Latin American forum says no to U.S. imperialism

Left parties and organizations from all over Latin America and the Caribbean and their allies converged in San Salvador Jan. 12-15 for the Sao Paulo Forum XIII, an ongoing meeting whose first session was in Brazil in 1990.

Salvadoran crowd celebrates forum. WW photo: Heather Cottin

They called this forum “A New Stage of the Struggle for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean.” Over 500 delegates from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Curacao, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico (including Oaxaca), Peru, Chile, and Colombia discussed the need to combat U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism, the “globalization” policies ravaging the Third World.

Outside the forum one could observe the impact of neoliberal policies. Salvadorans who work in factories called “maquilas,” owned by capitalists in the imperialist countries (the U.S. and Western Europe) are paid $4 a day. The rest survive on $2 a day. People in the countryside have no running water, no clean water, no medical care or free schools.

Although the delegates had political differences, the theme of the four-day forum was unity and support for all the left parties and formations in the region.

The forum delegates were ebullient as Raphael Correa was about to be inaugurated as Ecuador’s president, and Daniel Ortega, who had led Nicaragua during the Sandinista period, had just been inaugurated Jan. 11. Ortega had announced then that Nicaragua was leaving the neoliberal Central American Free Trade Agreement and had signed the ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) accords as Cuban Vice-President José Ramón Machado, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez embraced him.

At the Sao Paulo Forum, the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front of El Salvador (FMLN) General Coordinator Medardo González, said, “Today we are in position to affect the defeat of neoliberalism, and not just to defeat it, but to overcome it and to construct a new model for Latin America and the Caribbean.”

The four major points of agreement, which were unanimously accepted on the last day of the conference, called for fundamental structural reforms that would improve society and the creation of an economic alternative to neoliberalism. They called for national sovereignty and cooperation among the people and countries of the region who embrace this project for continental integration.

Beyond this, the forum denounced U.S. imperialist doctrine, which promotes poverty, militarization and colonialism, especially in Puerto Rico and the other remaining ten colonies in the Caribbean. The final declaration called for genuine political, social and economic democracy, sustainable development and full equality for all human beings.

The women’s caucus, made up of women from Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and North America, met to denounce imperialism’s exploitation of women, in the maquilas, in the countryside and in the sex trade.

The women’s final document stated categorically, “Capitalism cannot resolve the problems of humanity ... nor support the family. Capitalism humanizes neither men nor women.” Their resolution said, “Socialism and democracy are possible only when women take an active part in taking decisions” in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Speakers from Germany, Italy, Norway, Catalonia and Portugal commended the unity apparent in the Latin American and Caribbean left. Speakers from Vietnam, Palestine and China spoke as well, all of them supporting unity against U.S. imperialism and Israeli Zionism, condemning the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and against the people of Lebanon.

In the amphitheatre on Jan. 14 the forum participants were greeted by thousands of FMLN activists bused in from all parts of El Salvador to celebrate the success of this new direction in Latin America. Signs supporting the Cuban, Venezuelan, Bolivian and Ecuadorian struggles were displayed among the FMLN banners in a sea of red shirts and banners.

They cheered their hearts out when Freddy Bernal, the mayor of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, said: “If we don’t take this road to socialism, the other is the road toward exclusion, death and misery. It is the road that the United States has forced us to walk on for so many years. There is now a change in Latin America, a change made by the left, and it represents a rebirth of hope for the people who never tire of the struggle.”