Huancayo, Peru, 3.7.2003

We took part in the Foro Social de Huancayo, organized during 2-3- July 2003 in the Peruvian city of Huancayo in the Central Andes. It was an interesting experience of local organizing, insipired by and conceived as part of the World Social Forum process. The organizers, mostly people affiliated with the main public university of the city, had received moral support from various institutions, but almost no material support anywhere. The only concrete support that the organizing committee acknowledged was that the regional government of the Junin region, of which Huancayo is the biggest urban center, had let the forum use the government´s main conference hall.

We participated in the second day of the event, including its final ceremonies. One of us (Teivo) was the main speaker in the final session, giving a talk under the title “The World Social Forum and Alterglobalization”. The title had been decided by someone else, after Teivo gave critical comments on the first draft of the program in which he was described as member of the “European antiglobalization movement”. There was a relatively long and animated discussion after Teivo´s talk, on different aspects of the WSF process and the world much more generally. There were some 50-60 people in the audience.

The Huancayo forum was explicitly conceived as one part of a larger process that will include a regional forum called Foro Social Junin during the first days of August 2003; a process leading to Foro Social Peru with a major event in Tambogrande in April 2004; and the larger process the World Social Forum and the Social Forum of the Americas.

Even if there was plenty of enthusiasm, the event was not organized efficiently. The flyers and posters of the event had major factual and linguistic mistakes. The organizers had not been able to get any of the established non-governmental organizations or major social movements to participate in the event. A telling example is that one of the main NGO organizers of the WSF process in Peru, who formally functions as key member of the WSF mobilizing committee in Peru, was visiting Huancayo the same day of the Huancayo Social Forum, but in another event. This person had been totally unanaware of the Huancayo Social Forum until Teivo mentioned it to him a few days before the event, in Miami during the WSF International Council meeting.

This lack of articulation and communication reflects the problems of the Peruvian WSF-related process more generally. There has been an initial NGO-led group that has acted as the mobilizing committee of the WSF in Peru. Beginning in early 2003, there have been new organizing processes, initiated by organizations with a more “movement”-oriented self-identity. In recent moths, they have organized various events that are leading towards a major event in Tambogrande in 2004. This event is sometimes called Foro Social Perú, though some of the organizers want to make avoid making too hasty ownership claims to the WSF brand. NIGD-Americas has taken an active part in the organization of these processes, at the same time trying to create links between the different parts of the sometimes not so unified civil society groups.