Brazilian social movements open a new cycle of struggle against global financial capitalism

19 November 2024

Thursday, November 14, 2024, downtown Rio de Janeiro. A capoeira Angola chant plays at the Brazilian Press Association, in front of more than 700 activists gathered at the People's Summit against the G20.

In parallel, the Lula government is launching the G20 Social in the port area, a mechanism that the Brazilian executive has turned into its star contribution to the summit with the Rio Declaration , generating harsh criticism among grassroots social movements in Brazil and Latin America for having demobilized protests against the G20.

As Sandra Quintela, a member of the Jubileu Sul Network and leader of the organization of the Summit against the G20, explains, “We went through many stages to be able to hold the Summit against the G20. There was a lot of pressure for us not to do it and to join the G20 Social. They want to dictate the rules of the world, but we know that the objective of the G20 is austerity and the expression of racist, patriarchal and ecocidal capitalism. We do not want to legitimize that place as a space for dialogue. That is why we held this People's Summit, an autonomous, sovereign and self-financed space.”

The ecological, feminist, social economy, rural, peasant, indigenous and quilombola social movements denounce the capitalist model “that is destroying life on the planet” and demand a strategy for protecting nature in the face of what will be discussed at the G20 summit, whose objective is “to plan and continue to order its plan of destruction.” 

Vladimir Silva, an activist from the Jubileu Sur Network and a member of the organization of the Summit Against the G20, says that the lines of debate – food sovereignty, climate justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, feminism, solidarity with the Palestinian people – are the result of eight months of work: “We have been working on these issues for many years, which are not new. That is why, in this process of articulation, the social organizations of Brazil dedicated a lot of time to reflecting on the Official Summit of the Government with the G20 and looking for a sovereign space. There were some problems of digestion with some groups (mainly the CUT union and Via Campesina) because we understood that this Social G20 disarticulated our transformative power.”

“Civil society has a life and a role of its own. A democracy is created when there is a strong civil society that is not domesticated, contained, encapsulated by the government,” says Soraya Tupinambá, researcher and activist.

For Soraya Tupinambá, researcher and activist at the Terra Mar Institute, civil society already has a place in the G20, with groups such as the C20 or the T20, which produce documents that are directed to heads of state. “The creation of the Social G20 is not new either. I saw the same thing in Dubai, at COP28, where the government captured the energy of civil society in institutional spaces and diverted public opinion from fundamental issues. Civil society has a life and a role of its own. A democracy is created when there is a strong civil society and not one that is domesticated, contained, encapsulated by the government. If there is a desire to democratize, it is necessary to strengthen civil society on its own legs, by relating, dialoguing and negotiating with it, without wanting to organize it, because that is not the role of the government.”

Ana Priscila Alves, leader of the World March of Women in Rio de Janeiro, explains: “When we started to build the Summit against the G20, we wanted to reorganize ourselves, to sit together again, to build a common analysis and action. As some movements left the People’s Summit Against the G20 and others did not want to participate in the Social G20, the World March of Women in Brazil believed that it was important to be in both places, to build a bridge.”

Via Campesina organizations such as the MST, and feminists such as the Brazilian Union of Women (UBM) did not want to participate in the Counter Summit. According to Giselle Betencourt, representative of the UBM in São Paulo, “we did not intervene because we understood that the G20 Social was the place to promote these debates. Our expectation is to leave with the guarantee that public policies on health, education and economy will be implemented, not only in Brazil, but throughout the Global South.”

An MST activist who participated in the G20 Social and prefers not to give her name acknowledges that “in 25 years of activism we have never suffered as much stress as that generated by the G20.”

For Graciela Rodriguez, representative of the Brazilian Network for Peoples' Articulation, despite supporting Lula's government in general terms, they did not agree with the government's strategy at the G20. "That is why we decided to hold a People's Summit, a social technology created for the first time in the fight against the FTAA (1999, Canada). This brought us many problems because the Brazilian government has much more capacity for resources and infrastructure, and it divided the movements."

On November 30, South Africa will assume the presidency of the G20. A delegation of South African activists took part in the anti-G20 summit in Rio. Khaliel Mosses of the climate justice organisation 350 Africa and his colleagues support the Brazilian proposal to tax the super-rich, with the money to finance a fair energy transition. “In South Africa and across the Global South we are experiencing a terrible climate emergency, extreme floods and droughts. Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer. We want our communities to have access to solar and wind energy and to be able to be energy sovereign,” explains Khaliel.

“African countries are the most affected by debt and spend much more on paying off this illegitimate debt and its interest than on climate and social public policies. There is a historical root to the debt,” says Khaliel Mosses.

Jenny Ricks, a member of the Fight Inequality Alliance in South Africa, explains how important it has been to learn from Brazilian movements in Rio de Janeiro. “In 2025, the G20 will be coming to South Africa, the most unequal country in the world. The fight against inequality needs to be central to the agenda of movements. The level of wealth of a few on the planet is grotesque, private wealth that continues to increase while people suffer from austerity policies and cuts to public services. These are policies that kill people and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet. Billionaires need to pay taxes on their fortunes.”

