South American Leaders Join anti-Davos Forum

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 29, 2009
Filed at 10:53 p.m. ET
BELEM, Brazil (AP) -- South America's leading advocates of socialism got a hero's welcome from 100,000 activists at the mouth of the Amazon River Thursday as they demanded an overhaul of global capitalism.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said the time has come for the world's leftists to ''leave the trenches,'' propose solutions and ''launch a political ideological offensive everywhere.''
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was showered with the most boisterous cheers as leaders took the stage in a cavernous convention center for an evening rally that lasted more than six hours.
Silva said the election of U.S. President Barack Obama showed that progress was being made for the left.
''It is impossible to imagine that a country that 40 years ago shot Martin Luther King would today elect a black president,'' Silva said to warm applause. ''This means things are changing. Not with the speed we want, but they are changing.''
Silva blasted former U.S. President George W. Bush, saying the Iraq war would be his legacy, and that his presidency served as an example for mankind.
''The world cannot elect any more presidents that do no listen to social movements, that do not listen to the people,'' he said.
Earlier in the day, advocates for landless Brazilians gathered in a sweltering gymnasium and roared in approval as Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa belted out the Cuban classic ''Comandante Che Guevara.'' Chavez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Paraguay's Fernando Lugo joined him on stage at the World Social Forum.
Chavez, the frequent critic of the U.S. and Bush, blamed American-style capitalism for the global meltdown that is prompting economic devastation throughout Latin America.
''Misery, poverty, unemployment are growing, and global capitalism is largely to blame,'' Chavez said in a convention center before 10,000 of the estimated 100,000 people at the social forum.
Obama could bring change, Chavez said, while adding: ''I hold no illusions.''
Nicinha Durans, a 34-year-old Brazilian activist and singer with a red shirt saying ''Hip Hop Militant,'' cheered Chavez because he ''is fighting for people like me and his presence validates our movement.''
Morales, Bolivia's first Indian president, also saluted the crowd at the annual protest against the World Economic Forum, where the rich and powerful gather at the Swiss ski resort of Davos each year.
''Before you are four presidents -- four presidents who could not be here were it not for your fight,'' he said. ''I see so many brothers and sisters here, from Latin America's social movements to European figures.''
Lugo, a former Roman Catholic priest and follower of liberation theology, declared that ''Latin America is changing and the hope is the north will change as well. We have seen the economic policies they said were so efficient fail.''
Silva -- a former union leader who has steered Brazil on a centrist course as president -- decided to make his first social forum appearance in three years instead of going to Switzerland.
All the leaders at the forum railed on the U.S. and other developed nations for creating the financial crisis now gripping the globe. Silva pointed out that during that for decades, U.S. leaders and international institutions had imposed economic ideas on the developing world -- mostly in the form of the Washington Consensus.
Silva, dressed in black and pacing the huge convention center stage, said the International Monetary Fund loathed by leftists ''should now tell Obama how to fix the economy in the U.S., like they did to us in the 90s.''