Category Archives: Climate Justice

The movement that defeated Trump’s agenda in Brazil has deep roots

by Jim Hodgson

Lula’s victory Sunday has global significance. Lula – Luiz Inácio da Silva – faced threats from U.S. President Donald Trump. His campaign withstood interference by the U.S. government and by giant tech companies, notably Meta.

In his victory speech, Lula proclaimed: “This country does not accept being anyone’s back yard.” The United States has always treated Latin America and the Caribbean as a back yard. Even when then-President Joe Biden said in 2022 that it wasn’t the back yard, but the front yard, he still implied U.S. possession.

Trump’s revival of the early-nineteenth century Monroe Doctrine, continuing airstrikes against fishing boats while arguing without evidence they were used for drug-trafficking, the fuel blockade against Cuba, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, and overt interference in elections in Honduras, Colombia and Argentina (among others) all show renewed U.S. determination to force the region’s submission – together, evidently, with that of Canada.

This election was the fourth that he has won (2002, 2006, 2022 and 2026), but there were three others before 2002 which he lost.

Images from the 1989 campaign: “Without fear of being happy”

The deep roots of Lula’s movement

In December 1989, a night or two before the run-off vote in that year’s election (Lula’s first campaign), I was one of about 300,000 people who gathered in the wide avenue leading to the old cathedral in Rio de Janeiro for Lula’s final rally of that campaign. The famous “Olé” soccer chant, altered here to end “LU-LA, LU-LA,” reverberated in the steel and concrete canyon.

After long decades of military dictatorship, Brazilians were making history: this was their first direct presidential election since 1960. In 1980 with the military still in power, Lula and others formed the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – the workers’ party – from his base in the industrial suburbs of São Paulo. It built links with social movements across Brazil: farmers, landless farm-workers, women, Indigenous people, ecological defenders and others.

What I learned in my 1989 visit was that many of those movements had roots in the development of Christian base communities in the Catholic Church and in the processes of popular education and cultural action developed decades earlier in Brazil by people like Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Those methods had spread rapidly across Latin America, and shaped the work I did in the Dominican Republic from late 1986 through 1988. I was a “communications technician,” working in an organization dedicated to popular education and cultural action. My role was to train people in basic skills: how to write a news release, how to publish a newsletter. (This was long before the internet!) My colleagues did the prior work: adult literacy, building awareness. The people worked on issues of land, water, and threats of expulsion from their homes. I helped them make more noise about their concerns.

I learned far more from my Dominican colleagues about long-term struggles than they did from me about communication!

I returned to Toronto from the Dominican Republic at the end of 1988 and began working with the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) in early 1989. That work brought me to Rio de Janeiro for a global ecumenical “Cultural Action Workshop.”

The World Council of Churches and the Brazilian Ecumenical Youth Union (UBRAJE) organized the event for young adult leaders from around the world to share experiences of action for social change, and to learn from each other. The theme was “The Senses of Creation,” and participants (about 20 of us from various parts of the world) were encouraged to use our senses to increase our awareness of our surroundings as a sort of first step in a longer process of personal and social change.

We spent a day, for example, visiting parts of Rio de Janeiro: a traditional neighbourhood market, a middle-class beach area (Ipanema), and a Pentecostal church. We broke into small groups, each group corresponding to one of the senses. Later, we returned to our conference centre and talked about our experiences. This wide-ranging discussion succeeded in heightening our awareness of various components of Brazilian society.

Drama exercises took us into our own minds and bodies, and then back out into the world, moving us to think about our place in the world. It seemed quite simple to open a huge trunk, remove costumes from the trunk and don the garb of some other personality. Here we entered the world of Boal’s “popular theatre,” used in Brazil to help people understand issues which surround them and begin to see what can be done to make change happen.

The Brazilians with whom we worked showed us how these activities helped participants to discover their roots, notice the ground on which they stood, and match their ideals to proposals for political and social action, lessons that we would later apply in our own contexts.

One of the organizers was Mauricio Lissovsky, who worked then with Brazil’s Institute for the Study of Religion (ISER) and later as a communications professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Despite the disappointment of Lula’s loss, Brazilians, he said, would continue to strive for transformation of Brazil “with full awareness of the ground beneath our feet.” Action for change could not be rooted in ideologies that were abstracted from people’s daily realities, but rooted instead in the ways that people live, work and express themselves.

In the years that followed, I thought often of Mauricio’s words as Brazil’s Landless Peoples Movement (MST) emerged alongside other social movements across the country. These movements played lead roles in the new international social movement spaces like the World Social Forum and the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Meanwhile, Lula’s political movement gathered strength and the PT won power in various cities and states.

Finally, in 2002, Lula won the presidency. He and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, led the country until 2016, when Rousseff was removed from office through a series of legal and parliamentary manoeuvres that eventually led to the presidency of the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro. Lula won the 2022 vote and returned to power – and won again in 2026 as the whole region seemed to be shifting to the right.

