I am a Colombian law researcher and teacher who did his doctoral studies at the Centre for Social Studies. My first personal encounter with Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos was in a small debate in which I expressed my disagreement with the way in which the scholarships allocated to students from countries in the global south were administered. In my case, I lost the opportunity of a scholarship awarded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in Portugal because of problems in validating my undergraduate degree. I found Professor Boaventura's attitude humble and understanding, accepting that the realisation of an alternative political and academic project such as the Centre for Social Studies (CES) was mediated by forms of state production and understanding typical of the global north. Since then I have maintained a cordial relationship with Professor Boaventura, through email exchanges in which he has always shown an interest in stimulating respectful, critical and scientifically rigorous exchange. He has constantly supported organisational, academic and political processes, particularly for those of us from peripheral countries.
I also had the opportunity to attend multiple lectures by the professor, all of them massive and ending in a "jantar" a collective dinner where many of us would go to share good food, wine, poetry and exchange experiences with people from different backgrounds, which enriched my time in the city of Coimbra. That is why the events described in the book chapter The walls spoke when no one else would, I find difficult to create, it portrays a pernicious atmosphere that is difficult to accept for those of us who attended these invitations and even narrates facts related to the geography of the place that are evidently inaccurate, this is obvious for those of us who live in the small and welcoming city of Coimbra. Sadly, since my time as a student I began to feel a smear campaign against Professor Boaventura, but in general against any form of "heteropatriarchal symbolic violence".
However, I never managed to find evidence that these denunciations were brought before the Portuguese legal system or that they were discussed in the academic scenarios that at that time were still open and tolerant in the CES. I can exemplify this climate of cancellation by recalling that on one occasion, during the visit of a Spanish professor and political activist, a minority group of feminists were scandalised because the speaker had to quickly leave a panel accompanied by an indigenous Guatemalan academic. According to this group, the speaker had violated the academic by leaving her alone, showing traits of misogyny and devaluation of the role of women in the university. Now as a post-doctoral researcher I must state that this climate of moral censorship has expanded in the CES, at the same time academic research that implied an epistemic and political challenge has been relegated or made invisible because this group representing white European feminism sacralises and purifies the "healthy academy free of gender violence" silencing the voice of other violence such as racial violence (one of the accused also happens to be one of the few non-white professors in the academic centre). In relation to the moral condemnation brought against Professor Boaventura de Sousa, this seems to me to be a condemnation and not a prosecution. In different academic circles the person has been quickly cancelled without due process guarantees, he has been condemned a priori by means of a book chapter that never mentions conclusive data proving the alleged responsibility for sexual harassment. As a human rights defender for more than fifteen years in Colombia, due process is a fundamental right in my work experience.
Unfortunately it has been dismissed from the beginning of the case, in fact a Colombian academic colleague has told me "after what happened with Professor Boaventura, we are all guilty until we prove otherwise in case of being accused of sexual harassment", this as a human rights lawyer has seemed to me a nonsense and leads us to put at risk the way of conceiving law as a guarantee system, which would mean going back at least two centuries ago. By way of conclusion, I have followed the career of Professor Boaventura de Sousa and I consider that a lifetime of academic and political commitment to the creation of a theoretical framework that highlights the knowledge and subjects of the global South is today at a crossroads. I have had the opportunity to share in the academic and cultural spaces in which sexual harassment allegedly occurred, and I have also maintained a cordial relationship of permanent academic and humanist formation accompanied by the teachings of the master Boaventura. Therefore, the professor should have the guarantees of defence and presumption of innocence as pillars of justice and human rights. With the cancellation of Boaventura De Sousa, the legitimacy of alternative social and political movements is also undermined, replaced by groups with more limited and sectoral agendas that are not particularly involved or interested in the defence and emancipation of a more just global system.
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