cheeky and good-humored, critical and corrosive, the weekly tabloid was born under the aegis of counterculture, but it needed a typically Brazilian knack for maneuvering to keep circulating during the Years of Lead. In one of its most famous episodes, the entire editorial staff was arrested by the military, as a consequence of a satire by Jaguar based on the painting Independência ou Morte, by Pedro Américo.
The magazine's staff organized themselves and managed to publish the issue anyway, mockingly justifying the main team's absence: a "flu outbreak" had struck the newsroom. O Pasquim ceased operations in 1991. In 2001, it returned to newsstands as a magazine, OPasquim21, which featured the participation of some former staff members, running until 2004.
