Vol. 71/No. 21      May 28, 2007

Delegates attended from a range of social protest groups, as well as some peasant, trade union, and student organizations. Talks and panels focused on current trade agreement negotiations between Washington and governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.

"Like a malignant virus the FTAA [Free Trade Agreement of the Americas] has mutated and maintained its essence as a project of plunder and domination," said Osvaldo Martínez, president of the Economic Affairs Commission of Cuba's National Assembly, at the conference opening. "Now it shows its face with bilateral free trade agreements and siren songs of trade liberalization."

In previous years, similar gatherings focused on opposing the FTAA, a pact Washington sought to establish throughout Latin America to eliminate protective trade and investment policies of weaker capitalist states on the continent and open them to even greater exploitation by U.S. imperialism.

Unable to win full backing for the FTAA—both from sections of the U.S. ruling class and from governments of semicolonial countries—Washington has pursued regional and bilateral trade accords. Martínez noted that the governments of Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua have already signed such trade pacts. Those of Colombia and Peru are waiting approval from U.S. Congress for similar agreements. Negotiations are also underway with Panama.

Washington's plans to impose the FTAA have also run into opposition from workers and peasants fighting for greater control of their country's patrimony, for access to land, and against other forms of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation.

On behalf of the conference organizing committee, Martínez urged participants to organize "actions to get closer to a world without the FTAA, without free trade agreements, without environmental destruction, without imperialism, and without discrimination on the basis of race or sex, and with social justice, respect for the environment, and full human dignity."

Martínez also reported some accomplishments of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) and other initiatives to expand Latin American cooperation based on solidarity, not profit. ALBA is a trade pact signed by the governments of Cuba and Venezuela in 2005, which Bolivia and Nicaragua have now joined. ALBA includes programs to combat illiteracy, expand access to health care, and develop energy and infrastructure.

In a little more than two years of ALBA, Martínez said, 30,000 Cuban volunteer doctors have provided services to people who did not have access to medical coverage in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua; 70,000 youth are studying on scholarships to become doctors; and 2 million Latin Americans have learned to read and write. Martínez also noted that in the last three years more than 600,000 people have received eye operations, allowing them to see.
 
 
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