The article I found most interesting was the one on the 1973 Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism. Like a lot of literature that focuses on the origins of human rights activism, these organizations were created out of a paradoxical situation. The highly politicized Chilean exile was able to create connections with activists who were reeling from the Left's global decline in cultural and political influence. Patrick William Kelly posits that these activists created a chink in the armor of national sovereignty since national leaders now had to answer to a world community for their sovereign actions. Activist networks could apply external pressures if foreign governments decided to withdraw support from the repressive regime.Nonetheless I feel weary in reading this history knowing that the international pressure put on repressive regimes merely led to a change in how those oppressive regimes made their torture systems visible to the international public. I guess what I am referring to is the behavior of the military juntas that governed Argentina later on in the 1970's and early 1980's. Wishing to forego the negative press that Pinochet received, the Argentine government relied on disappearing people completely so as not to generate suspicions of human rights abuses (though I understand the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo used the international human rights networks that were created after 1970's Chile). Even taking that into consideration, Pinochet remained in power in Chile for decades after the coup, peacefully transitioning the presidency to Patricio Aylwin in 1990.
I found the explanation of how citizens in exile were able to use groups that positioned themselves as nonpartisan, such as Amnesty International, and the more politically-entrenched transnational solidarity movements, to leverage international support and awareness for human rights crimes that previously (and probably continue to be) ignored as "domestic concerns." I remember first learning about Amnesty International in the early 1980s as a middle school student and having an English teacher in 1983 (!) tell us stories about Stephen Biko and others who had died for human rights, pointing us to groups like Amnesty International for more information (back then, being on a mailing list always meant a paper newsletter--we would pass them around school). I hadn't realized the role Latin American activists had played, especially the Pinochet story. Europe is almost always given the starring role in these stories (more white savior narratives, perhaps, that erase the work of those in exile doing the dangerous work of communicating with those left behind in repressive regimes and risking lives of themselves and others to shine a light on abuses).
I found the paradox of transnationalization as both a contradictory and constructive strategy fascinating. It would seem that indigenous people would be able to leverage the most concern and involvement in their local or national space, but instead, Brysk argues that the international resources give them a greater platform than they can marshal at home. The idea of Indian rights mobilizing identity and consciousness rather than material resources (39) would seem, on its face, to be less productive--ideas over resources--but Brysk is arguing that the international nature of the movement allows these groups to move beyond local fragmentation and use identity as a "form of information' (39). Reframing identity as information makes sense in our world--information can be monetized, and indeed that's the story she is telling: by creating a transnational identity and movement, these organizations can tap into resources that are earmarked specifically for transnational mobilizations (43). Brysk is arguing that because the "exotic" garners more media interest, these marginalized groups can use their identities to engage in information politics, which allows them to use fewer resources to get support for their for these groups that are "working for principled change in the status and conditions of Indians as a distinct cultural group" (42). This moving beyond local or national to transnational stages as a way of garnering change by attracting attention to the needs of a marginalized group has allowed these indigenous groups to put the power of the United Nations, for example, as well as other international systems, to work for their cause by showing the connections between the needs of these groups across cultural and state boundaries. I'm left wondering in what ways the internet, 24 hour cable news, and instant communications have shifted and changed both the strategies and the outcomes for these groups.
I think technology has dramatically changed the scope of such movements however the these groups remain locked in these repeating pattern as the lower class of the global capitalist system and therefore the demanded losers in the competition that is capitalism. They will therefore always be on their heels fighting for what little support or relief they can garner between popular cycles of reality TV shows and domestic scandals/gossip as even the US's own indigenous population, attempting to protect the water of 18 million people, could not garner enough support to gain sovereignty over their own land. These cycles will repeat themselves because governments will continue to exploit and interfere in foreign countries to shore-up economic and geopolitical interest, the UN, which has no real institutional power (ie: no army/force that the US has to respect) will be powerless to stop it, and NGO groups that now commodify atrocities will be there to allow for the visual appearance (eye candy for CNN, MSNBC, FOX) that makes it look like "we care" and that someone is doing something about all these poor people being mistreated. The actual fact of hy these people are poor and powerless will never make it on the news and thus it will all repeat again and again. This is how capitalism works on a global stage.
You ask an interesting question about how these transnational strategies work for groups who have been historically marginalized within their nation-states. A question I wonder about goes in line with yours: if the strategy is to garner international attention based on social media, the 24 hour news cycle, and instant communications, do governments withhold 100% national accessibility to internet service?
