The popular movements of 17 countries of our American continent, brought together in the ALBA Movements, met in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 25, 26, and 27, 2019 to hold our 5th Continental Coordination Meeting, in the context of the international call to mobilize against G20 and the IMF.
For the first time in history, the G20 (leading members of the most powerful world countries, which concentrate 85% of world riches resulting from the plundering of our natural resources and the looting of the rights of the working class) meets in South American territory, under the council of a totally traitor government such as Mauricio Macri’s.
This G20 meeting has the purpose of outlining dreadful mechanisms such as deepening the work flexibility, deregulation to create greater opportunities for transnational capital, and privatization and commercialization of all spheres of life. In short, the balance of this elitist meeting will represent more adjustments, more repression and vigilance, more debt and less right for the Argentinean people and for all peoples worldwide.
Evidence of it is the recent wave of repression that becomes ever acuter in the countries of the region. We have lost comrades in the struggles for emancipation; the most recent are three members of the Argentinean popular movement, victims of the “easy trigger” policy.
All this, far from discouraging the struggle, has represented a process of organization, mobilization and construction of unity, generating milestones for the entire continent such as the feminist struggles that have been growing in radicalism and massiveness, against patriarchal violence, and in favor of abortion, as well as the iron defense of the rights conquered by our peoples.
ALBA Movements reaffirms that capitalism will not die of natural death resulting from its own contradictions; on the contrary, it is becoming much more dangerous. Our first-rank challenge is therefore the construction of a civilizing alternative contrary to this hegemonic, predatory and unequal system.
We neither forget nor lose the perspective of looking after and sustaining our popular conquests. There are victories we must sustain, study in depth, and at the same time celebrate. They have not defeated us. We have become stronger.
Now more than ever we must be more active in the defense of the revolutionary and popular processes of Our America. For everyone, the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela is the main trench of struggle against imperialism in the continent. The brave Venezuelan people and President Nicolás Maduro Moros have faced the most brutal attack from the US imperialism and its lackeys. Such firm position deserves respect and our full support.
In that same line are the extraordinary and unquestionable social results of the process of changes in the Plurinational State of Bolivia under the leadership of our brother Evo Morales. There is also the exemplary resistance of the Cuban people, for whom we will not cease to demand the immediate and unconditional end of the blockade imposed by the United States for more than 58 years. The solidarity with Cuba cannot be blocked, nor the social and popular conquests of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.
What is happening in Brazil concerns all of us. We will continue to raise our cry of “Free Lula! Marielle lives!” against the fascist, racist, male chauvinistic, homophobic and anti-popular offensive represented by Jair Bolsonaro, which is nothing but another stage of the parliamentary/judicial coup against President Dilma Rousseff. We will continue in the streets, supporting and endorsing the struggle of our brothers and sisters in the Movement of Rural Workers Without Land – MST, in the face of the criminalization of the social movement and their vindication of the agrarian reform in Brazil.
The ALBA Movements endorse the Cuban decision not to continue participating in the “More Doctors” Program due to the threatening declarations of the elected president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, which are a risk for the doctors who have participated in the direct medical attention to the population with the greatest needs.
Peace with social justice in Colombia continues to be a battlefront, with which we reaffirm our militant commitment in solidarity. At this meeting we made progress in the creation of the Continental Peace Commission with the purpose of developing actions to expose the conflict and against the militarization of the territories and in defense of the life and freedom of the social leaders. Only in this year the murders total 226.
We support the decision of the Haitian people to go out to the streets to denounce all those events that attempt against their sovereignty. In the first place is the denounce against President Juvenel Moïse for stealing the Petrocaribe funds (an initiative promoted by the Bolivarian Revolution to ensure the investment of the oil resources in reducing the social gaps of the Caribbean peoples); also the foreign military presence in Haitian territory for more than 103 years, currently active in the MINUSJUSTH, as well as compensation for damage, and justice for the victims of this occupation.
We condemn the assassination of comrade Camilo Catrillanca as expression of the wave of repression against the heroic resistance of the Mapuche people. We demand the immediate retreat of the illegal presence of the Jungle Command, a death squadron at the service of the transnational capital that only brings blood and pain to this oppressed people. We demand that the authorities of the Chilean State assume the legal and political responsibilities for this crime, and demand justice.
Latin America and the Caribbean are living particular moments where not only the rights to independence and self-determination are at stake, but also the rights of the working class. An example of it are the battles being waged by the peoples of the region, as in Trinidad and Tobago, against the Petrotrin privatizing project, and the mass mobilizations in Costa Rica against the Combo Fiscal.
