CESE, MOURNING AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY
16 de May de 2016Whenever we join social leaders, residents of city peripheries, women, traditional peoples, black young people, activists from the pastorals, or threatened peoples, and express our indignation with the levels of intolerance and violence, including those related to the impeachment of President Dilma, systematically struck down by the mass media and now by the authorities, they comment, with unexpected calm and wisdom: “this doesn’t surprise us, it’s what we experience every day, but we haven’t lost hope that one day it will change”.
Brazil and the world have been watching a game of marked cards, with a caricatured script, making a mockery of democracy, played out through an apparently institutional arrangement that has ensured everything falls into place according to the narrative of another government, leaving neither the trace nor the smell of where it came from. This is ironic, because we have had so many reasons to criticise the inadequacies and mistakes of the PT and its leader Lula, but there is neither the space nor the time left to do anything but resist and, equally, to defend the achievements we have made over this period, which are now threatened by this terrible backward step.
We have to look at history and once more take up the struggle for secular and democratic liberties against a wave of conservatism, aware that history does not repeat itself, except in farce, and that the neo-developmental model is already causing irreparable damage to the life and culture of populations in the countryside and the cities, given the high concentration of income, the predatory and unsustainable use of our natural riches and the absence of structural reforms for the right to life and public security.
In the face of the neoliberalism of the coalition that has just been installed in central power – dominated by a symptomatic white, male universe – we must support resistance for the defence of rights and common goods. This in parallel to our monitoring of the Federal Senate in order to create the conditions required for profound Political Reform through a Sovereign Constituent Assembly.
We will continue to exercise active citizenship in the hope that the Rule of Law and democratic liberties will be honoured.
In honour of its mission, CESE reasserts its commitment to populist struggles and to the reestablishment of democratic legitimacy, sustained by the hope of the indignant voices of those who come from the peripheries.
#NoToTheCoup
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