Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas

3. Affirming the Young Democracy

Three Affirming the Young Democracy Youth Engagement in Rio de Janeiro Irene Rizzini and Malcolm Bush The Context of Youth Civic Engagement in Brazil The backdrop for contemporary youth’s civic engagement in Brazil was a series of events in the country’s recent history that aroused unheard of levels of political participation (Rizzini and Barker 2002). In 1989, the first direct election for the presidency of the republic was held after twenty-one years of military dictatorship. In 1993, the nation’s political passions were aroused again by the financial corruption of the democratically elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello, who was impeached and removed from office. His removal followed massive street demonstrations against him by, among others, student activists. In 2002, Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva—the head of the Workers Party (PT), the most significant progressive party in Brazil–was elected president after three unsuccessful attempts at running for that office. These events were the result of—and themselves permitted—a new type of political and civic engagement in the country. In Brazil, to be engaged in the critical decades of the 1960s and the 1970s, according to the Brazilian anthropologist Alzira de Abreu (2000), meant participation in the struggle for a more just society. Early in that struggle, the search for a more just society depended on overthrowing the military dictatorship and installing a democratic regime. The members of the socalled leftist movements—among whom were the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B)—and the revolutionary guerrilla movements came together for this purpose at the end of the 1960s. Affirming the Young Democracy • 61 In the past several years, young people have received special attention in the Brazilian political agenda. Several sectors of society—including young social movements, organizations of civil society, and the federal government— have engaged to improve daily conditions and opportunities for youth. Their most notable achievements were the passage of a National Policy for Youth and the creation of the National Secretariat for Youth (SNJ), the National Council of Youth (CONJUVE), and the National Program for the Inclusion of Youth: Education, Training, and Community Action (ProJovem). The National Secretariat for Youth is part of the Brazilian president’s General Secretariat and is responsible for integrating all the federal government’s programs for young people, paying special attention to the characteristics and diversity of youth. The Secretariat is also the reference point for federal youth policy at the state and municipal levels. The National Council for Youth includes government officials engaged in youth issues, as well as organizations and experts concerned with young people and with public policies involving them. It has sixty members, forty of whom are from civil society and twenty from the federal government. Its purpose is to propose policies for young people and to promote studies about the socioeconomic realities that confront them. The situation of young people in Brazil is of great concern partly because of their large numbers. The 2003 United Nations Report on the World Population lists Brazil as the country with the fifth greatest percentage of young people (ONU 2003). According to data in the Report on Youth Development, in 2007 there were 35 million young people in Brazil between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Data from the Brazilian Household Survey 2006 (PNAD) listed 2.5 million of those young people living in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region.1 Moreover, 29 percent of the fifteen- to seventeen-yearolds in Rio, and 21 percent of the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds lived in households with incomes below the poverty line. One troublesome statistic about Rio’s younger population is the reduction in the number of black and brown youths (pretos and pardos, respectively, in Portuguese—the Brazilian census requires respondents to identify themselves by color) in the city between 1993 and 2003.That fact is most likely related to the high levels of violence and homicide that are most pronounced among nonwhite youths. A report sponsored by the Brazilian government to mark the twentieth anniversary of the passage of the pathbreaking Statute on the Child and the Adolescent notes an increase in the murder rate of young people twelve to eighteen years of age in Brazil, from 18.7 per 100,000 in 1997 to 24.1 per 100,000 in 2007; the majority of the victims were black and 62 • rizzini and...