Former ministers set tone for first International Forum for Emancipation and Equality [View all]

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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