Davos 2020
This January, like the last 50 Januaries, the Davos World Economic Forum has just begun. The event is a meeting of the world’s most powerful individuals and business groups, organized by a private corporation, deciding together the course of the world economy. Arriving by plane, surrounded by luxury, and with an extraordinary security device, world-famous leaders and VIPs from the ‘famoseo’ gather at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, the best example of Europe-Fortress.
The gathering, which is intended to be multilateral, has in fact generated a global financial elite, and a governing structure that today has more power than the governments of our countries.
The “men of Davos”, the global elites who best embody the fantasy of invulnerability, gather here every January to decide the future of the world. These elites stand so much above the problems of the “normal people” (precariousness, shared vulnerability …) that lose their emotional bond with the popular classes of their respective countries. After all, it seems that with money you can always buy a house somewhere else, when your country sinks.
In recent decades, the Davos summit has raised climate concerns, while consolidating business at all costs. There, Bolsonaro explained that two years ago the Brazilian presidency had cost him DAVOS 2020 and that he intended to put as much jungle as possible on sale. One year ago Thunberg became a recognized public figure with a talk in which he famously slapped global elites that no Davos guest had ever expressed in those terms.
We met in Bern several Rebels from Barcelona, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Canada and Switzerland. Many of us had met in Madrid during the COP25, and it was an opportunity to meet again in a very different atmosphere. We participated in some marches and demonstrations in Bern, along with other movements for climate and social justice, and began the three-day walking march from Landquart to Davos.
Along the way, the villages welcomed us into public buildings, and a very organized logistic team (the same from COP 25) accompanied us. We loaded an artifact from which music came as we walked, and we stayed like a large flock (of a thousand people) keeping the heat and moods singing in several languages.
Along the way, we left behind koala footprints (relating the Snow Rebellion to the Bushfire Rebellion). We wrote in the snow with the oil dust, celebrating the de-escalation of tension on the last day, after an unauthorized roadblock, which lasted for a short time. all the police in the region concentrated in that valley.
In fact, no one expected us to be reaching Davos, as the authorities had prevented it in the previous years, so the reality is that once there, we didn’t have much prepared action, and the one we had half ready was less spectacular than we expected in our heads.
During the route we shared a beautiful time, which consolidated us as an international group and strengthened our bonds of solidarity between the different nodes, as well as with other social movements.
