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by MARC COOPER [posted online on January 25, 2003] Porto Alegre, Brazil Friday Night

The highpoint of this year's World Social Forum was reached earlier this evening when newly elected Brazilian president "Lula" showed up to address an outdoor crowd of as many as 75,000 cheering supporters. Accompanied by seventeen of his cabinet ministers, this was the socialist president's first visit to this city of 1.2 million since he formally took office on January 1.

Lula arrived before the sea of waving flags and cheering voices on his way to Davos, Switzerland, where he was invited to deliver an address to the World Economic Forum, the yearly gathering of the globe's corporate and political elite. (The Social Forum held here in Brazil was founded three years ago as a "people's" alternative to the Davos meetings.)

Lula, who as a child worked as a bootblack, dropped out of school, and then as a metal worker led strikes against Brazil's military dictatorship, went on to found the leftist Workers Party in 1979--a unique amalgam of Marxist, Trotskyist, Catholic and democratic populist currents. Last fall he was elected President with a resounding 61 percent of the votes.

Speaking in a simple, conversational style, he told his crowd of supporters tonight that his new government was committed to reforming a "global economic system in which some people eat five times a day and others eat only once every five days." At one point in his speech when referring to children who go hungry at night, the new Brazilian president's voice wavered on tears.

Openly recognizing that Brazil is saddled with crushing debt and onerous obligations to international financial institutions like the IMF, Lula said that while he "would not cede an inch" on his campaign promises of reform, progress would nevertheless be achieved "cautiously." There was a smattering of hisses from the radical fringes of the crowd when he pronounced that word--but they were drowned out by thousands who throatily roared the trademark sing-song slogan "Olé! Olé! Ola! Lu-La! Lu-La!"

Lula's popularity is downright contagious in Brazil: Latin America's most powerful economy but one of the most unequal societies in the world. Lula is the first President in Brazilian history who looks, talks and indeed is of the bottom half of the population. All around the Port Do Sol amphitheater where he appeared tonight, a crop of what you might call "Lula Stores" mushroomed, busily selling Lula T-shirts, Lula calendars, Lula key chains, even Lula mouse pads, as well as stacks of the Workers Party red-and-gold flags.

"I know that my election has raised hopes not only among you, but also among the entire international left," Lula said in conclusion, "and that makes me even more aware of the heavy responsibilities I now bear." As Lula was finishing his half-hour speech, the crowd began to shout "Fica! Fica!" Stay! Stay! I'd love to see an American presidential candidate pull that off on the stump.

Earlier in the day thousands of delegates attended the first full day of the third annual World Social Forum crowding into a panoply of dozens--more like scores--of conferences, panel discussions, workshops and lectures on just about every imaginable aspect of globalization. With the threat of imminent war in Iraq weighing heavily over the conference, the most heavily attended events were those that focused on militarization. Thousands jammed into a local arena to hear speakers like author Tariq Ali analyze the Bush Administration's plans for the Middle East.

In another roundtable discussion, international trade activists, including Martin Khor of Malaysia and Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, outlined the high stakes in play at the next ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization, scheduled to take place this September in Cancun, Mexico. Over the next few days activists and organizers here will be informally networking, developing joint plans for mass demonstrations against the WTO meeting as well as strategies for opposing the looming Free Trade Area of the Americas--the continent-wide trade pact being pushed by the Bush White House.

Indeed, Porto Alegre the week of the World Social Forum becomes a heaven-on-earth for political networkers of every stripe. With 29,000 delegates in town from all over the world, and three times that number of "participants," onlookers and political tourists, it's virtually impossible to escape the activist buzz. Today during a brief time-out I took in my hotel bar, I had former French First Lady Danielle Mitterrand and legendary McDonalds-masher José Bové sitting at the table to the right of me, the former president of the Brazilian central trade union federation to my left and a radical Spanish mayor in front of me. Whom to talk to first?

www.nytimes.com By TONY SMITH

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jan. 24 — Urging the rich world to make peace not war, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged today to champion the cause of all poor countries when he addresses the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this weekend.

Raising whoops and cheers from a crowd of tens of thousands of antiglobalization activists gathered in this southern Brazilian city for the third annual World Social Forum, Mr. da Silva promised that his message to the cream of international finance and politics meeting in the Swiss Alps would be blunt.

"A lot of people in Davos don't like me, although they don't even know me," the Brazilian president said. "But in Davos I will say exactly what I say here.

"We need a new world economic order that distributes wealth more fairly," he said, "so that impoverished countries have a chance of becoming less impoverished, so that African babies have the same right to eat as a blond, blue-eyed baby born in Scandinavia."

Mr. da Silva, a former metalworker and union leader won a landslide election victory in October, but he has been savaged by the radical wings of his Workers' Party and the antiglobalization movement for agreeing to attend the World Economic Forum, seen here as antithetical to Porto Alegre's grass-roots meeting.

But his address today touched all the right buttons with the crowd, which gathered at a riverside park.