Some people from the social movements took positions within various PT-led local, state and national governments, and played positive roles within the structures of power. But the movements themselves retained their autonomy from the party and governments. When necessary, they criticized various government policies, such as the glacial pace of land reform, the charity model implicit in the government’s anti-hunger program, persisting corruption, the government’s embrace of food fuels like ethanol despite their impact on food prices and supply, and more recently the government’s move to allow oil and gas exploitation in the Atlantic Ocean near the mouth of the Amazon River.

Leaving aside for the moment debates over successive PT administrations, what had been underway among social movements in Brazil and many other countries in Latin America since long before the PT’s electoral success was a process of stepping back from reliance on political parties as vehicles (much less vanguards) for social change.

Instead, the social movements themselves become protagonists themselves in the political arena – as had Lula in his labour-organizing days. Widespread use of the techniques of popular education accomplished what they were intended to do: create new social subjects – people who were passive no longer and who understood themselves as agents of change.

Elections this weekend in British Columbia and Brazil: Who gets thrown under the bus for the sake of development?

by Jim Hodgson

I write today from northwest Chiapas, part of the traditional territory of the Zoque Indigenous people in southeastern Mexico. But I am thinking of friends and family in the Canadian province of British Columbia, who will elect a new provincial government today, and of the people of Brazil who will choose a president Sunday.

In all of these places, politics have become sharply polarized. The right attacks even the concept of Indigenous rights as an impediment to private property and to their notions of development – usually tied to ecologically-destructive resource extraction. They also attack 2SLGBTQIA+ people, especially trans people. And the left, rather tepidly in my opinion, defends the rights of Indigenous people, ecological protection and the rights of queer and trans people.

Today, let’s look at my home province, so-called British Columba, a land where virtually no treaties were signed during colonization.

Orange Shirt Day, Penticton, Oct. 30

In the B.C. provincial election, two acronyms have been bandied about. DRIPA and SOGI. Conservative politicians say they’re bad: threats to your property on the one hand and to your family on the other. And the relatively progressive government has not shown much courage in defending these policies.

What are they?

In this piece by Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), DRIPA is explained.

In times like these, First Nations and our rights are often the first to be thrown under the bus. In the territory known as British Columbia (B.C.), this has resulted in politicians placing a target squarely on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). Lost in all the related bluster and rhetoric is what UNDRIP and DRIPA actually are and are meant to do, and what those who seek to weaken or do away with them are asking British Columbians to give up.

Understanding UNDRIP and DRIPA

UNDRIP is an international human rights instrument. Developed through a series of forums beginning in 1982 and ending with the UN General Assembly voting to adopt UNDRIP in 2007, it is the product of more than 20 years of international deliberations, diplomacy, and compromise between UN member States and Indigenous Peoples’ representatives.

UNDRIP does not create new rights, nor does it extend any unique privileges or entitlements to Indigenous Peoples. Rather, it expresses long-standing international human rights norms in the specific context of the world’s Indigenous Peoples. Grounded fundamentally in the inherent right to self-determination enjoyed by all peoples, it is intended to protect the collective human rights of the more than 470 million Indigenous People worldwide that may not be adequately addressed in other human rights instruments that emphasize individual rights, and it also further elaborates on specific individual human rights with particular emphasis on the rights of Indigenous women and children.

Stated simply: UNDRIP recognizes and is meant to protect broadly accepted, basic human rights. Indigenous rights are human rights.

DRIPA, on the other hand, is a provincial statute which the B.C. legislature passed unanimously in 2019. The purpose of DRIPA is to advance the domestic implementation of these rights in B.C. DRIPA made B.C. the first jurisdiction in Canada to formally adopt UNDRIP as its framework for reconciliation, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada explicitly called for. Since then, DRIPA has played a key role in enabling First Nations to take our rightful place at the decision-making table while facilitating economic growth and prosperity. …

There are legitimate questions about how DRIPA should operate, how its obligations should interact with existing law, and what role courts should play when conflicts arise. But those questions should not be allowed to obscure the fundamental question at the heart of this debate: whether the rights of First Nations will be treated as enduring human rights or as political concessions that can be suspended whenever they become politically inconvenient.

Summerland’s first Pride March, June 18.

And SOGI – sexual orientation and gender identity – is explained here by Wilbur Turner, president and executive director of Advocacy Canada (a Kelowna-based 2SLGBTQIA+ advocacy organization).

SOGI 123 was introduced in BC schools in 2016, ten years ago. It is a set of resources to help schools be safe for every student, and it was never a stand-alone curriculum. Researchers at UBC’s Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre, led by Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, evaluated it using BC Adolescent Health Survey data from more than 98,000 students in grades 7 to 12 across 482 schools. They found that SOGI 123 reduced bullying and sexual orientation discrimination for students in the rainbow community and for their heterosexual classmates too. “We’ve now got 10-year evidence that it works,” Saewyc said.

