While thousands protested in the streets of New York City during the first World Economic Forum (WEF) to be held outside Davos, Switzerland, nearly 500 other activists from the U.S. spent those first few days of February in southern Brazil among about 80,000 people attending the second annual World Social Forum (WSF).
The protests at the WEF assured both supporters and opponents of the global justice movements, including those who had tried to write our obituary, that the movements' passion and relevance has not decreased in the post-September 11th world. The fact that such protests could take place in New York City, successfully pinning their message on the financial crisis in Argentina and the Enron debacle, and denying the media's hunger for sensationalism and conflict, was a crucial step, and was celebrated by the activists in Brazil.

The New York activists were linked up to the World Social Forum by video feeds on at least three occasions, including at the WSF's opening ceremony. But even with the bonds of solidarity expressed between New York and Porto Alegre, the WSF, in just its second year, has become a self-sufficient phenomenon. With over 80,000 people gathered from every sort of struggle in the world, the link to the WEF feels less and less necessary: the WSF has a vibrant and legitimate existence apart from the fact that some rich people are meeting at the same time.

The WSF was conceived in 2000 by progressive Brazilians as a popular response to the increasingly prominent WEF (commonly called "Davos" after the ski resort in Switzerland where it was held annually from 1971 to 2001). Davos had become the largest and most renowned gathering of the people who were making both the rules and the tremendous profits of the globalizing economy. The idea for the WSF was to bring together a broad range of people working for social change, for human rights, and against the established power of corporations and oppressive and unrepresentative governments. Its slogan, since picked up by many around the world, is "another world is possible."

For many activists, the 2002 WSF was the first opportunity to see familiar faces from around the world since September 11th and the beginning of U.S. military action. Many of us badly needed to compare reactions, impressions, and positions with people from other parts of the world. Just going to Porto Alegre and sharing the experience of a Forum four times the size of last year's was a tremendous vindication: our momentum has not been eroded by recent events, but rather continues to build.

The inclusion of political parties, trade unions, and elected legislators, among many others, and from as many different countries as possible, practically insured that the WSF would not develop a detailed platform that spoke for the entire assembly. Indeed, it is probably more accurate to think of the WSF as a "convention" (in the sense used by trade shows, not U.S. political parties) than a "conference." Without a centralized meeting point or common tasks, the WSF felt more like a large family than an organized whole. Almost no one could have much sense of more than ten percent of what was going on at any given moment.

The organizers of the WSF, many of them Brazilian, have prioritized moving the WSF to new locations within the Global South. But Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul have set a very high standard for others to live up to. That Porto Alegre is the Brazilian city with the highest standard of living, having been governed by the progressive Workers' Party (PT) for over 12 years, and that the city and state (also PT) governments together reportedly contributed more than $1 million to the WSF, intimidates other prospective hosts. Partly for this reason, the WSF will take place for a third time in Porto Alegre in 2003. India, however, looks poised to host the 2004 WSF, possibly in Bhopal, the city poisoned by Union Carbide in 1984.

Porto Alegre, along with the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is itself one of the attractions of the WSF, providing a taste of "another world" being possible. Under the PT government, Porto Alegre has developed a process of "participatory budgeting" open to all residents' input, and has maintained a city that runs as efficiently as any in the Global South, and without the extreme displays of wealth and poverty seen in most other places. The city, home to about 1.25 million people, showed little strain in handling the huge crowds attending the WSF.

Only about a quarter of those coming to Porto Alegre actually register for the WSF, since registration is only required in order to get a program and attend one series of plenary sessions. Registration, however, remains the only way to gauge the size of national delegations (with the proviso that the ratios for Brazil and nearby countries - Argentina and Uruguay - are likely too low). The largest national registered delegations were from Brazil, Italy (with about 1400 registered delegates!), Argentina, France, and the U.S. This year's Forum felt more fully international than last year's. The African Social Forum, held in Bamako, Mali during the first week of January, helped mobilize a greater number of Africans for the WSF, and Focus on the Global South led the way in Asia, bringing a delegation of 50 activists representing countries from Pakistan to Papua New Guinea.

With only about 50 registered delegates last year, those from the U.S. were determined to bring more this year. We had run into a conundrum: the Brazilians and others from the Global South were glad to see Northerners were not dominating the agenda, but felt, perhaps accurately, that the relative absence of U.S. participants was a sign of disrespect for a conference that did not revolve around U.S. concerns or organizing. This year, a high proportion of nearly 500 U.S. activists who came were grassroots organizers from community groups, rather than "think-tank" types. As a consequence the delegation was more diverse, and perhaps less inclined to attempt to "take over" parts of the Forum.

