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Peoples' Summit Prepares for Quebec It is hard to believe that three years have passed since almost 1,000 delegates met in Santiago to seek consensus in nine different forums and a short final declaration. Many solidarity meetings and one alternative world social forum (in Porto Alegre, Brazil) have been held since then, but the Quebec meeting will mark the first gathering of the hemisphere's NGOs and mass-based social movements since the 1999 Toronto Trade Ministerial. Although the HSA has increased its networks, the alliance still lacks a certain geographic symmetry. A new network in Peru, as well as a growing presence in Brazil and Chile, give the HSA an hourglass shape regionally: well-represented in South and North America but still without real roots in the Caribbean and Central America. The labor movement has held together through its regional organization, ORIT, despite certain local tensions. These pressures are most notable in Argentina, where poor relations between rival union groups-the CGT and the CTA-have complicated the HSA's ability to program a modest parallel event on April 5, during the FTAA Buenos Aires Trade Ministerial. This conference will be dwarfed by demonstrations that other groups, some of which are part of the alliance, have scheduled for the next day. Certainly, as in Chile in 1998, many observers will continue to question who represents civil society, as if to disqualify demands for more transparency and accountability in the FTAA process. Mass-based organizations such as unions and NGOs/CBOs gingerly began the process of coming together at the Civil Society Forum at the 1997 Belo Horizonte Trade Ministerial and in Santiago a year later. To date, their demands for integrating social and environmental concerns into trade negotiations have not been well received by the governments involved. The failure of multilateral approaches prompted human rights, trade unions and grass-roots activists to continue campaign-based strategies and to cite current bilateral resolutions linking human and worker rights to trade (for example, the United States' GSP and CBI legislation). However, grass-roots activists today show less interest in including labor and human rights conditionality in the FTAA process. The "Seattle Syndrome" has led more rejectionist organizations to channel debate in the Hemispheric Social Alliance toward torpedoing or at least delaying implementation of the FTAA. Many of the confrontational grass-roots NGOs characterize the debate as a fight between rejection and reform. Others don't like to be characterized this way. Most of the mass-based organizations and established NGOs seek more pragmatic positions that will keep them engaged in the political processes that will shape the final treaty. They are quick to point out that they too reject the "NAFTA, pro-corporate" trade negotiations that characterize the current FTAA. At the Alternative Forum it held in February in Canc�n, the HSA's Mexican network attempted to sidestep this issue by emphasizing "resistance and alternatives," a reference to the most recent version of the HSA document "Alternatives for the America," which will be presented in Quebec. The purpose of the document is to provide a basis to influence policy with a clear set of guidelines. But the HSA is such a large and diverse coalition that it has found it difficult to navigate between the different strategic and ideological visions of its members. Just as at the first Peoples' Summit, the key to success in Quebec will be the alliance's ability to manage this diversity and seek common ground. A complicating factor that weighs heavily on the decisions of the Peoples' Summit organizers is the repression of protesters in Canc�n recently (see www.asc-hsa.org). Protesters of the Davos-style meeting there came mostly from the HSA-sponsored conference that just that morning had held a well-mannered meeting with representatives of the Davos Conference. The morning dialogue was followed by brutal police repression in the afternoon. These types of clashes create a barrier to further discussions. Peoples' Summit organizers have requested a meeting with official summit or governmental representatives in Quebec, but outside of the security perimeter. There is not much enthusiasm for a "photo-op" style of meeting and one almost certainly will not take place. According to HSA documents, the organizers of the Peoples' Summit (Common Frontiers of Ottawa and R�seau Qu�b�cois sur L'int�gration Continentale) have reserved 500 hotel rooms and a meeting venue that will hold 2,500 participants. Many of the attendees will be from the Canadian and US labor movements, which are busing participants to the event. Because of the distance and the costs, there is still some doubt about how many Latin American and Caribbean NGOs will make it to Quebec. Government support for the alternative venue also will likely be less than expected. The Canadian trade union movement hoped to receive government backing for the event, much the same way it did in Toronto in 1999. However, the climate of cooperation has deteriorated in the last few years and many groups have taken a more aggressive stance against what they call "corporate-led globalization." In fact, Common Frontiers is part of a suit against the Canadian government over security arrangements for the Presidential Summit. At the same time, more and more pressure is being felt from other groups that wish to be represented or hold their own events. At last count, nine forums were planned for the Peoples' Summit: Agriculture and Campesinos, Women and Globalization, Education, Environment, Equitable Distribution of Wealth and the Role of the State, Unions, Communications, Human Rights, and Parliamentary. The selection is not very different from that at the Santiago Peoples' Summit. It is interesting to note that the women's forum has been scheduled as part of another event that will take place on April 16, the day before the inauguration of the Peoples' Summit. The women's forum was the most controversial one in Santiago, producing two reports. At this summit, the decision to meet a day early is an attempt to coordinate strategy and have women's issues included in the other forums. For more information on individual forums at the Peoples' Summit, see www.sommetdespeuples.org. On the same site, the section "What's New" includes the HSA declaration on the FTAA (in Spanish). This document is most notable for the fact that it avoids condemning the integration effort, emphasizing instead the type of FTAA the organization would like to see. As in Santiago, the Peoples' Summit in Quebec will be more than a meeting of the Hemispheric Social Alliance. It will attempt to pull together various groups that seek a voice for civil society in a complex world driven by globalization. Geographical distance threatens to diminish the participation of Latin America and the Caribbean at the Second Peoples' Summit. Nonetheless, the alliance's growth in the years since Santiago makes the HSA's leaders hopeful that the Quebec event will be representative of the growing consensus between social and environmental activism in the north and the south.
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