Dec 08 2023 | Nº. 96

Editorial

While President Lula has devoted considerable attention this year to armed conflicts playing out abroad, most notably in Ukraine and Gaza, emerging tensions along the northern tip of South America have begun to raise concerns closer to home. On December 3, Venezuelans overwhelmingly approved a referendum pushed by the regime of President Nicolás Maduro to, as the Associated Press put it, “claim sovereignty over an oil- and mineral-rich area of neighboring Guyana it argues was stolen when the border was drawn more than a century ago.” There are real questions about the validity of the referendum given the strongarm tactics of the Venezuelan government as well as the fact that turnout to vote was reportedly extremely low. While it is true that Venezuela has long claimed the territory, the timing of Maduro’s recent moves is notable. As Luke Taylor wrote in The Guardian, “the weekend’s plebiscite is seen foremost as a way to gauge how many people [Maduro] can mobilize in presidential elections expected for next year.” The Venezuelan government received some sanction relief a few weeks ago under an agreement that would allow for open competitive elections in 2024. It remains to be seen whether and how aggressively the United States will move to sanction Maduro given his growing bellicosity toward his country’s much smaller neighbor. 

For his part, Lula made clear this week that he would not support any aggressive action by Maduro. Answering questions at the COP28, held in Dubai last weekend, the Brazilian president insisted that conflict is the last thing South America needs. When asked if he feared a war in the region, Lula was unequivocal that war is always a scary prospect. “Every time I see one of those things exploding in Gaza, I imagine if it was over my head,” he said. He made very clear in his remarks that he won’t side with Maduro, with whom he is friendly. On Monday, December 4 at a press conference in Germany with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Lula was asked whether Vladimir Putin—another world leader reviled by most of the world’s advanced democracies—would still be welcome in Brazil for next year’s G20 summit. Lula reiterated his position that Putin will be invited to G20 and BRICS meetings in Brazil but says it’s up to the Russian leader to determine whether he wants to face potential arrest that may or may not happen. This marked a slight shift in Lula’s position a few months ago that Putin would be safe in Brazil regardless of International Criminal Court charges against him. 

Finally, Lula also made clear this week that he will not be attending the inauguration of Argentina’s new president on December 10. During the campaign, the fiery anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei harshly criticized Lula, calling him a communist and a crook with whom he’d rather not meet. After winning the election on November 19, however, Milei began walking back some of his most heated rhetoric. He extended a formal invitation to Lula. Instead, the Brazilian president will send Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, a cool but correct signal of Brazil’s relationship with its neighbor. 

Highlights

• MERCOSUR-EUROPEAN UNION. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva admitted this week that the agreement between Mercosur and the European Union could fail. According to him, the fault lies not with Brazil or South America, but with the European partners, who “do not want to make any concessions.” The main problems were posed by the French government, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, said he could not impose environmental conditions on his farmers and industrialists, while importing items from countries that would not comply with these same conditions. The statements were made after a meeting between the two leaders, at COP28, in Dubai.

• ENTRY INTO OPEC. The Brazilian government revealed this week that it is analyzing an invitation to join the Organization of Petroleum Producers Plus (OPEC+) , an expanded version of the organization that brings together the world's largest oil producers. The information, released during COP28 in Dubai, goes against the commitments made against climate change and resulted in the country receiving the symbolic Fossil of the Day award, given by non-governmental organizations participating in the meeting. Brazil said that its participation in OPEC+ would be marked by warnings about the need for a transition from the use of fossil fuels to renewable sources.

• ECONOMY. The Brazilian Gross Domestic Product had a positive change of 0.1 percent in the third quarter of 2003 compared to the previous quarter. This variation was surprising because the market had projected the opposite: a contraction of 0.3 percent. Even with better-than-expected performance, some data are worrying when sectoral analyzes are carried out. Agribusiness, for example, saw a decline of 3.3 percent, despite an accumulated increase of 18.1 percent in the year. Household consumption, however, remains strong.

