Former ministers set tone for first International Forum for Emancipation and Equality
Buenos Aires Herald
March 12, 2015
The first International Forum for Emancipation and Equality will formally begin in Buenos Aires today — with a master class from Noam Chomsky likely to steal the show — but Nicolás Lynch of Peru and Ticio Escobar of Paraguay set the tone yesterday with a discussion on the political similarities and divergences between Latin America and Europe as the two continents deal with the continued fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis.
Lynch — a former Peruvian Minister of Education and Ambassador to Argentina — summed up at least one of the fundamental pillars of the forum by saying that “normally Europe has influenced Latin America. And today it is the opposite. In Europe there has been a process questioning neoliberal ideology.”
That process, which included electoral victories for Syriza in Greece and the rise of Podemos in Spain in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, was considered comparable to and at least informed by the rise to power of left-leaning governments throughout the continent in the late 1990s.
Iñigo Errejón, political secretary for the Podemos Party will be in attendance, as will Camila Vallejo, a Chilean student leader and lawmakers for the Communist Party and Jean-Luc Melenchon, a founder of the Left Party.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/184111/former-ministers-set-tone-for-political-conference
= new reply since forum marked as read
A lot of good ideas and strategies first see the light of day in symposiums - especially during the cocktail parties that follow the day's speeches, when attendees are likely to be a little more uninhibited. 
I should also note that the forum is being held in a theater operated by the National Government. And you're right: if a neo-liberal puppet were in office in Argentina, you can bet they'd find some convenient excuse to deny them the use of such a comfortable (and low-cost) venue. The organizers would thus be forced to book a conference room in an expensive hotel, or go to another city outright.
Now, if racist colonialists like Mario Vargas Llosa, organ traffic apologists like Chicago Boy Gary Becker, "Hunger games" proponents like the Mont Pelerin Society, or con-men like Robert Kiyosaki want to hob-nob in Buenos Aires, that's a different story. Mayor Macri and his right-wing PRO (named in honor of the 'Proceso' dictatorship of the late '70s) would give them the red-carpet treatment, as Macri in fact did at considerable taxpayer expense in the past.
