Judy Rebick: A World Social Forum is many things to many people. What you see there depends in part on what you are looking for. This year, award winning film-maker Velcrow Ripper went to his first Social Forum. It was my third. We both went to discover the remarkable and inspiring struggles transforming peoples’ lives in Latin America but then we each had a different focus.

I went to learn more about what was happening in the extraordinary Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and to hear the debates about the experiences activists were having in Brazil and Argentina with left-wing governments. What I found was a veritable laboratory for a new kind of socialism — socialism from below — and debates that went beyond anything I could imagine. Activists, movements and leaders in Latin America are reinventing a vision for the future and how to get there. It was provocative, inspiring, hopeful and often confusing.

Velcrow Ripper: I came to the World Social Forum to seek out stories of spirit and action, in its many different forms. It was a research trip for FierceLight, part two of the ScaredSacred Trilogy — a podcast, a feature documentary and a book on the theme of spiritual activism.

One of my central definitions of spirituality is an understanding of interconnectedness, an understanding that everything exists in relation to everything else. Separation is a construct. In film speak, two shots alone are meaningless. Meaning occurs in the montage, the combination, in the collision and the connection.

The WSF is all about people coming together, to interconnect, to network in person, person-to- person, to share momentum and to build momentum, believing that another world is possible. “Otro mundo es posible.”

Under my definition, the gathering itself is inherently sacred.

It proved impossible to resist the call to South America, despite my travel weary bones. The excitement that is brewing, the possibility that is unfolding, is undeniable. As we in the north slide further down the abyss of materialism and the false promises of wealth and security dangled before us like a golden carrot by the Right, the South is embracing the call of collectivity, of interconnectedness, of participatory democracy.

One by one, governments are forming that are trying to realize these dreams. Indigenous people and women are coming into power: Evo Morales in Bolivia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Democratically elected revolutionaries like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — Lula — in Brazil are holding strong, despite the intensity of the oppositional oligarchies, despite attempted coups, despite the fact that they are standing up to the world’s biggest bully with audacity and humour. While there are shortcomings to every revolution, the positive change is undeniable, as any campesino on the street here in Caracas will tell you.

Judy: Velcrow went with a focus on indigenous struggles. Even though that was not my primary interest, what I found was amazing. Of course, I knew that Evo Morales, an indigenous leader, had become President of Bolivia at the front of a massive social movement that took power in one of the first mostly peaceful revolutions in human history. What I found were a number of extraordinary aboriginal women who are not only asking for solidarity with their struggle but sharing their wisdom to assist in building an alternative to corporate globalization or capitalism, the term used more and more often.

In a session on women and free trade, three indigenous women shared their wisdom about what they see as an historic and vital struggle to unite all the poor and marginalized peoples of the world. Sitting around an altar of fruit and flowers with a fire in the centre that was constructed on the stage of an ultramodern amphitheatre, the Mayan elder from Guatemala, Juana Vasquez, spoke eloquently of the need to challenge machismo and build equality for the sexes.

She warned against blaming all the problems of globalization on outside influences, saying Latin America has to face up to what she called endemic abuse and aggression toward women. Citing a Mayan creation myth that recounts the birth of life equally from four women and four men, she said: “How do we combat this? We return to our cultural roots; that’s where the answer lies.”

She also talked about spirituality and politics. “Sometimes when we talk about spirituality, people think that is different from politics but in the Mayan tradition it is all related. I can call myself a socialist but have a capitalist mind,” she explained.

Velcrow: What excites me is the power that we can tap into when we combine spirit with action — when we wake up and apply our awareness to transforming society, which is lost in a deep cultural pathology that is threatening the planet.

I set out into the fray of the social forum asking people what it means to combine espiritualidad y activismo I found that the Latino culture I was immersed in easily understood what I was getting at, a sharp contrast to our often frigid relationship to spirit in the North. They are people of the Corazon — of the heart. They don’t hesitate to express themselves with spirit and passion. Chávez shamelessly breaks into a sweet song in the midst of his revolutionary speech and the crowd laps it up.

