Chico Whitaker

Francisco Whitaker Ferreira ( born 1931 ), known as Chico Whitaker, is a Brazilian activist. He is one of the founders of the World Social Forum in Brazil and is a member of the Provisional Committee of the International Organization for Participatory Society.

Life

Chico Whitaker began his social work in the 1950s as an architecture student and member of the Juventude Católica Universitaria, the student movement of Catholic Action. After the establishment of the military dictatorship in Brazil, with the coup of 1964 and the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, he began his association with liberation theologians and educators as Bishop Hélder Câmara and Paulo Freire; and Leonardo Boff, he was influenced. Due to the intensification of the military dictatorship in Brazil in the late 1960s, he went into exile in France where he performed in conjunction with the headquarters of the International Catholic youth in Paris. He was project manager for the Catholic Committee against Famine and for Development.

Thinking

The German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle places it in her book Mysticism and resistance to the mystics. In terms of the World Social Forum, he represents an open -space concept: The event will be as comprehensive as possible, concrete political results are secondary. Also, only partial compliance of the participants could be a basis for concerted action.

Award

2006 Whitaker was one of the winners of the Right Livelihood Award.

Works (selection)

• The World Social Forum. Open space for another world. From the Portuguese by Elsmarie Pape. VSA, Hamburg 2007.