His speech marked the second day of the six-day World Social Forum, an annual counterpunch to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

While the latter draws CEOs who sleep in four-star hotels and take turns on the Swiss slopes, the participants in the World Social Forum are happy to camp on the sides of roads or sleep with locals in order to take part in the yearly anti-capitalist gathering.

Instead of suits, they arrive wearing tie-die shirts and trousers of organic cotton, like Lula who addressed the cheering crowd in a short-sleeved shirt. Presentations are frequently ad lib, including a fiery impromptu speech by Bolivian President Evo Morales on Sunday who told the assembled crowd that capitalism was in its death throes.

“We can see it with the global financial crisis. We can see it with climate change and global warming,” said Morales, who in 2005 became the first leader to be elected from Bolivia’s indigenous majority. “The capitalism of today is a capitalism that no longer produces but just consumes.”

The weeklong conference, which has drawn some 30,000 participants from 123 countries, aims to create “open space” for debate on subjects ranging from “the crisis of capitalism” to the African Diaspora. Many participants pointed out that the event is also taking place at a same time of change in Africa.

“If you look across the democratization struggle in Egypt and Tunisia and the challenges in Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, it is very important for people to express their views and indicate that there is a ruling elite, a very small group of people who are holding us hostage,” said Zimbabwean journalist and participant Thomas Deves.

Nilza Iraci, a member of the forum’s international organizing committee, says that in the early years, the forum attempted to bridge the gap with Davos. They held a teleconference with members of the Davos conference in an attempt to exchange ideas.

Critics of the forum say it has not effected real change in the 11 years since it started.

Iraci says the event is not meant to effect change, but rather to create a space to network and to share ideas for a new world.

The opening march included a delegation of women from Senegal’s provinces who had made their way to Dakar to try to lobby for land rights. In the oceanlike crowd, they ran into Liv Sovik, a communications professor at a school in Rio de Janeiro. She helped the women connect with a leader of the land rights movement that was also at the march, she said.

“It’s like a trade fair. You meet to make connections,” said Sovik.

Associated Press Writer Anne Look contributed to this report.

Minutes earlier, an attempt to touch down in another isolated area with nearly 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of food, water and medical supplies had been aborted after what at first seemed to be flat dirt turned out to be nearly liquid mud that could have swamped the six-person helicopter.

Three men digging at the edge of the mud flat, their legs protected by trash bags tied around their thighs, were left behind for another mission.

This time Costa got the go-ahead: The space was tight, with sheer drops on three sides, but it was enough. He touched down on the grass and more a dozen women and children crowded around, barely waiting for the rotors to stop.

“We have almost no water left to drink, almost no food,” said Adriana Claudia de Melo, 31, gathering up the packages of rice, spaghetti, tomato sauce and bottled water. “We were starting to panic.”

Monday’s delivery was the first time Melo and nearly 30 other survivors stranded on a hilltop received aid from the government nearly a week after torrential rains unleashed avalanches of rocks and mud in these mountains. Many more families remained isolated by washed-out roads and bridges.

For days after the slides, residents in the most inaccessible areas were forced to fend for themselves, searching for the missing and the dead in the mud and constant rain, and then hiking provisions for hours up and down mountainsides.

Bad weather meant aircraft could not reach more than 20 neighborhoods and villages for days. A break in the rain and improved visibility on Sunday finally allowed 12 helicopters to begin taking supplies and rescue personnel in, and shuttling injured residents out.

Costa’s crew started flying Monday. Seen from the air, the scale of the destruction was even more striking: Dozens of crumbled cliffs stood out against the lush green; valleys had turned into muddy rivers; and rivers into silted mud flats, obliterating the communities along their banks.

The city’s wealthy often escape Rio’s heat to estates nestled in these forested peaks, which are also home to a national park. It was in their employer’s stately country house that Melo and the other residents of the cluster of homes called Mariana — caretakers, maids, ranch hands and others — took shelter after their homes were buried or heavily damaged by the slides.

For the five families huddled in the ranch house, the helicopter’s arrival staved off desperation.

Diesel fuel for the home’s generator was nearing its end, water in the cistern was low and food was being rationed — there were 30 people to feed. There was no phone line to call for help, or to get news of other family members.

Normally, Mariana is a 40-minute drive from Teresopolis, the nearest city. With the five bridges along the route wrecked and the access road washed away, the only way to get to town was a five-hour slog on foot, including several dangerous river crossings.

Larissa Francisco Carvalho, 14, showed off the bruises and cuts on her legs suffered during a trip to town for supplies.

“It’s too difficult with the water rushing by, carrying the bags of food,” she said. “We needed help.”

Maj. Roberto do Canto Wilkoszynski of the Brazilian National Security Force, who is in charge of coordinating the air rescue, said the helicopters started flying as soon as it was safe to do so.

“We can’t put the crews in danger,” he said. “But we are doing what we can, as fast as we can, and we intend to stay here as long as we need to complete this mission.”

And while neighbors helping each other was a valuable lifeline during the first days after the disaster, Do Canto Wilkoszynski said people now need to be careful due to the risk of further landslides, collapsing debris from destroyed homes and contamination from bodies decomposing in the humid heat.

“The ideal is to contact professionals and let them know what’s needed,” he said.

