Tuesday, April 19th at 7:30pm ET/6:30pm CT/5:30pm MT/4:30pm PT
Twenty years ago, the Workers' Party (PT) came to power in Brazil and implemented policies that brought 40 million people out of poverty, offered new educational opportunities to poor, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous youth, and strengthened South-South solidarity, in order to counterbalance US imperialism in Latin America. However the attempts to advance towards democratic socialism in Brazil under the PT governments were derailed after the 2016 parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff and then definitively buried after the election of neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In Bolsonaro's three and a half years in office, his government has destroyed record swathes of the Amazon forest, persecuted social movement leaders, gutted labor rights, and deliberately mishandled the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the deaths of over 661,000 Brazilians from the virus. As Brazilians prepare to head to the polls this October, their choice between rebuilding their democracy or continuing a barbaric slide towards authoritarianism could not be any clearer. In this webinar, we will hear from Brazilian political and union leaders on the front lines of the struggle for human and labor rights, and learn about what we can do as activists in the US to fight against any undue US government intervention in the Brazilian political process. We will also give details about the upcoming NPC/IC May Day Delegation to Brazil and talk about what DSA aims to learn from the PT and other social movement partners during this trip.
Speakers include:
Monica Valente, Member of the National Executive Committee of the Workers Party and Executive Secretary of the Foro de Sao Paulo
Juneia Batista, National Secretary for Women's Issues, Central Unica dos Trabalhadores
Fabio de Sa e Silva, Steering Committee member, US Network for Democracy in Brazil and Assistant Professor of International Studies, University of Oklahoma