Activists say that the second strong point in South Africa must be debt cancellation. “African countries are the most affected by debt and spend much more on paying off this illegitimate debt and its interest than on climate and social public policies. There is a historical root to debt,” says Khaliel Mosses.

Adriana Odara Martins, state coordinator of the organization of the Unified Black Movement (MNU) in Rio de Janeiro, puts the conflict into context: “For more than a decade, we have organized this People’s Summit against the G20 in a completely autonomous way, without the participation of any government. We criticize this G20 Social Summit that was organized by the government, as much as I love our president Lula, we understand that government is government and movement is movement. Until recently we had a genocidal maniac in power. Governments change but social movements are still there. Lula could have come to listen to the movements at the Summit against the G20.”

According to Jenny Ricks, “It is complex when civil society is divided into two spaces as has happened here in Rio. The context in South Africa is very different, so we are going to have a lot of work this year.”

Anti-imperialist people's court

Friday, November 15, 2024. Full moon. A G20 Social activity goes beyond the institutional framework and recovers the collective spirit of indignation at the media circus and the hypocrisy of high-ranking officials. This is the Popular Anti-Imperialist Tribunal, which brought together thousands of people at the Fundición Progreso, a historic site in Rio de Janeiro, to judge six cases —among them Palestine, Haiti and the EU/Mercosur Agreement— of crimes in the presence of those affected, lawyers and judges.

“The most worrying case that was judged in the Court is that of Haiti. The Haitian people are suffering a massacre, their land is being taken away. So there is a fascist international (NATO, IMF, WB...) that is working at the same time as we are organizing ourselves from popular movements. We have a world in which 70% of nation states are governed by the extreme right. That is an alarm. In addition, there is the post-pandemic scenario, which deepened the crisis and the rapprochement, the recognition of each other, building new organized networks,” says Florencia Abregú, activist of the Rural Federation for Production and Settlement of Argentina and part of the Operational Secretariat of Alba Movimientos.

“We criticize this G20 Social Summit that was organized by the Lula government, as much as I love our president Lula, we understand that government is government and movement is movement”

At the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal, as well as at the G20 counter-summit, the concept of “ecological transition” was denounced. Soraya Tupinambá explains: “We are seeing an energy transition that is not ours. For example, Brazil already has half of its energy matrix renewable and 83% of its electricity matrix is ​​also renewable. Brazil has three times more renewable energy than OECD countries. So this energy transition is not ours, we are buying it, but it is a transition of the Global North that needs to go through a process of reindustrialization and has neither the energy nor the raw materials to do so. So the expansion of renewables in Brazil is projected with serious problems such as deterritorialization of traditional communities, loss of agricultural land, loss of access to ecosystems fundamental to human reproduction, unequal contracts of extreme injustice for renting land, violation of human rights and violation of women.”

Adriana Odara Martins insists: “The G20 is made up of the world’s biggest polluters. They are responsible for inequality and hunger in the world. There is no way for social movements to engage in dialogue with genocidaires and leaders who finance wars. Weapons produced by US companies enter Brazil. And these weapons end up in the suburbs and favelas. Every 12 minutes a black person is murdered in Brazil. Every five minutes a woman is murdered and another raped. Rio de Janeiro is a laboratory for the extreme right. Here we are going through a very strong political suffocation.”

On that same November 15, thousands of people took to the streets of the main cities of Brazil to demand the end of the six days of work for one day of rest (6x1).

“In the end we managed to create a Tribunal that was born in the G20 Social and emancipated itself from the institution, becoming an autonomous space that brought together social movements again. We managed to maintain a process of building unity and it was not by chance that we were women again,” Ana Priscila Alves sums up.

On November 15, thousands of people took to the streets of Brazil's main cities to demand an end to the six-day work week for one day of rest (6x1), a demand that is being led in the Brazilian Parliament by Deputy Erika Hilton (Psol) to approve a Proposed Amendment to the Constitution (PEC) that establishes work schedules of up to eight hours a day and 36 a week, with four days a week and three days of rest.

March of the Peoples: Free Palestine from the River to the Sea

Saturday, November 16, 2024, in the gentrified southern area of ​​Rio de Janeiro. More than 10,000 people participated in the People's March “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea: Imperialism Out”, which went along Avenida Atlántica in Copacapana for almost four hours, surrounded by civil and military police, under the rain and fog more typical of Europe than Brazil.

The groups denounced the genocide against the Palestinian population and accused the G20 economic leaders of being complicit in the world's wars and responsible for the social and climatic catastrophe in which the planet finds itself today.

The March also denounced the plundering of the Amazon, the impunity of agribusiness and the new attempt to sign the EU/Mercosur Trade Agreement. “Saying no to this Agreement is part of our agenda. Lula cannot talk about global governance and sign such an agreement,” Vladimir Silva claims. “We already said no six years ago. It is a neocolonial agreement that disguises old agreements to put the country into debt and have more presence of the colonialists here.”

More than 300 organizations signed the demonstration, opening the door to a new cycle of unified protests, in a context of an offensive by the fascist extreme right that they consider “extremely worrying” for the entire planet, not only for Latin America and the Caribbean. “All movements participated in the March against Genocide in Palestine and against Imperialism. We want Lula to take this message to the G20,” explains Ana Priscila Alves.

