Leis, At the World Social Forum

Imagine a city with population similar to that of Panama City, receiving 150,000 people from 60 countries all at once, all of them concentrated in an area provided with a great many canvas canopies where more than a thousand events (debates, lectures, workshops, meetings, roundtables and cultural activities) are held. This area is divided in eleven subject areas, whose names will give you a clue:

Democratic order, sovereign economies, human rights and dignity, peace and demilitarization, people and the communal ownership of land, communication art and creativity; diversity; social struggles; autonomous thought; ethical world views and spirituality.

In the midst of these spaces, 40,000 young people gather in the intercontinental youth camp. All this is known as World Social Forum (WSF) territory. The event held from the 26th to the 31st of January took place on the shores of Lake Guaiba in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegro. It was the fifth world forum and it firmly continues to support its principal motto: "Another world is possible."

The city vibrates with the event's activities, which were preceded by local, regional and subject forums all over the world, and all the public services and infrastructure, especially the hospitality, was poured out on visitors to the forum, which cost about $6 million contributed by the municipality, international donors, forum participants and Brazil's federal government.

A huge, colorful and militant march opens the event, in which ideas, cultural ethnic groups united for the common purpose of humanizing the planet by means of diversity and pluralism cultures are mixed, becoming one pole of a global debate which has its opposite in the economic forum at Davos.

The WSF is a participative space, more and more decentralized, that seeks to join together in an inclusive way the rainbow of social movements, NGOs, political networks and people who believe the situation of inequality, injustice, racism, machismo, war, and world poverty that we are experiencing can and must change in the direction of a better reality. A fundamental aspect of the debate at the WSF is whether it continues to be a space or becomes a more propositive and active entity. The truth is that there were proposals aplenty, hundreds of posters with proposals were clustered together like an enormous menu at the closing ceremonies.

A group of celebrities that included Nobel laureates Saramago and Pérez Esquivel, launched a 12-point manifesto synthesizing many of the proposals, among which are:

• Cancellation of the undeveloped countries' foreign debt.

• Promotion of "fair business" forms, rejecting the "free trade" rules of the WTO.

• Guaranteed food sovereignty and promotion of family agriculture.

• Opposition to the privatization of communal property, especially water.

• Struggle by means of different policies against racism, discrimination, sexism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

• Urgent measures against attacks on the environment.

• The dismantling of military bases and occupation troops in every country in the world.

• Guaranteed citizens' right to information by means of legislation that ends the monopoly of the big communications media, autonomy for journalists, stimulate community media and communications alternatives.

• Reform and democratization of the international institutions such as the UN and the OAS.

• In case of persistent violations of international law by the US, transfer UN headquarters from New York to another city city in the world.

• Affirmation of the citizen's right to decent employment, land and social security.

I had the opportunity to attend the deliberations of the WSF International Committee, as a delegation from the Latin American Council on Adult Education (Consejo de Educacion de Adultos de America Latina, or CEAAL), which also sponsored various activities during the event. In the committee, it was determined to administer the WSF in a decentralized way in 2006 and to concentrate meetings in Africa during 2007. We were invited to a session with President Lula, in which he explained his accomplishments and projects, as a response to the criticisms that arise especially with respect to his performance and the expectations created by his election.

Submerged in the land of WSF, I wonder: Is another world possible? Another Panama possible? Another society possible?

The WSF continues to affirm that they are, and not just in proclamations, but they make a tenacious effort to build it.

Reader, are you resigned to, or frustrated by, reality and do you accept it as immutable?

I beg your pardon, but that is the greatest of defeats.

Despite the adversities and the slashing, brutalizing, marginalizing and exclusionary splintered reality, as the poet Guillermo Delgado wrote, one has to seize hope and to hang on with hands of iron.

Of course another world is possible!

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opinion

In World Social Forum territory