Brazil's first black Supreme Court chief a sign of change

The historic election of Brazil's first black Supreme Court president signals winds of change in a country where Afro-Brazilians hold a majority but still languish at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, analysts say. Wednesday, Joaquim Barbosa, the top court's only black judge, was tapped by his peers to head the highest judicial body in the Latin American powerhouse of 194 million people -- 52 percent of whom come from African descent. "We make up the majority of the population. It is extraordinary to have for the first time one of us as president of the judiciary," the 58-year-old judge said. "Barbosa made history as it is very rare in Brazil to see blacks in positions of power, in the corporate world, in universities and in government," said Marcelo Paixao, coordinator at a research center on issues of race at Brazil's Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The low-key Barbosa shot to fame as the court's most vocal critic of the congressional vote-buying scheme laid bare in the ongoing trial -- dubbed "Mensalao," meaning "big monthly payments" -- of ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's former top aides. Tuesday, three Lula associates were found guilty of corruption in connection with the scheme, which ran from 2002 to 2005 during the popular president's first term. The scandal nearly cost him re-election in 2006, but the 66-year-old founder and leader of the leftist Workers' Party was cleared. The trial, which opened in August, has riveted the nation, and Barbosa, with his trademark black toga, has emerged as a folk hero for his uncompromising stance, despite having been nominated to the court in 2003 by Lula, himself. This week, Barbosa, who rose from humble beginnings to the top of the judicial ladder, made the cover of the leading Veja magazine, which described him as "the poor boy who changed Brazil." But Barbosa's rocketing to the stratosphere of Brazil's annals of power lies in sharp contrast to the daily reality of most Afro-Brazilians. The group makes up two-thirds of the country's poor and earns, on average, half the salary of white Brazilians with equal qualifications, said David Santos, a leading black activist, citing the Brazilian statistics agency IBGE. "Afro-descendants today make up only five percent of Congress' membership and less than three percent in the judiciary," added Santos, noting Brazil was also the last Western Hemisphere nation to abolish slavery, on May 13, 1888. "In industry, they hold less than four percent of managerial positions and barely 10 percent of university seats," continued Santos, a Franciscan friar who heads Educafro, a lobby group defending the labor and educational rights of blacks and indigenous people. "But they represent 80 percent of domestic workers, garbage collectors and construction workers," Santos noted. "This is why Barbosa's election is a sign of hope for blacks and confirms that the winds of change are blowing," added Santos, who also led the fight against the under-representation of black models in the fashion industry. "It is an unprecedented step in Brazil, which shows that the country is coming to terms with itself," concurred Professor Helio Santos, an expert on racial issues and a leading black activist. Many analysts say the spark that ignited the changes came from the affirmative action policies that had been demanded for decades by black groups to correct the inequality spawned by centuries of slavery and discrimination. In August, President Dilma Rousseff, after 13 years of congressional debate, backed a controversial law that reserves half the seats in public universities to public schools students, giving priority to Afro-Brazilians and indigenous people. Critics say the legislation is "discriminatory" against those who "are not beneficiaries of the quotas." But black groups see it as a necessary response to end what Educafro's Santos called "a policy of inaction that benefited the most privileged." "I came from humble beginnings. I had to struggle, and I made it. But I know that others in the same circumstances, with the same determination, did not because the education system creates powerful mechanisms that exclude blacks," the new Supreme Court chief said recently. Professor Santos, meanwhile, warned against racial discrimination in other sectors. "The world of high technology is for whites," he said, noting that many of Brazil's skilled workers in that sector come from Europe. "If quotas had been introduced in the 1980s-1990s we would not need to import labor from Europe," he maintained. "Brazil's future depends on the future of its black population."