Things to know about Mário
Meet your 2025-26 Rotary president, Mário César Martins de Camargo
RI President-elect Mário César Martins de Camargo and 2024-26 RI Directors (from left) Christine Etienne, Alain Van de Poel, and Daniel V. Tanase at One Rotary Center in Evanston, Illinois.
Image credit: Clare Britt
After a day of interviews with the committee vetting candidates for 2025-26 Rotary International president, Mário César Martins de Camargo returned to his hotel and waited. And waited. “It’s an elimination process,” he says. “The anxiety level reaches sky high.” When he got a call asking him to return to Rotary headquarters in Evanston, his first thought was that he’d made some sort of mistake. As he walked the few blocks to the building, he mentally reviewed everything he’d said. When he finally realized why he’d been called back, it was an emotional moment, he says. “The nominating committee stands up and applauds you, and you are invited to say your first words as president. Mine were, ‘Are you guys sure?’”
They were, of course. De Camargo’s Rotary résumé goes back decades. A member of the Rotary Club of Santo André, Brazil, since 1980, he served as his club’s Rotary Youth Exchange officer the following year at age 24 and as its president in 1992-93. He was governor of District 4420 (part of Brazil’s São Paulo state) in 1999-2000, Rotary Foundation trustee in 2015-19, and Rotary International director in 2019-21. He has also served Rotary as an RI learning facilitator, committee member and chair, and task force member. De Camargo and his wife, Denise da Silva de Camargo, also a Rotarian, are Major Donors and Benefactors of The Rotary Foundation.
Professionally, de Camargo was president of the printing company Gráfica Bandeirantes and has been a consultant to the print industry in Brazil. He has served as president and chair of several printing and graphics trade associations. He has been on the board of Casa da Esperança (House of Hope), a medical center in Santo André sponsored by his Rotary club that sees more than 200,000 patients a year.
That’s his official biography. But we wanted to know, What’s de Camargo really like, what makes him tick? Here’s what we found out.
His biggest regret is that he stopped playing piano.
From the ages of 8 to 21, de Camargo played piano. He even attended a music conservatory for nine of those years. While in Germany apprenticing at a press manufacturer, he attended German language classes at the Goethe Institute. The school had a Steinway piano that “to me, was the Rolls-Royce of pianos,” he recalls. The school’s dean allowed him to play it under one condition: he perform for the school when his training was finished. “It was the last time I played the piano,” he says, explaining that family and work obligations began to take more of his time. “I really regret not being able to continue because it is a self-rewarding experience.”
He believes printers have a noble cause.
Printing presses have their origins in China, where movable type was invented in the 11th century. When Johannes Gutenberg created the mechanized printing press in Germany 400 years later, it launched the mass production of books, newspapers, and more throughout Europe. “The press and the publication of books and ideas changed the world,” de Camargo says, allowing scientific findings to be shared more widely, decreasing censorship as it was harder to destroy a “dangerous idea,” and giving the general public access to educational materials.
De Camargo’s business used to print 25 million to 30 million items per year: coffee table books, romance novels, automotive industry manuals — “you name it,” he says. “We were replicators of ideas. Printers have a mission to reduce ignorance.”
Rotary is the best leadership training he’s ever had.
De Camargo has been on several boards in his industry, but it was through Rotary that he learned how to be a leader. “Rotary is the best school of leadership I’ve had,” he says. De Camargo says Rotary taught him to speak in public, one of people’s biggest fears, along with flying. (“If I was still afraid of flying and speaking in public, I wouldn’t be president of Rotary International, because all we do is public speaking and flying!” he says.) He also learned when to stop talking and listen. “You have to pay attention to what people are telling you,” he says. “It is an exercise of humility.” And he learned how to motivate people who aren’t getting paid to perform a task. “When you’re motivating volunteers, you don’t have that tool of payment. The only tool you have is inspiration, motivation, and challenge to make them a better person.”
This is the most memorable Rotary advice he’s received: Never ask for anything, never refuse anything.
As co-chair of the Host Organization Committee for the 2015 Rotary International Convention in São Paulo, de Camargo received these words of wisdom from John Kenny, a past Rotary president who was The Rotary Foundation trustee chair at the time. “That has oriented my Rotary journey,” he says. “I never refused any job that was given to me by Rotary or The Rotary Foundation, but at the same time I offered myself for different positions without knowing what the result would be,” he says. “I could never fathom that I would be here someday.”
People call him Membership Mário.
“It’s not rocket science,” he says. “If you look at our numbers, some people say we have stabilized at 1.2 million. I say we have stagnated at 1.2 million.” The word “stabilize” makes people sit back and relax, he believes, whereas the word “stagnate” makes people want to sit up and do something.
The puzzle, he says, is figuring out why membership is increasing in some areas and decreasing in others. “Maybe it’s demographics, maybe it’s economics, maybe it’s an age thing,” he says. “The challenge motivates me so much because it’s a mosaic of different regions and different performances that makes it very challenging and at the same time very attractive.”
What works in Korea may not work in Germany, and what works in Germany may not work in Brazil or the U.S., he says. “We have to be humble and very attentive to the different scenarios.”
The 2025-26 presidential message is Unite for Good.
“I think ‘unite’ is a very powerful word,” he says. “It’s a very powerful word in a divided world.”
It’s easy to sow division, he says, but much harder to find common ground. “We are always looking for somebody’s defects,” he says. “We should be looking for somebody else’s talents.” That’s where Rotary comes in, offering the opportunity for people to connect with others in their community and around the world.
He believes a focus on the environment will draw younger members.
Before de Camargo, the last RI president to come from Brazil was Paulo V.C. Costa in 1990-91. Costa is best known for the environmental program he started, Preserve Planet Earth, which launched shortly before the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Had Rotary kept the environment as a central focus then, de Camargo says, “we would be far ahead, bringing a visionary agenda to the world.” As a Rotary director, de Camargo helped secure approval of the environment as the newest area of focus. “We still have a lot of room to grow,” he says.
In 2025, the annual UN conference on climate change, COP30, will be held in the Brazilian Amazon, and de Camargo sees a place for Rotary to get involved. “Rotary should have its logo, its brand, associated with environmental protection in the Amazon,” he says. “We have a unique opportunity to do that.”
He gets to know a city by walking.
“When I go to Chicago or New York or São Paulo or wherever, when I have the chance, I just put on my tennis shoes and I start walking,” he says, “just seeing the colors, the smells, the different foods, the people.” It’s the best way to feel like a local, he says. “You cannot do that by Uber or by driving a car. You’re not part of the environment. But when you’re walking, you feel like you are.” But he doesn’t stop at the city. De Camargo is a fan of hiking. “I love the outdoors, to be able to breathe fresh air,” he says.
Yes, he once dressed as Super Mario.
Step into de Camargo’s office at One Rotary Center in Evanston and you’ll notice a collection of figurines based on Super Mario, the Nintendo character. “That was the idea of Trustee Akira Miki, who was a director with me on the Board in 2019-20,” he says. “He immediately called me Super Mario, and it started catching.” At the 2024 Rotary institute in Toronto, de Camargo dressed up as the character and engaged in a mock battle with Past RI President Holger Knaack, part of a Rotary Foundation fundraiser that netted $115,000. “I put the moustache upside down, but I’ll get better,” he says. “Whatever it takes to raise money for The Rotary Foundation.”
This story originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.
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