The implementation of the political/military siege imposed today in the North Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) is against the fundamental rights of self-determination of the peoples in a situation of socio-economic crisis, and aggravating the violation of the rights of our Honduran brothers and sisters who are forced to emigrate or do it freely for survival reasons. The criminalization of social protests and the violent actions, assassinations and repression against the original peoples is systematic and continued; the most evident example of it was the cruel assassination of our sister Berta Cáceres, whose judicial cause, plagued with irregularities that distort the due process, still does not show signs of a firm condemnation of the material and intellectual authors.
In response to a colonial, drug dealing State that expresses itself in recurrent assassinations, increase of female murders, and institutional violence against the indigenous peoples, the victory of López Obrador in Mexico shows that the cycle is not closed, that it is still open and in dispute for counter-hegemonic alternatives. We understand that this victory responds to the popular mobilization derived from the accumulation of struggles. With a similar glance we strive for and accompany the project led by the Farabundo Martí Front for the National Liberation in El Salvador, which will face a hard test in the upcoming presidential elections of February, 2019.
Since our most recent continental meeting, held in Panama in 2017, we have been witnesses of the wide construction in unity of the proposal of change represented by the Frente Amplio por la Democracia (Wide Front for Democracy), political instrument of FRENADESO, which will take part in the presidential elections in Panama in May, 2019 with comrade Saúl Méndez as candidate, a popular reference and group member of our movement. With them we say: “The struggle is carried by fighting.”
We are in a state of alert because of the process of judging politics that is currently being applied in the region against leaders of the process of change. We understand that this imperialist tool is part of a wide spectrum, non-conventional war strategy. What the School of the Americas stood for in the past, with emphasis in the training of the repressive military corps, today has a new element in the training of judges to enforce this imperialist strategy. The illegal and arbitrary imprisonment of Lula Da Silva is an example of it. These practices are evidenced in the offensives carried out by the dominant groups against Cristina Fernández in Argentina and Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas in Ecuador, the last of them in hunger strike with death risk.
Conscious of the pressing need to construct the unity of the popular struggles against the United States imperialism and the transnational capital, we promote and call for participation in the International Assembly of the Peoples, a space that will bring together more than 1,500 militants of popular movements of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the entire American continent, from February 22 to February 27, 2019 in Caracas, Venezuela.
We recently came together in the Central American Forum of ALBA Movements that met on October 25, 26, and 27 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with more than 425 delegates of social movements, to prepare the Central American participation in the International Assembly of the Peoples. As one of the points of the agenda, the Central American movements have agreed to meet in 2019 in the Central American Congress in Mexico.
Heading to the International Assembly of the Peoples, the social movements of the region have agreed to meet in La Paz, Bolivia early next year to consolidate our actions in that sub-region and, at the same time, support and accompany the process of change led by Evo Morales, who will be a candidate in the presidential elections of October, 2019. This endorsement will also be expressed in our participation and organization of the 4th International Seminar “Latin America in Dispute”, to take place in September, 2019 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, convoked by Azules del Oriente and the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements In Defense of Humanity.
In that same action line, we call for accompaniment in the 13th International Meeting “Paradigms of Emancipation”, which will be held in Havana on January 22-25, 2019, in the context of the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
Another essential step in the path we intend to follow in 2019 for the articulation of our struggles will be the meeting of Caribbean movements in favor of the Decade of Africa and Reparations, as well as the 8th Assembly of the Peoples of the Caribbean, which will be celebrated in Trinidad and Tobago on August 15-19, precisely on the 25th anniversary of this Caribbean effort for articulation.
After three days of analysis, reflection, drawing up of programs and self-evaluation regarding the peoples’ struggles and the clear vision we have of our common enemy, the U.S. imperialism and the transnational capital, we have agreed to raise the level of mobilization, to wage with strength the political-cultural battle, to defeat the most regressive common sense standpoints and to construct an action plan in unity and solidarity that will strengthen us more and boost our capacity of timely response to the different recycling attempts of the hegemonic model in crisis.
Inspired by the results of this movement, we head toward our 3rd Continental Meeting of ALBA Movements that will coincide with the bicentennial of the Address of Angostura, a historical call for unity and construction of popular power for the definitive liberation of our peoples, which will enable us to reach the possible and concrete utopia of the commune.
Down G20 – IMF!
Unity, struggle, battle, and victory!
We shall overcome!
Buenos Aires, December 1, 2018
Translation by albamaltanorthafrica
