At 8:00 in the evening of Saturday, February lI, Archbishop Dom Helder Pessoa Camara of Recife, Brazil will speak on “Brazilian Development and U. S. Power.” The meeting will be held at Washington Square Methodist Church, 133 West Fourth Street, just two blocks west of the Loeb student center. Anyone in New York is cordially invited to attend.
Dom Helder Cmara, Archbishop of Recife and Olinda, was born February 7, 1909, in Fortaleza, capital of the Northeastern state of Ceara. In 1931, he entered politics by joining the Ministry of Education of Brazil. Regarded by admirers as “‘the Prophet of Brazil,” Helder Camara, at 57, has spent most of his life at war with the feudal poverty in Brazil’s Northeast. He has said, “the Church must join the battle for development and social justice so that later people will not say the Church deserted them in their hour of need because it was compromised by big business.” He has also set forth ideas for an Agrarian Reform pilot plan–to return those Rio favelados who originally came from rural areas to the land, giving them acreage, housing, seeds, farm implements and instruction. In 1959 he launched the Banco da Providencia — a cross between a bank and a charity organization — whose leaders every three months successfully browbeat Rio’s middle and upper classes for goods/money to distribute through the 19 favelas of Rio.
Helder Camara is aware of the international implications of poverty as well. He has said, “From April to June, 1964, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development was held in Geneva–a great stride ahead in the march of the Third World. In spite of some vacillations, and a few serious breaches, it can be said that Latin America stood beside Asia and Africa…There are now 75 countries determined to demand that aid to the developing world be measured in terms of justice on a world-wide scale.”
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Copies of Orlando Fals Borda’s speech, “The Ideological Biases of North Americans Studying Latin America’ are available from NACLA, Room 924, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, N. Y. 10027. One copy free; additional copies 10c each. Orlando Fals Borda was born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1925. He completed his university studies in the United States and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He has served as a UN. advisor on rural problems in Brazil and was Director-General of the Colombian Ministry of Agriculture from 1960-62. Together with the late Camilo Torres he founded the Sociology Faculty at the National University of Colombia in 1959 and is currently a full professor there. He is co-author of La Violencia en Colombia and has just completed a term as a visiting professor of sociology at Columbia University.
