Taking Note
PL
Sao Paulo Forum VI in San Salvador In this era of neoliberalism, the mainstream press tends to ridicule and misrepresent attempts by the left to rethink its objectives and methods. The...
...It also served as a reminder that even as it struggles to redefine itself, the left has not fallen into the dustbin of history, as its critics predicted...
...Unfortunately, in the end, the San Salvador meeting failed to produce much in terms of concrete policy proposals...
...This caricature of the left bears little resemblance to reality...
...The New York Times did no less in its July 29 story, headlined "A Chastened Latin Left Puts Its Hope In Ballots," in reference to the recent meeting of the Sdo Paulo Forum...
...The San Salvador session was, in fact, the sixth meeting of the Forum (the fourth, indeed, was held in the beleaguered Havana of the "special period" in 1993...
...It also criticized the region's pseudo-democracies, marked by flawed elections, elite corruption and ongoing human rights violations...
...According to Rohter, the left's decision to hold the San Salvador meeting was prompted by accusations of inflexibility and irrelevance-such as those found in a recent book authored by the son of conservative Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa...
...Today, the Forum has 112 member parties...
...Mindful of the fact that previous Forums produced little more than stirring rhetoric, the FMLN organizers of the sixth meeting hoped to break the impasse by making the meeting's strategic objective the formulation of concrete democratic alternatives to the neoliberal model of state and society...
...For the first time, preparatory workshops for the Forum generated detailed resolutions for discussion in corresponding roundtables...
...The threat underlined the basis for the left's previous "obsession with armed struggle...
...The left increasingly holds public office, with 300 members of congress, over 60 senators and hundreds of mayors and city-council members...
...The book, which Rohter describes as a "300page jeremiad," slams the left for blaming the World Bank, the IMF, the CIA and transnational corporations for Latin America's ills, rather than examining its own doctrines and past failures...
...Not surprisingly, the Salvadoran right, in the form of a brand new death squad, threatened to blow up the meeting...
...It deplored policies that have generated poverty and inequality, destroyed national industries and devastated the environment, as well as the multilateral financial institutions that promote these policies and have undermined national sovereignty...
...While the left has had little luck winning national-level elections, it has rebuilt grassroots support by challenging free-market orthodoxy and promoting locallevel, small-scale initiatives to mitigate some of neoliberalism's worst effects...
...Six years ago, in the Forum's first declaration, the left acknowledged both the end of the era of armed struggle and its own need to be competitive in multiparty elections...
...The Forum did, however, improve notably in other respects compared to previous sessions...
...The final roundtable proposals were presented to the plenary for deliberation and then became part of the central document...
...Stay tuned for the seventh forum in Brazil...
...Rohter's "critical" review suggests that the left's only redeeming quality is that finally, its "30-year obsession with armed struggle as a means to revolution has come to an end," and that "in place of bullets, leaders of leftist parties expressed a commitment to reaching power through the ballot box...
...Nongovernmental organizations from around the world were much more in evidence than at previous meetings...
...Nor did it take the left until now, as the Times implies, to acknowledge the radical changes that have occurred since the fall of the Berlin wall, and to initiate regional efforts to redefine its project...
...A decade ago, such a conference might have taken place in Havana," continued Rohter, "and been accompanied by ringing declarations of the inevitability of the triumph of socialism...
...From its inception, the Sdo Paulo Forum was a deliberate and conscious attempt by the left to confront momentous changes in the global economy and geopolitics marked by the then-imminent collapse of the socialist bloc, the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and the proclamation of a unipolar, capitalist "new world order...
...Over the last two years, these parties have garnered around 29 million votes, representing about 30% of the Latin American electorate...
...Apparently unaware that the Sdo Paulo Forum was founded in 1990 by 48 left-wing parties from all over the continent, Times reporter Larry Rohter described it as a "Braziliansponsored regional organization...
...The preparatory declaration for the sixth meeting, like previous Forum documents, offered compelling analyses and critiques of neoliberalism...
...After all, irrelevant and moribund institutions are not the objects of threats and attacks...
...More than a hundred delegates participated from the United States alone, representing a plethora of grassroots and solidarity groups...
Vol. 30 • September 1996 • No. 2