Back at a helicopter refueling stop in Teresopolis, slide survivor Rejane Melo, 34, sat among packs of bottled water after being airlifted from the remote neighborhood of Santa Rita, where 10 have been found dead.

“You see the state we are in here,” she said, motioning to her 6-year-old daughter, Ellen, and her 16-year-old son, Reginaldo, whose leg was amputated below the knee just days before the storms because of cancer. “We couldn’t walk out. We were left to God’s mercy.”

The family were not injured and their home was still standing. But it was left damaged and leaky, and Melo worried it could collapse at any moment in the ongoing rain. There was no water or electricity.

Staying became more unbearable each day, Melo said, as bodies began decaying under the debris, causing an overwhelming stench and raising fears of disease.

Then the helicopter showed up.

“We have to thank God in these moments,” Melo said.

After caring for the living, rescuers have to think of the dead. A still unknown number of victims lie under tons of red mud and rock in various valleys.

The first search teams with sniffer dogs arrived Sunday, sent by the National Security Force, which is made up of military troops from various states.

Many gained experience in this kind of work from massive landslides in 2008, but the rough terrain could pose new challenges, team leader Lt. Niccolo Inacio Alves de Sousa said.

How far the bodies were scattered by the rushing floodwaters, and how deep they are buried will determine how many will be found, he said. The search also will be hampered by the lack of heavy equipment, which can’t reach many slide sites due to collapsed infrastructure.

How long the house in Mariana will be cut off from town is unclear — rebuilding these rural bridges and roads is not an immediate priority. The five families stranded there fear that once the immediate rescue effort ends, they’ll be on their own to face a long recovery.

“We lost our bearings with this,” said Carvalho, the teenage girl with the bruised legs. “Now we’ll look to each other, and to God, for help.”

Damage is less severe in Australia. Queensland, Australia’s “Sunshine State,” is underwater due to a combination of record rainfalls and a compromised dam. According to a report in the L.A. Times, waters gushed from the overflowing Wivenhoe Dam yesterday and headed toward Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city. Built after a devastating flood in 1974, the dam helps contain the Brisbane River but failed to contain the volume of this year’s record rainfalls.

Brisbane is only the latest city affected in the Queensland floods — so far the floods have claimed 15 lives nationwide. Riverbanks in the city of Toowoomba failed to handle the 6 inches of rainfall that fell in just 30 minutes on already saturated lands. You might’ve already seen this video of a creek carrying away a parking lot:

People clung to fences and tree branches best they could as a wall of water wreaked havoc on Toowoomba, nicknamed “The Garden City.” Speaking to ABC News, the town’s mayor Peter Taylor described the horrendous scene:

There’s massive damage… It’s just blown shops away, there’s water literally running out of the front door of shops here as a major flash flood came through the middle of the city.

Some houses have been taken off their stumps and literally gone down the creek. It’s been through buildings over buildings, washed cars away that type of thing. Horrific, really horrific circumstances.

 While it’s too soon to tell the full extent of the damages, the long-term impact and implications of such a large-scale disaster could have global implications. According to ClimateWire (via the New York Times), global coal prices have already soared due to the record rains in the resource-rich state of Queensland.

Brito did say the killings are believed to be premeditated because of the groom’s announcement and because he had hidden a gun in his father’s pickup truck.

Twenty-five-year-old bride Renata Alexandre Costa Coelho and best man Marcelo Guimaraes were both killed in Saturday’s murder-suicide. A brother of the bride was treated at a hospital and released.

The website Globo.com quoted a sister of the bride who left before the shootings as saying she didn’t believe it was a crime of passion.

“My sister was a wonderful person who loved and wanted to be loved,” Lucia Helena Coelho was quoted as saying.

“He was happy, she was happy, the party was beautiful. His family adored her and doesn’t understand this,” Coelho told Globo.com. “He revealed himself as a sociopath who fooled the entire family and killed his best friend, who was … the best man.”

Brazil’s amnesty law, passed in 1979, barred prosecution of both government agents and leftist militants who committed politically related crimes during the 1964-1985 military regime. The law was recently upheld by Brazil’s supreme court.

The Costa Rica-based court found the law incompatible with Brazil’s commitments under the American Convention on Human Rights.

The head of the government’s National Human Rights Secretariat, Paulo Vannuchi, said in a press conference Wednesday that authorities understand the ruling must be obeyed.

The country is also taking other steps to clarify what happened under military rule, Vannuchi said, noting that Congress is considering a bill to create a truth commission.

The court found the amnesty law “impedes the investigation and punishment of serious violations of human rights,” and said it “cannot continue to be a hurdle to the investigation” of the fate of the suspected Araguaia guerrillas.

The Brazilian government must investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators involved in the Araguaia case, find and identify the bodies of the disappeared, and make amends to their surviving relatives, the court concluded.

It also said authorities should release archived information about Araguaia, and information on other human rights violations that took place during the military regime.

“I hope this ruling can be a tool for change,” said Beatriz Affonso, director of the independent Center for Justice and International Law, which advocates prosecution of military human rights violators. “The Brazilian state has a duty to fulfill (as a signatory of the American Convention on Human Rights.)”

Earlier this week President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked the Defense Minister, Nelson Jobim, for an update on the search for bodies of those who disappeared in Araguaia. The army has not revealed their location.

Jobim has not commented to the media about the court’s decision.