World's biggest anti-globalisation event opens

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is hosting one of the world’s largest anti-globalization, anti-war events starting tomorrow – and the timing couldn’t be better.

Leftist leaders are increasingly popular across Latin America, while Chavez’s own “revolution” for the poor has become an inspiration for like-minded activists everywhere from Canada to Chile.

Organisers predict as many as 100,000 people will attend the World Social Forum this week in Caracas, including campaigners against US-style free trade, environmentalists, Indian leaders and human rights activists.

Their views span a wide spectrum, but most participants appear united by strong opposition to the US government and the war in Iraq. The forum will begin with an ”anti-imperialist” march tomorrow through the streets of Caracas, with protesters likely to aim their chants against US President George Bush.

“Venezuela has become an epicentre of change on the world level,” Chavez said on Friday, mentioning the event in a speech. “That’s why (US) imperialism wants to sweep us away, of course … because they say we are a bad example, but they haven’t swept us away and they won’t.”

The Venezuelan leader is expected to address activists on the sidelines of the gathering, soaking up the spotlight as a leading radical voice of the Latin American left.

The World Social Forum was first held in Brazil in 2001 and coincides each year with the market-friendly World Economic Forum of national leaders in Davos, Switzerland.

Those at the social forum, in contrast, traditionally criticise free trade and the evils of capitalism – stances that closely mirror Chavez’s socialist views.

Some 2,000 events – including seminars, speeches, concerts and craft fairs - will be held across Caracas during this week’s forum.

More than 50,000 participants had signed up by yesterday, organisers said. But an estimated 100,000 in all were expected for the six-day event, said Carlos Torres, a Montreal-based Chilean organiser. About half the attendees were expected to come from outside Venezuela.

“The world is changing, and I think leaders like Chavez can provide interesting examples of what can be done to ensure it changes for the better,” said Moritz Lange, 24, who came from Bremen, Germany, to help to organise the forum.

Others expected to attend include Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel and American anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004 and who set up a protest camp near Bush’s ranch in Texas last year.

It remained unclear whether other leftist leaders from Latin America would come. Some activists said they hoped to see Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia or Fidel Castro of Cuba. Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva initially was expected, but then said he would not come.

The recent rise of left-leaning governments in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile makes the event a timely forum to exchange ideas, said Miguel Tinker Salas, a Latin American studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

“It’s an opportune moment, given what’s happening in Latin America and the fact that it brings together these various political forces on the left,” Tinker Salas said in a telephone interview from California.

This year’s social forum is being held in three spots around the world, including one ending today in Bamako, Mali, and another two months from now in Karachi, Pakistan.

Groups from Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil were coming in caravans of buses and cars, while two Colombian environmental groups were pedalling bicycles hundreds of miles to Caracas.

Cyclist David Torres, of the Freedom Horizons Foundation, said in an e-mail during a stop along the way that his group hopes to promote bicycles as an environment-friendly transportation alternative.