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Brazil Strategy Network
3401 - 38th Street, N.W. #803
Washington, D.C. 20016
Tel. (202) 744-0072

Website: http://www.brazilstrategy.org

• National Organizer
• Coordinating Committee
• National Advisory Committee

National Organizer:

Mark Langevin
MLangevin@afscme.org

Mark is a strategic analyst for the American Federation of State, County and Muncipal Employees (AFSCME/AFL-CIO) and also sits on the editorial board of Revista Humanas of the Federal University of Espirito Santo. He researches and writes on U.S.-Brazil relations, and is currently working on a book, Tentative Engagement: U.S.-Brazil Relations in the Face of Global Challenges.

Coordinating Committee Co-chairs

Stanley Gacek
sgacek@aflcio.org

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney named Stanley A. Gacek Assistant Director for International Affairs in February 1997. Gacek is responsible for the US labor federation's relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. He has played a key and fundamental role in developing a more progressive North American trade union presence in the Western Hemisphere during the post-Cold War period. He helped appoint and manage an entirely new AFL-CIO-International Solidarity Center staff for the Americas region.

During the 1980's and 1990's, Gacek served as the effective contact in the US labor movement for both the Brazilian PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers Party) and the Brazilian CUT (Central Unica dos Trabalhadores). He has been a close friend and adviser to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and to the Brazilian PT for 24 years.

He is a recognized observer of Latin American labor and politics, having published and spoken widely on the subject. His comparative analysis of the US and Brazilian labor law systems was published as a law review article in the United States, entitled "Revisiting the Corporatist and Contractualist Models of Labor Law Regimes: A Review of the Brazilian and American Systems", 16 Cardozo Law Review 1, August, 1994. His work was also published as a book in Brazil, entitled Sistemas de Relações de Trabalho — Exame dos Modelos Brasil-Estados Unidos, Editora Ltr, São Paulo, 1994. Dissent Magazine recently published his article, "New Hope for Brazil?" at http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=501.

James Green
James_Green@brown.edu

James Green is Associate Professor of Brazilian History at Brown University. He is past-President of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) and currently chairs the Committee on the Future of Brazilian Studies in the U.S. With support from the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, Dr. Green will publish No Time for Tears, a book length project that analyzes the impact of a human rights campaign regarding torture in Brazil initiated by a network of clergy, academics, Brazilian exiles, and others in the late 1960s, on shifts in United States foreign policy in the 1970s. His is also author of Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Winner of the Hubert Herring Book Award of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, 1999. Winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation/Paul Monette-Roger Horwitz Trust Award, 2000.

Coordinating Committee

Eryck Duran
Eryck@brgny.org

Eryck Duran is Executive Director of the Brazilian Rainbow Group in New York City.

Eric Leenson
eleenson@hotmail.com

Eric Leenson is a co-founder, the President and CEO of Progressive Asset Management, Inc. (PAM), the nation's first full service broker dealer to specialize in socially responsible investing (SRI). He co-founded The Forum on Business and Social Responsibility of the Americas, an umbrella organization that brings together business organizations with similar interests from throughout the hemisphere. Participating groups currently exist in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, and Peru and in other nations. Eric recently addressed the annual conference of Instituto Ethos in Brazil on new developments in the field of fiduciary responsibility. More than 900 leading business people attended the gathering. Mr. Leenson is also a founding member of the Friends of the MST.

Juan Reardon
info@mstbrazil.org

Juan Reardon is the National Coordinator of Friends of the MST

Lidia Santos
lidia.santos@yale.edu

Lidia Santos is Associate Professor at Yale University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She specializes in Contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literatures, and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary Latin American Studies. She is author of Kitsch tropical: los medios en la literatura y el arte en América Latina (Frankfurt: Vervuert: Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2001). She is co-author of Barrocos y modernos: Nuevos caminos en la investigación del Barroco iberoamericano (Frankfurt: Vervuet; Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1988) and Séductions du kitsch: Roman, art, culture (Montréal: XYZ, 1996). She received the Guimarães Prize awarded by Radio France Internationale in 1992 as a writer and author of two books of short stories, Flauta e Cavaquinho and Os Ossos da Esperanca. Work in progress includes Tears for Export: Soap Operas and Literature in Latin America and Cultural Studies in Latin America: A Reader. Professor Santos has previously taught graduate courses entitled "Literature and Mass Culture in Latin America", and "The Latin American Essay"; undergraduate courses "Cultural Memory in Latin America", Cultural Studies: Latin America", "Studies in Latin American Literature II", "Introduction to Popular Culture in Latin America: the Soap Operas", and "Brazilian Poetry and Popular Music".

Jeff Vogt
Jvogt@aflcio.org

Jeff Vogt is a Global Economic Policy Specialist in the Legislation Department at the AFL-CIO.

Cliff Welch
welchc@gvsu.edu

Cliff Welch is an Associate Professor of History at Grand Valley State University and CAPES Visiting Foreign Professor of graduate studies in history at the Pontificia Universidade Católica in São Paulo, the Universidade de São Paulo, and a research fellow at the Núcleo de Estudos, Pesquisas e Projetos de Reforma Agrária at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Presidente Prudente, Brazil. His publications include Jôfre Corrêa Netto: The Fidel Castro of Brazil (2004), The Seed Was Planted: The São Paulo Roots of Brazil's Rural Labor Movement (1999) and Lutas camponesas no interior São Paulo: a memória de Irineu Luís de Moraes (1992). He is working on a history of contemporary land struggle in the state of São Paulo and a documentary feature on youth soccer in the US and Brazil.

Wendy Wolford
wwolford@email.unc.edu

Wendy Wolford is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently a fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University (2004-5) and is the co-author (with Angus Wright) of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (2003, Food First Publishers).

National Advisory Committee

The National Advisory Committee serves an important networking function, bringing together experienced and dedicated activists and organizational leaders, scholars, and professionals who share a commitment to equitable, democratic development in Brazil and respectful, mutually beneficial bilateral relations between Brazil and the United States. The Committee regularly advises the Brazil Strategy Network and its Coordinating Committee on vital issues of the day, and when appropriate, provides coordination and leadership on BSN related activities and programs.

Organizational affiliations are provided for identification purposes only.

Members are listed in alphabetical order by last name.