Is promoting disability rights conducive to a stronger democracy in Brazil?

While organized advocacy among and on behalf of people with disabilities in Brazil began in the early 1980s, it was not until that nation’s 2008 ratification of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that the Brazilian state assumed responsibility to promote and guarantee the rights of its disabled citizens. The Convention holds the status of a Constitutional norm in Brazil, enabling disabled persons and interested civil society organizations to press to hold the state accountable for the protection and advancement of disability rights. This paper explores the tensions revealed by these ongoing efforts to empower a long-subjugated population through examining the online and printed materials of seven disability advocacy organizations and through interviews conducted in summer 2011 in Sao Paulo, Brazil with their leaders. In particular, the paper examines whether and how these organizations’ liberal advocacy discourses stressing equal rights, dignity and respect are reconciled in practice with their calls for social inclusion and active citizen engagement. Drawing on Held(1996), Sandel(1996), Freire(1970;1973), and Taylor(1992), I argue that well-intended rhetoric notwithstanding, paradoxically, without a participatory political life it is difficult for the disabled to achieve a shared social aspiration. I draw on interview data and compare the disability rights literature with the claims of a sample of disability advocacy organizations to consider how advocacy strategies might be recast to help the otherwise heterogeneous disabled population attain both a common sense of identity and individual rights as they seek full citizenship.