The second year class of the ALPI Master’s programe had the opportunity to attend Geraldo Luiz Dois Reis Nunes’ lecture via videoconference on 8 October 2020. This was a new situation for Mr. Nunes who had travelled in person for several years to Rennes 2 to meet the Master’s students and collaborate in the ERIMIT laboratory. Unfortunately, this was not possible this year because of the global pandemic caused by Covid-19.
Mr. Nunes is a university professor at the Federal University of Rio Janeiro (UFRJ) and former Vice-President of the UFRJ in charge of International Relations. He specialized in Brazilian history, and allowed us to gain a better understanding of political and economic life in Brazil and its relations with the rest of the world.
This videoconference allowed us to immerse ourselves for several hours in Brazilian history, but also to realize the road that has been travelled, especially with regard to slavery, and to analyse of the current government of Jair Bolsonaro.
Mr. Nunes explained to us that the fires in Brazil were not only due to global warming, but also because of the mass burning and destruction of the Atlantic Forest. Over 90% of the forest has been destroyed up until now. We also saw that most of the people who now own property in Brazil came from the hereditary captaincy.
Furthermore, he spoke to us about the history of slavery in Brazil. When it was abolished in 1888, some owners found themselves not knowing what to do with their slaves. It is important to remember that at that time slaves were not considered people but rather animals, pieces that had no connection with citizenship. Slaves were an integral part of the inventory of the family they worked for from generation to generation. If a family’s slave went to war and died there, the owners usually received compensation, but if he returned, he escaped his slave status and was no longer obliged to return to work for his former owners.
When they were finally freed, former slaves were dumped in the cities. Many of them were able to take advantage of the Golden Law (the law that abolished slavery in Brazil), but unfortunately the black population remained excluded from the possibility of education and the labour market. Despite the freedom they were gradually given, because the end of slavery did not come overnight, some found themselves not knowing where to go or what to do, so some people stayed to work in their owners’ homes. While some families stayed on the properties where they had been slaves, others migrated to urban centres in search of a better future, a job.
Today, black people are still very often considered as inferior beings, hence the desire of Jair Bolsonaro’s government to raze the indigenous population to the ground, at least what is left of it. According to Ricardo Salles, a minister in the current government, the indigenous people are taking up space and are useless. He explained that they will “take advantage of the pandemic to open the door and let the cattle through”, which implicitly means that they want to put an end to the indigenous population once and for all. Geraldo Nunes added that in 1970 more than 50% of the population was illiterate, and that today many were functionally illiterate, and therefore did not understand what they were reading.
Today, 55% of the Brazilian population does not have water sanitation at home, and at the university a specific number of places are reserved for black or mixed-race people. They sometimes represent only one tenth of the total number of students, depending on the university in question. And if it turns out that a person of mixed race has declared himself to be white, he automatically loses his place and is immediately expelled when this is discovered.
Finally, as far as the global pandemic is concerned, today Covid-19 is causing a lot of serious damage, especially in Brazil. In the big cities, some Brazilians have found themselves on the streets and are still on the streets today because they have no means of getting home, they can’t take public transport for lack of money or even join their families. Some of them have no place to go and no place to take refuge…
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