WBO Brings Activists and Academics Together at a Conference on Brazil at Georgetown University
WBO Press release
October 23 2023
• Event brought together 15 experts to discuss the political, economic, and social transformations taking place in Brazil
• Initiative brings Brazil and the USA closer together, raising the voice of Brazilian civil society at the international level, according to the organizers
The Brazil in Transition conference that was held in Washington on October 19 and 20 by the Washington Brazil Office (WBO) and Georgetown University became a valuable meeting point between academics and representatives of civil society organizations and movements interested in debating the rapid and profound transformations that Brazil is going through.
For two days fifteen experts in economic development, racism, human rights, the environment, indigenous issues, democracy and crime took turns participating on five thematic panels on the university campus. The conference was broadcast live on the internet and the complete content – both from the 19th and 20th of October – remains available in full.
In his opening speech, Professor Bryan McCann, chair of the Department of History at Georgetown University, welcomed the partnership with the WBO to bring Brazil and the USA together in a joint dialogue. “It is a great pleasure and an honor to start this conference. We made a huge effort to get this conference off the ground. This would not have been possible without the support of Georgetown University and the Washington Brazil Office, which worked together to hold this conference,” said McCann.
The chair of the Georgetown Department of History was followed by an opening greeting from Brown University Professor James N. Green, president of the WBO Board of Directors, who recapped the last 54 years of solidarity actions between the USA and Brazil with regard to the defense of democracy. He placed the work of the WBO and the panelists present as part of a historical chain that began in 1969, when the lawyer, political scientist, journalist and impeached congressional representative Márcio Moreira Alves went to Washington to warn leaders in the U.S. Congress about the countless crimes that were being committed by the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).
Alves' visit “was the first of many decentralized actions to internationally denounce state violence against opponents, human rights violations, and repression against all Brazilian progressive social movements at the time,” said Green. “Since then, over the years at different times and in many ways different groups have tried to carry forward this solidarity and this mission of informing the American public about what is happening in Brazil. We founded the WBO with 22 affiliated organizations initially – NGOs, movements, think tanks and other organizations – to think about ways to articulate the interests of Brazilian civil society internationally,” he said.
“We are particularly proud to organize this meeting at Georgetown University to think together about the nature of the current situation in Brazil, together with the academics, experts, Brazilianists, and representatives of civil society organizations that we brought to this meeting,” concluded Green, highlighting that “the voices of civil society are a key element in the defense of democracy in Brazil in the years to come”.
Afterwards, Bernardo Velloso, the minister-counselor of the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, spoke of what he classified as a “promising moment in Brazil-USA relations.” He recalled President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's visit to his American counterpart, Joe Biden, in September 2023, even before completing his first year in office. For Velloso, this visit “was a strong signal of the importance of Brazil-USA relations,” in agendas of common interest in the environmental areas, the reform of multilateral institutions, and climate change, for example.
Valloso also cited JAPER – the English acronym for the Brazil-United States Joint Action Plan for the Elimination of Ethnic-Racial Discrimination and the Reduction of Inequality, with which the WBO has been working to articulate an even more active and close participation in Brazilian civil society organizations in bilateral relations.
The importance of the partnership between the WBO and Georgetown University was revisited in the remarks at the close of the conference. Paulo Abrão, executive director of the WBO, considered the conference as “an opportunity to put into practice the conviction that the alliance between the academic sector and the social sector, activism, and Brazilian social organizations is fundamental because this is a convergence which guarantees the necessary independence for those who want to make a correct analysis of how democracy is advancing in Brazil”.
Abrão highlighted what he classifies as a “positive alliance between academic in the United States who have a passion for Brazil and study the country and Brazilians who have a desire to deepen the democratic experience.” He highlighted that the conference contributes to the WBO's objective to create connections between civil societies in Brazil and the USA, which “will be solid ties as they are built from the ground up rather than dependent on the moods of those in power.” According to Abrão, “governments and institutions already have their diplomatic channels; they have their structures. Now civil society needs to build ways to strengthen its critical, clear, and independent voices.”
Political scientist and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies Diana Kapiszewski closed the conference on behalf of Georgetown University. She highlighted the quality of the panels and speakers, which contributed to a deeper insight into “the challenges that Brazil is facing and the many reasons to be optimistic about the country's extraordinary power and its ability to continue building a future less unequal, more inclusive, more sustainable and safer and more democratic.”
Economy, racism and human rights
The first panel, on economic development, was opened by Monica de Bolle, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who drew attention to the absence of a serious discussion on development in Brazil in recent decades. “Brazil is stuck in this place where the discussion about the macroeconomic agenda overshadows the debate in the public arena about economic development,” said the professor.
Next, Nelson Barbosa, a director of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), cited the pandemic to show that “fiscal policy works when it is correct.” Barbosa cited compensatory measures taken by different governments to overcome the crisis. The BNDES director also spoke about the challenges of financing a social welfare policy in a country like Brazil, listing the experiences of financing public health, public education and programs such as Bolsa Família, which explains the high Brazilian tax burden when compared to other developing countries.
The panel on economic development was completed by Marcelo Paixão, associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin and affiliated with the Department of African Diaspora Studies and the Teresa Losano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Paixão presented a retrospective about Brazilian economic plans from 1986 until the Real Plan, which was marked by the opposition of inflation control to economic development. He noted the Brazilian economy’s emphasis on the exports of primary projects, which depends mainly on agriculture. The professor cited data showing that in 2002 the agro-industrial complex led Brazilian exports, while in 1989 two thirds of Brazilian exports were manufactured goods and showed the harmful effect of a concept of economic development that is not inclusive, especially in relation to the Black Brazilian population.
