The new board of directors of Cebes: Forward for democracy and the right to health

50 YEARS of existence.Born in the struggle against the military dictatorship that dominated Brazil between 1964 and 1985, Cebes was at the origins of the Health Reform Movement, actively participating in the fight for democracy and the right to health 1 .Cebes remains in the uncompromising defense of the right to health established in the 1988 Constitution, the most significant social achievement in Brazilian democratic history.The full realization of this right still requires many advances -and it is up to Cebes, as it has always been, to criticize the political, technical, and social impediments to its implementation.For Cebes, health is more than the absence of disease; it is a set of economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that require health care centered on the social, physical, and mental well-being of the population, in which everyone can live with dignity, without exclusion, discrimination or violence.Building a nation with full health also means building justice, solidarity, peace, democracy, and sovereignty.These principles are expressed in our motto, 'Health is a democracy, democracy is health,' which is renewed with the new board for the 2025-2026 term.Elected during the biannual Cebes Symposium in Fortaleza in November 2024, the new board takes on the challenges discussed during the Symposium, with Cebianos from all over the Country 2 .In the conception embraced by our entity, health concentrates and evidences a good part of the bottlenecks that hinder our path in constructing a nation of well-being in tune with the parameters of civilization and human dignity.In this sense, it is necessary to put health back at the center of the national debate based on its relationship with social, economic, and environmental needs.One of the challenges is to invest vigorously in knowledge about the relationships between health and ecology and climate, not only in local terms but also at regional and planetary levels, valuing the contribution of native peoples in constructing harmonious forms of coexistence and reintegration of humanity with nature.We defend the right of Indigenous peoples to their territories and ways of life while denouncing the insatiable economic model of the destruction of human resources and nature and defending a development model centered on life and socio-biodiversity.