Brazil's Rousseff snubs Davos, opts for anti-capitalist debate

Jan 26, 2012, 15:12 GMT

Rio de Janeiro - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff snubbed the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland this year and opted instead to take part Thursday in the anti-capitalist World Social Forum.

Rousseff was to appear at the forum in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, where she herself built her political career.

The six-day World Social forum is due to end Sunday. It brings together thousands of Brazilian trade unionists, students and activists for indigenous and environmental causes, along with representatives of Spain's Indignados, Chilean student protestors, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring.

The annual event was created in Brazil in 2001 as a protest against the World Economic Forum at Davos, which is also held this week but only for elite business leaders and top political figures.

The Porto Alegre forum gathers under the motto 'Another World Is Possible,' which pursues alternatives to 'economic neo-liberalism' - private enterprise, open markets, liberal trade and globalization.

In her address late Thursday at the Gigantinho sports complex, Rousseff is expected to talk about Brazil's preparations for the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit, which is to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June. Plans ahead of the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development have been the target of a lot of criticism in the early days of the anti-capitalist forum.

The gathering in southern Brazil has as its theme this year 'Capitalist Crisis - Social and Environmental Justice,' and it is also a platform to prepare the Peoples' Summit to be held in parallel to the Rio+20 gathering.

'I fear that the summit of heads of state will be a failure. The G8 (industrialized countries) does not have the slightest interest in making environmental commitments,' said Brazilian Dominican friar Frei Betto, an exponent of Liberation Theology, which focuses on the poor.

Brazilian environmental activists are also hoping that Rousseff will, if need be, veto the country's new Forest Code which is being debated in Congress. The proposed new code passed the Senate and it is now set to be voted on by the Lower House of the Brazilian Congress. Environmental organizations have stressed that it will increase deforestation.

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