GUATEMALA CITY -- Thousands of Latin America's indigenous people, union leaders, peasants-rights organizations and young idealists sporting dreadlocks and Che Guevara T-shirts have gathered here this week for a forum to discuss the region's food crisis, fighting international corporations and ``post-neoliberalism.''

''Everyone's goal is to create real socialist alternatives,'' said Blanca Chancosa, a Quechua indigenous woman from Ecuador who attended the Third Social Forum of the Americas.

The forum is a spin-off of the World Social Forum, which was first held in Brazil in 2001 as a counter to the annual meeting of powerful business leaders and economic institutions held in Davos, Switzerland. At the time, right-leaning governments ruled most of Latin America, with the exception of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Many at this year's forum said the current U.S. financial crisis is proof that the market-centered, free-trade model -- espoused by the United States and accepted by most Latin American governments since the end of the Cold War -- has failed.

''Neo-liberalism, proposed as the sole hegemonic theory, has demonstrated that it doesn't work,'' said Byron Garoz, one of the forum organizers. Still, he and others worried that the financial crisis could cripple the region's vulnerable economies.

''The problem is that the crisis affects all of us,'' he added.

The political winds in Latin America have blown steadily to the left in recent times.

At the forum, many were quick to note that the new brand of socialism -- dubbed ''21st Century Socialism'' by Chávez and others -- isn't the same model that put up the Berlin Wall and led to massive bloodshed throughout Latin America during the second half of the 20th century.

Garoz called this new socialism ''one that can be constructed within the framework of bourgeois democracy. It's going to the polls and winning,'' he said.

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