Lula and Afro-Brazilians

11/04/2018
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If any president quickly understood the need to settle a historical debt to Africa and its diaspora in Latin America, specially in Brazil, the second most populated country of people of African descent in the world, it was President Ignacio Lula Da Silva upon coming to power.

 

Brazil, as the statistics show, is the country with the largest Afro population in the Americas and thus after Nigeria is the country with the largest population of black skin on planet Earth.

 

Upon his arrival in power on January 1, 2003, Lula met with the Afro-Brazilian movement, not to dance Samba but to discuss politics in depth to start pushing a series of legal measures, emanating from the III Plan of Action against Racial discrimination, held in the city of Durban, South Africa in the year 2001.

 

This plan of action for afros was recognized by Brazil in its aspects of inclusion of public policies and political participation with decision, creating even the Party of Workers, with no referent in the left wing in our America, particularly because they had to respect the paths of social movements.

 

Lula made a perfect combination of State, Government, Party and respect for the agendas of social movements. The creation of an afro-descendant secretary with a ministerial character to incorporate millions of afro-descendants was an extraordinary triumph of afro-descendant social movements.

 

He has been the only president who made incredible advances in education, making it compulsory to disseminate the General History of Africa, translating the eight volumes edited by UNESCO into Portuguese. Additionally, he also promoted the teaching of moral, political, social, cultural, spiritual contributions from Africa to the Brazilian nation throughout the education system, because he understood it was the key to ending racism and endoracism. We must remember that in Brazil, slavery remained in force until 1888, barely twelve years before the twentieth century.

 

Racism, slavery and neo-slavery that existed in Brazil when Lula came to power was a shameful reality. In his period, as a statesman, from 2003 to 2011, Lula, with his work team led among others by Afro ex-minister Matilde Riveiro, managed to bring out of extreme poverty more than twenty million Afro-Brazilians. Today the dictatorship of Temer (exterminator), with its illegal neoliberal government, not only returned them to poverty but to the re-initiation of racial extermination. But beyond that vision of President Lula of public policies for afro Brazilians, including them in decision-making power, Lula also, together with Chavez and former President Obasanyo of Nigeria, created a new block of power between Africa and South America, called ASA, which started in Nigeria and then was crowned with a summit in 2009 in the city of Porlamar, Margarita.

 

But one of the things for which the Brazilian racist bourgeoisie, as well as the international one led by the United States, hate Lula, is because, together with Nestor Kirchner and Chavez, he buried the imperialist plan of the Free Trade Area in 2005.

 

Today, the maneuver of the illegal and corrupt government of Temer and his ring of racist fascist generals, with the support of the neoliberal governments of Latin America under the direction of the United States, want to charge Lula for his historic leadership and his sure triumph in the next elections in Brazil. They do not want to accept that a man who left the favelas, the factories, with his sensitivity to the poor of the world and who feels himself an afro-descendant, can comes back to power to return it to the wretched of the earth, as Frantz Fanon said.

 

 

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