Buenos Aires, Nov 14 (Prensa Latina) Several former presidents as Dilma Rouseff, José Mujica, Cristina Fernández and Ernesto Samper, ex presidential candidates will lead here the First World Forum on Critical Thinking and the Eighth Latin American and Caribbean Conference of Social Sciences (Clacso). Other figures to take part of the panels will be Nobel Peace Prize Adolfo Perez Esquivel; the president of the Grandmothers' Association of Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto: former senator of Colombia and defender of human rights, Piedad Cordoba and French-Spanish intellectual Ignacio Ramonet.
Other participants will be former presidential candidates Fernando Haddad (Brazil) and Gustavo Petro (Colombia), together with Spanish lawyer Baltasar Garzón.
As organizers detailed, the most important world critical thinking event will also summon famous intellectuals such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Rita Segato (University of Brasilia, Brazil) and Elias Sanbar (writer, Palestinian ambassador to Unesco).
Until now there are over 30 thousand applications, 18 thousand permanent participants and over 600 guests to the different activities to be held in more than 10 venues with special fórums as that of China and Latin America, Russia and Latin America, that of Popular Universities, and that of Cuba in Buenos Aires.
Intense days will be lived next week with multiple panels, conferences and special interventions and latent and urgent panels, such as the social and political struggles in the region or Afrolatinities, racism and resistance.
As the Executive Secretary of Clacso, Pablo Gentili, would say 'Latin America lives a cycle of enormous complexity. We are seeing, he said, the reversion of some of the main democratic conquests reached by our countries during the last 15 years of progressive transformations, of building a model of social inclusion'.
'Critical thinking is a tool that undoubtedly serves to interpret, but interpreting serves to transform reality, to fight for the construction of social, political, educational, cultural, more just and equal realities', he added.
In its eighth edition, the meeting will pay special tribute to the Arab Council of Social Sciences, based in Beirut.
Created in 1967, Clacso is an international non-government institution that groups 624 research and post-graduate research in the field of social sciences and humanities in 47 countries.
