http://www.luisjrodriguez.com/blog/2006/01/another-world-is-possible.htmlThe ride from the main airport in Venezuela to the capital city of Caracas took close to three hours, normally a half hour ride, due to bridge construction that complicated the accommodation of some 300,000 visitors to the World Social Forum here (with the slogan "Another World is Possible"). The re-routing took our bus through mountainous and heavily trafficked roads laden with shacks and poor people selling food and refreshments as traffic moved like molasses. Venezuela, as most Latin American countries, is extremely poor. Before you get to the main center of Caracas, you have to pass the poor dwellings, built as if on top of one another, in the outskirts.
Yet, Venezuela is in a revolutionary process, as the young members of the Frente Francisco de Miranda say, to remove poverty, erase illiteracy, and help become a beacon for social equitable change in the hemisphere.
I came as a delegate of the Poor Peoples Economic and Human Rights Campaign from the United States, representing leaders among the homeless, migrant workers, inner-city poor, Native American reservations, and in the battles of health care, decent housing, education, and dignity in the richest country of the world. The irony of bringing US leaders among the poor is not lost on me as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the government-owned oil industry have made numerous offers to get gas and heating oil to the poorest sectors of the US.
I also came as a writer for the various magazines and radio outlets I freelance for. This, as you can see, is not a contradiction. I can be part of a movement and I can also bring out the voices, stories, truths of this vitally engaging conference, its mission, and diverse participants.
There is a US Tent where many groups, including PPEHRC, will hold panels, reading, and press conference. On Thursday night, January 26, at 7 PM, I will do a poetry reading and lead a talk on the major issues facing the poor in the US.
My first night in Caracas involved trying to find a place to stay (some of our party ended up sleeping under the US tent in the cold). I was able to hook up an $18 (which translates into 40,000 Bolivars) in a rundown section of the city (few amenities and lots of cockroaches). I didnt mind since I’ve slept in park benches, in caves, and hammocks in Mexico and other countries Ive visited.
The highlight of my first evening was an impromptu talking circle with members of the PPEHRC delegation (which included a cross section of US activists) and the youth leaders of the Frente Francisco De Miranda, presently active in the re-election this year of Hugo Chavez and the continued growth of the Venezuelan Revolution.
The country seems to be united on the need to end poverty and have the world come here to witness as well as to voice the intricacies and complexities of this process. I was particularly impressed with the intelligence, spirit, and selfless efforts of the Frente to make sure the US delegation was taken care of, protected, fed, and talked to.
There are some people I met who had bad things to say about Mr. Chavez and the whole revolution, including the hotel proprietor who, when he found out we were part of the World Social Forum, threw four of our company out of the hotel (thus their night in the open), despite our pleas and willingness to accommodate them. He said he had to follow "rules of business." We said, damn the rules, people shouldn’t be forced to walk the streets at night looking for places to stay, especially guests of the country. Fortunately, most Venezuelans were hospitable and self-sacrificing, particularly to the needs of the many foreigners in their country.
Today, I hope to make some connections as well as interviews to leaders in the US delegation, the Venezuelan Revolution, and among the many visitors from around the world.
posted by Luis J. Rodriguez at 11:49 AM
Email: LRodrig555@aol.com
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http://www.luisjrodriguez.com/bio/bio.html
Biography
Luis J. Rodriguez has emerged as one of the leading Chicano writers in the country with ten nationally published books in memoir, fiction, nonfiction, children’s literature, and poetry. Luis’ poetry has won a Poetry Center Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award, and “Foreword” magazine’s Silver Book Award, among others. His two children’s books have won a Patterson Young Adult Book Award, two “Skipping Stones” Honor Award, and a Parent’s Choice Book Award, among others. A novel, Music of the Mill, was published in the spring of 2005 by Rayo/HarperCollins; a poetry collection, My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, 1989-2004, came out in the fall of 2005 from Curbstone Press/Rattle Edition.
Luis is best known for the 1993 memoir of gang life, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. An international best seller—with more than 20 printings, around 250,000 copies sold—the memoir also garnered a Carl Sandburg Literary Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Book Award, and was designated a New York Times Notable Book. Written as a cautionary tale for Luis’ then 15-year-old son Ramiro—who had joined a Chicago gang—the memoir is popular among youth and teachers. Despite this, the American Library Association in 1999 called Always Running one of the 100 most censored books in the United States. Efforts to remove his books from public school libraries and reading lists have occurred in Illinois, Michigan, Texas, and more recently in California, where the battles were quite heated.