Nowhere did the sense of evolutionary excitement ring truer than in my encounters with the indigenous contingent, in the large plenary sessions, on the indigenous march, and most concretely, in the intimate encounters of the street interviews I conducted. This is their day — after 500 years of being ruled, they are now the rulers of their own land, with the election of Evo Morales only last month. The first indigenous president since the invasion of North and South America.

This is a big deal, not just for Bolivia, but for indigenous peoples around the world, and in fact, for us all. To see revolutionary politics employed by an indigenous leader who also has to juggle all the hard realities of running a country, including tough calls involved in resource extraction, is going to be an experiment worth following.

As one group of Bolivian indigenas explained to me, their activism is grounded in spirit, and their spirit is grounded in the earth, in an understanding of interconnectivity. One thing we all share in common, is that our feet are on the same earth. This is our common ground, and can become a profound source of unity.

This same thought was mirrored by Pedro Gonzales, who I interviewed in front of his Mayan altar in the youth camp. He started one of the many eco-villages that are popping up all over South America, inspired by the perma-culture work of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, and the intrinsically sustainable nature of indigenous culture. To Pedro, the idea of revolution is static — it means one dogma being replaced with another. He said, “No to revolution. Yes, to evolution.”

Judy: The inclusion of aboriginal people in this World Social Forum was a welcome change from the past. Another was the much greater participation of women in many of the panels. Women’s issues were also a major theme of the event. In the first social forum I attended in Porto Alegre, most women’s issues were brought into the forum from the outside by women demonstrating. This time they were front and centre. Gender and inclusion were supposed to be central themes of all the panels and workshops.

In addition, a variety of women’s issues including violence against women, women’s poverty and women and free trade were discussed in large meetings every day. This is still a macho culture, of course, so all the celebrations of revolutionary leaders left off Chile’s Michelle Bachelet. She is seen as supporting neo-liberalism so her achievement as the first female head of government in Latin America got little notice here. Class trumps gender still.

Velcrow: The walls of the cities are plastered with creativity, new murals springing up everyday in response to the visitation of 100,000 kindred spirits of the Foro Sociale del Mundo. I found spirit in the youth camp, where a vibrant cast of visionary hip hop artists gathered one night when a portable state-funded hip hop stage, complete with DJ booth, arrived, filling the night air with song and rhyme.

Backstage, I interviewed free stylers from Cuba, Brazil, Columbia, Mexico and Venezuela, who would often burst into verse in the midst of the interview to more deeply express their understanding of the power of spirit in action. Their lives had been transformed by in the embrace of a global movement of evolutionary hip hop. They raved about Canada’s own K’naan, the dusty footed philosopher.

Judy: The global nature of culture is echoed in the global nature of political discussion.Many observers said this forum was more political than previous ones meaning the issue of political power was a major preoccupation. I participated in a panel organized by the Transnational Institute on this very question with an international panel of participants from parties and social movements. The discussion was broad — from the idea that social movements alone had the integrity to take power and that we had to figure out ways for that to happen: from a Council of Social Movements to various proposals for transforming political parties with a particular focus on more democracy within the party and an end to hierarchy.

Of course, in Venezuela the road to Bolivarian socialism is very different. Hugo Chávez, a charismatic leader from the military moved left after coming to power and uses instruments of direct and participatory democracy to mobilize the people in their communities without much of a party or really any major social movements mediating that relationship.

Everywhere we went poor people told us how much better their lives have been under Chávez. But I missed the grand spectacle of Chávez’s two hour speech to 5,000 people in a stadium. Caudillo culture is still alive and well and while I greatly admire Chávez, I could do without the idolization. If there is a negative note here, this is it, in my view.

Velcrow: Chávez’s weakest policy area, in my opinion, is in dealing with the environment, and as a consequence, with his own indigenous people. This is the great pitfall of the resource-rich revolution. This was evidenced by the large indigenous protest march against the open pit coal mines in Venezuela that are decapitating their mountains.

Judy: Another major discussion at the forum was whether the World Social Forum should remain a place for reflection, discussion and debate or focus more on proposals for action. A number of the speakers at the closing panel called for a worldwide day of action against war and militarism on March 18. It was just such a call in 2003 that resulted in the largest global protest in human history against the war in Iraq.

More images are available in two slideshows.

Velcrow Ripper's slideshow