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WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Venezuela Seeks to “Politicise” Meet

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jan 19 2007 (IPS) - World Social Forum (WSF) participants from Venezuela associate left-wing politics with the struggles of social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, but do not think that Africa is experiencing the same process.

Nairobi will be hosting the 7th WSF, focused this time on the urgent social agenda of the African continent, from Saturday until Jan. 25

The last global meeting of civil society, held as always at the beginning of the year, was staged in multiple locations – Bamako, Caracas and Karachi, the largest financial centre in Pakistan – and included debates about the forum’s politicisation.

Edgardo Lander of the Latin American Social Sciences Council (CLACSO), an umbrella group for some 170 research centres, told IPS that “there is an obvious relationship between social and political agendas.”

“The WSF has an impact on the regional agenda, even though its original goal was to establish links between movements and groups rather than to produce immediate effects,” he explained.

“I think that in Caracas the WSF was given an emotional boost, and that people found reasons for hope and encouragement to continue their struggles and networks,” forum participant Julio Fermín of EFIP, a group promoting employment and training for young Venezuelans, told IPS.

“For a long time Latin Americans have been breaking out of the mould, and we have moved from social resistance movements to a situation in which the people are taking the offensive. The electoral victories of the left are evidence for all to see,” Jacobo Torres of the Bolivarian Workers’ Force (FBT), a pro-government union organisation, told IPS.

“That has had an impact on the debate,” Torres said. An example, he said, was the election of left-winger Evo Morales, “a child of the social movements,” as Bolivia’s president.

“Evo won. Should we keep our distance because he’s in the government? Or should we back him up so that he succeeds?” he asked.

The debate at the WSF in Caracas was intense, because the site itself was chosen in recognition of the harmony between the forum’s own proclamations and preaching with those of the host country’s president, Hugo Chávez.

At two mass meetings with forum participants, Chávez urged them to become more politically committed. Otherwise, he warned, the WSF could become just an “annual festival for revolutionary tourism,” and he ended his speech with

the slogan that, one year later, after his reelection, has become the watchword of his government: “Socialism or death.”

Caracas was also the scene of one chapter of the debate over whether the forum should be primarily an open space for discussion, exhibitions and meeting others, or a mechanism for agreeing on common platforms and action networks.

“This question is still at the heart of the WSF,” said Torres, who added that the meeting is “not only important but essential.” “In the last few years, it’s been the only international meeting place that has allowed us to

create common political and social agendas on issues such as the environment, development, indigenous peoples or sexual diversity,” he said.

In Lander’s view, one example of the interaction between political and social agendas was the South American Community of Nations Summit in December in Cochabamba, in central Bolivia, where a parallel Social Summit for the Integration of the Peoples was held by civil society organisations from the region.

“Between these two conferences, of governments and of social organisations, a third, intermediate space was created for meetings between activists and spokespersons of both sides. That would have been unimaginable 10, or even five, years ago,” Lander said.

Lander who, like Torres, is on the Hemispheric Committee of the WSF, dismissed any similarities with other regions. “It’s rather difficult to imagine something like this in Africa. Left-wing governments haven’t spread there as they have in Latin America. Not even the South African government can be considered leftist.”

Torres said that “in any case it will be politically important for the problems of Africa to be presented, mainly to the European delegations, which for reasons of distance and money are those that can travel most easily to Nairobi.”

Lander called to mind the 14 areas that are “common ground” between the WSF in Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean, “beginning with memory and

resistance, the African presence in the Americas and the history of colonialism and slavery.”

Another topical shared issue is migration, and the diaspora suffered by Africans when they cross the Mediterranean to Europe and by Latin Americans and Caribbeans when they go to the United States.

In regard to trade, “the experience of Latin America, which through the action of its social movements has been able to stop the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas, promoted by Washington), could be useful for Africa, which is about to negotiate a free trade treaty with the European Union,” Lander said.

“There are other extremely attractive issues, like that of campesina (peasant) women in Latin America and their relationship with women farming their fields in Africa. These issues are addressed by organisations and networks that, in fact, didn’t originate with the WSF, such as the World March of Women,” added Langer.

A few days before the WSF was due to start in Nairobi, activists who were consulted still didn’t know exactly who would be attending from Venezuela, although there was a consensus that they should represent local groups with experience of working with Afro-descendants and their culture.

They all agreed that the intense political activity in Venezuela during the second half of 2006, associated with Chávez’s reelection campaign, had overshadowed the Nairobi WSF among social organisations and activists.

Among those who will be attending, Rafael Uzcátegui of PROVEA, a human rights organisation, told IPS that he would present a view of Venezuela from

the perspective of human rights. According to the organisation’s most recent

annual report, Venezuela has made progress in social assistance programmes, but taken a step backward in terms of the tolerance displayed by those in power towards opposition groups.