That tendency was more common to the French delegation. Several organizations in France have been instrumental in creating and promoting the WSF, and have combined that effort with rapidly increasing visibility in French politics. While their high profile has led some in the South to be concerned about disproportionate influence for the French (the suspicion that those from the U.S. are usually subject to!), it has also allowed a glimpse of one path to power that the global justice movement is creating. With elections coming up this year in France, six members of the national cabinet felt it important to make an appearance in Porto Alegre, as did three presidential candidates. Three other cabinet members went to New York for the WEF. While we cannot conclude that the French government is likely to become a voice for progressive initiatives against corporate globalization (and indeed one of the ministers, a member of the Communist Party of France, was hit with a pie), such attention to the second WSF, in a country so far away from Paris as Brazil, is an important gauge of how significant a force the global justice movement has become there. That the Belgian Prime Minister, a centrist neo-liberal, wanted to attend but was successfully discouraged at the last minute indicates that the weight of the movement in the region is not restricted to France. The abundance of French journalists in Porto Alegre suggested how the U.S. political scene might look for global justice advocates if genuine campaign finance reform is implemented here.
Like last year, the 2002 WSF was a high-profile landmark in Brazilian politics as well. National elections are scheduled for October, and at this point the PT's candidate, Lula da Silva, leads in the presidential polls. His appearances were mobbed by press and supporters, as were other PT events. The seriousness of the PT and of the global justice movement in the Brazilian context was emphasized by the dramatically increased level of security visible in Porto Alegre. Two PT mayors, including one of Lula's campaign coordinators, had been assassinated in the weeks leading up to the WSF. The national labor federation, the Workers' Central Union (CUT), a very progressive force in Brazil which was instrumental in the creation of both the PT in 1986 and the WSF, was also targeted during the WSF: its São Paulo headquarters was attacked by uniformed men and ransacked.

Many participants at the WSF reported the sense, hardly unusual at conferences and other large events, that the greatest value came from the numerous informal conversations struck up outside formal workshops, seminars, and plenaries. While the WSF made heroic efforts to provide translation between four languages (English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese) for many of the over 800 sessions, there was still, predictably, an element of uncertainty in cross-language communication.

By the same token, a great number of the sessions were well-planned and included a rich variety of perspectives on a plethora of issues vital to the international progressive movements. We were most involved with the sessions dealing with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and therefore, like everyone, felt like we were missing a lot of other opportunities. That's unavoidable when so much activity is compressed into four days. The most popular events were probably those on the U.S. war in Afghanistan (and wherever else), which featured Noam Chomsky, but many people were surprised that this issue, and militarization in general, did not attract more attention.

Jubilee South, the coalition of debt and reparations campaigns in the Global South, sponsored a two-day International Tribunal on the External Debt, with witnesses from dozens of countries providing testimony in an open-air amphitheater. The "sentencing" phase of the tribunal will conclude this month in Washington during the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank - two of the most prominent defendants - with a three-hour session during the morning of April 18.

By far the biggest topic at the WSF was the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement. Dozens of sessions explored its flaws and strategies for defeating it. Brazil is probably the most pivotal country in determining the fate of the FTAA; should the PT win the presidency, it will almost certainly doom the FTAA. Even without a PT victory, the impact of the Argentinean crisis on Brazil, and the awareness among Brazilians that Argentina was destroyed by enthusiastic application of the economic principles embodied in the FTAA, makes Brazil a key target for anti-FTAA activism.
There were plenty of marches and small demonstrations at the WSF, with the most impassioned being the opening day's march and the anti-FTAA march. While some may feel that demonstrating without a government or corporate force to oppose (the central police station in Porto Alegre was decorated with signs welcoming the WSF and expressing support for its causes) seems a little dry, others found it invigorating to be encouraged to express politically radical messages loudly and publicly.

Argentina was never far from people's minds in Porto Alegre. The enormity of the economic disaster there is widely-reported in Brazil. People remember that Argentina was for a long time the most affluent economy in Latin America, and understand that its downfall has much to do with the orthodox, destructive "advice" of the IMF. Just as the Enron debacle has the potential to re-shape the way politics is practiced in the U.S., so Argentina has the potential to bring closer the day when Latin American politicians must finally stand with their people in opposition to the reign of corporate neo-liberal economics. The World Social Forum, while too large and diverse to be a source of a simple, straightforward progressive mandate, will without question be a leading force in bringing about that day in Latin America, and, as it broadens its reach, the rest of the world.