Manchete went dark in 1999 — its debt, now over R$1bn, is still alive

On 5 June 1983 Adolpho Bloch inaugurated Rede Manchete on five channels won in a public bid, concessions granted by president João Figueiredo in 1981. It ran on borrowed scale from the start: by 1986 it carried 80 million dollars of accumulated losses. Then came Pantanal — premiering on 27 March 1990, written by Benedito Ruy Barbosa, directed by Jayme Monjardim, it averaged a network-record 22 rating points in São Paulo, and from its fourth week beat TV Globo almost every day: never the flagship Rainha da Sucata itself, but the lineup around it. Globo stretched its schedule to respond.

The hit could not pay for the network, and even the debt was contested: Bloch said in 1991 that it was under five percent of the group's assets, others said forty million. In June 1992 the IBF group took over with 110 million dollars of debt; the buyer broke the contract, and in 1993 the network went back to the family. Adolpho Bloch died in November 1995 and his nephew Pedro Jack Kapeller inherited the slide. The last years were strikes, mass dismissals and unpaid salaries; the 1998 novela Brida was cut short for lack of money — its lead actress was paid only in 2022, through the courts.

By May 1999 the 1,359 staff of the network and its sound-and-image company had gone unpaid since October. At 2 a.m. on 9 May, after twelve hours of meetings at Rio's Hotel Glória, Kapeller signed the sale to TeleTV, the group of Amilcare Dallevo Jr. and Marcelo de Carvalho: 608 million dollars, of which the seller received one million down and 7.5 million a year for six years — the rest was the debt itself, including 500 million owed to the government. Manchete went dark on 10 May 1999, after sixteen years. Bloch Editores filed for concordata that July; bankruptcy was decreed in August 2000.

The network is still remembered — and still billed. In 2021 its archive of 25,000 tapes was auctioned for 500,000 reais, the proceeds against the debts; in 2022 Globo remade Pantanal, written by the original author's grandson. And the debt keeps the name alive: 560 million reais in December 2018, 1.04 billion by May 2023 — doubled by the rising dollar and interest — and 1.324 billion across eight company registrations in 2024, most of it unpaid wages. As one retrospective put it: the extinct Rede Manchete remains alive because of an unpayable debt.