João Ribeiro de Almeida, President of Instituto Camões, was one of the participants in the Jornada Agostinho da Silva in Lisbon yesterday, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the CPLP and also served as the presentation of the book. An overview of Brazil’s contribution to the spread of the Portuguese language… And when he intervened in the debate about which language is the fifth most spoken in the world, he described Portuguese as the language of “brotherhood and family”, and in front of an audience that was living testimony of this, there was such an eccentric manner with which Brazilians were present – and they were in the majority, perhaps because the Federal Senate and the Chamber of Deputies were organizers – they welcomed the Portuguese, Angolans or Mozambicans, or the latter with each other, or the Cape Verdeans with the Portuguese and vice versa, and Guineans for everyone, even Timorese for Brazilians and Portuguese and so on.

There was no shortage of references to the thought of Agostinho da Silva, a Portuguese philosopher who lived for many years in Brazil and always spoke a language that unites peoples. And from Esio Neves, deputy and former presidential candidate, to Arthur Lear, president of the Chamber of Deputies, several speakers recalled the role of the Brazilian Jose Aparecido de Oliveira in the creation of the Community of Portuguese Countries in 1996 (his son Jose Fernando Aparecido de Oliveira was especially emotional) … The seven founding countries were joined by two – Timor-Leste and Equatorial Guinea.

In the afternoon conversations, which passed with a fluidity that refuted the importance sometimes attached to different pronunciation, much was said about the sentimental value of the language, as well as about its economic potential and even about its geopolitical role. And it was this last moment that brought me back to the interview with João Ribeiro de Almeida, when the diplomat took over as President of Camões. We talked about his experiences, including being ambassador to Colombia and Argentina; and, above all, the passage through Timor-Leste when the country was preparing for its official independence in 2002, and how not everything could have gone the way it did, even after the 1999 referendum that liberated the former Portuguese colony from Indonesian occupation. “I witnessed how the authorities of Timor put great pressure on Timor so that Portuguese would not be the official language,” President Camões told me at the time.

Language plays a role in geopolitics, as does religion (if Brazil is the most populous Catholic country in the world, and Timor-Leste the most Catholic country in Asia, this cannot be separated from the heritage of Portugal), as well as in determining the fate of Timor. -Leste was decisive. Portugal, the administering Power, supported the Timorese struggles at the UN, Brazil announced at the time that it was present, and Sergio Vieira de Mello rose to fame as administrator of the territory during the transition to independence. In film Sergio, the biography of a prominent Brazilian diplomat who died in an attack in Iraq, you can see how the fluency in Portuguese has made a difference in many ways. After all, it was a family.

The CPLP’s Executive Secretary is Zacarias da Costa of Timorese, who certainly did not miss the Brazilian event to celebrate the Portuguese language, the language of 300 million people.