The First International Congress of Students from the Amazon Region intends to reflect on the “social and environmental mistakes” made in the region in its various cycles of development and integration.
The Congress was inaugurated Thursday, July 21, at the National University of Colombia (Unal), in Letícia, Colombia.
Presentations of academic investigations, talks, roundtables, and workshops were held through today.
Part of the discussions took place at the Amazonas State University (UEA), in in the Brazilian frontier city of Tabatinga, which neighbors Letícia (the two cities are separated by a single street).
The organizers say that around 400 undergraduate and postgraduate students from Brazil, Colombia, and Peru attended the congress.
The debates revolved around four subtopics: Citizenship and culture; education and integration; national security and territoriality, and government policies and ethnic groups.
Ozíris Guimarães, director of the UEA in Tabatinga, hopes that the event will achieve three main results.
The first is the definition of the date and general subject of the second Triple Frontier Cooperation Forum, scheduled to take place in October.
The second is the creation of a student commission to organize the next congress. “We want it to become a students’ event and for them to take over the organization,” Guimarães explained.
The third objective is the formation of a permanent nucleus of strategic studies, bringing together governmental and non-governmental organizations from the three countries.
ABr – www.radiobras.gov.br