Attorney Eddie Shore is traveling to Brazil to participate in the 18th Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) which will take place July 7-10 at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil.
Eddie assembled a conference panel with quilombola scholars and attorneys to explore quilombola legal battles for land and socioenvironmental rights under the third administration of President Lula (2022-2026) on the eve of the October presidential election. Quilombolas are inhabitants of quilombos, rural Black communities descended from enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians, which are analogous to the freedom communities formed by freed Blacks in Texas and across the Southern United States after emancipation and the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution accords legal recognition and collective territorial rights to quilombos. However, while more than 6,000 quilombos have been recognized by the Brazilian government, fewer than a dozen possess full collective title to their land.
His presentation will specifically address a landmark decision at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the case of Quilombola Communities of Alcantara v. Brazil (2024), which was the first time the tribunal took up a case finding Brazil responsible for its failure to title quilombola lands in accordance with the 1988 Constitution and the American Convention on Human Rights.
Featuring the participation of quilombola-attorney-and-scholar activists from Alcântara, Maranhão, the Vale do Ribeira, São Paulo, and an ally-attorney and historian from Austin, Texas, this multidisciplinary, transregional, and transnational panel will address successes and setbacks of the Quilombola Movement during the preceding four years, and consider strategies for holding the next president—whether Lula or someone else—accountable for its constitutional and international human rights commitments to Brazil’s one million quilombola men, women, and children.
After the conference in Salvador, Eddie will be traveling to Rio de Janeiro to meet with the Ford Foundation to learn more about its support of quilombola and indigenous territorial and socio-environmental rights, and also plan to meet with members of the Brazil Texas Chamber of Commerce (BRATECC), of which GDHM is a member, to develop Brazil-based clients.
Read more about the conference here.