Maggie Carter
Brazil
Brazil Foundation
For over a month, I’ve been working in Salvador, Brazil, for an organization called Fazer Acontecer (“Make it Happen”). The NGO runs an afterschool program for youth in low-income communities in the region. Institute Fazer Acontecer (IFA) has several programs in the city of Salvador running now, and is currently setting up a multi-city program to take place in the semi-arid region surrounding the city. The community I have been working in most is a favela called Castelo Branco. The program meets three times a week, twice a week for soccer classes and once a week for citizenship classes. The program uses sports as a tool to keep children engaged and passionate about something to discourage involvement in crime and drug use. In order to participate, students are required to attend both the soccer classes and the citizenship classes, where they discuss topics such as environmental preservation, political participation and even sex ed.
My role while here is twofold. Firstly, I am working with the organization by helping to facilitate classes, running an upcoming soccer festival in which IFA will demonstrate a new methodology for sports education that they are using, helping create a video about the organization, writing grant proposals and translating current ones from Portuguese to English, and other various tasks. Secondly, I am conducting my own research on community participation in low-income communities in Brazil, through a comparison study of the community they are currently operating in, Castelo Branco, and a community in which they previously ran a program, called Calabar. Calabar is very important to my research as it was the first community in Salvador to have a community police force- but much more about that later.
The question of human rights is incredibly relevant to this study. Brazil, like most democracies and international human rights law, privileges civil/political rights over economic/social rights. The democratic constitution of 1988 gave everyone the right to vote regardless of race or gender and removed the capacity qualifications such as literacy that had existed previously. Economic rights are seen as something people can access by mobilizing their political and civil rights. However, Brazil’s landscape is covered in favelas (slums) that still have little to no government services, are occupied illegally, are incredibly violent and in many cases operate outside existing legal structures.
People in these communities cannot demand their socio-economic rights such as health and education because their political and civil rights are not functioning. They can vote, yes, but these votes are often bought through corrupt arrangements between drug dealers and politicians. Once someone is elected, they are not held accountable to their community; their continued power is dependent upon their relationship with the various people who control that community: corrupt police officers, drug dealers, and community leaders in their pocket. What results is the deterioration of citizenship: people cannot participate politically to bring change to their communities. My research here attempts to understand how citizenship can be revived and encouraged once these corrupt and clientalistic relationships are eradicated.
In Calabar, the constant police presence that has existed there since the opening of the Community Security Base (BCS) in April 2011 has lead to a large decrease in drug trafficking and related violence in the community. Castelo Branco remains a place where at lease some level of corrupt and illegal activities play a role in controlling the community. While here, I will be getting to know both communities and its members in an attempt to understand what citizenship means, what it looks like, and what kind of impact it has in each place.