Mapuche activist Moira Millán recounts sexual assault by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Moira Millán, Mapuche weychafe (warrior) and activist from so-called Argentina.
Interview • Lola Matamala • April 18, 2023 • Originally published April 16 in El Salto Diario, Translation by Ojalá
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Coimbra, Portugal, 1940) holds a PhD from Yale University, and is a professor at Coimbra University in Portugal. He is among the most prestigious intellectuals on the European left, and has published books including Human Rights, Democracy and Development (Routledge, 2020). He has been a regular participant in international conferences and forums including the World Social Forum.
In the past week, a group of Portuguese students have accused him of sexual aggression and Brazilian member of congress Bella Gonçalves has added her testimony, as has the well known Mapuche activist, writer and screenwriter Moira Millán.
I spoke with Millán on Friday April 14, one day before the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO) announced via social media the suspension of all activities involving the sociologist, who is among the most prestigious on the continent, “while the investigations are underway.” On April 15, the Center for Social Studies of the Iusa University of Coimbra did the same, suspending all of de Sousa Santos’ academic activities.
Lola Matamala: Moira, what happened with Boaventura?
Moira Millán: In 2010 I traveled to Portugal by invitation of a collective of Argentines living in Lisbon for a discussion in the Lusophone University. I let Boaventura know, we had met at the World Social Forum in Brazil, where we had a political exchange that was enjoyable and respectful. He immediately wrote back and invited me to Coimbra to give a talk to his students.
I accepted, though he didn’t offer to pay. I told him I needed him to pay my expenses because my economic situation was very precarious, and Boaventura said he would pay for my travel, accommodation and meals.
I arrived in Coimbra and gave the talk. By the time it ended it was quite late and his assistant told me I was to go for dinner in a predetermined location.
I thought the whole team would go, but when I got there, he was alone. The place he had chosen was a restaurant that belongs to his family, which he had opened so we could have dinner alone. He began to drink heavily and say really strange things as a kind of “flirtation.”
The whole time I was setting boundaries. When we finished eating he told me he wanted to give me some books, and I asked him to give them to me the next day. He said no, and told me his house was nearby. I agreed to go with him.
I don’t remember what floor he lived on but I do remember there was a security system to get into the building. We went into the apartment and he got comfortable and began to drink whisky. I wanted to leave, but he told me to sit down. I did, but across from him. When I did, he leaned into me and started touching me, trying to kiss me.
I got angry and pushed him and I said: “No!” I was upset but I stayed calm. He pushed himself onto me again, and I got very angry and pushed him even harder. I wasn’t going to let anyone rape me, not even Boaventura.
He realized he wasn’t going to be able to rape me because I wouldn’t allow it. At the same time, I felt like a hostage. I didn’t know how to get out of the building, I didn’t know if it was far, I didn’t have any money to pay for a taxi. I also didn’t have my return flight to Lisbon. I was in his hands, and that sensation made me feel afraid and upset. I tried to calm myself down and I made him think it through, and he calmed down.
LM: What did you say to calm him down?
MM: I asked him if he acted this way with white academics or if he just did it with me, since I’m Indigenous and not an academic. We had spoken at length about Blanca Chancoso and I asked him: did you do this to Blanca Chancoso too?
LM: And what did he say?
MM: He said of course not. So I responded: then why are you doing this to me? Because I’m poor? Then I started crying, even though I never cry because I’m implacable. I’m the kind of person who says “not a tear for the enemy”. That’s when he apologized, and I left.
I’m a woman who knows how to defend herself, I have to confront the Argentine Gendarmerie, and he’s an older man. This whole thing could have ended in tragedy because I could have killed him, and I’d be in prison.
LM: How did you get your return ticket?
MM: The next day I went to ask his secretary for it, but I was told that he had it and that he was waiting for me in a restaurant. When I heard that I got very upset: it meant the humiliation at his hands would continue. He was like a fussy child who didn’t get what he wanted from me the day before, so he wanted me again the next day.
His assistant was upset and it’s not her fault, so I went and saw him. And there he was, waiting for me with a bouquet of flowers, begging for forgiveness, but I took my ticket and left.
ML: When you arrived back in Lisbon, did you tell anyone what happened in Coimbra?
