Artists are remembered for their music or paintings, statesmen for their laws and policies and athletes for the medals and cups they win. But when Herbet de Souza, known affectionately as Betinho, died, few Brazilian obituaries remembered him as the author of a small literary jewel - Ailce's List - nor for his incisive essays on democracy, multinationals or the World Bank. Betinho's legacy, or his 'miracle' according to the theologians who have proposed him for canonization, is not the legacy of sociologists or politicians, but rather the legacy of prophets: Betinho changed the Brazilian conscience. And with it, the path of history.

The merit of intellectuals is usually judged by the innovation of their ideas. Betinho's was his ability to state the obvious. In 1992 it was obvious that the Presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello had submerged Brazil in the mire of corruption, but a voice was lacking which could spell it out and galvanize society. That Brazil, the world's eighth economic power, is also the world's most inegalitarian society is just another statistic mentioned time and time again in reports churned out by international organizations. But a voice was missing, which would say, not only that such a situation was politically unsustainable in the long run and likely to cause economic paralysis in any system, but also that such a system was ethically unacceptable.

Instead of turning to the traditional method of tracking down guilty parties and demanding that others find a solution, Betinho told the citizens of Brazil a parable, the parable of the hummingbird. The forest was aflame, he said, and whilst all the animals were fleeing to save their skins, the hummingbird stayed back to carry water from the river in its beak, to throw onto the flames. 'Do you really imagine that you're going to put out the flames with the water you can carry in your beak?' the lion asked him. 'I know that I can't do it all alone,' replied the bird, 'But at least I'm doing my bit'.

Marizilda Gruppe for Agencia Globo

Citizen Action Against Poverty and For Life, known by all as the Campaign Against Hunger and also (without the authorization of its inspiration) as 'Betinho's Campaign', called on every citizen to do his or her bit by identifying the poor in their own neighbourhood and going out to help them. The idea was that every one of Brazil's 32,000,000 hungry had a face, were known to someone, and that nobody needed permission or instructions to help them.

In just a few months, a country that had appeared only to be interested in discussing how to institute the death penalty as a deterrent to crime, became mobilized in a massive crusade of solidarity. Parishioners, neighbourhood associations, trade unions and Rotarians drove truckloads of donations to the favelas (Brazilian shanty towns), only to find, to their surprise, that the beneficiaries were organizing their own campaigns to help others more in need than themselves.

Such an innovative model, without leadership structure or institution was almost impossible to evaluate. The campaign turned to public opinion polling companies and discovered that millions claimed to be participating in it. Sixty percent of the population said that they had heard of the campaign, but the most surprising was that ninety percent of those interviewed said they supported it! The power of the obvious. Everyone knew that something needed to be done even if they were not aware that somebody was already doing it.

At Death's door

So how did Betinho come to have the power to move so many? His political and personal life were inseparable and undoubtedly his love of life was the result of his own living in continual ill-health and near death's door.

Betinho was born in Bocaiuva, a very conservative, Catholic town in the interior of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He and his two brothers had inherited haemophilia, a disease which inhibits the blood's ability to clot, and endured a childhood of seclusion and suffering. As a teenager he caught tuberculosis and became one of the first patients to be saved by the newly discovered wonder-drug, Penicillin. It was an experience, which, decades later, after he became HIV positive following one of the frequent blood transfusions he needed, led him to conceptualize AIDS as 'a condition, not a death-sentence'.

When the military coup of 1964 occurred, Betinho, a Catholic Youth activist, was a student leader and advisor to the government of Joao Goulart. Acción Católica (Catholic Action) became Acción Popular (Popular Action) and was one of the first political expressions of the nascent Liberation Theology. After a short, first period of exile in Uruguay, Betinho was back in Brazil living clandestinely when the 'coup within the coup' (a right-wing about-face inspired by the doctrine of national security) took place in 1968. Acción Popular radicalized and became Maoist.

The Maoist doctrine that required that the leaders of the revolution become part of the working masses, was not easy for Betinho to adhere to. He had never weighed more than 120 pounds in his whole life and nobody wanted to contract him as a labourer! So he began by selling cheap trinkets outside the factory. Eventually, he managed to get a job inside, painting pottery. One day, it occurred to him that there was a more efficient way of doing what he had to do - painting the rim of mugs. But here was his dilemma. If he made his job easier, and he increased production, wasn't he going to be contributing to the profits of the bourgeois and the exploitation of the working class? Perhaps it was this personal experience, rather than an analysis of the overwhelming odds against them and the sterility of the left's 'heroic strategies', that pushed Betinho towards choosing exile in Chile, renewing his sociological studies within the framework of Salvador Allende's grand experiment in social transformation, and above all, taking the decision to publish his first self-criticism in the collective work, Memorias del Exilio (Memories of Exile) which linked his political analysis to his personal experiences.

