ALBA after ten years

By John Riddell. The following talk was given at a celebration of ALBA in Toronto, 21 February 2015 (see below). Today we celebrate a decade of achievement of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA). For ten years ALBA has stood on the world stage as a defender of peace, solidarity, and popular sovereignty.

Before ALBA, Cuba stood alone for many years against the U.S.-led empire. But through ALBA, an alliance of countries, with wide influence and many friends among governments and peoples, now challenges imperialism on a range of issues. While representing only a few small and poor countries, ALBA exercises great moral authority and carries weight in world affairs. ALBA is the most effective international alliance based on solidarity in modern history.

Nowhere has this been so clear as with regard to climate change, which profit-driven corporations have escalated into an existential crisis for humanity. At the December 2014 Lima governmental conference on climate change. Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, speaking for ALBA nations and the entire G77 group of developing countries, called for “a climate agreement based on an anticolonialist vision,” on the “learning of indigenous peoples,” on “protection of life and mother Earth,” and “not on the market, profit, and capitalism.”

Yet the world’s great powers, once again, refused at the Lima conference to take meaningful action to prevent catastrophic climate change. In response, the subsequent ALBA meeting in Cuba resolved to work toward a “world encounter of social movements” that would develop “a proposal to save life and humanity.” This goal recalls the great conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010, where more than 30,000 people from 100 countries, with leadership from Evo Morales and ALBA countries, adopted a manifesto against capitalism’s devastation of Mother Earth.

Some have criticized ALBA countries for their failure to shut down oil and other environmentally harmful extractive industries. This is un-called for. ALBA nations have endured economic pressure and even subversion from Canada and its allies. To survive, they must sell what they can on the world market, and extractive products is almost the only thing that rich countries will buy. We should not advise poor countries to scale down exports in the face of such hostility. Instead, we in Canada should focus on converting our own country into a loyal friend of Latin American peoples, a country that will assist them in pursuing a more ecologically sound path of economic development.

Throughout ALBA’s decade, its member countries have worked consistently against war. For example, four years ago, leading ALBA countries strongly opposed the war launched by a U.S.-led alliance, including Canada, against the Libyan government. Today, the disastrous results of this assault are plain to see: the Libyan state has been shattered; the country thrust into civil war. Nicolás Maduro, then Venezuelan foreign minister, spoke prophetically in 2011 in branding the 2011 attack as part of “a new cycle of colonial wars … without any limit to is destructive voracity.”

When a destructive civil war broke out in Syria later that year, progressive forces in Canada were of many minds regarding the nature of the conflict. But surely we can all now see how right ALBA countries were to oppose foreign intervention and urge a political solution in Syria.

No wonder, then, that ALBA nations have stood out in support of Palestinians against Israeli’s wars and taken action in the spirit of “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.” At an anti-imperialist conference in Egypt in 2007, I heard delegates hail Hugo Chávez as “more Arab than the Arabs” for his bold stand against Israeli’s wars.

And when last month a socialist, Alexis Tsipras, was elected prime minister of Greece, he was quickly in touch with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez will now be heading to Greece to work on agreements for cooperation.

During a visit to the Penobscot indigenous nation in Maine a few years ago, I found they were receiving material aid from Venezuela, in a program that also assisted Black communities in the United States. The Bolivarians thus confirmed the vision of Malcolm X, murdered 50 years ago today, who saw the freedom struggle in the Global South as a beacon of hope for his people. ALBA has set an example for such mutual assistance, in a spirit of solidarity, among its members and also with non-member countries in the region.

ALBA has provided us with a historic example of international anti-imperialist collaboration. Moreover, leaders of ALBA have argued for an alternative type of society, a socialist society. And once again socialism is being discussed not merely by narrow radical circles but, in many Latin American countries, by millions of working people.

All the more reason for us today to support Venezuela and its president, Nicolas Maduro, to support ALBA, and to spread knowledge of ALBA’s bold experiment in solidarity.

The February 21 meeting was convened jointly by the Bolivarian Circle Louis Riel and the Canada Cuba Friendship Association. The 70 participants also heard remarks by Aura Suárez (Consulate of Venezuela), Susana Malmierca Benítes (Consulate of Cuba), Juan Carranza, Keith Ellis, María Páez Victor, and Juan Valencia.

A video of the celebration is available at “Left Streamed.”

The member states of ALBA, in the order in which they joined, are Cuba and Venezuela (2004); Bolivia (2006); Nicaragua (2007); Dominica (2008); Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador, St. Vincent and the Grenadines (2009); Saint Lucia (2013); Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis (2014). Honduras joined in 2008 but was forced to withdraw the following year after a U.S.-supported right-wing military coup.