“Even before Bolsonaro came to power, Brazil lacked a self-managed social space for convergence like the one we created in this march and at the People's Summit against the G20,” says Vladimir Silva, who says that Bolsonarism is still strongly present in everyday life.

For Soraya Tupinambá, “the conclusion is that we as people need to mobilize ourselves deeply. It is not enough to change fossil fuels for renewables.”

According to a study by the Unified Black Movement, from October until today, the difference between the number of people killed in Palestine and the number of black people killed in Brazil is only 1,000 people. “It is a silent war and nobody does anything. We voted for Lula, but there are things we need to talk about. Brazil is secular in the constitution, but in everyday life it is not like that. I am a woman from the terrero, a woman from axé. We know how violent the fundamentalist process is. Our lands are violated, invaded and burned. We are stoned for wearing white. Drug trafficking closes our spaces in the favelas and outskirts, and the Brazilian State does nothing. They close us in the name of Jesus and many evangelical churches launder drug money. It is a vicious circle that suffocates us, especially black people,” denounces Adriana Odara Martins.

For Soraya Tupinambá, “the conclusion is that we as people need to mobilize ourselves deeply. It is not enough to change fossil fuels for renewables. It is not about changing the source, but rather about changing the patterns of consumption and production of our society. We need to review our ways of life, promote energy efficiency and sobriety, and reduce our energy consumption patterns to 10% of what we consume today. And that is possible if we organize ourselves and orient ourselves with another logic of existing and being in the world, in communion with all that is alive, not just humans. Reconciling ourselves with the planet is the challenge. We need an ecological transformation and not an energy transaction.”

Official meeting of the G20

On November 18 and 19, Rio de Janeiro will host the 19th G20 Summit, with heads of state and representatives of the richest economies on the planet. The city centre has been blocked off and adapted to the security needs of the G20 Summit, displacing thousands of homeless people, recyclers and street vendors.

“We know that our influence in the G20 will be very little or non-existent, but our commitment is not with the G20 but with the articulation of social movements. On the other hand, we hope that Lula will now put some pressure on the G20. We do not build events, we build processes. This has been part of the process that continues and transcends nation states. Institutionality is important, but limited,” confesses Ana Priscila Alves.

On November 30, South Africa will assume the new presidency of the G20. According to Khaliel Mosses, “our president Cyril Ramaphosa is not as open to civil society and social movements as Lula, there is a problem of transparency and access, so our approach cannot be with the government, but with social movements, from an independent self-organisation.”

“We were very inspired by the People’s Summit against the G20 in Brazil and we have learned some participatory methodologies that we will put into practice in South Africa,” says Jenny Ricks.

In 2025, Brazil will host COP30 in the city of Belém (Pará State), and also the meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa), probably in Rio de Janeiro, events for which social protests and multilateralism strategies are already being prepared.

For Soraya Tupinambá, Brazil has not been very ambitious at COP29 in Azerbaijan: “This is very sad for a country that claims to be an international climate leader without committing to similar goals to keep the planet at 1.5 degrees of temperature before the end of the century. We have seen this with surprise and we are in shock. How will Brazil do in 2025 without aligning itself with the Paris Agreements?”

According to Graciela Rodríguez, it is necessary to continue debating the issues that the G20 has been promoting "from this kind of fantasized local governance, disguised as a block of countries", because very important measures have been taken since the G20 was created (especially since 2008) and have deepened many of the problems that the neoliberal model has imposed since the 1970s, especially with proposals for fiscal adjustment and deepening of debt, with the financing of wars, and the lack of combating climate change.

Latin American and Caribbean social movements are currently talking about an agenda against the advance of the fascist extreme right and its financing by wealthy countries. Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples are guides for all movements in the Global South. The struggles for the retaking, protection and demarcation of lands, the demand for historical reparation for the slave-owning African diaspora, as well as the defense of ancestralities and cosmogonies in resistance to colonialism are helping to think about other structures of action.

“At the world social forums we used to say ‘Another world is possible’, but now the world needs a radical transformation that incorporates other sensibilities within a common planetary agenda,” concludes Vladimir Silva.

A bit of history

The Group of 20 (G20) began as a Forum of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, formally created at the G7 Finance Ministers Meeting on 25 September 1999.

This select group, self-appointed as the leader of the world economy, was created as a new mechanism for informal dialogue within the framework of the Bretton Woods institutional system (USA, 1944), to expand dialogue on key issues of economic and financial policy among significant capitalist economies with the theoretical idea of ​​“promoting cooperation to achieve sustainable development that benefits everyone.”

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, meetings of finance ministers and central bank governors were elevated to the level of heads of state and government, known since then as the G20 Leaders' Summits.

Soraya Tupinambá points out the hypocrisy of the G20 before the 2024 Summit begins in Rio de Janeiro. The expert in climate justice insists on dismantling that “sustainable development”, which means wanting to sustain development. “We need to sustain society’s relationship with nature. We need sustainable societies that do not break the planetary metabolism as the current development model does today, which demands more than the planet can give.”