Clodomir Santos de Morais

Clodomir Santos De Morais (30 September 1928 – 25 March 2016) was a Brazilian sociologist who originated the Organization Workshop (OW) and the associated Activity-based Large Group Capacitation Method (LGCM).

In the 1940s and 1950s De Morais worked as a trade unionist and a journalist, becoming a member of the Pernambuco State Assembly and co-founder of the Ligas Camponêsas (Peasant Leagues).

In 1950, aged 22, he moved to the Bahía State capital Salvador where he founded the weekly "Critica", the only opposition paper to the then governor Régis Pacheco.

In 1951 he moved to Recife where, while studying law at the Federal University of Pernambuco, he worked as Associated Press reporter on several local dailies such as the Jornal do Comercio and for Radio Clube and Radio Olinda.

Together with Francisco Julião, who became their president, he was co-founder of the Nordeste Peasant League movement in Pernambuco.

The insights which gave rise to what was eventually to become the Organization Workshop were the unanticipated outcome of a clandestine meeting held by a large group of Peasant League middle managers in an ordinary townhouse, in Recife in 1954, to study Brazilian Agrarian Law, and which Clodomir De Morais attended.

An evaluation conducted six months after that meeting found that participants had made remarkable contributions to their home communities, in some cases in marked contrast to previous behavior.

Rather than improved knowledge of agrarian law (most of which had been forgotten), they had developed strong organizational skills.

De Morais attributed this unexpected outcome to the fact that "the cramped conditions of the house, combined with the need for secrecy so as not to arouse the suspicion of the police, ... had imposed on the group a strict organizational discipline in terms of division and synchronization of all the tasks needed for such an event".

This insight led Moraes to think about practical exercises where a shared resource base, activity, and the need for analytical thought would stimulate organizational consciousness.

In 1955 De Morais was elected delegate to the Pernambuco Federal Assembly where he was instrumental in getting approval for the creation of the Pernambucan Development Bank.

about which he quipped "I am hopeless with money, yet am responsible for one of the big banks in the country".

From the early 1960s onwards De Morais staged workshops of an experimental character among the Pernambuco Peasant Leagues.

Among the many incriminating counts the Military held against De Morais (he ranked an honorary 12th on the Junta's list of the 100 troublemakers who had their civil rights suspended for 10 years) were his and the Peasant League's Cuban sympathies, e.g. the hospitality he gave in his house, in 1961, to a visiting Cuban Central Committee member.

During his captivity Clodomir, always a raconteur, wrote a series of stories from "deep Brazil".

At a much later stage in life, De Morais would reminisce about those days of liberating struggle.

De Morais was forced into exile for 15 years and was granted asylum at the Chilean Embassy in Rio de Janeiro.

While in Chile, Clodomir specialized in cultural anthropology at University of Chile, and in Agrarian Reform at the Agrarian Reform Capacitation and Research Institute (ICIRA), after which he was appointed ILO Regional Advisor on Agrarian Reform for Central America.

Paulo Freire recounts that De Morais had already been imprisoned and tortured – he, and his then wife – well before the coup (1962), "by the Police of Carlos Lacerda, in Rio de Janeiro", "because of his political activities" which meant that, including 1964 post-Coup, he spent "a total of two years in prison".

Paulo Freire himself was arrested at the time of the coup and spent some time with his friend De Morais in the same tiny cell in the Olinda prison.

After the 1964 coup he was forced into exile, first in Chile, and, as ILO Regional Advisor on Agrarian Reform for Central America, he subsequently worked as Agrarian Reform consultant in Latin America, Portugal and Africa.

The military coup d'état of 1 April 1964 overthrew the João Goulart government.

Left-wing politicians and activists were arrested.

The inspiration for these "boarding" type OWs came from a CEPAL-led course for international economic development experts which Clodomir attended during his studies in Santiago (Chile) in 1965.

It was to Guanchias that development and agrarian reform agencies would send their recruits for initiation into the OW.

In 1968, as consultant for the National Agrarian Institute (INA) of Honduras, he set up a "Centre" OW at the Guanchias Cooperative in the course of which the construction of the Centre itself became an integral part of that OW.

The "Centre" OW – (and, later on, the "Course" and "Enterprise" OW) – was a variation on the main "Field" OW theme.

The latter is always open to local large group participation, "regardless of age, sex, color, religion or whatever", and lasts one month.

The former, which may last three months or more, has participants, OW fashion, entirely in charge of internal organization and management, and is structured around the formation of cadres and (future) OW Directors and Assistants (known as APIs).

In 1969 he directed a large "Centre" OW in Panamá in the context of Omar Torrijos' Mil Jovenes (Thousand Youths) Operation which sent out 1,000 young Panamanians to reproduce the OW in support of the government's agrarian reform.

280 new enterprises resulted, grouped under the Panamanian CONAC (National Confederation of Campesino Land Settlements) which subsequently organized other OW learning events nationally.

In 1970 (until 1973) De Morais, on account of the ILO, moved to Costa Rica where a new Land Settlement Policy had just come in operation.

His conferences at the University of Costa Rica and the Universidad Nacional aroused a keen interest.

At the behest of T. Quirós, president of the Institute for Lands and Colonization (ITCO), an ILO-funded Centre OW was arranged in Bataán.

After the end of military rule De Morais returned to Brazil in 1988, answering a call from the University of Brasilia to help in the 'hidden civil war' of unemployment.

He recently returned to his hometown in Bahía State.

De Morais (occasionally spelled Moraes) was born in Santa Maria da Vitória, Bahía State, Brazil.

After elementary school and a short apprenticeship as tailor there, he moved, barely 15, to São Paulo where, to pay for his studies, he played the saxofone in a jazz band and clarinet in a symphonic orchestra, before becoming a conveyor belt operator at the São Paulo Ford plant making it to line supervisor after two years.

While finishing his Secondary he also worked as part-time journalist.

It was while working at Ford that he became involved in trade unionism and political activism along with the painter Luis Enjorras Ventura, the educator Dario Lorenzo, the art critic Radha Abramo as well as the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC), who later was to become president of the Republic.