Thousands of students have now graduated after spending most of their school years with these resources in their classrooms. The sky hasn’t fallen. What has happened is that more kids feel safe at school.

British Columbians face real problems this fall, from housing and health care to the cost of groceries. Let’s get serious about those, and leave the kids out of this culture war.

I’ll write about Brazil’s election in days to come. In the meantime, for excellent updates check out posts from Panamerican Dispatch.

Colombia’s Gustavo Petro seeks to contain the growth of “hyper-fascism” in Latin America

by Jim Hodgson

During a visit last week to Mexico City, Colombia’s former president Gustavo Petro declared he would work with others to prevent “hyper-fascism” and “techno-fascism” from taking control of all Latin America.

He met with President Claudia Sheinbaum in the National Palace (above); spoke with students at Mexico’s National Autonomous University on economic policy in the climate crisis; met with Colombians living in Mexico; and sat down for an interview with Miguel Ángel Velázquez of La Jornada daily newspaper.

In that interview, Petro spoke of his complicated relationship with the administration of Donald Trump. The two have differed sharply over Israel’s treatment of Palestine, climate justice, relations with Venezuela and Cuba, and the U.S. “war” on drugs.

Petro’s four-year presidential term ended on Aug. 7 when his hard-right successor, Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in. Petro had been Colombia’s first president from a party of the left. He had tried (unsuccessfully) to bring about “total peace” in a country torn for decades by civil war and violence tied to drug-trafficking. It was Jan. 3, when the United States kidnapped Petro’s Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, that fear set in.

“After the crucial day, when they bombed Caracas, Trump said: ‘Watch your back, because now I’m coming for Petro.’ That day I thought: ‘A missile is coming for me.’”

After talks among diplomats and with Republicans in the U.S. congress, Petro and Trump met in the White House on Feb. 3. Trump called the conversation “terrific.” Petro said it was “constructive.” (In the La Jornada interview, Petro added that others behind Trump “worse than him” are driving the key decisions.)

Their rapprochement did not last. In Colombia’s presidential election, Trump and his officials backed de la Espriella, calling the other candidate, human rights defender Iván Cepeda, a “radical left Marxist.” This was one more instance of U.S. interference in Latin American elections (after a presidential vote in Honduras and mid-term contests in Argentina). 

Now, countries from Argentina and Chile to El Salvador and Trinidad and Tobago have governments of the hard-right that are solidly attached to Trump’s agenda. The next election to watch is in Brazil next month, where progressive President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva faces Flávio Bolsonaro, son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Across the region, right-wing parties are backed by a large-scale disinformation network, La Derecha Diario (“The Right Wing Daily”). A failed murder-for-hire plot in Bolivia has drawn wider attention to the network’s activities. 

In his interview with La Jornada, Petro spoke of his vision of the political moment: 

“We live in a planetary shell; it’s the matrix of lies. We act like in The Matrix, like in the movie. Suddenly you find a bot farm. It’s not made up of human beings, but rather profiles that automatically react to any Latin American leader because they want to degrade political discourse and reduce it to insults. That’s why I call it the matrix of lies. In this shell of falsehood, some parts escape because they are strong, like states, but the intention of this matrix is ​​to enslave human beings, and it’s not just a physical chain, but a mental one, to enslave human beings to allow the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, for example.”

Petro explained the counterattack: “Mathematics is required, because it’s a mathematical, algorithmic attack, both in the bots used to manipulate human beings and in the elections themselves and their final results.”

In a subsequent editorial, La Jornada wrote:

“Petro’s contribution to the political debate serves as a wake-up call to increase vigilance regarding foreign agents who exploit communication tools such as social media to promote neo-fascist rhetoric, spread misinformation, incite hatred, and manipulate electorates to benefit their external and internal sponsors – namely, the White House and a sector of big business resistant to democracy. 

“Alongside the bleak picture he paints, there is a message of hope. In his country in 2022, the people elected the first progressive government in history, and this experience cannot be seen as a failure. Societies are not defenseless against technofascism, he says, because they can protect themselves with strong minds and with the same resources used by oppressors: mathematics. Education is fundamental to the resistance that he joins and invites others to join.”

Yes. And, to me, hope is in revival of the networks of social movements that gave rise to the “pink wave” of progressive governments a quarter-century ago.

A postscript: In a Labour Day essay, Canadian politician and activist Charlie Angus offered a similarly sharp warning about the power of the big-tech corporations in the Trump White House. He recalled that in his farewell address, Joe Biden warned that the Silicon Valley elite were capable of destroying democracy and damaging the future.