Reuters
January 27, 2001
By Shasta Darlington

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jan 27 (Reuters) -- Farmers, union workers and left-wing activists who opted to skip a gathering of world economic leaders in Davos, Switzerland, to attend a rival meeting in Brazil pledged on Saturday to take their movement global in a new era of protest.

"Corporations are transnational and we need to be transnational too if we're going to beat them," Kristen Moller, director of the U.S.-based Global Exchange, told a packed conference room at the alternative meeting in Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil's southernmost state Rio Grande do Sul.

As 10,000 participants from 120 countries and 1,000 organizations got down to work, Moller declared, "This conference marks a new era for the movement."

At separate events, speakers talked about turning the so-called anti-globalization movement into a world-wide political party, about taking the Internet back from multinationals and about creating a global human rights court with real powers to punish.

Due in part to the diversity of participants, organizers do not expect to come up with a single, unifying manifesto at the end of the five-day conference that began on Thursday, but they do hope to reach consensus on a wide range of issues and to expand support networks.

Some of the dominant proposals will be the cancellation of debt for Third World countries, taxing capital flows and alternative trade pacts with more environmental and child labor considerations.

And in a sign that corporate executive officers and central bankers are finally taking notice, prominent personalities at the World Economic Forum in Davos agreed to debate leaders of the "anti-Davos" on Sunday afternoon.

The face-off, which will include financier George Soros in Davos and editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique Bernard Cassen in Porto Alegre, will be carried on the Internet.

But that does not mean the left -- including some who battled police in past trade talks in Seattle and Prague -- has lost its groove.

Instead of cheering the debate as a sign the World Social Forum is a force to be reckoned with, activists complained it would "legitimize" the World Economic Forum.

Che Guevara And Condoms

At Brazil's gathering, Che Guevara T-shirts abound and figures like Jose Bove, the French farmer who trashed his local McDonald's, are treated like movie stars.

Hundreds of students camped out for the World Social Forum in a local urban park received a gift of 10,000 condoms, while visiting dignitaries like former French first lady Danielle Mitterrand are being treated to tours of cooperative farms by the radical Landless Workers Movement (MST).

The euphoria that has dominated the forum ebbed on Saturday, however, when an Argentine activist lashed out at French Foreign Trade Minister Francois Huwart, accusing him of imposing sanctions on Latin American exports.

The forum did, however, come together to issue a statement expressing solidarity for protesters in Davos and condemning police use of water cannons to drive back anti-globalization demonstrators who defied a protest ban on Saturday and tried to march against the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.