Ex-Convict Who Turned Professor Leads Reading Projects in São Paulo

03/16/2017 - 12h38

Itamar Xavier Camargo, 37, is an art professor, Master's Degree student, gives speeches and has even written a book.

But in a former reality he lived far from the academic environment. He stopped going to school at age 13, got involved with drugs and only finished his high-school equivalency degree after serving a sentence for armed robbery.

Since 2011, he has led the Readership Champion Project (Projeto Leitura Campeã), which has already collected about 20 thousand books and established 11 libraries in the President Prudente region in the São Paulo countryside.

He told the Folha that he was arrested for the first time at 16 years of age. "When I was on the inside, I only saw the money that drug traffickers and criminals got and everything else that didn't seem possible to get through honest work. But, during idle times, I started developing a certain taste for literature. That's when I got to know an art professor that motivated me to learn some painting techniques."

"But then, one time, I ran away. I left the books behind and went back to committing crimes. At 22-years-old I was arrested for armed robbery and forming a gang and served a sentence in the countryside."

"I saw death, fights, got beaten up, got to know members of the largest criminal factions. I slept without clothes on cell floors, without a mattress. But it was in prison where I became a library rat. I served out my sentence, about five years, and was released in Presidente Prudente, where I still live to this day", he said.

Translated by LLOYD HARDER

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