• OPEN INQUIRY. Luiz Fux, one of the eleven justices of the Brazilian Supreme Court, authorized the opening of an investigation into Federal Congressman André Janones, one of the main influencers of the Brazilian left on social media. Janones was accused by the Public Ministry of demanding that advisors return part of their salaries. This practice is called “rachadinha” in Brazil. The deputy was one of the most active figures in the progressive field in digital media during the presidential campaign that led Lula to the Presidency in 2022.

• ENVIRONMENTAL TRAGEDY. The mining of an ore called rock salt in the subsoil of an urban area located in Maceió, capital of the state of Alagoas, in Northeast Brazil caused the soil to sink and the risk of collapse, leading the local city hall to remove more than 57 thousand people from the area on a emergency basis. The sinking of the soil affects seven neighborhoods in the city. Mineral exploration in this region has been occurring since the 1970s. The first signs of the disaster appeared in 2018. Now, thousands of houses are condemned, and there is no expectation that the soil situation will stabilize.

• DEFICIENT EDUCATION. Brazil did not show a worsening in education rates in the areas of mathematics, reading and science, despite the difficulties imposed by the pandemic. However, the country maintained stability at a negative level. The country continues to occupy the bottom of the performance table of 81 countries, with data measured by International Student Assessment Program. Of the total number of Brazilian students, 73 percent do not know how to convert rates of exchange for different currencies or compare distances. Among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this percentage is, on average, 31 percent.

NEWS FROM ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

DICTATORSHIP ARCHIVES. On December 5, the U.S. Congress, with support from the WBO, held a remote briefing on Brazilian civil society's request for the US government to make public secret documents about the 1964 coup in Brazil. The session had presentations from three guests: James N. Green, from the WBO; Gabrielle Abreu, from the Vladimir Herzog Institute; and Maria Hermínia Tavares, from the Arns Commission. Among the 37 participants were academics, activists, journalists and parliamentary advisors, including members of the office of Democratic congresswoman Nydia Velásquez, partner in the initiative to convene this briefing.

NEW NETWORKS. The WBO launched two new social media profiles in December. From now on, the organization will also start communicating with its partners and followers through Instagram and LinkedIn, in addition to existing accounts on Twitter and YouTube. The expansion of the WBO's communication channels is accompanied by the production of the weekly newsletter, which will reach its 100th edition in January, and the Brazil Unfiltered podcast, presented by Brown University Professor James N. Green.

NEGO BISPO. The National Coordination of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (CONAQ) announced on December 3 the death of one of the greatest quilombola leaders in Brazil. Antônio Bispo dos Santos, known as Nêgo Bispo, was a philosopher, poet, writer, teacher, farmer, and political and land use rights activist. He was one of the main voices of critical thinking among traditional communities in Brazil with influence around the world.

Feature Article

by Rosana Heringer

A New Stage in Affirmative Actions in Education

This article was written by Rosana Heringer, professor at the Faculty of Education at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Coordinator of the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Higher Education, and associate researcher at the Washington Brazil Office for issue 95 of the WBO weekly newsletter on December 1, 2023. To subscribe to the newsletter, simply enter your email in the form at the end of the article.

When sanctioning the new quota law on November 13, 2023 in a ceremony at the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential palace, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated that all public policy, no matter how good it is, is always subject to improvements and adjustments. This was the general spirit of the ceremony for Law 14,723/2023, which modifies and improves affirmative action policies for the admission of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Quilombola (people from communities of former enslaved Afro-Brazilians), public school, lower-income and disabled students into universities and other federal institutions of higher education and secondary technical education. Let's briefly go over the main changes made to Law 12,711, the well-known Quota Law, of 2012.

We can summarize the changes made to the previous law in ten points, presented here in four large groups, namely: a) changes in relation to the program's audience; b) changes in relation to implementation mechanisms; c) changes in relation to the monitoring of affirmative actions; and d) innovations.