I found the value of identity and information as a strategy to be rather intuitive. Movements and ideologies are driven by identity in my opinion. The nation-state which constrained and marginalized indigenous groups is based on its own power of national identity which indigenous nations can represent a threat to.
The article that I found most interesting was about how Brazil dealt with the apartheid regime in South Africa. I was reminded about how nations such Brazil and the United States had to deal with a nation that despite its horrendous human rights record during the second half of the twentieth century, it played an important ally against communism during the Cold War. I wrote a paper last semester about the relationship that the United States had with South Africa. The questions that were raised about how did Brazil portrayed itself over race, which is very different from in the United States. I did not know that the post-military dictatorship Constitution attempted to pass a notion to not trade with states that had racial discrimination as law. This read reminds up about how human rights have become a flash-point in modern-day Latin American history and for good reason.
What I found most interesting about these articles was one: that any and all opposition to these acts of barbarity were begun at the grassroots level and had to force anything like systemic intervention, and two: that there was and is a kind of state sponsored media in this nation that like than and now does not exist to inform the population accurately, but to manipulate the population to understand and follow events from a perspective that is most convenient to authority, capital, and the hegemony of the two. The dissemination of the Reader's Digest and the implicit bias of its perspective is one good example form the readings.
Additionally, that these interventions and inhumane acts continue to take place is evidence that is not the people at the helm so to speak but the systems and structures of the system themselves that contribute to this cyclical process of imperial intervention and gangster like behavior by the US. Our generation, just like almost every US generation has unjust wars, illegal foreign intervention, and imperialistic machinations taking place on the daily and we those privileged enough to actually know about it, do nothing. It is after readings like these that I most think of the most significant thing Karl Marx ever said/wrote; "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."
It's also interesting, as one of this week's articles mentions (I think it was Green), that the US uses defense of human rights to justify foreign intervention. As you say, grassroots activists were the ones starting to speak out against the abuses they witnessed or experienced, and they were also the ones starting to call for international attention to these issues. Usually that was out of necessity, because their own politicians were carrying out these inhumane actions or turning a blind eye to them. As we saw in Brysk's article, there can be strength in international solidarity. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, powerful nations like the US have used this as an excuse to say that they are entering or waging war on other countries in order to show "solidarity" and defend against human rights abuses when it's really just a cover for the US defending their economic interests.
The issue of racism in Latin America is best explained in Jerry Davila's article "Brazilian Race Relation," and Alison Brysk's "Turning Weakness into Stregnth." I find these pieces very informative for previous discussions in our class, where I have said that racism in Latin America is difficult to detect and address, in part, because of discourses like Brazil's "racial democracy," and celebration of racial mixing such as Gilberto Freyre's. What happens to people who are not part of this "mixing" or more importantly don't appear to have been "mixed"? That creates a new racial construct. For as long as a person looks to "African" or too "indio", in comparison to a "mulato", "trigue~o" or "mestizo," the person is associated with backwardness and too primitive for the state project. This creates another form of silencing. As the article explained, accusation of racism would be labeled by officials and some intellectuals, as isolated cases. That is the danger when the celebration of racial mixture falls in the wrong hands.
I also found it quite "funny" how North American Indians saw South American Indians as primitive and not to be worth allies. I do know that the superiority complex is not exclusively Anglo/European, and not rare in Indigenous populations. The Inka Empire exercised notion of backwardness onto their subjects and remade history according to their imperial project. However, can North American Indian's superiority complex be informed by their struggle against the U.S and the "reality bubble" that this could create? In other words, have they internalized ideas such as, "we have been fighting a bigger foe than the South Americans"? I have also noticed this with Afro-descendants. Cuban musician, Mario Bauza, recalled how Cuban musicians and their folklore, were underestimated by some African-Americans in the early twentieth-century.
I highly recommend for those who want to see the complexities of racial relations in Latin America, three video sources: the first one, to understand blackness in some of our countries, Henry Louis Gates Jr's "Black in Latin American." The second, is a independent movie called "Even the Rain," starred by Gael Garcia Bernal. This movie is a must-see and depicts indigenous mobilizations against multi-nationals corporations, and the Bolivian state. The third, is a documentary film called "When Two Worlds Collide" that takes place in Peru. Here, the Nation of Indigenous Peoples of Peru sought to protect the Amazon and faced multi-national corporations and the Peruvian state led by the Peruvian President, and recently deceased (committed suicide), Alan Garcia. I think this material will compliment this week's readings.
