Centro de Cultura Libertária da Amazônia

Who we are

The Centro de Cultura Libertária da Amazônia (CCLA) is a libertarian athenaeum based in Belém do Pará, in Amazonian Brazil. Our blog is the web portal of the Pará libertarian movement.

We belong to a long tradition: that of Amazonian anarchist militancies which, since the late 19th century, have nourished the struggles of workers in northern Brazil. An irregular, wounded tradition, partly erased by repression and by the institutional left, but alive.

What we do

The CCLA brings together several complementary activities, articulated around a common political demand: to disseminate, transmit, organize.

The Biblioteca Libertária Maxwell Ferreira (BLMF). Our militant library, named in tribute to comrade Maxwell Ferreira, anarchist militant from Pará. It is today the first pilot library of the AnarBib network.

Editora CCLA. Militant edition of political texts, brochures, training materials. In regular collaboration with Partage Noir, we translate classic texts of international anarchism into Brazilian Portuguese — recently, a brochure on Erich Mühsam read from contemporary Amazonian struggles.

Audio and video resources. AnarcoTube (video channel), libertarian podcasts, anarchist poetry (by bzarro zangado), libertarian music from around the world. A continuous work of militant cultural production and diffusion.

Mobilizations. We participate in the concrete political struggles that cross Pará and Amazonia: classist 1st of May, libertarian 8M, international solidarity (Rojava, Iran), defense of rivers and indigenous peoples (struggle against Cargill and Decree 12.600), support for strikes by gig-economy workers.

Anarcho-History. Research and reappropriation of the history of the Pará libertarian movement, often erased by official historiography. Recently, an article on Black anarchists in Belém (Almerinda Gama, José Da Silva Gama, Bruno De Menezes, 1910-1920).

History

The roots (1875-1937)

Anarchism arrived in Amazonia through immigration, especially from the second half of the 19th century. The inauguration of the Benevides colony in June 1875 marks the beginning of this migratory flow that brought Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, French, Germans, Belgians, Swiss. As early as May 1896, on the island of Caratateua (Outeiro, district of Belém), the archives mention an immigrant who distributed anarchist propaganda.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Belém and Manaus saw the development of a strongly anarchist-oriented workers' movement. Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread served as the basis for workers' education, alongside texts by Bakunin, Malatesta, Ferrer y Guardia, Jean Grave, and Reclus, but also by anarchist women such as Maria Lacerda de Moura, Maria Antônia Soares, Espertirina Martins, Angelina Soares — figures often erased, whose memory we are tasked with reawakening.

In April and May 1914, a major strike in Belém brought together cobblers, carters, dockers and other trades. State repression was heavy — arrests, seizures. In 1937, under Vargas's Estado Novo, anarcho-syndicalism receded: trade unions were regulated by the State, and our current entered isolation.

The modern refoundation (1989-2001)

At the turn of the 1980s-90s, in the student struggles of Pará, a new cycle of anarchist militancy reconstituted itself. The Movimento de Conscientização Popular (MCP), the Núcleo da Confederação Operária Brasileira (COB), the Juventude Libertária reappeared in Belém. In 1991, we founded the Coletivo Ovelha Negra at the Federal University of Pará, with its journal Ovelha Negra.

In 1992, in the occupation Na Morada da Arte, in central Belém, we founded the Centro de Cultura Libertária (CCL) — direct ancestor of today's CCLA. Throughout the 1990s, the CCL became a reference space for Pará anarchism, training comrades of struggles. It is also there that Maxwell Ferreira militated, in tribute to whom our library would later be named.

In 1998, we hosted in Belém the founding congress of the Organização Socialismo Libertário (OSL). In 1999, we launched the Resistência Popular Amazônica (RPA). These two projects experienced a downturn in 2000-2001, in parallel with a broader disorganization of organized anarchist militancy in Brazil.

The current refoundation (2013 to today)

After a decade of downturn, it was in the struggles against the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam (2012) and in the Movimento Passe Livre (2013) that Pará anarchist militancy rearticulated itself.

On 1 May 2013, we founded the Biblioteca Libertária Maxwell Ferreira (BLMF). On 30 November 2013, we founded the Núcleo Anarquista Resistência Cabana (NARC), in articulation with the Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira (CAB).

The CCLA today extends this work, in the human and political continuity of the CCL of the 1990s — many of the current comrades are also those of that time. It is this continuity, patiently maintained for over thirty years, that carries the AnarBib project.

AnarBib and the CCLA

AnarBib is not a product fallen from the sky. It is the tool the CCLA needs for its own library, the BLMF, and which we decided to share as free software with other anarchist militant libraries around the world.

The BLMF is thus the first pilot library of the AnarBib network. The technical choices, the editorial choices, the political choices that structure the software come from real use, in a real library, frequented by real readers. It is not abstract development — it is militant documental work embodied in a collective.

This anchoring also explains why Brazilian Portuguese is the project's reference language, and why multilingualism is assumed as a principle: other anarchist militant libraries exist, elsewhere, in other languages. That they can join the network without having to adopt our language is a central political principle of AnarBib.

Find us

We prioritize free and militant platforms. Commercial platforms are used for wider diffusion, but they are not where the collective's life takes place.

Site and blog — cclamazonia.noblogs.org
Hosted on Noblogs (Autistici/Inventati). It is there that you'll find political texts, mobilization announcements, historical articles, communiqués.

Mastodon — @CCLAmazonia@kolektiva.social
On Kolektiva.social, an anarchist instance of the Fediverse. To follow our news.

KolektivaMedia — kolektiva.media/a/cclamazonia
Our video presence on a militant PeerTube instance.

FunkWhale — open.audio/channels/leituras_anarquistas
Our anarchist readings on a free audio platform.

The CCLA is also present on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and BlueSky for wider diffusion — these are not the channels where the collective life takes place.