SUNS  4317 Thursday 5 November 1998


LATIN AMERICA: NOT QUITE BUSINESS AS USUAL AT LEFT-WING PARLEY

Mexico City, Nov 3 (IPS/Diego Cevallos) -- They condemned neo-liberalism, pounded the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and blamed right-wing parties for the persistence of injustice and poverty, but all of that was to be expected.

Amid the usual chorus of outwardly-aimed criticisms, though, there were signs of divergence and even the odd veiled reproach between delegates of 58 Latin American leftist parties at their annual Sao Paulo Forum, which ended here on Sunday.

Predictable developments at the five-day meeting included the kudos showered on Spanish courts for attempting to try former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the calls for political solutions to civil
conflicts, and appeals for governments to release political prisoners in several countries of the region.

The gathering was attended by groups ranging from Cuba's Communist Party, in power for more than three decades, to parties that have exercised power and social democratic formations that have recently enjoyed relative success at the polls, such as Mexico's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which hosted the meeting.

The PRD's leader in parliament, Porfirio Munoz, called on leftist parties to leave aside "your token, localist vocation" to unabashedly take on a "vocation of power." Said Munoz,, in what some read as a veiled allusion to Cuba's Communist Party, "we must avoid dogmatic narrow-mindedness and a centrist party approach, and sweep away the last vestiges of sectarianism within our organisations." He also called on parties to take a realistic approach to globalisation, and come up with "a policy of advanced ideas and concrete responses to specific problems, while taking back the intellectual, political, economic and historic initiative."

In the view of the PRD, the leftist winds sweeping Europe prove the decline of the right and neo-liberalism, and are a good omen for the left in Latin America. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are all ruled by left-leaning governments.

But in hallways and behind closed doors, some delegates criticised the PRD's stance, arguing that the European left was no left at all, but rather parties that continued applying neo-liberal policies.

The Sao Paulo Forum, which has met annually for the past eight years, drew a total of 167 delegates, including specially invited representatives of 31 African, Asian and European leftist
organisations.

Libyan Foreign Minister Abdurrahman Shalgam said the Sao Paulo Forum should serve as a blueprint for the creation of a global alliance of parties, to become eventually the new "non-aligned" group - a concept which, he said, seemed no longer to exist in the movement bearing that name.

At each of its eight workshops, opinions were divided on the validity today of armed struggle, a phenomenon which mainly affects Colombia, but also Peru and Mexico to a lesser extent. Some delegates argued the need to abandon the armed struggle, negotiate with the government, and
join the electoral fray, but others, like Shafick Handal of El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) questioned that strategy.

The final declaration signed by a majority of participants urged closer work with grassroots organisations, whose autonomy must be guaranteed, however, "because the pursuit of similar programmes must not translate into absorption."