I found the participation on exiled activists fascinating in this week's readings. International pressure was a key element in pushing nations to, for example, change racist policy or stop torture of prisoners. Exiles from Chile or Brazil were typically liberal and outspoken against their governments, and removing them from the country was their government's way of silencing them. In this set of articles, we saw that exile often had the opposite effect: those in exile became the mouthpiece for the international solidarity movement calling out human rights abuses in parts of Latin America. Exiles were able to express their politics more freely away from oppressive regimes, but attracted international attention and support because the issues they spoke of transcended politics. These transnational campaigns for international human rights grew in success through the late 1960s and 1970s, but changes in international law did not necessarily translate to domestic action. I thought Green's article did an especially good job of showing this. I finished these readings thinking that exiles jumpstarted an impressive amount of international attention for their causes, but how much impact did they actually have in defending human rights at home?
I had the same question Katie. I also wondered to what extent did international organizations utilize the connections these exhiled activists had back in their home countries? -Alexandra
I was really interested to learn about the two major forces that were both at work for dealing with the human rights issues and violations in both Brazil and Chile. Personally, I was much more interested in the way that James N. Green explained the entire process of increasing awareness throughout the world and the United States but also learned much from Kelly's as well. For me, I had never made the distinction between awareness and solidarity. However, it now makes sense that this double pronged approach would be especially effective. The work of groups like Amnesty International seem incredibly necessary for providing the facts and verifiable information about the atrocities occurring in each respective country. This way activists groups could call for action with actual proof that action was necessary. However, getting the political support, especially abroad, was necessary by making sure the public was also aware and on-board with intervening. This is where the work of the solidarity activists and exiles seems to come into play as there stories and real life accounts could not only be backed up with the facts provided from the investigations but also made the atrocities much more personal so that even those in foreign countries would become much more emotionally invested. I guess what is surprising is that the whole process seemed to arise and evolve more naturally than I would have expected, which leads me wondering how natural it may actually be for people to work towards the protection of there fellow man.
I found the successes and failures of indigenous transnational advocacy to be illustrative of the power I believe exists in identity, the ability for otherwise disparate movements to become mutually supportive, and the persistent problem of building local consensus. The appeal to a broader indigenous identity altered the relationship that had governed the previous 500 years of resistance by drawing support from allies outside the state structure designed to determine those relationships. I note that three of our readings coincide with the late 60s or early 70s. I suspect that the push for transnational relationships tapped into the rise of both counter-culture and new left politics around the globe, with the environmental movement acting prominently in this case. The "exoticism" and mis-characterizations of indigenous people as timelessly premodern made them appealing allies. Although this relationship may have been based on false impressions I think it remained strong because ethnodevelopment serves as a counter-model to development by multi-national corporations.
Davilla's Brazilian Race Relations in the Shadow of Apartheid was a chilling reading (partially due to America's past and present. It was painful to read about Gilberto Freyre was this great activist/intellectual and he "could only muster a vague call to better education about nonwhite individuals in South Africa" (pg 125). A lot of these racist systems and attitudes were the result of colonization and the racial hierarchy established by the Portuguese and reinforced by the United States. It was ironic that while Freyre wanted to educate South Africans about nonwhites it would be Nelson Mandela a Black South African who would reinvigorate the leftist movements fighting in Brazil.
One of the aspects of the articles we read today is the extent to which exiled citizens were still involved in the reporting of human rights violations in their original countries. I think that it shows how informal sources of powers or lone actors can sometimes be more powerful or relevant than established, organized forms of power such as the United Nations. It’s these unique and familiar connections held by those suffering the torture and those who have been exiled from the country for speaking out that allowed for successful international movements. -Alexandra Vidal
Davila's article about the Brazilian apartheid drove into the Black diaspora in Brazil and South America. I was amazed the Brazil's apartheid was hand in hand with Jim Crow in the US and the more known apartheid movement in South Africa. African decent people around the globe participated in the revolutionary movements for equals rights. It brings about the theory that if the apartheid movement was more known, would it have been more successful. Just as in the United States Former President Nelson Mandela's visit to Brazil shows solidarity across borders and ocean among the black diaspora.
Davila's closing statements about the democratization of the African decent impoverish Brazilians have rights too. Yes, their journey may have taken longer then their African and African-American counterparts, black Brazilians will achieve equality.