His desire to understand the complex forces that make up history without falling into dogmatism never left him, and his critiques were always legitimized by his tendency to air his own mistakes. In 1973, Betinho, in exile still, lived in Glasgow and Toronto, where he finished his studies and organized analytic groups which looked at Brazilian and Latin American realities. Betinho was one of the first to analyse the role of multinationals, going beyond the tendency of the time to attribute all Latin American ills to conspiracies. In Mexico, where he worked for a year in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), together with other intellectuals and thinkers, he founded a magazine, which like so many others, didn't see its third publication. However, that didn't matter. What did matter was that in the very first edition, for the first time, the issue of democracy as *the* goal, the utopia, the horizon which must guide all proposals, and not just democracy as a mere instrument, entered left-wing debate. Betinho called it 'adjective-less democracy'.

Symbol of the Amnesty

Without any effort on his own part, Betinho in Mexico became the symbol of the Brazilian campaign for amnesty. His brother, the famous Brazilian cartoonist, Henfil, made a mockery of the climate of censure in Brazil at that time, in his weekly column 'Letters to my Mum' (Cartas a mi Mama). Between the day-to-day anecdotes, he alluded to the issues affecting all Brazil, including those people forced into exile by the military dictatorship. His eternal question, 'when will my brother return' which was even referred to in song by one of Brazil's foremost singers, Elis Regina, finally led to Betinho's return from exile in 1979.

He returned to found the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE), placing his analytic capacity and a new instrument - the personal computer or PC - at the disposition of social movements. The PC made it possible for small groups to access tools that until that time had only been available to the State and big business.

Statistics continued to point to the issue of land distribution as the major problem of the Brazil's poor, a problem exacerbated by urban poverty, and rampant capitalism with its resulting environmental contamination and social disintegration. Betinho worked with 'new actors' - street children, the women's movement, Brazilians of African descent, grassroot groups, and the new trade unions. However, he never lost his independence and his capacity to criticize even his own supporters, as demonstrated in his public condemnation of a 'savage strike' by health workers, which left patients dying through lack of medical attention.

AIDS

In 1984, Betinho was diagnosed as HIV positive. He became the first Brazilian to publicly declare 'I've got AIDS and I'm going to live with it'. He faced this new challenge and dealt with it as he knew best, by organizing campaigns which forced changes in discriminatory policies by the State, and he dared to criticize the policies in Cuba in a strongly worded letter to Fidel Castro, which he made public. Betinho came up with the idea of producing a video about 'the day they discover a cure for AIDS' in which he played the part of a pharmacist who sells a person with AIDS his daily medication. The idea was not to create illusions about wonder drugs, but rather to demonstrate that, just like diabetes or other chronic illnesses, AIDS is a condition with which people live and is not a stigma, a modern leprosy. Horrified by the suffering which surrounded the deaths of his two brothers, Betinho was bold enough even to challenge his Catholic friends and allies by publicly defending euthanasia.

'Land and Democracy'

As Brazil prepared to host the Earth Summit in 1992, in the slogan 'Land and Democracy', Betinho synthesized the link between the environmental, the social and the political. He mobilized pop stars, artists, and actors from theatre and cinema to participate in an incredible campaign in a country where 'agricultural reform' had been a banner forgotten by all except by a handful of nostalgic, old left-wingers.

The movement for land and democracy gave birth to the campaign for ethical politics, and that campaign led to the campaign against hunger. A whirlwind of social forces had been unleashed by a person whose health was frail. The president, Itamar Franco, was postulating him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 when a bomb went off. Betinho's name appeared in a list of politicians and journalists captured by the police who had received money from the 'jogo do bicho', a popular underground lottery controlled by the mafia of Rio de Janeiro. Whilst the politicians mentioned were holed up waiting for the dust to settle, Betinho went on television to admit that yes, he had received $50,000 in donations for the Brazilian Association for Anti-AIDS Initiatives over which he presided and which would not have survived without the contribution. 'I'm not above right and wrong', he admitted, 'I recognize that I should have consulted others on the decision to receive this money'.

The Nobel Prize went to another but the people of Rio gave Betinho their own homage. An 'escola do samba' (samba dance troupe) heralded his life as if he were a latter-day 'Don Quixote' and they paraded him through the streets, dressed in white and surrounded by scantily-clad dancers.

Betinho hadn't recovered from the carnival when he began to launch other initiatives. It wasn't enough to attack hunger, what were needed were jobs. Private and public companies weren't there just to round up the figures for their shareholders. As another representative of society, they ought to publish a social accounting sheet. Gazeta Mercantil, the top business daily in Brazil and various industrial associations and chambers of commerce joined the initiative.

When new treatments for AIDS appeared in the '90s, Betinho had already spent fourteen years living with his condition, but the hope that with these new cocktails, he could prolong his life indefinitely, was thwarted. In another blood bank mistake he was infected with hepatitis, which forced him to come off the 'triple cocktail' that he was taking. He died at home, surrounded by his family and the friends who continue his fight, in his honour, because his fight, after all, was a fight for life, for life which deserves to be lived, and nothing less.

By Roberto Bissio

Roberto Bissio is the Director of the Third World Institute (ITeM), Uruguay. He shared a house with Betinho and Maria Nakano, Betinho's wife, during Betinho's time of exile in Mexico. This article appeared in a commemorative edition of 'Revista del Sur' No. 74 published December 1997 by ITeM.