The loudest cheers came when Mr. da Silva, standing on a stage draped with a banner reading "No to Imperialism! Against the Imperialist War!" spoke out against a possible war against Iraq.

"The world doesn't need war, it needs peace and understanding," he said. "I often wonder why, instead of spending billions and billions of dollars on arms, they don't spend it on bread, rice and beans that could help feed the poor of the world."

However radical his speech at Davos may be, Mr. da Silva will also have to strike a more pragmatic note behind the scenes when he confers with the international movers and shakers there.

Fears — so far unfounded — that Mr. da Silva might steer Brazil off the free-market course that it has plied for the past decade, sent the country's currency, stock and bond markets tumbling last year, and they are only just recovering.

With foreign investment in the country slowing, Brazil must export more to keep its books balanced. But to do that its cash-starved exporters need credit lines from abroad, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of them, cut off during the election campaign, have yet to be restored.

For now, by appointing a market-friendly finance minister and central bank chief, Mr. da Silva has managed to keep the financial markets healthy, while still talking tough about redressing Brazil's appalling gap between haves and have-nots.

He also gained a vote of confidence on Friday from Anne Krueger, the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which last year approved a $30 billion loan package for Brazil. Speaking in Davos, Ms. Krueger said the new Brazilian government's efforts to maintain fiscal and monetary discipline were "a step forward."

Mr. da Silva might be walking a tightrope, but most analysts agreed he had to play both sides to start a dialogue between rich and poor.

"The reality is that he has to have a foot in both worlds," said John Schmitt, a labor economist from Washington. "A dialogue has to be possible."

Ex-Leftist In the Center As Brazil Votes Again

www.guardian.co.uk Saturday January 25, 2003 12:40 AM

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (AP) - Anti-globalization protesters greeted Brazil's new leftist president like a rock star at the World Social Forum on Friday, cheering the one-time revolutionary as one of their own.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told a crowd of tens of thousands that he will fight Brazil's grinding poverty and rampant corruption, oppose war and urge rich nations to help bring the Third World out of misery.

``I want to tell the world 'What a wonderful world it would be if instead of spending money on arms and war, the rich world would spend its money on buying food,'' the recently elected president said to thunderous applause.

Activists waving bright red flags chanted ``Lula! Lula!'' - as Silva is popularly known.

Silva, who was inaugurated on Jan. 1, earlier had breakfast with the socialist mayor of Porto Alegre, talked with forum organizers and held an afternoon meeting with former Portuguese President Mario Soares, founder of Portugal's socialist party.

Soares said Silva, who has made fighting hunger in Brazil his top priority, is ``real proof that there can be social participation in government.''

Hundreds of Brazilians and foreigners attending the six-day forum chanted ``Lula! Our President!'' when Silva visited Porto Alegre's state government palace earlier Friday.

Some 100,000 activists are attending more than 1,700 sessions and workshops on topics ranging from corporate misdeeds to Third World debt as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum being held simultaneously in Switzerland.

Silva spoke on the same stage where Brazilian pop stars like Jorge Ben Jor are putting on shows at the end of each day of the forum.

There's never been a president of Brazil who's been a laborer,'' said Emilio Penna, a 26-year-old Uruguayan university student. Politics have always been in the hands of the rich.''

Silva also defended his decision to travel to the Swiss alpine resort on Saturday to join the meetings of government and business leaders that are the focus of the protests in Brazil.

Many people in Davos don't like me and don't want to meet me,'' he said. I want to make a point of going to Davos and saying to them that it is not possible to have an economic model where a few people eat five times a day and many people go five days without eating.''

The son of a poor farmer, Silva dropped out of school to help support his family and became a symbol of hope for Latin America's impoverished millions after his landslide election in October.

In an indirect reference to a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq, Silva told forum organizers he is against war to resolve international conflicts, according to foreign relations adviser Marco Aurelio Garcia.

Later, in his speech, he said it makes no sense for countries to spend billions of dollars on war while millions of children don't get enough to eat. And without naming the United States, he criticized the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba.

Crowds mobbed the smiling president when he arrived in a motorcade at his hotel late Thursday night. Frustrating his security detail, the former union leader spent 10 chaotic minutes shaking hands and hugging admirers outside the hotel and inside its lobby.

Some activists were critical that Silva was going to mingle with the rich and powerful in Davos, but others conceded it's only natural that he would attend both events now that he's president of the country with the planet's fifth-largest population and 12th-biggest economy.

He is a symbol of new hopes that a poor country can solve its problems,'' said Brazilian electronics salesman Eduardo Martins da Costa, 34. And he has to speak more rationally now, not with as much radicalism like he did before.''

abcnews.go.com RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil Jan. 25 —

Marina Silva spent her childhood collecting sap from rubber trees and planting subsistence crops in Brazil's vast wilderness. She was 14 before she learned to tell time or do arithmetic.

Now, after a remarkable rise from poverty and illiteracy to the highest levels of government, the 44-year-old Silva has been named environment minister the top guardian of the forests where she grew up.