The article I found most interesting was the one on the 1973 Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism. Like a lot of literature that focuses on the origins of human rights activism, these organizations were created out of a paradoxical situation. The highly politicized Chilean exile was able to create connections with activists who were reeling from the Left's global decline in cultural and political influence. Patrick William Kelly posits that these activists created a chink in the armor of national sovereignty since national leaders now had to answer to a world community for their sovereign actions. Activist networks could apply external pressures if foreign governments decided to withdraw support from the repressive regime.Nonetheless I feel weary in reading this history knowing that the international pressure put on repressive regimes merely led to a change in how those oppressive regimes made their torture systems visible to the international public. I guess what I am referring to is the behavior of the military juntas that governed Argentina later on in the 1970's and early 1980's. Wishing to forego the negative press that Pinochet received, the Argentine government relied on disappearing people completely so as not to generate suspicions of human rights abuses (though I understand the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo used the international human rights networks that were created after 1970's Chile). Even taking that into consideration, Pinochet remained in power in Chile for decades after the coup, peacefully transitioning the presidency to Patricio Aylwin in 1990.
ReplyDeleteI found the explanation of how citizens in exile were able to use groups that positioned themselves as nonpartisan, such as Amnesty International, and the more politically-entrenched transnational solidarity movements, to leverage international support and awareness for human rights crimes that previously (and probably continue to be) ignored as "domestic concerns." I remember first learning about Amnesty International in the early 1980s as a middle school student and having an English teacher in 1983 (!) tell us stories about Stephen Biko and others who had died for human rights, pointing us to groups like Amnesty International for more information (back then, being on a mailing list always meant a paper newsletter--we would pass them around school). I hadn't realized the role Latin American activists had played, especially the Pinochet story. Europe is almost always given the starring role in these stories (more white savior narratives, perhaps, that erase the work of those in exile doing the dangerous work of communicating with those left behind in repressive regimes and risking lives of themselves and others to shine a light on abuses).
DeleteI found the paradox of transnationalization as both a contradictory and constructive strategy fascinating. It would seem that indigenous people would be able to leverage the most concern and involvement in their local or national space, but instead, Brysk argues that the international resources give them a greater platform than they can marshal at home. The idea of Indian rights mobilizing identity and consciousness rather than material resources (39) would seem, on its face, to be less productive--ideas over resources--but Brysk is arguing that the international nature of the movement allows these groups to move beyond local fragmentation and use identity as a "form of information' (39). Reframing identity as information makes sense in our world--information can be monetized, and indeed that's the story she is telling: by creating a transnational identity and movement, these organizations can tap into resources that are earmarked specifically for transnational mobilizations (43). Brysk is arguing that because the "exotic" garners more media interest, these marginalized groups can use their identities to engage in information politics, which allows them to use fewer resources to get support for their for these groups that are "working for principled change in the status and conditions of Indians as a distinct cultural group" (42). This moving beyond local or national to transnational stages as a way of garnering change by attracting attention to the needs of a marginalized group has allowed these indigenous groups to put the power of the United Nations, for example, as well as other international systems, to work for their cause by showing the connections between the needs of these groups across cultural and state boundaries. I'm left wondering in what ways the internet, 24 hour cable news, and instant communications have shifted and changed both the strategies and the outcomes for these groups.
ReplyDeleteI think technology has dramatically changed the scope of such movements however the these groups remain locked in these repeating pattern as the lower class of the global capitalist system and therefore the demanded losers in the competition that is capitalism. They will therefore always be on their heels fighting for what little support or relief they can garner between popular cycles of reality TV shows and domestic scandals/gossip as even the US's own indigenous population, attempting to protect the water of 18 million people, could not garner enough support to gain sovereignty over their own land. These cycles will repeat themselves because governments will continue to exploit and interfere in foreign countries to shore-up economic and geopolitical interest, the UN, which has no real institutional power (ie: no army/force that the US has to respect) will be powerless to stop it, and NGO groups that now commodify atrocities will be there to allow for the visual appearance (eye candy for CNN, MSNBC, FOX) that makes it look like "we care" and that someone is doing something about all these poor people being mistreated. The actual fact of hy these people are poor and powerless will never make it on the news and thus it will all repeat again and again. This is how capitalism works on a global stage.
DeleteHi Jen,
DeleteYou ask an interesting question about how these transnational strategies work for groups who have been historically marginalized within their nation-states. A question I wonder about goes in line with yours: if the strategy is to garner international attention based on social media, the 24 hour news cycle, and instant communications, do governments withhold 100% national accessibility to internet service?
