VESPEIRO

Estou em divida com os leitores do Vespeiro.

Tendo sido convidado pra participar do Oslo Freedom Forum, na capital da Noruega, que terminou ontem, com apenas 72 horas de antecedência, estive mergulhado na confecção do texto em que minha apresentação acabou apenas se baseando.

O texto começou sendo escrito em português mas logo partiu para uma versão em inglês que, no voo entre São Paulo e Oslo, chegou à forma final que apresento aqui apenas como um meio de saldar minha divida com os leitores do Vespeiro que ficou abandonado em função dessa corrida contra o tempo.

Na volta a São Paulo, no próximo dia 16, prometo trabalhar para apresentar o mais rapidamente possível a verão traduzida para o português. 

I belong to a family that has been breathing journalism for the last 136 years.

That’s quite a perspective.

Journalism is the basic tool for promoting reforms in democracies. That puts you in the eye of the storm.

To be a journalist is really to live intensely the history of your times.

Our newspaper was born back when Brazil was still a monarchy, to advocate an end to slavery and the creation of the Republic. Ever since then we have been involved in a constant struggle with the people in power, often in an environment in which dedicating oneself to such activities is not exactly the best way to prosper and live in safety to a ripe old age.

Having taken an active part in all of the political movements the country has lived throughout these 136 years, O Estado de S. Paulo has been pegged by all of the governments the country has had since as their most bothersome opposition, mostly by those it has helped bring about.

We are collectors of episodes of armed intervention by the forces of the state, bombing attempts and censorship measures enacted by representatives of every different grade of the ideological spectrum that has been or tried to be in the country’s government.

We have broken from prison and taken into our newsrooms fugitives of all regimes.

There has been not a single member of this family that, in the four generations succeeding one another in this struggle, hasn’t been through upheavals that radically altered the course of their lives.

My grandfather was arrested 17 times and was exiled twice between the early 30s and the end of the war in Europe, which put an end to the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas, a Hitler sympathizer.

Brazil could then enjoy a brief period of Democracy.

In 1964, with the Cold War at its hottest, at a time when falling under Soviet influence meant forever saying goodbye to freedom, a military movement supported by our newspaper acted to prevent a coup in open preparation by the Socialists and installed a temporary government with the promise of holding new elections.

Less than a year later, after an editorial piece published in our newspaper denouncing the military plot to stay in power indefinitely, the last editorial page written by my grandfather before his death, opened a war against the new dictators and began a period of over 11 years of widespread censorship of the press, economic retaliation against the newspaper and episodes of torture against journalists and dissidents in general.

Fighting against the new dictatorship, organizing a resistance movement by means of a game of cat-and-mouse with the censors and the permanent effort in hiding, allowing to escape or setting free those persecuted by the regime, alongside the international human rights and freedom of press institutions, in which I, too, took part in the first half of my career in journalism, was the common struggle shared by the members of my generation and those of my father’s.

Nowadays, 26 years after the return of Democracy, our newspaper has once again been under censorship for the last 648 days, this time by virtue of a judicial sentence whose author is a judge close to a political figure that has its origins in the very political school founded by the dictator that my grandfather spent his life fighting against.

This man inaugurated his career as a member of the political party artificially created by the military rulers to lend them some resemblance of legitimacy. He became our first civilian president after the years of dictatorship by sheer accident. He was the vice-president negotiated with the military, by way of giving them an honorable way out. And took the country after the death, days before the tenure, of the would be president, one of the leaders of the movement that actually resisted the military dictatorship.

During his stint in the presidency, he gave out radio and TV stations to all of the country’s most backward politicians, thus enabling them – and himself – to perpetuate their own rule.

Crowning this brilliant trajectory, he has now become the president of the coalition that upholds in Congress the pseudo-Socialist government of Lula da Silva, who was elected by selling himself as a hero of the struggle against the dictators and a bulwark of political ethics.

What they all have in common is the skill and the lack of ethics necessary to manufacture impoverishment and then portray themselves as helpers of the miserable. A poorer version of the Portuguese art of socializing the little privileges so that a few can keep enjoying privately the bigger ones, keeping everyone, from businessmen to blue-collar workers benefitted with minuscule special rights, essentially dependent on their grants.

