Regarding the process of renewing the Executive Directorate of CLACSO

CLACSO is the most representative, democratic, pluralistic, and prestigious institution for the promotion, training, innovation, and dissemination of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, it must be defended and protected against all types of maneuvers and campaigns that seek to damage its image and its vital role in safeguarding critical social thought, which is essential for the development of our societies with a sense of equality, ethnicity, gender, participatory democracy, social justice, and sustainability.

Contradicting the principles, values, and norms that represent the historical foundations and orientations of CLACSO's work, communications—mostly anonymous and highly slanderous—are circulating within the framework of the renewal process of its Executive Directorate, seeking to discredit one of the legitimate candidacies, formally and correctly registered, in accordance with CLACSO's regulations, with due transparency and ethical principles.

This smear campaign not only seeks to harm the candidate, but at the same time harms its authors and, above all, harms the CLACSO institution that we all love, respect and strive to safeguard its institutional integrity.

El CLACSO Working Group on emancipatory practices, common goods and methodologies decolonial alter-global It advocates for an academy capable of safeguarding critical, political, and emancipatory thought and feeling. In this sense, we declare the urgent need for professors and researchers to nurture our decolonial and depatriarchal research processes and trajectories, capable of dismantling hierarchies and revealing the implicit and explicit power dynamics within the complexities we are observing in the current context addressed by this statement.

In these challenging times, when far-right political movements seek to eliminate all rights won throughout modern history, including those in the social sciences and humanities aimed at human emancipation, defending CLACSO is an inescapable duty. The process of renewing its Executive Board must be conducted under the principles of transparency and dialogue based on the candidates' programmatic proposals, with due respect for the diversity of approaches and viewpoints. This important election process cannot and must not be affected or manipulated by a campaign waged by those who do not respect these principles.

As the CLACSO Working Group, we demand that all types of destructive and discrediting campaigns against candidates for Executive Director, which are contrary to the ethical principles that underpin CLACSO, cease immediately.

March 27th 2025
CLACSO Working Group
Emancipatory practices, common goods and methodologies decolonial alter-global

This text expresses the position of the aforementioned Working Group and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.