I found the value of identity and information as a strategy to be rather intuitive. Movements and ideologies are driven by identity in my opinion. The nation-state which constrained and marginalized indigenous groups is based on its own power of national identity which indigenous nations can represent a threat to.
DeleteThe article that I found most interesting was about how Brazil dealt with the apartheid regime in South Africa. I was reminded about how nations such Brazil and the United States had to deal with a nation that despite its horrendous human rights record during the second half of the twentieth century, it played an important ally against communism during the Cold War. I wrote a paper last semester about the relationship that the United States had with South Africa. The questions that were raised about how did Brazil portrayed itself over race, which is very different from in the United States. I did not know that the post-military dictatorship Constitution attempted to pass a notion to not trade with states that had racial discrimination as law. This read reminds up about how human rights have become a flash-point in modern-day Latin American history and for good reason.
ReplyDeleteWhat I found most interesting about these articles was one: that any and all opposition to these acts of barbarity were begun at the grassroots level and had to force anything like systemic intervention, and two: that there was and is a kind of state sponsored media in this nation that like than and now does not exist to inform the population accurately, but to manipulate the population to understand and follow events from a perspective that is most convenient to authority, capital, and the hegemony of the two. The dissemination of the Reader's Digest and the implicit bias of its perspective is one good example form the readings.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, that these interventions and inhumane acts continue to take place is evidence that is not the people at the helm so to speak but the systems and structures of the system themselves that contribute to this cyclical process of imperial intervention and gangster like behavior by the US. Our generation, just like almost every US generation has unjust wars, illegal foreign intervention, and imperialistic machinations taking place on the daily and we those privileged enough to actually know about it, do nothing. It is after readings like these that I most think of the most significant thing Karl Marx ever said/wrote; "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."
It's also interesting, as one of this week's articles mentions (I think it was Green), that the US uses defense of human rights to justify foreign intervention. As you say, grassroots activists were the ones starting to speak out against the abuses they witnessed or experienced, and they were also the ones starting to call for international attention to these issues. Usually that was out of necessity, because their own politicians were carrying out these inhumane actions or turning a blind eye to them. As we saw in Brysk's article, there can be strength in international solidarity. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, powerful nations like the US have used this as an excuse to say that they are entering or waging war on other countries in order to show "solidarity" and defend against human rights abuses when it's really just a cover for the US defending their economic interests.
DeleteThe issue of racism in Latin America is best explained in Jerry Davila's article "Brazilian Race Relation," and Alison Brysk's "Turning Weakness into Stregnth." I find these pieces very informative for previous discussions in our class, where I have said that racism in Latin America is difficult to detect and address, in part, because of discourses like Brazil's "racial democracy," and celebration of racial mixing such as Gilberto Freyre's. What happens to people who are not part of this "mixing" or more importantly don't appear to have been "mixed"? That creates a new racial construct. For as long as a person looks to "African" or too "indio", in comparison to a "mulato", "trigue~o" or "mestizo," the person is associated with backwardness and too primitive for the state project. This creates another form of silencing. As the article explained, accusation of racism would be labeled by officials and some intellectuals, as isolated cases. That is the danger when the celebration of racial mixture falls in the wrong hands.
ReplyDeleteI also found it quite "funny" how North American Indians saw South American Indians as primitive and not to be worth allies. I do know that the superiority complex is not exclusively Anglo/European, and not rare in Indigenous populations. The Inka Empire exercised notion of backwardness onto their subjects and remade history according to their imperial project. However, can North American Indian's superiority complex be informed by their struggle against the U.S and the "reality bubble" that this could create? In other words, have they internalized ideas such as, "we have been fighting a bigger foe than the South Americans"? I have also noticed this with Afro-descendants. Cuban musician, Mario Bauza, recalled how Cuban musicians and their folklore, were underestimated by some African-Americans in the early twentieth-century.
I highly recommend for those who want to see the complexities of racial relations in Latin America, three video sources: the first one, to understand blackness in some of our countries, Henry Louis Gates Jr's "Black in Latin American." The second, is a independent movie called "Even the Rain," starred by Gael Garcia Bernal. This movie is a must-see and depicts indigenous mobilizations against multi-nationals corporations, and the Bolivian state. The third, is a documentary film called "When Two Worlds Collide" that takes place in Peru. Here, the Nation of Indigenous Peoples of Peru sought to protect the Amazon and faced multi-national corporations and the Peruvian state led by the Peruvian President, and recently deceased (committed suicide), Alan Garcia. I think this material will compliment this week's readings.
