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).There is no routine translation for or equivalent to the 'latino' term "MCM" (Método de Capacitación Masiva) as, in English, 'capacitación' is usually presented or translated as 'Training' and/or 'Professional Development' as in, for example, Large Group Professional Development or Large Group Interventions . Moraisean 'capacitation', on the other hand, is activity-based. See, for example: , .
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). 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.
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.de Morais in "Cultura y Paz y la Guerra Civil Camuflada del Desempleo – Culture and Peace and the Hidden Civil War of Unemployment".
He recently returned to his hometown in Bahía State.
Pre-exile: Bahía, São Paulo, Pernambuco
De Morais (occasionally spelled Moraes) was born in Santa Maria da Vitória, Bahía State, Brazil.Sobrado in After elementary school and a short apprenticeship as a 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,Sobrado in 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 a 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.
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 an Associated Press reporter on several local dailies such as the Jornal do ComercioJornal 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 LeagueWhen the Pernambuco Agricultural and Cattle Raising Society of Planters, SAPP, located on the Galiléia Plantation, in Vitória de Santo Antão, Pernambuco, was formed. Re: Peasant Leagues /Ligas Camponêsas 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.Correia in From the early 1960s onwards de Morais staged workshops of an experimental characterknown originally as 'Experimental Workshop on Theory of Organization' (EWTO) see: and 5.6: for the nature and reason for the artificial aspect of the 'Experimental' Workshop. among the Pernambuco Peasant Leagues.
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.In 1998 taken over by ABN/AMRO and in 2008 by Santander. about which he quipped "I am hopeless with money, yet am responsible for one of the big banks in the country". The military coup d'état of 1 April 1964 overthrew the João Goulart government. Left-wing politicians and activists were arrested. 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.Paulo Freire and Clodomir Morais in 1997 at the University of Rondônia (Amazonia) See also Correia in 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)Ato No1 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.To be understood in the context of President Jânio Quadros' visit, the year before, to Cuba, accompanied by two League Officers re: Moraes, 1970 p.478 and the Left’s armed struggle in Brazil 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.
1964–1988: Years of Exile and Spread of the Organization Workshop
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),ICIRA after which he was appointed ILO Regional Advisor on Agrarian Reform for Central America. In 1968, as consultant for the National Agrarian Institute (INA)INA of Honduras, he set up a "Centre" OW at the Guanchias CooperativeRojas in 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",Correia in 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). 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.Correia in It was to Guanchias that development and agrarian reform agencies would send their recruits for initiation into the OW.see 1980's period: OW spread by former Guanchias recruits and notes 67–69 below
In 1969 he directed a large "Centre" OW in Panama 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.Sobrado in 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.Bataánre: The new cadres and OW directors formed there were responsible, in 1973 alone, for 80 new pre-cooperative groups and 15 new enterprises.Sobrado in Barrantes' 1998 book Coopesilencio: 25 years on traces the story of one of the many long-term surviving cooperative enterprises hailing back to those groundbreaking years.see Organization Workshop 'Long term survival'see also 'External Links'
After having spent some time as visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin, US, de Morais was again in Honduras from 1973 until 1976 as FAO consultant in charge of the PROCCARAPROCCARA Program (Campesino Capacitation Program for Agrarian Reform), which was to become the blueprint for the "Honduran Model", the application of the OW on a countrywide basis.Later on, in Brazil, known as PROGER (Employment and Income Generation Program), PRONAGER (National Program for Employment and Income Generation) and SIPGER/SIPGEI (Employment and Income Generation – Identification – System): and in which 27,000 Hondurans and other nationals, mainly campesinos but also students and public sector workers, participated in more than 200 OWs. This led to the creation of 1,053 new enterprises, some of the bigger ones, such as the palm oil growing and processing plants Hondupalma,Hondupalma celebrated its 30th year of operation in 2012 SalamaPalm Oil Producers in Honduras Salama p3 and Coapalma still operating today.
When his Honduras contract came to an end in 1976, de Morais, at the invitation of the Centre for Ecology and Sustainable Development (CECODES) took charge of the FAO/UNDP-funded (Mex74/006) Integrated Rural Development Program for Humid Tropics (PRODERITH) project in Mexico in 1977–78. PRODERITH ran various OWs in San Luis Potosí, Chiapas and Tabasco.See Rojas in for a full-length description of Tampaón (San Luis Potosí) OW experience. In 1985 de Morais, then visiting professor in East Germany, returned to Mexico for the official signing of a new tranche of World Bank funding for PRODERITH projects.Rojas in This was the start of a long OW presence in Mexico, from the "Enterprise" OW with the Huatusco, Veracruz coffee growers in the 90s, the Tabasco OWs in the noughties up to the recent Mexico City OW-based large scale "¡Que Buena Puntada!" sewing cooperatives led by Verónica ViloriaVerónica Viloria is one of the group of OW Directors formed by de Morais personally when he was visiting professor in Chapingo in 2000-2 in 2007–2012 Mexico City.