I am attending the sixth Polycentric World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela from January 24-29, 2006.
Friday, January 27, 2006
A couple comments from Teivo, posted with his permission:great, marc, wonderful you put the info this soon there.
just to add a couple of lines. first of all, despite various initial
logistical problems, i think our first event went well, fairly good debate
both on conceptual issues and more concrete cases (like cuba and porto
alegre), and many more people that i had expected.
i just got back to the hotel from the autonomous space caracol integalactica,
inspired by the zapatista experience. a representaive of the mexican networks
that work with the zapatistas was explaining the political situation in
mexico, and their conception of politics, very interesting. in the event, our
last year's debate on the wsf was also mentioned, and various people commented
afterwards it had been one of the best debates in caracol (and the whole
forum) last year in porto alegre. it was slightly embarrassing to tell the
people that this year our debate takes place in hotel hilton, but it seemed to
generateb no bad vibes... our nigd debate on the wsf is on saturday, and there
will be another debate on the wsf in the caracol on sunday, and people from
caracol promised to come to our debate, and we (johnattan and i) promised to
tell people on saturday to join the caracol debate on sunday.
yesterday there was, among other things, the opening march. suprisingly few
expressions of personality cult around chávez, which had been the fear of
many. the end of the march was a bit disappointing: we get to the big square
where there was some boring live music, the atmosphere was much less festive
than in the marches in porto alegre. the most annoying part was that when
people went to buy a beer from the street vendors, they responded that they
are not allowed to sell beer because we were inside a military fortress....
most people left the opening ceremony very soon.
the youth camp people were very unhappy the way their camp had been arranged
in a far-away site, johnattan can probably tell more about it.
all in all, most things are working relatively well, though much less so than
in porto alegre. more later.
yours,
teivo </Marc> <!--10:54 AM-->