I found the participation on exiled activists fascinating in this week's readings. International pressure was a key element in pushing nations to, for example, change racist policy or stop torture of prisoners. Exiles from Chile or Brazil were typically liberal and outspoken against their governments, and removing them from the country was their government's way of silencing them. In this set of articles, we saw that exile often had the opposite effect: those in exile became the mouthpiece for the international solidarity movement calling out human rights abuses in parts of Latin America. Exiles were able to express their politics more freely away from oppressive regimes, but attracted international attention and support because the issues they spoke of transcended politics. These transnational campaigns for international human rights grew in success through the late 1960s and 1970s, but changes in international law did not necessarily translate to domestic action. I thought Green's article did an especially good job of showing this. I finished these readings thinking that exiles jumpstarted an impressive amount of international attention for their causes, but how much impact did they actually have in defending human rights at home?
ReplyDeleteI had the same question Katie. I also wondered to what extent did international organizations utilize the connections these exhiled activists had back in their home countries?
Delete-Alexandra
I was really interested to learn about the two major forces that were both at work for dealing with the human rights issues and violations in both Brazil and Chile. Personally, I was much more interested in the way that James N. Green explained the entire process of increasing awareness throughout the world and the United States but also learned much from Kelly's as well. For me, I had never made the distinction between awareness and solidarity. However, it now makes sense that this double pronged approach would be especially effective. The work of groups like Amnesty International seem incredibly necessary for providing the facts and verifiable information about the atrocities occurring in each respective country. This way activists groups could call for action with actual proof that action was necessary. However, getting the political support, especially abroad, was necessary by making sure the public was also aware and on-board with intervening. This is where the work of the solidarity activists and exiles seems to come into play as there stories and real life accounts could not only be backed up with the facts provided from the investigations but also made the atrocities much more personal so that even those in foreign countries would become much more emotionally invested. I guess what is surprising is that the whole process seemed to arise and evolve more naturally than I would have expected, which leads me wondering how natural it may actually be for people to work towards the protection of there fellow man.
ReplyDeleteThis post was made by me, Nick Vitone
DeleteI found the successes and failures of indigenous transnational advocacy to be illustrative of the power I believe exists in identity, the ability for otherwise disparate movements to become mutually supportive, and the persistent problem of building local consensus. The appeal to a broader indigenous identity altered the relationship that had governed the previous 500 years of resistance by drawing support from allies outside the state structure designed to determine those relationships. I note that three of our readings coincide with the late 60s or early 70s. I suspect that the push for transnational relationships tapped into the rise of both counter-culture and new left politics around the globe, with the environmental movement acting prominently in this case. The "exoticism" and mis-characterizations of indigenous people as timelessly premodern made them appealing allies. Although this relationship may have been based on false impressions I think it remained strong because ethnodevelopment serves as a counter-model to development by multi-national corporations.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteDavilla's Brazilian Race Relations in the Shadow of Apartheid was a chilling reading (partially due to America's past and present. It was painful to read about Gilberto Freyre was this great activist/intellectual and he "could only muster a vague call to better education about nonwhite individuals in South Africa" (pg 125). A lot of these racist systems and attitudes were the result of colonization and the racial hierarchy established by the Portuguese and reinforced by the United States. It was ironic that while Freyre wanted to educate South Africans about nonwhites it would be Nelson Mandela a Black South African who would reinvigorate the leftist movements fighting in Brazil.
One of the aspects of the articles we read today is the extent to which exiled citizens were still involved in the reporting of human rights violations in their original countries. I think that it shows how informal sources of powers or lone actors can sometimes be more powerful or relevant than established, organized forms of power such as the United Nations. It’s these unique and familiar connections held by those suffering the torture and those who have been exiled from the country for speaking out that allowed for successful international movements.
ReplyDelete-Alexandra Vidal
Davila's article about the Brazilian apartheid drove into the Black diaspora in Brazil and South America. I was amazed the Brazil's apartheid was hand in hand with Jim Crow in the US and the more known apartheid movement in South Africa. African decent people around the globe participated in the revolutionary movements for equals rights. It brings about the theory that if the apartheid movement was more known, would it have been more successful. Just as in the United States Former President Nelson Mandela's visit to Brazil shows solidarity across borders and ocean among the black diaspora.
ReplyDeleteDavila's closing statements about the democratization of the African decent impoverish Brazilians have rights too. Yes, their journey may have taken longer then their African and African-American counterparts, black Brazilians will achieve equality.