There are really two parallel events at the WTO meeting in Cancún. On one side, approximately 8,000 people are housed in the hotel zone: members of country delegations, advisers, journalists, members of accredited NGOs. All of them meet, discuss, negotiate, and work hard. In the city of Cancún, far from the hotels, under large common tents, sleeping on the ground, in great heat and dust, with little food and simple goods, approximately 20,000 members of peasant, indigenous, youth and women's movements reside. The contrast is great between the two sides.

The representatives of the movements want to denounce the consequences of free trade agreements. In Mexico, 1,800,000 small corn producers have lost their land and jobs because of NAFTA. In many countries the effects of free trade are the same. In South Korea, a third of small farmers are threatened with the loss of their land.

In Cancún, far from the official negotiations, the movement Via Campesina, made up of associations of small agricultural producers, has managed to unite representatives from Mexico, nearly all the countries of Latin America, and also from several countries in Africa, Europe and Asia. There are approximately 130 Koreans and 40 Japanese.

Wednesday, September 10, Via Campesina, together with movements of indigenous and women, organized a first march. There will be another – a day of general mobilization, with the participation of many NGOs, it is hoped – on September 13.

Yesterday's march brought together more than 25,000 people. Principally peasants, indigenous and women, but also – and not as organized as the adults – a great number of young people shouting their uneasiness and dissatisfactions in the face of the meager prospects for work and education because of the new free trade agreements.

The self-immolation of a Korean activist, who stabbed himself in the chest in public on top of the barricades that prevented the demonstrators from communicating their concerns to those responsible for the meeting, expresses the discouragement of so many activists, organizations and social movements who are not able to be heard. In the name of the 146 countries of the WTO, the Secretary General merely said: « We all regret this sad incident. »

The Cancún Conference is going to make decisions that profoundly affect the life of millions of people both in the countryside and in the cities, in poor countries as well as rich. It is incomprehensible and unacceptable that the many groups who are trying to organize themselves in the name of the peoples do not have more permanent space within the WTO, like other international institutions, to express the concerns and aspirations of the majority of the world's population. Even the « accredited » NGOs in Cancún do not enjoy the conditions to have effective influence in the complex and broad processes of negotiation begun in the many commissions in Geneva. It is important that some NGOs be in Cancún, but it would be more transparent and just if they could participate in the whole range of negotiation processes.

Translated by T. Michael McNulty, SJ