Support first People’s Alternative Summit

Vania Lara WW photo: Lal Roohk

From a talk given by Vannia Lara, a Dominican organizer, at the May 13-14 conference on “Preparing for the Rebirth of the Global Struggle for Socialism” in New York City.

The U.S. is in the Dominican Republic right now, in Barahona, trying to do what they did in Vieques. We have been economically and culturally invaded, and are now being militarily invaded.

We were invaded in the past, in 1916 and in 1965, when we had the April Revolution that, along with a sector of the armed forces, was mostly fought by civilians. Even though there was only one gun per 20 Dominicans, we were about to defeat the right-wing section that had the coup d’etat against Bosch. And when we were about to take power, the U.S. Marines paid us a visit, and that’s the end of that. We lost a lot of valuable Dominican lives.

The Organization of American States is having its general assembly in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, June 4-6. We’re working really hard on a counter-summit. We call it the first People’s Alternative Summit.

We’re going to be talking about bad governance, the crisis of globalization, the FTAA, the post-FTAA, the DR-CAFTA. And we’re going to talk about the alternative, the ALBA, Mercosur, Petrocaribe, the TCB—the treaty that recently Morales, Chavez and Castro came together to make concrete.

We’ll have camps for the three days, forums and workshops, and a big march on the fourth. We’re inviting social activists, religious figures and representatives from progressive governments such as Cuba and Venezuela.

The congressional elections are going on right now in the Dominican Republic, and the crisis is awful. The health-care system is in a big crisis, and our children are in the streets. Haitian immigrants are being persecuted because of institutionalized xenophobia, because we are taught in school that we were invaded by the Haitians and that we became independent from them, not from Spain.

We’ll also be talking about militarization. They say that the troops that are now in Barahona are leaving on the 30th of this month. We don’t care, we want them out now.

We’ll also be talking about human rights, the immigration issue here, and the immigration issue in the Dominican Republic, with the Haitian people.

We’re trying to bring groups from all over Latin America and the U.S. I hope I see you in Santo Domingo.

For more information, visit http://peoplessummit.tripod.com.