Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

SOUTH AMERICA: Social Summit to Be Heard by Official Summit

Carlos Tautz

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia, Dec 8 2006 (IPS) - This Bolivian city of nearly a million people lived through the “Water War” in 2000, when up to 100,000 people took part in demonstrations against water privatisation. Now it is hosting two other major events, but they are nothing like the water protests.

The Social Summit for the Integration of the Peoples began on Thursday at the Instituto Americano in downtown Cochabamba, and will run through Saturday, bringing together nearly 3,000 representatives of social movements and non-governmental organisations from Latin America and the Caribbean, half of them local to Bolivia.

The gathering, which addresses similar issues and has a similar format to that of the World Social Forum, was organised by the Hemispheric Social Alliance and the Bolivian Movement for the Sovereignty, Integration and Solidarity of the Peoples.

The annual World Social Forum (WSF), whose theme is “Another World Is Possible,” first took place in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001. The Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) is renowned for leading the campaign against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) under the slogan “Another Americas Is Possible.”

The Social Summit is being held parallel to, and with close links to, the second summit of the South American Community of Nations, an official meeting of leaders of 12 of the region’s countries in Cochabamba this Friday and Saturday.

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay and Venezuela are the 12 members of the South American Community of Nations, founded in December 2004.

Several official summit delegates will discuss with Social Summit activists the 13 issues that the social organisations consider to be essential strategies for South American integration.

The special inter-summit encounter will table the whole agenda, ranging from environment to infrastructure, and including social rights and indigenous peoples, that the Social Summit wants to discuss with respect to South American integration. Plans for integration have so far been exclusively in the hands of the governments, who have prioritised trade ties between their countries.

The purpose of the Social Summit is to give a voice to people who so far have only suffered the impacts of development models adopted by governments, and have had no say in discussing and selecting these models, the organisers said.

Despite the unprecedented climate of dialogue between governments and non-governmental organisations, relations between the two Summits are not all sweetness and light.

On Thursday afternoon, activists held discussions with the Bolivian Foreign Ministry’s official in charge of integration and trade issues, Pablo Solón, and with Brazilian Deputy Foreign Minister Samuel Pinheiro-Guimarâes. And in the evening, representatives of the parallel Social Summit met with all the deputy foreign ministers present at the official South American Summit.

“These meetings do not give rise to decisions, but neither are they merely to exchange information,” HSA coordinator Gonzalo Berrón told IPS. “Our idea was to highlight the most critical items on the integration agenda.”

These issues – some of which are touchy, according to Berrón – are set out in a document that the HSA Reflection Group sent to the foreign ministries of the members of the South American Community of Nations a month ago.

They include, for example, the occupation of Haiti since mid-2004 by U.N. peace-keeping forces under the military leadership of Brazil and the political leadership of Chile, and the lack of debate on migration issues.

But the issue that really arouses opposition among many social movements is the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA).

IIRSA is a package of more than 300 works of infrastructure, including waterways, railways and hydroelectric plants, that is still at the planning stage. It is coordinated by the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), and has been promised huge amounts of funding by the Brazilian state National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES).

IIRSA is the main bone of contention between the two Summits, and is also the only element that has so far given an institutional focus to the South American Community. It was proposed in 2000 by then president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), and enthusiastically embraced by current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

It is a platform which acts as a base for the South American Community of Nations, but as information about it has gradually been made public, it has received criticism from all quarters. The first public debate about IIRSA was held in November 2005 at the BNDES headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, five years after it was launched.

Social organisations complain that IIRSA serves the interests of corporations that export commodities from South America, and argue that the local population does not benefit at all from that wealth of resources.

The host of the official summit, Bolivian President Evo Morales, sent a frank, straightforward letter to the parallel Social Summit, saying: “We must review IIRSA, taking into account the concerns of people who want to see avenues for connecting poles of development, not super-highways for the transport of export containers surrounded by corridors of extreme poverty, and more national debt.”

Several of the projects being planned by IIRSA, the IDB and BNDES follow the logic of establishing platforms for exporting commodities and natural resources out of the region.

The large San Antonio and Jirau hydroelectric plants, with a planned cost of 13 billion dollars, to be built on the Madeira River in the northwestern Brazilian state of Rond- nia, on the border with Bolivia, are an example of this, said sociologist Luis Novoa.

“Our studies show that the lake formed by the dam across the Madeira River may accumulate sediments in its bed, and may overflow, flooding Bolivian territory in a few years time,” said Novoa, a Brazilian.

In his view, the two hydroelectric plants may be just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger complex, involving two further electricity stations, and a waterway for shipping soybeans and other crops, to be grown in areas of Brazil that are now jungle.

Indigenous people, who usually bear the brunt of the environmental damage caused by such projects, held their own meeting on Monday and Tuesday, ahead of the Social Summit, on “South American Integration from the Point of View of Indigenous Peoples”, which drew representatives of nearly two million people belonging to numerous ethnic groups.

“We want government agreements on integration to respect indigenous peoples’ rights, as already enshrined in other international agreements, such as the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169, which recognises indigenous peoples’ sociopolitical organisations, and our right to the wealth contained in our territories,” said the tribal leader of the Xukuru people, Marcos Luidson de Araújo Tatuí, who is from the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco.

“Big investments that only look to foreign markets, like the paper pulp sector, are obstacles to the demarcation of our territories, and cause deaths and suicides among indigenous people who suffer greatly when they are confined to a small patch of ground,” he said.