Foro de São Paulo

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Foro de São Paulo (FSP, São Paulo Forum) is a conference of left-wing and nationalist political parties and social movements in Latin America and the Caribean. The Forum was created by the Workers' Party (PT) of Brazil.

According to FSP's founders, Forum of São Paulo was constituted in 1990 when the Brazilian Workers' Party approached other parties and social movements of Latin America and the Caribbean with the objective of debating the new international scenario after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the consequences of the implementation of neoliberal policies by the majority of governments in the region.

FSP leaders say that the conference's main objective is to argue for a popular and democratic alternative to neoliberalism, a list of political and economic reforms which had reached a phase of world-wide implementation.

The first meeting was in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in July, 1990, in which 48 parties and social organizations from Latin American and the Caribbean participated. In 1991, in Mexico City (Mexico), the meeting was named Foro de São Paulo, in reference to the location of the first meeting. The next meetings were held in Managua (1992), Havana (1993), Montevideo (1995), San Salvador (1996), Porto Alegre (1997), Mexico (1998), Managua (2000), Havana (2001), Antigua Guatemala (2002), Quito (2003), São Paulo (2005), and San Salvador (2007).

1 Political stands
2 Criticism
3 Partial list of participants
4 External links

[edit] Political stands

According to FSP, more than 100 parties and political organizations participate in its conferences today. Their political positions vary across a wide spectrum, which includes: social-democratic parties, left-wing grass-roots labor and social movements inspired by the Catholic Church, ethnic and environmentalist groups, anti-imperialist and nationalist organizations, communist parties, and armed guerrilla forces.

These groups differ on a range of topics which go from the use of armed force in revolutions to the support of representative democracy. The Cuban Communist Party, for example, has adopted a single-party system for decades, while Brazil's Workers' Party (PT) supports and participates in a multiparty electoral democratic system. These differences grant special relevance to FSP's final declarations, released at the end of each conference, which state the collective position of its members.

Ever since FSP's first meeting (1990), the Declaration which was approved expressed the participants' "willingness to renew leftist and socialist thought, to reaffirm its emancipating character, to correct mistaken conceptions, and to overcome all expressions of bureaucratism and all absence of true social and massive democracy."

Despite the Cuban Communist Party's participation, the first Declaration manifests "an active compromise with the validity of human rights, of democracy and of popular sovereignty as strategic values, which place the constant challenge of leftist, socialist and progressive forces renewing their thoughts and actions."

At the second conference (Mexico, 1991), FSP expands its objectives to add the proposal of working toward Latin American integration, toward interchanging experiences, toward the discussion of the political left's differences and searching for consensus in action. The following conferences reinstate the participants' willingness to exchange experiences and to dialogue, while - at the regional continental level - FSP's influence grows, as some of its members achieve electoral success, with their candidates reaching the presidency of many countries.

[edit] Criticism

According to Brazilian philosopher and essayist Olavo de Carvalho, the activities of the FSP amount to a continent-wide conspiracy to override national sovereignty, destroy democracy, and implement communism all over Latin America. Carvalho and the other writers of his online newspaper, Mídia Sem Máscara [1] frequently stress the fact that several of FSP's members are, as they put it, "drug traffickers, terrorists, kidnappers".