By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, Jan 17 2005 (IPS)

The broad spectrum of social activism embodied by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) will once again be the driving force behind the fifth annual World Social Forum in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

At the end of January, thousands from around the world will convene at the Forum, a meeting of civil society groups that gives a voice to those who feel marginalised by governments and multilateral institutions.

But in Chile, at least, NGOs rank last in terms of influence, according to the latest United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) human development report for that country. In the UNDP ranking of 32 different categories of groups and organisations, NGOs were given a score of just 3.6 on a scale of one to 10.

They rank below professional associations (3.7) and are just ahead of trade unions, which tail the list with a score of 3.4.

The ranking, which assesses the degree of influence of different entities in society based on a survey of members of the Chilean elite, puts the media at the top of the list with a score of 8.6.

Although they may be undervalued by the elites and unknown to a large portion of the population, Latin American NGOs nevertheless move vast amounts of aid funds and mobilise hundreds of thousands of professionals, activists and volunteers.

Their activities, which often complemented the work of the state in areas like education until the 1960s, later grew more focused on the defence of human rights. Many became adept at devising survival strategies in the 1970s and 1980s, when military dictatorships were the norm in much of Latin America and poverty was growing under belt-tightening economic programmes.

Today, in the era of “neo-liberal globalisation”, NGOs are gaining ground in new areas, like microfinance and the environment, while they remain active in the fight against poverty, the defence of the rights of women, children and indigenous people, and opposition to free trade agreements.

The vast number and variety of NGOs makes it impossible to come up with a reliable total, although a study in the mid-1990s based on national directories of civil society organisations estimated the total number of NGOs in Latin America at around 10,000.

In a report for a seminar organised by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in Montevideo, Uruguay in 2001, researcher Jorge Balbis said the difficulty in counting the NGOs in the region arose from methodological inaccuracies that confuse NGOs with other organisations from the so-called “third sector”.

“NGOs have often incorporated as an essential part of their identity the search for democratic alternatives for development based on the concept of social justice, differentiating them from other more assistance-related institutions,” says Balbis.

“There is a broad range of organisations, especially in emerging issues of sectors of society…that do not draw a great number of people and which represent very diverse interests,” Marta Lagos, director of Latinobarómetro, which carries out surveys of political and social attitudes in Latin America, told IPS.

“Six or seven of every 10 Chileans participate in something, but that does not mean we are in a political revolution, because clearly these people are not participating in politics,” said the researcher.

In Argentina, four million people (11 percent of the population) participate in civil society organisations, which are mainly based on the work of volunteers.

A study carried out in Chile among 45 NGOs found that 1,452 people worked in these organisations for a salary, alongside 1,929 volunteers, who included 78 foreigners, 371 university students involved in internships, and 96 students writing their theses.

María Eugenia Díaz, director of Acción, a Chilean network of NGOs, told IPS that the media “is closed to the proposals of alternative organisations.”

This alternative world lacks a strategy for getting press coverage, and thus the image of NGOs is often distorted, because civil society groups only make it into media reports when violent incidents occur during demonstrations, as happened on Nov. 19, 2004, in the march that opened the Chilean Social Forum, said Díaz.

More than 100 demonstrators were arrested that day. A group of hooded protesters threw rocks and pieces of wood at the Carabineros (militarised police) who reacted to put down the unrest. Protesters set up flaming roadblocks around the area. Two police officers and a gas station employee were shot and injured in the disturbances.

“The particularity of NGOs is that we work with the people who are willing to participate and organise themselves collectively to improve their quality of life in different spheres, like labour, the family, economic questions, and day-to-day life in general, and the media basically ignore these kinds of initiatives,” said the activist.

Ignacio Illanes, director of the political programme of the conservative Liberty and Development Institute, said there are “some NGOs that are media savvy and others that are not, and the latter do not have much of an impact on public opinion.”

In Lagos’s view, NGOs do not represent the public. “In a representative democracy, those who represent the people are the individuals who are elected. The idea that NGOs represent anyone beyond their own members seems to me extremely worrisome and dangerous,” she said.

“An NGO expresses the views of the members of that organisation, and they are far from representing the population,” said the director of Latinobarómetro.

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