A change of direction for Atila Roque

by Andrés Alsina

Rome. Atila Roque is not crazy; far from it, his comments show great clarity of thought, he always seeks the meaning beyond the words he hears, and is acute in defining what matters to him. He is only crazy in the sense that you have to be a bit crazy to believe that everything can change and, what’s more, to dedicate your life to that without thinking twice, simply because you are convinced that the moment has come when what is desirable becomes possible.

Fifteen years ago, Roque was starting in the world of non-governmental organisations and the question attention was focused on was the fact that Japan was the third largest investor in Brazil, after Germany and the USA. So Roque volunteered to go and live in Japan, to gather information that would benefit his work and to build a network of relations with Japanese civil society. All this was based on an informal contact with a Japanese whom he had met in one of those international meetings, with whom he had subsequently had a brief correspondence.

There was a plan behind all this —there is always a plan. His organisation, Ibase, was embarking on a programme of personnel exchanges for periods of one to five years in order to cement relations with civil society networks, people and movements, and to carry this through in the long term. “So they sent a crazy Brazilian like me, and the idea turned out to be utopian, because Japanese society was even more closed than Brazilian society, there was no information available, and the little there was I didn’t understand because I didn’t know Japanese.”

So he spent the first year literally keeping alive, “and I was mad enough to insist on staying for another year, even though I was depressed and everything”. The second year began to bear fruit. He still had only a limited Japanese vocabulary and even less money, but he met Martin Khor, the current director of the Third World Institute, and they began to construct a network of relations with Asia. “The project functioned as well as it could.” Perhaps it is truer to say that it turned into a different project, but this new project was just as important and interesting and, what’s more, was viable. By the end of the second year, Atila Roque was feeling productive and settled —at least, as settled as someone from Rio de Janeiro can feel in Japan. Going back to Brazil was still an option, but a frustrating one. “So we decided that I should stay on for a third year.” Relations were consolidated and it became possible for a Japanese to accompany him on his return to Brazil. The lucky candidate was Tomoya Inyaku, who was at the time 29, a year older than Roque, and who was always known as “Tomo san”. He stayed in Brazil for three years, incidentally in more favourable circumstances than those of Atila in the land of the rising sun. “Today, as a result of that madcap enterprise, there is a whole history of relations with Japanese civil society, which all began with me. No one remembers me any more, but that’s not important, because now those relations have a life of their own. A relationship of political trust was created between our organisations and today, with more cultural translators, it is clear that the problem was not a lack of information, but of the capacity to make the best use of it. The reward is to be found in the relationship of trust which has grown and consolidated.”

The man who today is 41 years old and had the ability, worthy of a samurai, to carry through that battle for the long term glory of civil society, was, at the time, a history graduate with a half finished doctorate in political science. He had just spent a brief spell, in 1984, as an adviser on agrarian reform to the first democratic government following the long dark night of the Brazilian dictatorship.

He says that he ended up working on the issue of agrarian reform as a result of his political activism as a student and his academic knowledge. But it soon becomes clear that this is not entirely true, and that, at the very least, his concern with social issues was first awakened at the age of ten, when he was selling bananas and apples in the street with his father Achiles Pinto Roque Filho, who was tragically killed in a robbery, aged fifty. His father, who only had one year of primary schooling “was intelligent and had a great sensitivity about social issues”. Atila Roque remembers his father’s indignation at the military regime, and has an image of him protesting against daily events which denied humanity; he felt his deep-seated contempt for authoritarianism. He listened to his almost illiterate father patiently explain the benefits of getting an education; telling him how and why he should study, and even up to what point he could pay for his son’s studies —if he didn’t manage to get into a public university he would have to content himself with whatever he could get, as there was, and never would be, any money to send him to a private university. “As long as I can manage, you make the most of it and study,” his father used to say to him.

And that’s what Atila did, with the same energy that he had dedicated to selling fruit to live - or even more, since not only his own life, but that of his father, was in those studies.

And Atila Roque was a good student, opting, whether for strategic or vocational reasons, for social sciences, at the time branded as leftist and only taken by long-haired misfits. “They didn’t have the glamour of medicine, that’s for sure,” he laughs. But, he says, he was not nervous when he sat the crucial entry exam, a sign that it was a carefully considered decision.

And with that same sense of determination which had guided his life, more or less, since his time selling fruit in the street, he started work at Ibase and learned from the organisation’s founder, Bethiño, the legendary leader of the campaign against hunger, who became his friend, whose death he mourned in 1997, and whose work he has continued.

Atila Roque says that he had a lot of luck in the complex world of non-governmental organisations, NGOs. “I got involved at the best moment and with the best people. It was a privilege to work with Bethiño.”

Carrying on means always daring to innovate, and that is the challenge his active mind is currently turning over. For fifteen years, he has been doing a job that only he regards as routine, but that is enough to spur his desire for change. “Of course I want to carry on, but I also want to do something else; otherwise I’m in danger of becoming an NGO dinosaur. Looking back, what was expected of us twenty years ago was very simple —important, but simple. We used to say that “to democratize information is to democratize society”. We achieved that. Now we have to democratize the economy, we have to face the challenges of our times. And that means that the work of NGOs must become more qualified, more specialist, because that is what the subject demands. Today it’s not enough just to systematise and disseminate information, because there are a lot of people doing that —even the free press does it. The information needs to be met by a greater technical demand.”

This demand arises from the reality itself. “Our technical capacity determines our capacity to engage in dialogue with the government. We cannot criticise the models of economic adjustment if we are not capable of proposing alternatives. And if we want to discuss economic issues, we have to know who we’re dealing with. In Brazil, the current finance minister responsible for budget administration is someone who worked with us at Ibase for years. We are up against not just anyone, but people with whom we shared discussions over a drink, shared seminars, and wrote articles. The president of the republic himself, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is by no means incompetent, and we’re not dealing with incompetent people. When we were, it was easy. No, the people in power today have capabilities and solid training in what they do, which they use to develop a theory and model very different from our own. For this reason, we have to be able to question that model with the same level of technical competence, otherwise we will simply remain sidelined and demoralised.”

He pauses for an instant before continuing with this line of thought: “That is the challenge for Social Watch in Brazil. How can we challenge public policy without carefully constructed indicators and rigorous analyses? We are debating with former colleagues who until yesterday shared the same trench with us and today have the technical ability to occupy posts in the ministries of Health, Education and Employment. We have to learn to listen to their arguments, present cogently constructed counter-arguments and sometimes agree with them. This presents us with new challenges which we cannot face simply by carrying on with the same old routines. We have to move forward.”