Brasília, June 23, 2004 (Agência Brasil) - "The indicators of violence amid Brazilian youth are unacceptable, dramatic, and need to be changed," the representative of the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (Unesco) in Brazil, Jorge Wertheim, remarked today during an interview on the "Amazônia Magazine" program. He also spoke about the 40 years in which Unesco has been active in Brazil through 79 technical cooperation projects, 47 of them in the area of education.

Data provided by the UN representative show that 50 thousand young Brazilians between the ages of 15 and 24 suffered violent deaths last year. Werthein expressed his concern over the fact that "these very high indexes of violent deaths amongst young people are characteristic of the peripheral areas of large cities, especially among young blacks and mulattos, who are the most excluded."

Regarding the upcoming inauguration, expected within the next 30 days, of the Brazilian government's first explicit policy for youth, Wertheim said that he hopes it "answers the needs that young people have already indicated, which can be summarized as social inclusion."

Besides tackling the issue of discrimination against young blacks and mulattos, the Unesco representative notes that inclusion must begin with education. "Only 30% of Brazilian youth are enrolled in secundary schools, when the average should be 75%," he observed. And he added that what is even more disturbing is the "pattern of little likelihood for the number of years of schooling to increase in this segment of the excluded population."

Reporter: Eduardo Mamcasz
Translator: David Silberstein