The year 2018 marks 130 years since slavery’s abolition in Brazil, and over a century later, the colonialist and racist structure inherited from the slaveowning period is still present. The history of Brazil is marked by violence against indigenous people and the black population that had been enslaved, a violence that today reflects in a policy of genocide of the black, poor, and peripheral people.

In 2016, a special senate report concluded that a black youth dies every twenty-three minutes in Brazil, and the rate of incarceration of the black population increases every year. Brazil is one of the countries that most kills LGBT people in the world. The Brazilian Forum of Public Security announced in 2017 that more than 135 women are raped every day, and the rates of femicide have only been growing. This scenario of violence against women, black people, LGBT people, and the indigenous is reinforced by the structure of a racist, misogynist, and classist judiciary branch, dominated by the Brazilian elite who succeeded the planters and pervert the laws to their interests, because the law serves only the maintenance of the conservative and slave-like status quo.

Since 2003, with the governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, we have witnessed an unprecedented social and economic transformation in our country. More than forty million people have left poverty; black and peripheral youth — through programs like the universal college program (PROUNI), the fund for students in higher education (FIES), and racial quotas — have accessed higher education; the northern country has access to water and electricity; the minimum wage increased over inflation. On the international scene, Brazil has strengthened ties with Africa and South America and has come to be seen as a world power. All this happened because of the arrival of a former metallurgist at the Planalto Palace, who made a government that, despite its contradictions, has transformed Brazil into an increasingly fair and egalitarian country.