Yet for all the controversy, Luis has gained the respect of the literary community. In addition to the above honors, he has received a Sundance Institute Art Writers Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Lannan Fellowship for Poetry, an Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, a National Association for Poetry Therapy Public Service Award, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an Illinois Author of the Year Award, several Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the 2001Premio Fronterizo, and “Unsung Heroes of Compassion” Award, presented by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Luis is also known for helping start a number of prominent organizations—such as Chicago’s Guild Complex, one of the largest literary arts organizations in the Midwest, and the publishing house of Tia Chucha Press. He is also one of the founders of Youth Struggling for Survival, a Chicago-based not-for-profit community group working with gang and nongang youth. He helped start Rock A Mole (rhymes with guacamole) Productions, which produces music/arts festivals, CDs, and film in Los Angeles. And he is a cofounder of Tia Chucha’s Café & Centro Cultural—a bookstore, coffee shop, performance space, art gallery, and workshop center that opened in December 2001 in the Northeast San Fernando Valley.
On top of this, Luis has spent some twenty five years conducting workshops, readings, and talks in prisons, juvenile facilities, homeless shelters, migrant camps, universities, public and private schools, conferences, Native American reservations, and men’s retreats throughout the United States. He has also traveled to Canada, Europe, Mexico, Central America, and Puerto Rico doing similar work among disaffected populations. In addition, he’s editor of the new Chicano online magazine, Xispas.com.
Luis has been part of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation’s Men’s Conferences since 1994 with Mosaic founder Michael Meade, healer Orland Bishop, West African teacher-elder Malidoma Somé and American Buddhist Jack Kornfield. At these conferences, the complex but vital issues of race, class, gender, and personal rage are addressed with dialogue, ritual, story, poetry, and art involving men of all walks of life, including those in urban street gangs. He also created a CD of original music and his poems called “My Name’s Not Rodriguez” for Dos Manos Records, released in the summer of 2002.
Luis’ work has also been widely anthologized, including in Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters (1997 Broadway Books/Kodansha American), and most recently in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999 Thunder’s Mouth Press) and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (2001 Three Rivers Press). His poems and articles have appeared in college and high school textbooks throughout the United States and Europe. He has done radio productions and writing for LA’s KPFK-FM, California Public Radio as well as Chicago’s WMAQ-AM’s All-News radio and WBEZ-FM. And his writings have appeared over the last twenty-five years in The Nation, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, U.S. News & World Report, LA Weekly, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, American Poetry Review, San Jose Mercury, Grand Street, Utne Reader, Prison Life, Progressive Magazine, Rock & Rap Confidential, among others. In 2005, he was asked to become a contributing writer to the LA Time’s “West” magazine. {See Websource...}
Order the works of Luis J. Rodriguez from Amazon.com
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Related Articles on World Social Forum:
http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/wsf2006/viewstory.asp?idnews=510
TIME TO WALK THE TALK?
Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 26 (IPS) - The debate on whether the World Social Forum (WSF) should remain merely a space for reflection and protest or should move on to proposals for concrete action once again emerged at the sixth edition of the annual global civil society meet, taking place in the Venezuelan capital this week.
The discussion on moving "from protests to proposals" began last year at the fifth edition of the Forum, in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, where the WSF was first held in 2001.
The social movements "emerged as a tool of defence against imperialism. But a change has occurred, because now they have moved into an offensive phase," said Jacobo Torres, with the Bolivarian Workers Force, a Venezuelan trade union that supports leftist President Hugo Chávez.
As part of the offensive, which also involves the current wave of centre-left or leftist governments in Latin America, Torres mentioned "the consolidation of a common space for grassroots groups to meet up." He was not only talking about the annual WSF gatherings, but also the "people´s summits" held in opposition to the periodic Summits of the Americas.
The debate on whether or not the Forum should move towards action is taking place this week in a country whose government proclaims itself to be revolutionary and on the path to a still-undefined "21st century socialism", and whose leader, Chávez, has been an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy.
Many of the foreign participants taking part in the Forum were at least partly moved to come by an urge to obtain a firsthand view of the changes that the Chávez administration has brought about, mainly through his social programmes - known here as "missions" - in the areas of health, education and food security.
Brazil's leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's former chief of staff José Dirceu praised Chávez's "Bolivarian social revolution", which he described as a "process that is unique in South America, where for the first time, oil revenues are being distributed in order to, slowly but surely, bring about change ."
