Monday 27, Porto Alegre
While Noam Chomsky attracted a full house at the Gigantinho stadium for a conference entitled "How to stand up to the Empire?", thousands of activists from all over the world got ready to march against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). This event was the last mass event of the Third World Social Forum (WSF), which came to a close on Tuesday 28 in Porto Alegre.
At 6pm, the demonstration set off, with almost as many marchers as had participated in the WSF's inaugural march on Thursday 23. This time the march left from the Gigantinho, in the south of the city, with its destination the city centre, in the north. At one point the march passed the Pôr-do-Sol amphitheatre, where on Saturday Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva had convinced Forum participants that he was right to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos, to transmit the voices of the poor and anti-neo-liberal thinkers from all around the world.
The more than 40,000 demonstrators formed a human column marked by diversity -in terms of gender, nationality, colours and also how they expressed themselves. While some marched in silence, in the late afternoon sunshine, others shouted slogans against the war, against United States president George Bush, against the FTAA, or simply sang and danced to the many drums accompanying the march.
That afternoon, shortly before the march, a press conference had been held in the Catholic University (PUC), with Ricardo Navarro (Friends of the Earth International), Karin Nansen (REDES - Friends of the Earth, Uruguay) and Adilson Vieira (Amazonian Working Group, Brazil). They explained to those present why organized civil society, the main participant in the WSF, was waging a campaign against the FTAA.
The FTAA is a trade integration project that is being negotiated since 1994 by 34 countries on the American continent except Cuba. The talks have the objective of getting this new economic bloc up and running by 2005. Critics within civil society say that this process will only benefit and increase the power of large companies, international banks and the United States government, with serious consequences for the lives and fate of the peoples of America.
The popular movements aim to make clear to the population the negative effects that the FTAA will have and to construct an alternative which respects sovereignty and democracy, and which will positively integrate all the countries in America.
In Brazil, the anti-FTAA movement is in the midst of a campaign demanding that an official plebiscite be called, so that the population of the largest country in South America can decide with full sovereignty whether Brazil should be party to this free trade agreement.