With regard to the target audience of the affirmative action program, the main change concerns the inclusion of Quilombola students among the benefited groups, alongside Black, mixed-race and Indigenous students, lower-income students from public schools, and those with specific deficiencies. This measure meets a demand for recognition of the ethnic and cultural specificity of this group, which is still little considered in targeted policies. This measure is incredibly important given that for the first time the country collected data on the Quilombola population in a demographic census, enabling better knowledge of this group.

In regard to the target audience of the affirmative action program, the new law redefined the income cutoff, reducing the maximum income limit for qualification from 1.5 to 1 minimum wage per capita. In doing so, legislators were aware of the fact already identified in several studies that point to the need for greater focus on the poorest students, so that the policy actually contributes to reducing socioeconomic inequalities in access.

In relation to implementation mechanisms, the most notable advance of the new law in comparison to the previous one is the availability of widely competitive vacancies for all students competing in the Unified Selection System. This measure means that candidates benefiting from affirmative action compete for reserved spots only if they are not approved in the general selection. As several researchers and activists in this field have emphasized, this measure allows quotas to be “a floor and not a ceiling,” expanding the entry possibilities for students benefiting from affirmative action. This group will also have priority in the allocation of spots not filled by other methods. A final point in relation to mechanisms refers to the need to update population data after the last demographic census, opening the possibility of using other official databases for this update.

The recently enacted law also improves guidelines in relation to defining the forms of its monitoring and evaluation, a point widely highlighted as absent in relation to the implementation of Law 12,711. For various reasons, the federal executive has not developed the necessary tools to carry out this monitoring since 2013, which was aggravated in the period 2019-2022, leading to an effective “blackout” of possible monitoring instances precisely at the moment when the law completed ten years of implementation. As a response to this situation, Law 14,723 provides improved guidelines for monitoring and evaluation by the Ministry of Education, together with other bodies of the federal government, with evaluation scheduled every ten years and publication of annual monitoring reports.

Finally, we must discuss the item we call innovation, which concerns two specific aspects that have been debated by experts and also in federal higher education institutions. The first refers to the anticipated adoption of affirmative action policies in postgraduate programs. This forecast formalizes the recommendation that the Ministry of Education and Culture had made in 2016, guiding the adoption of these programs and integrating them with the set of affirmative actions in higher education.

The other measure provides quota students who are in a vulnerable situation at the time of entering higher education a priority when it comes to receiving assistance. Although we know that this and other measures provided for in the law are subject to regulation, we highlight the importance of this guidance that aims to provide groups benefiting from entering higher education with the necessary support to remain at the university. The importance of permanence conditions being perceived as part of affirmative actions is widely recognized in several studies, guaranteeing special attention to students from these specific groups.

In summary, we can say that law 14,723, by promoting changes to law 12,711, improves mechanisms and also innovates in specific aspects, including new benefiting groups and new monitoring mechanisms.

On the other hand, studies on the topic and also the practice of university management demonstrate that some aspects relating to the full implementation of affirmative actions in federal higher education institutions remain a challenge and should be the object of attention in the day-to-day activities of institutions. Here we highlight, for example, the issue of hetero-identification committees, a topic on which the new legislation does not comment, therefore remaining something under the responsibility of each institution.

We also draw attention to aspects linked to anti-racist training of members of university communities and other federal educational institutions and the need to strengthen the internal management bodies responsible for affirmative actions in each institution, which need to be better equipped in terms of human resources, budget, and legitimacy within the scope of university management.

Law 14,723 inaugurates a new moment in the implementation of affirmative actions in Brazil and represents an important stage in this long path of historical reparation and the search for racial equality in the country. With the approved changes, the responsibility of everyone involved in implementing and monitoring these programs also grows, as well as the need for our institutions to build anti-racist academic environments committed to Brazilian diversity in its various dimensions.

This article was written by Rosana Heringer, professor at the Faculty of Education at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Coordinator of the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Higher Education, and associate researcher at the Washington Brazil Office.

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.