Dirceu said in Caracas that the Forum was held here because of the process of change that Venezuela is undergoing, which is "based on real participation by the people."
The WSF "is the embryo of an 'assembly of humanity', which is not aimed at homogeneous thought, but at allowing diverse movements to organise without submitting to a single way of thinking," said French journalist Ignacio Ramonet, the director of the Le Monde Diplomatique newspaper and one of this week´s speakers.
In his view, the Forum "has become the voice of those who are suffering from globalisation," and the idea is for people to listen to each other, in order to move towards a collective grassroots vision.
For his part, South African activist Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, maintained that to dismiss the WSF "as simply an 'anti-globalisation' movement is to ignore, among other things, the fact that it is one of the most globalised movements in the history of this planet."
"Although it would be a mistake to straitjacket all WSF delegates into an artificially-constructed consensus on policy positions, it is important that the Forum correct the myth that there are no major policy directions that most WSF delegates share and advocate - both within and outside of the WSF," he added.
A survey carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE) at last year's Forum in Porto Alegre revealed that 60 percent of the participants considered themselves to be leftist, while 19.8 percent described themselves as centre-left.
Last year's WSF witnessed the emergence of a "hard line" in favour of strengthening the activist aspect of the event, when two of the Forum's founders, Emir Sader of Brazil and Samir Amin of Egypt, urged participating intellectuals to adopt a manifesto calling for concrete actions and a more clear-cut political stance.
"The utopian outlook of the earlier forums seems to be fading in Caracas, and there are those who want to bring about an extreme shift towards a more political nature," commented Plinio Arruda Sampaio, a leftist Brazilian community activist who has participated in previous WSF meets.
According to Sampaio, the Forum "is facing a delicate moment, and will have to decide what course to take with caution, because it is in danger of losing much of the ground gained since 2001, when it emerged as a counter-current to the World Economic Forum," which hosts an annual meeting of the world's business, economic and political elite in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.
"It seems that some people come to the Forum to sell their own fish, when they should really be coming here to see all of the fish that are being offered," he added.
In Bamako, Mali, which served last week as the African venue for this year's polycentric WSF - Karachi will host another Forum session in March -, ActionAid International chief executive Ramesh Singh stressed the importance of the WSF as a "large space" that has been created and enhanced.
"WSF started as protest; it is now a search for alternatives. The next logical step is action - without losing that space. Whether the WSF itself takes action is a different issue," said Singh.
Edgardo Lander, a member of the Venezuelan organising committee, admitted that the WSF "is relatively fragile, and must be handled with care. It is a political forum, which undertakes campaigns, but it could be hurt by a more militant commitment."
"Sometimes we talk about the need for campesinos (peasant farmers) to be incorporated into efforts towards development, but without knowing hardly anything about this matter. That is why it is important for urban movements to listen to campesino and workers' organisations, and vice versa," he added.
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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31806
WORLD SOCIAL FORUM:
The Great Debate in a Land of Change
Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 17 (IPS) - Some 100,000 social activists from across the Americas and the world will soon be arriving in the Venezuelan capital, where they will condemn war and imperialism, and lend their support -- although not unconditionally -- to the changes introduced in this country by President Hugo Chávez.
The sixth annual World Social Forum (WSF) is being held at several different sites this year, instead of one centralised forum as in the first five editions. In addition to the Americas forum in Caracas Jan. 24-29, the African forum will take place in Bamako, Mali, Jan. 19-23, and the Asian meet will be in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi in March.
In Venezuela the WSF "will find a process of transformation that has incorporated some of the policies of mass movements in this continent and in other regions. People come to the forum to speak and debate, but also to see and learn," Carlos Torres, of the Canadian non-governmental organisation Alternatives, told IPS.
The Venezuelan government is carrying out agrarian reform, redistributing government land and large private estates. It has launched mass literacy and adult education programmes, and set up basic health centres across the country -- many staffed by Cuban doctors. Outlets for subsidised food have also been put in place nationwide.
As for foreign relations, Chávez speaks out strongly against the U.S. government and President George W. Bush, and is critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He defends high crude oil prices and works to strengthen the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). And, under Chávez's policies, Venezuela supplies fuel to Caribbean and Latin American countries on preferential terms, as a form of cooperation.
"Of course the forum is neither apolitical nor antipolitical. It is political, it is a meeting of social organisations that have their own world view," Edgardo Lander of the Latin American Social Sciences Council, co-organiser of the WSF, told IPS.
