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World Social Forum 2005: 'nation shall speak unto nation': Damian Grenfell argues that the nation was the unmentioned presence at this year's World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Article Excerpt
The grand finale of this year's World Social Forum (WSF), which returned to Porto Alegre, Brazil in January, was a speech by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Gigantinho--a huge indoor concrete cauldron of a stadium packed with the factionalised Brazilian left. Many thousands more listened outside. During the final stages of the speech a lone figure struggled through the audience carrying a massive Brazilian flag. Tolerated by the socialist masses, the appearance of the flag in the dying moments of this year's WSF typified a kind of persistent 'unmentioned presence' afforded to the nation throughout the forum.

Around 155,000 people attended this year's WSF, marking another dramatic increase in the level of participation in each successive year since its inception in 2001. Porto Alegre was the site for the first three World Social Forums, with the fourth held in the Indian city of Mumbai last year. In stark contrast to Mumbai, where the forum was held on an enclosed former industrial site in the north of that huge Indian metropolis, the venues in Porto Alegre followed a long narrow trajectory along the city's lake edge. With Porto Alegre so much smaller a city than Mumbai, the struggle for accommodation meant that a tent city--the acampanmeto intercontinental da juventude--rimmed much of the WSF site. The event program, an immense newspaper document split into two volumes, carried with it some possible 2500 formal events across eleven thematic terrains.

Extremely long days, intense discussions and a wearing heat all took a toll, as did many of the logistical problems the event itself faces--a reality borne of the lack of resources that progressive movements...

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