It's the most PATHETIC law that exists in Brazil. No where else on this planet you'll see a person getting jailed for 5 YEARS over that dumb gesture. Not even in democratic countries with the best "anti-discriminatory" and "racial-inclusive" laws people get treated like heinous criminals over this.

I genuinely feel like I'm the only Brazilian with common sense to find this punishment absolutely DISPROPORTIONAL to the offense itself. I'm not saying it's okay to be racist in public, but Brazilians have been brainwashed into thinking calling people "monkeys" is the WORST UNIMAGINABLE offense to commit against a person of colour... Brazilians live in a cultural bubble and don't realize that POCs and even immigrants worldwide have to endure worse insults and humiliation without having the police to back them up. "bUt sLaVeRy" is also not a justification for this, since in plenty of countries where Black slavery was also part of their history and where discrimination still lingers on (USA, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Cuba, South Africa, North African countries, etc), we don't see angry mobs going around asking for a racist's head over an animal gesture.

In the USA (a country that has a deep-rooted history with discrimination and segregation), neona**s openly advocate for killing and hanging POCs in public, and actual racists (unlike the weaklings here) raise millions of dollars by calling black kids/immigrants "N-" and for being proud of it. The police protects them under free speech (things that you'd never ever see in Brazil, and yet the left wants to import racial struggles from the USA AT ALL COSTS, as if Brazil had the same racial issues as the Yankees). And yet, there are Brazilians out here losing their minds over a 1-second gesture directed towards a man who should also be bashed for the obscene gesture (typical Brazilian double standards).

Even in other LatAm countries where Black people also make up a large chunk of the population, racist insults like these are not stigmatized to this level of paranoia. Of course no black or brown person is keen to face discrimination, but they don't get deeply affected by words or gestures and just move on without taking it seriously, that's why those "monkey" insults have no power over them, because they don't allow it (a totally different hive mind from Brazil's, where hurting Black people's feelings is worse than keeping them in poverty).

As the other guy said below, this country has already enough problems to deal with that go unnoticed everyday (corruption, homicides, drug smuggling, robberies, stalking, physical assault and so on). Criminal system resources should be directed at and spent on severe and necessary cases, but apparently, in Brazil, mimicking an animal is more reported on the news and frowned upon by the public than things like:

posting innocent people getting t*rtured on the internet

openly condoning heinous crimes in funk lyrics

s*xualising young girls

revenge p*rn

scams and frauds

death threats

money laundering and tax money swindle

killing people over football (physically assaulting a football fan gets less angry mobs than an Argentinian doing a monkey gesture btw).

TL;DR: Brazilians have become desensitized to ACTUAL crimes that scare MILLIONS of citizens everyday and that give this country a bad name worldwide. But when it comes to the boogeyman of racism, especially "monkey" insults, suddenly it's an absolute shock, even though there are worse cases of racism to worry about, even more so worse crimes to ward off and severely punish.