The document also calls for “all Portuguese citizens, civil society, teachers at schools and universities, to distance themselves from anti-democratic projects and movements and help raise awareness among new generations about the urgency of humanistic values and the risks of extreme-right ”.
The call for an awareness of the risks experienced in the face of the resurgence of these threats and for them to assume their role in this struggle is also left to the organs of justice, the media, political parties, and even the President of the Republic, parliament and the Government, “to exercise a rigorous scrutiny of constitutionality and ensure that fascism will not pass”.
The open letter warns that culture and literature “do not flourish in these suffocating times, when the terrible humanitarian crisis of refugees, in the deplorable fields at the gates of Europe, and the ecological and environmental threat, on a planetary scale, are trivialized in the news”, stressing that, to the already existing problems, will be added those resulting from the crisis caused by the pandemic of covid-19: “the spread of unemployment and poverty, fertile pasture for demagogies, anti-immigration theses, racism and extreme rights”.
“In the certainty that, as History has always shown us, those who fall asleep in democracy wake up in dictatorship”, conclude the authors.
The open letter is signed by nearly two hundred Portuguese-speaking writers, including names such as Alice Vieira, Almeida Faria, Carlos Tê, Laborinho Lúcio, Ana Margarida de Carvalho, Eric Nepomuceno, Gonçalo Cadilhe, Francisco José Viegas, Isabel Minhós Martins, Itamar Vieira Júnior, Jacinto Lucas Pires, Joel Neto, José Eduardo Agualusa, José Fanha, José Luís Peixoto, Julián Fuks, Luísa Costa Gomes, Luísa Ducla Soares, Manuel Jorge Marmelo, Mário Cláudio, Mário de Carvalho, Nélida Piñon, Ondjaki, Richard Zimler, Rodrigo Guedes de Carvalho, Sandro William Junqueira, Tiago Rodrigues and Teolinda Gersão.
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