In other words, spreading and institutionalizing corruption.

Their success has benefited largely from the priceless contribution they receive from the intellectuals and democratic governments that, across the world, support their actions as long as they describe themselves as members of whichever ideological category is currently most fashionable in rich countries.

Fighting for Democracy in Latin America is something akin to a Sisyphean task. We always find ourselves back at the starting point.

In the saga my family has lived in this almost century-and-a-half the only front of progressive struggle that yielded significant fruit was our active involvement in improving the quality of education in Brazil, in which the highlight was the creation of the Universidade de São Paulo in 1936, the first University in the country to live up to such a name. My grandfather was one of its founders.

This was the school that originated all of the people who really helped the fledgling Brazilian Democracy reach new heights.

In the remaining Latin American countries, the outlook is, almost invariably, worse than Brazil’s. And this state of affairs stems from the same fundamental cause.

The financial crisis in the United States has had a nefarious effect on Latin American democracies.

Together with the reaping of generous rewards seen in Chinas state Capitalism, before which the greed of the entire world kneels down, it has deeply shaken the belief in the efficiency of democratic Capitalism as a tool of development, confirming once again that crime does pay and killing the arguments of those that put respecting human rights as a necessary condition of relations between governments.

The new turn in the Latin American vicious cycle brought about by these facts has resulted in a return, now without any ideals or utopias, of vague echoes of the Socialist speech in justifying a dangerous mix of old Populist tactics and organized crime methods.

Colonel Hugo Chavez, a sort of Fidel Castro wannabe with continental aspirations, and his wild bunch of Bolivarian Socialists fight a relentless war against freedom of press in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

In Argentina, a country whose internal debt is financed largely with Venezuelan oil money follows suit. The Kirshners are going for a new rendering of the “unionist  republic” of Juan Peron and act against the free press violently and objectively, knowing that their vision of power hinges on their ability to silence it.

In Nicaragua, another Chavez ally, Daniel Ortega, is treating the press with growing contempt.

Colombia, living in full democracy alongside Chile, was able to control, after years of fighting and countless lives lost, the drug-dealing guerrillas that for a long time turned that country into a living hell.

Now the nightmare of narco-terrorism has engulfed Mexico, where the corrupt police and the complacent government leave only the journalists as preferred targets.

The urgent matter of legalizing drugs is a reality that the international community must face up to at once, before it is too late.

Many believe today in a freer world made possible by the new developments brought about by the new information technologies.

In open societies is clear that they shall have that effect. And, indeed, international networks operating beyond the reach of national states have proved their worth as tools of resistance capable of exploiting cracks in monolithic regimes. Political violence must now be carried out in front of everyone, and that helps speeding up the mobilization of international solidarity.

This is, without any doubt, a substantial progress.

But as with every other tool created by man, these can also be used for evil purposes.

Virtual reality, without which no one can fully work or relate oneself in modern societies, is a mathematical reproduction of physical reality. Within this virtual world, instruments of oppression may also acquire a mathematical efficiency.

Those who have followed the hunt for Osama bin Laden may well imagine how that could one day be turned against each and every one of us.

There are no shortcuts.

Freedom is not a consequence of technology. Democracy, the art of organizing human societies for freedom, is a byproduct of education.

History is societies psychoanalyst. Only the peoples that clearly understand how they became what they are today can be in control of their own fates and avoid political exploitation. That is the goal of education.

Meanwhile, all we, on the press, can do is to fight and resist to avoid political setbacks beyond points of no return.

Among the most visible current threats against freedom, the one that most concerns me is the apparently irreversible process actually affecting the world’s economy.

It is mainly through our social capacity as workers and consumers that we exert our freedom. But China’s state Capitalism, with its competition that knows no rules or rights to property, has, year after year, pushed private companies all over the world to the arms of the state, forcing the consolidation of industry after industry in large monopolies, concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people and destroying the labor and the consumer markets.

Diverse markets are Democracy’s habitat. And, presently, Democracy faces the same threat that has, since always, led different species to extinction on planet Earth: the suppression of its habitat.