Hugo Chavez Gets Hero's Welcome at World Social Forum
By Alan Clendenning
The Associated Press
Sunday 30 January 2005
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (AP) - Sporting a red shirt embossed with a picture of the revolutionary Che Guevera, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez received a hero's welcome Sunday at the World Social Forum, where activists greeted him with hugs and cries of "Here comes the boss!"
Tens of thousands of people attending the six-day gathering held to protest the simultaneous World Economic Forum in Switzerland consider Chavez their strongest voice against the U.S.-sponsored spread of liberalized trade in Latin America, a move they say benefits multinational companies while enslaving workers.
"Now the imperialist forces are starting to strike against the people of Latin America and the world," Chavez said. "And it's up to our soldiers to stay alert and be prepared to defend the people and not to submit themselves to the interests of the empire."
Chavez, a self-described revolutionary, is mounting an aggressive land reform campaign and funneling profits from Venezuela's oil riches to the poor as part of a political movement loosely based on the ideas of South American independence hero Simon Bolivar.
While Chavez was cheered at the social forum, some jeered Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva when he spoke Thursday, accusing him of failing to come through on promises of social reforms to eradicate Brazilian misery.
Chavez was greeted like a rock star by 15,000 activists in a sports stadium, and came to Silva's defense after speaking for an hour and a half against American imperialism.
"I love Lula!" he yelled. "I respect him. Lula is a good guy with a big heart. He's a brother and a comrade." Silva is popularly known as Lula.
Brazilian activist Gledson Oliveira, who lives in the country's impoverished northeast, called Chavez "an icon of the struggling classes right now from a socialist perspective."
"He's taking on agrarian reform and improving education, showing he's a true revolutionary," Oliveira said. "I think the Brazilian public was expecting from Lula something like Chavez is providing in Venezuela."
Earlier Sunday, Chavez traveled 81 miles in a heavily guarded convoy to the town of Teves, visiting a cooperative at the end of a bumpy dirt road, where poor farmers with no land invaded a spread of unused property seven years ago.
The 33 families squatted on the land for years, went to the courts to win possession and now grow rice, corn and fruit. Chavez donned a keffiyah, the checkered Arab headdress, given to him by an admirer and asked farmers what they used to fertilize their crops. Then he dumped a bag of live fish into a rice paddy to control pests and weeds.
To cheers from thousands of members of the Landless Rural Workers' Movement, many of them bused in from hundreds of miles away, Chavez said his government will attempt to expropriate 7.4 million acres this year and give it to peasants.
An additional 42 million acres in Venezuela may be seized to combat what he described as modern-day feudal land ownership of huge estates by the rich and businesses.
"This can't be tolerated," Chavez said. "We're going to keep on giving power to the people."
Landless Brazilian farmers stage invasions of idle farmland, then stay and work the land while they take the owners to court in a bid to gain title.
Activists at the social forum say Chavez is eclipsing Silva in agrarian reform with a push the Venezuelan leader has called "war against owners of large land estates." It uses a 2001 law allowing the taxation and expropriation of idle farmlands.
Government opponents, including cattle ranchers and owners of large land estates, argue the law is unconstitutional because it violates private property rights that are constitutionally guaranteed.
But Jacek Padee, a Pole who has been living in Brazil for more than a year while studying the landless movement, said Chavez is in a better position than Silva to promote land redistribution because Venezuela has vast oil reserves to prop up its economy. Silva has had to struggle to turn Brazil's economy around after a near-recession in 2003.
American Mike Fox, of San Francisco's Global Exchange human rights group, said Chavez has become the model leftist leader in Latin America.
Since surviving a referendum bid last year aimed at ousting him, Chavez has promised a new role for Venezuela's state-owned oil company in the "redistribution of national income." High oil prices have allowed the Venezuelan leader to fund massive social programs for the poor.
"In Latin America, he's the one a lot of people in other countries are looking to with a lot of hope," Fox said.
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" I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins." Philosopher Antony Flew 1922 - .
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