The “People’s Summit,” an international gathering of leftist organizations, commenced on Wednesday in the Brazilian city of Belém as a counter-event to the ongoing COP30 climate alarmism conference.
According to Telesur – the Latin American leftist propaganda network funded by the Venezuelan, Cuban, and Nicaraguan regimes — the “People’s Summit” aims to function as a “space for resistance and alternative proposals” to the U.N. climate event and is based on “six fundamental themes,” including “historical reparation and environmental racism, just transition, and food sovereignty.”
In its manifesto, the “People’s Summit” said that it is composed of a litany of different social movements, networks, and civil society organizations including, but not limited to, “traditional African-based peoples, black people, indigenous,” activists, environmentalists, students, and “LGBTQIAPN+” people.
“Our goal is to strengthen grassroots organizing and bring together agendas for unity: socio-environmental, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and rights-based, respecting their diversity and specificities, united for a future of good living,” the manifesto read.
The event’s opening, Telesur claimed, saw some 5,000 leftists from 62 countries sail across the Amazon River onboard 200 boats. The event will run through November 16 at the Federal University of Pará to counter “false solutions to the global climate crisis.” All participating leftist organizations, Telesur detailed, will hold a “Unified March” on Saturday, November 15 with the theme, “environmental justice is directly linked to the defense of life and territories.”
The government of radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is currently hosting the COP30 climate alarmism conference in Belém through November 21. The official event has been marred with several logistical complications such as a lack of adequate lodging offerings and a significantly lower turnout by heads of state in last week’s COP30 Summit that last year’s. The initial COP30 leader summit is a separate high-level event that served as a prelude to the ongoing series of COP30 conference activities.
On Tuesday night, a group of Brazilian indigenous protesters demanding “climate action” stormed COP30’s venues, leading to clashes with the event’s security officials as the protesters attempted to breach a reserved area inside the venue. The incident reportedly left two security guards injured, one of whom had to be escorted out of the premises on a wheelchair.
Although the leftist gathering is allegedly a climate change one, the Brazilian state-owned outlet Agência Brasil reported that the initial speeches “defended Palestine” and criticized the lack of support for popular participation in the conferences.
The leftist summit’s program will see debates on topics such as “territories and food sovereignty, historical reparation and environmental racism,” as well as transition from fossil fuel extraction, “participatory governance, democracy and internationalism among peoples, fair cities and vibrant suburbs,” and “popular feminism and women’s resistance.”
“More than two years ago, upon learning that COP30 would be held in our country, specifically in the state of Pará, we decided that, given the challenges of the COP, we should organize one of the largest mobilizations of the working class in our country, bringing together workers from all over the world,” Ayala Ferreira, a member of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), told Agência Brasil.
“We begin the People’s Summit by strengthening our resistance to the false solutions presented by COP30, which bears the mark of projects that destroy nature, pollute rivers, and poison forests,” Ferreira told Telesur.
Greenpeace is among the organizations participating in the leftist summit. In an official statement, the organization detailed that it sent one of its ships, the “Rainbow Warrior,” to Belém to join the leftist flotilla to protest against false climate solutions, such as carbon markets, and demonstrate that the answer to the challenges we face does not lie with the big polluters and destroyers of nature, but in the ancestral knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples and coastal and local communities.”
President Donald Trump did not participate in the COP30 presidential summit, nor did the U.S. government sent any high level official to attend COP30 — which appears to have angered California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who travelled to Brazil this week to participate in COP30. The governor spent much of his time at the climate alarmism event condemning Trump, accusing him and his policies of being a “threat to rule of law and democracy.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
