RECIFE, Brazil, Apr 24 (IPS) - The reelection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is still the best option in the view of Brazil's social movements. But activists would have a "qualitatively different" relationship with a second Lula administration, "because they have lost the high expectations and hopes" for enormous changes that catapulted the left to victory in the late 2002 elections.
That viewpoint, expressed by Jaime Amorim, one of the leaders of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), reflected the widespread sentiment among the nearly 15,000 social and political activists who took part in the second Brazilian Social Forum last Thursday through Sunday in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife.
There is now awareness that "greater popular organisation and mobilisation are indispensable for pushing for change and for making the government forge ahead," Amorim told IPS during the national plenary session of the "coordinator of social movements", which brought together around 700 people at the closure of the Forum.
A proposal for a model of national development, envisioning profound changes in the government's current economic policy, was presented at the plenary session, and is to be debated and approved over the next three months.
The aim, rather than influencing the upcoming elections in October, is for the social movements' proposal to be taken up by whatever government emerges from the elections, regardless of who wins, said Antonio Carlos Spis, secretary of communications in the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), Brazil's largest and most progressive labour federation.
The underlying tone in the plenary session of the "coordinator of social movements" and in the seminars and workshops that addressed the central theme of the four-day Brazilian Social Forum - assessing the political and institutional experience in Brazil in the past few years - was one of support for Lula, "to keep the right from returning to power," but laced with criticism - of the government itself, and of social movements and political parties.
The Forum called for more in-depth reflection, given the frustration of the high hopes that Lula and his leftist Workers Party (PT) awakened when the current administration took office in January 2003, Francisco Whitaker, one of the founders of the World Social Forum (WSF), told IPS.
The WSF, which was first held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001 as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland, holds a yearly gathering of the global civil society movement. In addition, regional and national social forums, like the one that ended Sunday in Brazil, are organised year-round.
The conclusion reached by one of the 250 seminars and workshops held at the Brazilian Social Forum was that political parties are necessary but insufficient in terms of bringing about change, and other instruments are needed, such as popular mobilisation and autonomy for social movements, said Whitaker.
During the Lula administration, errors were committed by both the government and the social movement when that autonomy was sacrificed, said the activist. The government accepted the support of the country's social organisations, "but while seeking to coopt them, especially the trade unions, whose leaders have been named to a number of public posts," he said.
Accepting that cooption for fear of "losing capacity to criticise or exercise pressure" was the mistake made by movements that later avoided a break with the government - even after it blocked their initial proposals and then fell into a major corruption scandal - due to past ties, as well as subsidies offered by the administration, said Whitaker.
He said the subsidies even benefited the MST, which has carried out the biggest, most aggressive demonstrations and land occupations to push for faster, more effective land reform.
With its close ties to social movements in Brazil, the PT played the role of an intermediary in the close relationship between civil society and the Lula administration, said the activist.
But there are reasons for the growing ambiguity marking the relationship between the government and Brazil's social movements, say activists.
Brazil's black movement, which was very active in the second Brazilian Social Forum, "gained visibility and grew in strength" thanks to public policies put in place by the Lula administration, Ubiraci Matildes, gender affairs coordinator in the Union of Blacks for Equality (UNEGRO), told IPS.
UNEGRO, which has 7,000 members, participated in the social forum in Recife with 150 representatives from 11 of Brazil's 26 states.
Matildes pointed out that the government created the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality, which has the rank of a government ministry, put in place affirmative action programmes, including university quotas for black students, and established laws and incentives that favour domestic workers, most of whom are black women.
Furthermore, the government has made great progress in legalising land ownership in the country's "quilombos" - rural Afro-Brazilian communities originally founded by escaped slaves - and made it mandatory to include African history and culture in educational curricula, she added.
UNEGRO estimates that there are some 7,000 quilombos in Brazil today.
But the strides made in terms of social policies do not exempt Lula from criticism of his government's economic policies, which have aggravated inequality by failing to generate employment and decent wages for blacks, who have the highest unemployment rate and earn the lowest wages, the activist argued.
"We want equal opportunities for blacks, who have been excluded and marginalised throughout Brazilian history," said Matildes
Afro-Brazilians participated more heavily in the Apr. 20-23 social forum than in the first one, which took place in 2003, because it was held in the country's impoverished northeast, where most of the country's quilombos are located.
Along with autonomy for and mobilisation by social movements, activists are calling for political and electoral reforms, which they say are key to avoiding new frustrations in the future.
The Citizen Network for Political Reform, which already includes more than 200 organisations, is pressing for greater popular participation in elections.
Measures like public financing of election campaigns, party loyalty among legislators, and a drastic reduction in the number of "posts of confidence" are indispensable for correcting the "political distortions" in Brazil, according to Oded Grajew, another of the founders of the WSF, who is a former adviser to President Lula and an activist in favour of social responsibility in business.
Under the current system whereby elections are privately financed, political parties do not answer to the public good, but to the interests of those who finance the elections, said Grajew.
Another problem he pointed to is that in Brazil, many legislators leave the party for which they ran in the elections, to join another that offers them greater advantages.
In addition, corruption and cooption are both fomented by the fact that the president has more than 20,000 political posts at his discretion, for which he can hand-pick officials, said Grajew.
Lula and the PT missed the chance to carry out political reform - "the mother of all reforms" - to ensure a strong administration, at the start of their term in 2003, when popular support was high, he argued.
Political reform could have modified the direction taken by the government, which has found itself in the midst of a serious corruption scandal for unethical negotiations for support in Congress, including bribes paid to lawmakers for their votes, he added.
Reforms of the political system are aimed at long-term results, in future elections and governments, and should include the creation of other instruments, such as citizen participation in government decision-making, through referendums, said Grajew.
Other questions debated at the Brazilian Social Forum were the fight for women's rights, education, art and culture as factors in development, urban policies, and Latin American integration. (END/2006)