MM: Yes, and they told me not to mess with him, that the right would take advantage of what happened because he was the guru of the left in a very difficult moment in Portugal. But does a leftwing rapist do less damage than a rightwing rapist?
LM: As the days went on, and faced with these kinds of responses, how did you process what happened to you?
MM: I thought, I’m 40 years old, what could happen that hasn’t happened already? How is it possible this guy is going to get away with doing this to me? Major mistake.
Since then, though, whenever I am traveling I ask to come with someone else, so that I have witnesses. The only ones I have from what happened are the students I gave the class to and his secretary, but there’s no witness in the restaurant or in his apartment. I realized later it wasn’t spontaneous, that he acted as a criminal with a premeditated strategy.
LM: Since then, has Boaventura been in touch with you?
MM: No, he’s terrified of me, he knows what he did. And I have told a lot of academics, because we’ve been in conferences where he is also invited, and they’ve asked me to be on the same panels as him, and I’ve said no, and if they insisted, I’ve threatened to publicly denounce him as abusive.
For example, CLACSO has known since the beginning, because I told them, which means it is totally complicit.
LM: Has anyone in CLACSO been in touch with you over the past days?
MM: They’ve called me as individuals and they’ve told me that, for now, they won’t go against him. I think what’s missing in this moment is a clear political position: the left has a chance to clean house, to redeem itself by condemning these extremely violent events.
Instead I’m being threatened on social media. I don’t care because they aren’t going to come to Patagonia, but the young Portugese women who have spoken out, what support and security do they have?
I can’t understand how these practices have been allowed inside academia, and I especially don’t understand the women who are complicit in these situations.
LM: Have you received any kind of support since the news of these events went public?
MM: A handful of Portuguese academics have called to say they are sorry for Boaventura’s attitude.
In Argentina, in general, academia and many Argentine feminists have looked the other way, in fact, one woman academic told me that he’d done the same in Africa.
And I think, if he did that to me, a Mapuche woman activist and writer with a certain amount of recognition and all of the tools to speak out, and I haven’t received solidarity, what attitude will they have with the African sisters who have been his victims?
LM: Have you spoken to any of them or to others who have suffered abuse by Boaventura?
MM: No, I don’t even know the students that have gone public, but I’m sharing my testimony because I heard him deny it and delegitimize them.
Some people have asked to see the email exchanges I’ve had with Boaventura, but I’m a person who is persecuted in my country and I have to change my phone number and email all the time because of hacking. How am I going to recover emails from 2010 if I’ve changed my email three times?
LM: Are you going to make a criminal complaint?
MM: Yes, but I have to go to Coimbra to do that because that’s where it happened, and the issue right now is that I’m in Patagonia. Between August and September I expect to travel to Europe for a script I’m writing and I can do it formally.
I’ll go to Portugal, even though since this happened I haven’t gone, even though I’ve been invited, I haven’t dared to go. Now I have to go denounce that white academic, and presumably also the left that speaks about the south and coloniality.
LM: A year and a half ago you denounced Boaventura during the CLACSO conference in México [City], I imagine what’s happening now is affecting you emotionally.
MM: I’ve felt a lot of pain, powerlessness and rage. They say time heals all wounds, but it’s not true. If there’s no justice, there’s no healing. Your soul still feels it, you live it all over again.
I was asked how I understand justice, and in this case I know he won’t go to jail because of his age, but I hope he’s kicked out of academia and that he’s separated from the strategic spaces where he continues to prey on people, to humiliate them, to exercise violence against women, so that they can go to university without having an abuser deciding their future. For me, that would be justice.
LM: Finally, what reflections have this emotional rollercoaster led you to develop?
MM: Well, I lacked self-esteem at that moment, and many Indigenous women continue to lack self esteem. We normalize that things like this can happen to us because we don’t matter to anybody, we’re rapable and killable. And we’re tired.
This happened in 2010 and I was alone, I wasn’t part of any Indigenous collective spaces or any feminist spaces. Once we’re part of collectives we also feel stronger as we face our Mapuche world that is machista and where there are also abusers and mistreatment.
I will no longer accept any dogma, any nationalist flags that allow “mal vivir,” mistreatment or oppression.