The next panel dealt with racism and human rights. The first speaker, Marcia Lima, from the Ministry of Racial Equality, reported the dismantling of sector policies by the previous government. She enumerated the various direct and regressive actions that led to a weakening of the racial agenda. Lima said that much of the time of these ten months of government has been dedicated to building a ministry, “which we hope will not have an existence restricted to the four years of this government”.
She was followed by Edilza Sotero, assistant professor of Sociology and a researcher at the A Cor da Bahia Program at the Federal University of Bahia, as well as consultant at Center for the Study of Labor Relations and Inequalities, which launched the fight against racism as a fundamental element for building a real, solid, and effective democracy. Sotero recalled the history of active mobilization and international dialogue of Black movements, highlighting the fact that this struggle led to the recognition of slavery and transatlantic trade as crimes against humanity that today demand reparation policies. She situated the struggles of Black movements – throughout history and today – as a phenomenon inseparable from the struggle in defense of democracy and human rights.
Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, professor of Political Science at North Carolina Central University and co-coordinator of the US Network for Democracy in Brazil (USNDB), focused her presentation on the analysis of access to food as a factor in citizenship and human rights for people of African descent in Brazil, placing special attention on the Bolsa Família program. According to data presented by her, more than 60 percent of households led by Afro-descendant women suffer from hunger in Brazil, while among households led by white people this percentage is approximately 10%. Mitchell-Walthour presented data and conclusions gathered from her research visits to Brazil, which resulted in the publication of a book on the topic: The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future).
Environment, indigenous peoples, crime, violence and democracy
The second day of the conference began with a panel on the environment and indigenous peoples. The first speaker, Kathryn Hochstetler, from the London School of Economics spoke about the dismantling of the state apparatus used to curb deforestation in Brazil during the government of President Jair Bolsonaro. According to her, past laws approved in Congress and regulations overturned during this period greatly reduced the government's ability to curb deforestation. Hochstetler also said that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government has reversed 40 of these government measures over the last 10 months.
Then, Janes Jorge, associate professor of History at the Federal University of São Paulo, Campus Guarulhos, deepened the analysis of the many regressive measures taken in the last four years in Brazil, reconstituting the political and social dynamics that made the rise of the extreme right possible in the country – a political sector that, according to Jorge, “had the environment as one of its targets.”
The third speaker at the panel on the environment and indigenous peoples was Caetano Scannavino, who reported on the work in the Amazon carried out by the NGO Saúde e Alegria, of which he is part. Scannavino spoke about the growth in records of cases of mercury poisoning and how this fact inhibits breastfeeding among mothers who are afraid of contaminating their babies with mercury. He also spoke about the increased persecution of environmental defenders and brigade members in the region.
The next panel, on crime and violence, was opened by Carolina Ricardo, executive director of the Sou da Paz Institute, who showed the growth in the availability of firearms in Brazilian society, driven by the creation of more than 40 standards in this regard by the Bolsonaro government. Deaths caused by firearms in Brazil are higher than the world average and mainly affect young Black people living on the outskirts of urban centers, said the director of the Sou da Paz Institute.
Douglas Belchior, a history professor and founder of Uneafro, continued on the panel talking about the importance of access to education as a tool for reducing violence and the exposure of young Black people to the effects of this violence. Belchior also drew attention to the disproportionate burden of violence and economic difficulties on Black Brazilians, compared to the rest of the population. He conceptualized Brazilian society as “violent, authoritarian, elitist, and hypocritical” highlighting examples of the difficulty in overcoming these elements, even during periods of progressive governments in the country.
Fabio de Sa e Silva, Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies and co-Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma, was the third panelists. He began his speech by analyzing aspects linked to police and criminal issues. which, according to him, require profound reforms in Brazil that even democratic governments have had difficulty implementing. Silva also addressed the challenges that the Lula government will have to face in relation to institutional deterioration, conflicts between crimes groups and a worrying tendency to deny the input of experts and civil society organizations to the detriment of a fetish for merely relying on police solutions to address issues of crime.
The last panel of the conference, on democracy, was initiated by Flávia Pellegrino, executive coordinator of the Pact for Democracy, who established parallels between the recent attacks to democracy in Brazil and the USA – countries that have in common the fact of having been governed by l far-right populist leaders (Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro), in which democratic candidates subsequently triumphed (Joe Biden and Lula). Pellegrino highlighted the importance of exchanges, joint reflections between civil society in both countries, and expanded the analysis of the problem on a global scale, as currently 72 percent of the world's population lives under autocratic regimes.
Angela Alonso, professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo and visiting researcher at the Afro Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University, then spoke about the long political and social process that led Brazil to the current scenario, which she defines it as being of great antagonism between the sectors united around Lula and Bolsonaro. According to Alonso, since Lula's first term in 2002, this division has been created and deepened around three main axes: the redistribution of resources and scarce social opportunities; the use of violence by the State and citizens; and the moral orientation of collective life (including corruption) – three elements that increasingly exacerbated the political antagonism between opposing camps in Brazil.
José Antonio Cheibub, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, focused his presentation on the description and analysis of the Brazilian electoral system and the phenomenon of party fragmentation that exists in Brazil. He explained how the Brazilian system favors small political parties in a scenario of institutional weaknesses. Cheibub stated that the discussion of institutionality is key to understanding the weaknesses of democracy in the country and to thinking about ways out of this problem.
