Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

DEVELOPMENT: Brazilian Social Forum Puts Lula in the Dock

Mario Osava

BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, Nov 10 2003 (IPS) - The Brazilian Social Forum, a national gathering of social movements and non-governmental organisations, had some hard words for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the economic policy his leftist Workers’ Party (PT) government has implemented in the 10 months since he took office.

There are discrepancies between the diplomatic corps, which is building an independent space for Brazil in the world, and the current domestic economic policy, of free flows of foreign capital and high interest rates, Luiz Gonzaga Belluzo, economics professor at the Brazilian University of Campinas, told a Forum seminar.

Without regulation of speculative capital, Brazil will not be able to lower interest rates because, in doing so, there would be immediate capital flight, destabilising the currency exchange rate and obstructing economic growth, he said.

That is why there was a recession in the first half of this year and the first six months of the Lula administration, Gonzaga Belluzo said in his presentation at the Brazilian Social Forum (BSF), which ended Sunday in the southeastern Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, capital of Mato Grosso state.

The independence that the government grants the Central Bank in conducting the nation’s monetary policy, without legally authorising such autonomy, came under fire from several speakers at the BSF, the national version of the World Social Forum.

The southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, hosted the first three annual editions of the World Social Forum, organised as a kind of counterweight to the World Economic Forum held every year in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos.

The current political tensions in Brazil arise from the fact that the PT government does not satisfy, “and at times acts counter to, the people’s aspirations for change,” the people who elected Lula in October 2002, said Juarez da Rocha Guimaraes, a political scientist with the Federal University if Minas Gerais.

But Lula maintains a high popularity rating because, according to a survey, the respondents said they give him an average of 23 months to keep the promises he made for transforming the reality of this country, with its growing rich-poor gap, Guimaraes told a seminar on “the post neoliberal agenda”, sponsored by the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE).

At the BSF conferences, the main events of the four-day Forum, filling the venues with NGO delegates and the general public, there was no lack of criticisms and jeers against some of the official policies mentioned.

The apparent unanimity of Forum-goers against the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and economic neoliberalism placed them on opposite footing to the stance taken by the Lula government.

The conference on “the state and social movements”, held Sunday, turned into one of the most heatedly political events of the four days with the presentation by Valerio Arcary, historian and national leader of the Socialist United Workers Party (PSTU), a small leftist group that opposes the Lula government.

Arcary condemned the government’s decision to negotiate the creation of the FTAA, even if it is defending a “light” treaty that would exclude issues that are not in Brazil’s best interest, and he criticised Lula for signing a new agreement with the IMF. The politician’s words won much applause, in part from the activists of his own party present for the conference.

The only party leader to take part in the BSF conferences, Arcary criticised Lula for pursuing “a strategic option in favour of capitalism.”

He said, however, that Latin America is experiencing a “revolutionary wave”, citing as examples the recent indigenous rebellions in Ecuador and Bolivia and the failed coup attempt last year against the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez.

“I support (the government), but have my criticisms,” said Luiz Marinho, president of the CUT labour federation. He noted that the Lula administration is the product of an alliance, and the scenario of internal disputes between ministers of different political orientations.

But the attitude that seemed to best reflect the sentiments of the majority of BSF participants was that of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), expressed by Gilmar Mauro, one of the peasant farmer movement’s national leaders.

Without “mass struggle”, organisation, unity and autonomy of social movements, the desired social transformations will not be achieved because the government alone cannot make it happen, said Mauro, adding that it is a matter of mobilising the population to put pressure on the government to adopt policies for change.

The spokesman for the MST, a movement that demands land to farm, made the distinction between what he referred to as “the social left” and “the party left”, and stressed the need for dreams and hopes in driving the fight for social equality.

Around 23,000 people registered for the BSF, and nearly 1,500 NGOs were represented, but with the participation of the general public there were more than 40,000 people, Salete Valesan, an organiser of the Forum as representative of the Paulo Freire Institute on education, told IPS.

More than 250 seminars and workshops accompanied the six larger conferences that made up the official BSF programme. There were innumerable parallel events also, taking place in tents set up around the Forum site by social movements and NGOs, Valesan said.

Such was the case of “Planeta Femea”, led by a group of women’s organisations, the event tents set up by CUT, MST, children’s groups and leftist parties. A youth camp also drew thousands of people for a series of its own events.

The Brazilian Social Forum “surpassed all expectations” in the number of participants and “tranquillity”, because there were no reports of theft or conflicts of any type, despite the financial and organisational difficulties, said Valesan.

The plan is to hold the national forum every two years, in different Brazilian cities, in the months before the World Social Forum – when the global forum takes place in a foreign country.

The venue for the WSF in January 2004 is the western Indian city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), and in the following years will alternate between Brazil’s Porto Alegre, which hosted the Forums in 2001 through 2003, and other foreign cities.

The Social Forums are important for strengthening society, increasing political awareness and promoting the exchange amongst people of diverse experiences, Nivea Gonçalves Nisa, 76, told IPS.

They serve to express “ideas of the people – which people often do not know how to put into words,” because the solutions to humanity’s problems emerge from communities, said the former public school director who currently works for an elderly assistance programme in Belo Horizonte.

The principal outcome of the BSF “is the encounter and integration of different movements,” said Silvia Regina de Almeida, of Join Consult, a Rio de Janeiro organisation that provides consulting services to other cooperatives.