Between the 4th and 10th of March 2004, in Quito, Ecuador, around 2000 participants from social movements and civil society organizations participated at the preparatory meeting for the first Americas Social Forum due to take place from 25 - 30 July later this year in the same city.

Broad issues discussed at the Preparatory Meeting highlighted the geopolitics within the Americas and the world, and the search for alternative responses and initiatives to halt the ever accelerating neoliberal model. Among these issues figures the FTAA and free trade agreements, the environment, communication and independent communicators, migration, sovereignty, youth resistance, indigenous rights, war and militarization, diversity and the social movement's resistance as expressed within the World Social Forum process.

With visitors from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Portugal, Venezuela and USA participating in the program that included self-managed events as well as a discussion on the WSF process organized by the Organizing Commission of the ASF, the Meetings also expressed the importance that the ASF has in social movements' processes to advance in constructing alternative proposals and strategies against the neoliberal globalization project.

In this regard, the LGBT South-South Dialogue (Dialogue) re-affirmed the call for the first Forum on Sexual Diversity to be held in the framework of the ASF. Among the aims of this Forum is to develop LGBT proposals to the axes proposed for the ASF, which are:

· Economic order: human and environmental impoverishment, debts and total market (FTAA-WTO). Resistances, visions of the future and construction of alternatives.

· The violent face of the neoliberal project: militarism, strategic control of biodiversity, imperial hegemony. Resistances and the emergence of new subjects; construction of sovereignty and human rights.

· Power, democracy and State: changes, permanence and visions of the future. How to construct democracy in a period of globalization and fracture of international structures. Power dynamics in national and local governments; in sub-regional, regional and world instances; in society and in the “private” sphere.

· Cultures and communication: resistances, memory, the construction of identities; spaces and practices of creation; critical and alternative languages; democratization of communication.

· Indigenous peoples and African descendents: territories; autonomy; diversity and multiculturalism; knowledge and intellectual property.

Transversal key themes: gender and diversity.

These axes represent the broad concerns of all social movements, including anti-sexual orientation discrimination, and the outcomes will strengthen the important role that common proposals have within the different sectors active in the WSF movement.

Ecuador is expected to receive around 12,000 delegates to participate at the ASF and the Youth Camp, as well as related activities like the Parliamentarians and the Political Parties Forums.

For more information on the Forum on Sexual Diversity see www.movimientos.org/dss and for the Americas Social Forum see www.forosocialamericas.org

Quito, 11 March 2004

LGBT South-South Dialogue Coordination