New York Times | February 7, 2002 | By Simon Romero
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil - The 40,000 people who gathered here for the World Social Forum, the antiglobalization alternative to the World Economic Forum in New York, had adopted the motto, "Another world is possible."
By the time this meeting concluded, though, it was clear that the refrain, "Politics is local," won out. Brazilian leftist organizations seized control of the event, which closed today, making it more than anything a campaign stop for the country's coming presidential election. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the presidential candidate of the socialist Workers Party, acted statesmanlike at a leisurely lunch on Saturday with representatives of the French left.
A procession during the forum appeared scripted to describe this city's populist legacy, with a crowd of people marching in the hot sun in penitence for their sins, a group of political dignitaries on a shaded platform and a historical sketch by performers of this frontier region, which was a battleground for centuries between Portugal and Spain.
The politicians included Gov. Olivio Dutra, a Workers Party leader who was asked by a young man in the crowd to sign a copy of "Empire," the book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that is a kind of diagnosis of 21st-century global capitalism.
"It would be my pleasure," Mr. Dutra said.
Many of the visitors came here for political reasons too. Three French presidential candidates and half a dozen cabinet ministers attended. In fact, French politicians and their aides seemed more numerous than members of organizations like Attac, the Paris-based group seeking a global tax on financial transactions.
Those elements clashed on Monday, when French students threw a pie in the face of Marie-George Buffet, the minister of youth and sports, who is a Communist Party member.
All this did not stop several vague declarations from being signed supporting world peace, opposing free trade in the Americas or condemning United States military action.
Anti-American sentiment abounded even as the number of delegates from the United States this year, the forum's second, climbed to several hundred from a dozen last year. One popular T-shirt among fringe groups compared Osama bin Laden to Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Jesus. No American flags were burned, though, apparently out of respect for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The forum is not strong in proposing ideas," Mr. Hardt, who took part in a national sovereignty debate here, said in an interview. "My perception was that one position represented by the Brazilians and French wants to weaken globalization with strengthened national power while others from a North Atlantic mindset aren't interested in that at all."
As at the World Economic Forum in New York, which concluded on Monday, this forum's debates included much on Argentina's crisis but not much on the collapse of Enron, which has extensive interests in big developing countries like India and Brazil. A notable exception was a column in the newspaper Zero Hora by Luis Fernando Verissimo, who called Enron a "learning shock against all the neo-liberal arguments for our wallets and our minds."
"Neo-liberalism" and its proponents' aspirations to construct an economy with fewer tariffs and less regulatory malfeasance was the subject of much ire. So were global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which were barred from the meeting. Others moved past anti-globalization attacks, though, and set about using the event for networking.
"I was amazed at how the concept of corporate responsibility has grown in Brazil," said Mark Ritchie of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. "Meeting those people was invaluable in my efforts to better understand the ambitions of big Brazilian agricultural players."
In the end, however, little of substance was accomplished. There was some talk about scheduling next year's meeting in another part of the developing world, perhaps in Africa, but local political interests won out. The next forum will again be in Porto Alegre, though it is not certain if the socialists will still be in control of the local government a year from now.
More than anything, the event seemed to illustrate democracy's strength in this nation of 170 million, which emerged from military rule a decade-and-a-half ago. The federal government did not interfere with the meeting, organized by the socialist opposition. There were few violent incidents or protests. Some considered the variety of ideas swapped here a healthy illustration of the debate over global capitalism.
"No one in New York or Davos or Porto Alegre or anywhere else for that matter is really capable of anything more than a diagnosis of the contemporary situation," the Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar said in an interview. "The political horrors of the twentieth century taught us that it's better we don't leave here with a magic formula."
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