Dubbed "the forest senator" for her ecology crusades while a legislator, Marina Silva called her appointment a challenge "not just for me but for the whole government."

The major task she faces is saving the world's largest remaining tropical rain forest where an area the size of Belgium is cut down every year.

Silva grew up in those forests, in an Amazon village that had no schools. She she couldn't read until age 16, when she went to convent school, getting 12 years worth of education in four years. She later went on to a university and becoming a professor.

She suffered repeated bouts of malaria and years later, mercury poisoning from the treatments. It was a case of hepatitis at age 16 that took her to the state capital, Rio Branco, for treatment.

She decided to stay on working as a house maid, because she wanted to study and dreamed of becoming a nun.

She discovered Marxism at the Federal University of Acre and became a social activist. In the 1980s she began a political career, rising through the Rio Branco city council, a state senate, and finally, the national senate.

Environmentalists said her appointment as environment chief by leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shows the importance Brazil's first working-class president places on the environment.

"The choice of someone like Senator Marina shows that the environment will play a strategic role in this government," said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth Brazil.

But Smeraldi wonders if she will have the necessary tools to make a difference.

"The ministry ... today lacks the structure, budget and culture to do its job," he said. "To take advantage of all Marina has to offer would require a profound restructuring of the environment ministry."

Critics also question whether the success Silva had promoting sustainable development in her home state of Acre can be transferred to other parts of the Amazon. Silva says the solution is sound forestry management.

"You have thousands and thousands of people that live from this activity (logging)," she said. "The state has to do what it can to regulate it and create the conditions for it to be done sustainably.

www.heraldtribune.com

Protesters of the Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil wave a Venezuelan flag as they demonstrate against US policies for Venezuela and Iraq at the Third World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil Saturday, Jan. 25, 2003. The forum is an annual protest against the World Economic Forum held simultaneously in Davos, Switzerland.

By STAN LEHMAN Associated Press Writer

President Bush wants to establish a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Argentina, but if participants at the World Social Forum have their way, he'll never pull it off.

A collection of activists ranging from poor Bolivian farmers and Ecuadorean Indians to the poverty relief group Oxfam International said Saturday that the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, would translate into a U.S. annexation of Latin American economies.

Bush wants to form the 34-nation bloc by 2005, eliminating tariffs to create the world's largest free trade zone. Cuba would be excluded, because membership is limited to countries with democratically elected governments.

Activists at the six-day social forum, a counter-conference to the simultaneous World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, say the FTAA would mainly benefit large multinational corporations and hurt Latin American farmers who can't compete with agricultural giants based in the United States.

The Brazil forum has drawn about 100,000 participants, offering 1,700 sessions and workshops on topics ranging from corporate misdeeds to Third World debt.

One participant is Zacarias Calatayud, a Bolivian farmer in his 40s, who used to grow rice, sugarcane and potatoes on 20 acres in the country's tropical north. He was put out of business when cheap imported farm products started flooding into Boliva from Brazil and Argentina.

Those imports started in the late 1990s, when Bolivia joined the South American Mercosur trading bloc as an associated member. Now Calatayud farms just one acre, to feed his family.

"With Mercosur we're already living with a smaller FTAA," Calatayud said. "With the FTAA, we'll end up in the streets of the cities, abandoning our plots and building shacks."

Oxfam released a report Saturday criticizing the agreement, saying it favors investors but would increase Latin American poverty.

For comparison, Oxfam cited Mexico's 3 million corn farmers, who have seen the price of their product drop 50 percent since the NAFTA trade agreement with the United States and Canada went into effect.

"The poorest people of Latin America live in rural areas and they are the people who depend on agriculture," said Simon Ticehurst, Oxfam's Mexico campaign coordinator.

The trade agreement would probably be phased in over five to 10 years, meaning that Latin American farmers who never learned other skills would be displaced without jobs, said Mark Weisbrot, an economist who co-directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

"The United States went from 1870 to 1970 from having 56 percent of our population in agriculture to 4.6 percent," he said. "Imagine compressing this into a five or 10-year period: It's a recipe for social explosion."

Manuel Masaquiza of Ecuador's National Indian Conference called the FTAA "the birth of a monster that will devour the poor and marginalized of Latin America."

Ecuador's Indians, already the country's poorest citizens, doubt they can compete with an anticipated flood of American products if the trade agreement goes through, Masaquiza said.

Latin America will simply turn into a cheap source of labor and a huge consumer market for U.S. goods, said Doris Trujillo, an Ecuadorean Kichwas Indian dressed in a black felt fedora-style hat and a red-and-black poncho.

"The FTAA will bankrupt farmers and small businessmen who will not be able to compete with the United States," she said.

Even an association of small U.S. farmers sent a representative to Brazil to protest the agreement.

It "is a very tangible boogeyman out to get Latin America and spread the power of capitalism and multinationals in the region," said Dena Hoff, of the Washington-based National Family Farm Coalition.

Last modified: January 25. 2003 1:27PM