AGNELO (2011)

I spent a lot of time involved in politics within the Communist Party of Brazil and, finally, around 2008 or 2009, I managed to obtain federal funding to boost my NGO. It became a governmental organization of public interest and the largest electoral platform in the region to organize the first National Football Championship of Indigenous Nations, from which they became champions. My connection with the elected positions of the party was visceral, and the bonds of reciprocity that, in that era of abundance, of Chinese growth, of the rise of raw materials, of "never before in the history of this country", united us to the bonanza of the federal government, were unbreakable. From humble origins, a funk fan from the favelas, I had become a social scientist requested by all types of ambitious politicians linked to the party, due to my previous advisory work. When one of them was promoted to the Ministry of Sports, I immediately convened a general assembly in my NGO to prepare the institutional redesign that, from night to morning, would convert us into a government engine capable of managing millions and millions of public money:

"The federal government's current policies represent a process of social renewal and self-affirmation at a global level (I said into the microphone, in the packed auditorium), which profoundly changes the way power is exercised in our country. The ambiguities of the experiment thus far are irrelevant, as we can see progress in the autonomy of social movements of the subaltern classes, precisely those that our institution has always dedicated itself to representing, guiding, and supporting. Based on this foundation, President Lula's left-wing government establishes a fruitful and productive relationship with the programmatic content and dynamics of our institutional work. Despite the crisis of representation that has frequently threatened to explode here and there since the beginning of the administration, a new dynamic has emerged between social movements and the government, to swell our ranks in the confrontation with neoliberalism. At first, there were suspicions of continuity, of a physiological repetition of the internal alternation between groups of the same dominant elite, but the PT government, of President Lula and, soon, we hope, of President Dilma, committed to an open and productive relationship with the new social and political compositions of the exploited classes. In Davos, we distinguished ourselves by forcing the institutions that control the Empire of the World Economy to abandon their old policing and fascist hypotheses of fiscal austerity and now ask how to reorganize political-economic dependence in the medium term in a sustainable manner. We propose the support of autonomous instruments of cooperation between the nations of the subcontinents; we project the overcoming of dependence and the structuring of interdependence between world economies and social, indigenous, and anti-racist movements. It is a new era of social liberation that begins in Latin America and Brazil, especially with a new democratic government, sensitive and thrifty towards all interdependence worldwide. It is the definitive end of the infamous colonial tradition that has afflicted us since the beginning of our history as a nation, of the inter-class paternalism of national elites, and, finally, the POLITICAL RECOGNITION of the TRANSFORMATIVE NEEDS of the DESIRES AND POWER OF THE SUBJUGATED PEOPLE. Of course, the fight against the arrogance of economic corporations that, in their claim to act as all-powerful political subjects, to be "authors of history," sees only the political arrogance of the State as the key to development. It is in the construction of a terrain of dynamic opposition that we work! We fight for the development of educational infrastructure and social communication, of civil society organized around urgent social demands, for social preconditions (health, wage, ecological, cultural) of economic growth, for a globally controlled and democratically directed financial integration! For an irrevocable ethical and political investment! THANK YOU!"