When Venezuela was proposed last year as the next venue, at the fifth WSF in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, there was some worry about the potential "Chávezation" of the event, because of the host president's outsized personality, but particularly his activism, as he seeks re-election in December. His confrontational attitude towards Washington, and his forging of Latin American alliances using Venezuelan oil were also listed as points of concern.
"Although it does provide Chávez with an opportunity to show thousands of social activists from all over the world what he does, a lot of people who take part in the WSF have a left-wing view of society, and are interested in seeing as well as discussing," Francisco Iturraspe, of the Latin American Association of Labour Lawyers, said in an interview with IPS.
The WSF Hemispheric Council met with Chávez one year ago, Lander said, "and we explained the nature of the forum to him, as self-managing and non-paternalist, which is not Bolivarian (as the president defines himself) or Chavist, and he acquiesced."
The WSF Charter of Principles states that it is a non-governmental and non-party entity.
Jacobo Torres, of the trade union Bolivarian Workers' Force, told IPS that, precisely because of these scruples, Chávez will participate outside of the official WSF programme. The president will attend a rally on the night of Jan. 25, to which Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) and the international peasant movement Via Campesina are also invited.
On the last day of the forum there will also be a meeting between Chávez and leaders of the World Assembly of Social Organisations, an initiative of the WSF as an alternative to the annual World Economic Forum, a meeting of the economic élite at the Swiss alpine resort of Davos.
Lander remarked, however, that the WSF originally understood itself to be part of civil society, "something new, good, uncontaminated by traditional politics, which were perceived as being rather dirty. But the truth is that when the thematic axes of the 6th Forum were decided, most of the activities involved political debate."
The first theme is "Power, politics and the fight for social emancipation," with debates about states, political parties and social movements, as well as practical resistance against domination and political violence.
The second is "Imperial strategies and peoples' resistance," covering topics from imperialist military expansion to terrorism and free trade.
In "Resources and rights for life: alternatives to the predatory model of civilisation," there will be discussions about capitalism, privatisation of resources, global warming, desertification and the right to health.
The fourth axis is on "Diversity, identities and worldviews in motion," that is, peoples, indigenous nations and Afro-descendants, dialogue between religions, gender identities and sexual diversity.
The fifth theme is "Work, exploitation and reproduction of life," about the increasing precariousness of employment, as well as exclusion, inequality and poverty.
Finally, there is "Communication, culture and education: alternative and democratising dynamics," on the right to communication, social appropriation of technology, and artistic versus hegemonic production.
In addition to Chávez, another president expected to make a showing at the Caracas WSF is Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil was the birthplace of the WSF, with Porto Alegre hosting the event four of the five first years, and Lula has called this social conclave an "ideological fair."
Lander disagrees, because "although (the WSF) brings together organisations that think differently, there is continuity in its campaigns and it's a place where networks can be formed, such as those that oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or are against the war in Iraq, or the policy of the World Trade Organisation, or against foreign debt."
All these networks "have a privileged place at the forum, to evaluate the work done and analyse present circumstances, and to put their plans into effect. The WSF isn't only for exchanging experiences, meeting other people and celebrating life," stated Lander.
Nearly 2,000 activities registered for the Americas WSF will take place in about 250 meeting rooms, tents and open spaces in the "forum territory," which is actually made up of four public spaces in Caracas. The central area of the city is home to three million people.
Outside Caracas there will be a Youth Camp, and organisers are appealing to city residents to provide low-cost lodging in their homes, in the name of solidarity. They are hoping that the closure of the highway connecting the capital to its airport due to a bridge collapse will not discourage participants from abroad.
"We expect that up to 30,000 foreign participants will come by air, and another 30,000 by land, from Brazil and Colombia," said Zuraima Martínez, another forum organiser.
The largest delegations will be from Venezuela and Brazil, and from Colombia, which is "of interest to us because of the anti-imperialist nature of the forum," said Carlos Torres.
What is the connection between Colombia and the anti-imperialist stance? "Because the Colombia Plan (against drug trafficking and insurgency) functions to a large extent as a cog in the empire's machinery," Lander explained, in reference to the heavy financial and military backing from the United States.
"Some people see (Colombian) President Álvaro Uribe as the Latin American (Israeli prime minister, Ariel) Sharon, an executor or spokesman, like Mexican President Vicente Fox, of imperialist policy," he said.
"Our idea is to show that in these conflicts of interest, direct relationships between the people of different countries are important. Compared with these relationships between people, the states themselves are often fiction," Lander insisted.
(END/2006)
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