James Thorlby, Brésil

"Lessons learnt from the Struggle for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights."

We learn from the people´s struggle. We don´t learn from a version of history which was written by the white man - the colonizer, the ´conquistador´, the oppressor, the land baron, the sugar baron ...

We learn from the struggle that land reform isn´t accomplished by talking but by doing.

The best way to say a thing is to do it.

The best way to keep land reform on the political agenda is by doing it: occupy the land.

We learn from the struggle that we are not ´under-developed´. We lack justice due to First World mechanisms which seek to maintain the colonial chains through the I.M.F., W.T.O., World Bank ....

We learn from the struggle that the land was made for all and that the doctrine of private property is a blasphemy against the Creator’s Project.

We learn from the struggle for economic rights that the miracle of production is not about multiplying the bread and the fishes but rather to support the landless in their struggle to unite and to organize so as to share the land and to multiply the bread.

We learn from the struggle for social rights that the real act of faith is to believe in the power of the poor to organize and the force of the fragile to unite their forces.

It is not enough to believe this: we must also make a preferential option for the poor so that they be the protagonists of the New Heaven and the New Earth.

The poor, the excluded from society, those who are left on the margins of decision making: they also are called to make a preferential option for the poor in the day to day struggle.

We learn from the struggle for cultural rights to nourish the subversive memory of the landless ...

- we activate their memories so that they remember that things were not always the way they are now ...

- we celebrate that nothing is eternal, everything changes.

In South America, at least, we will be saved not because, but in spite of, the god of the conquistador; theology that does not free is not theology;

Jesus of Nazareth became man in Mary´s womb - but it was in Joseph´s workshop that he gained class consciousness. In Memoriam:

On this day, 11th of September, we remember the U.S. people who on this day in 2001, suffered a terrible blow to their humanity.

For them ´9/11´ was a new experience.

In South America, ´9/11´ is a daily experience symbolized on this anniversary date of the U.S. backed overthrow of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.

We learn from the struggle that when the people are not consulted, be it 9/11 in New York or 9/11 in Chile or wherever, the first to suffer are the people.