Above photo: Poster of the seminar “Latin American and Caribbean Unity in the Face of Imperialist Geopolitics,” held by the ALBA-TCP in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 24, 2024. ALBA-TCP.
On Friday, the Executive Secretariat of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP), and the People’s Institute for Original Thought organized the seminar “Latin American and Caribbean Unity in the Face of Imperialist Geopolitics.” Renowned experts agreed that the region continues to suffer from the dispute between the model of union proposed by the independence heroes, with Simón Bolívar at the forefront, and the Monroe doctrine that the United States has been trying to impose for the last 200 years.
At the start of the seminar, held on Friday, May 24, moderator Jorge Arreaza, executive secretary of ALBA-TCP, outlined that “our Latin American and Caribbean continent has been in dispute between two currents: that of the sovereign peoples, with their rights to freedom and self-determination as a fundamental principle, and the domination of US corporations over our neighbors.”
He stated that today, there is evidence that US imperialism is declining but still has great strength in the military sector.
“Our America, in this multipolar, multicentric world, has the potential, in terms of natural resources, population, territorial extent, [and] history, as Liberator Simón Bolívar would say, to be a great pole of power,” said Arreaza in his opening speech, adding that not only does ALBA-TCP act politically, but it also has a clear economic agenda, with a development bank, that aims to mutually benefit participating economies.
The ALBA-TCP executive secretary highlighted that regional unity is oriented towards a process of transition to a new world, towards a new systemic structure—the Latin American pole of power—which can contribute to generate balance in the world. “Only united can we influence geopolitically, geostrategically, the world that is emerging,” he said.
Bolivarian unity project
In her presentation titled “Towards a geopolitics of unity and anti-systemic alternatives,” Ecuadorian sociologist Irene León contextualized the proposal for sovereign regional integration as an alternative that resulted from a process that considers systemic change as a project and that resulted from intense struggles against neoliberalism and free trade. This proposal has opened up possibilities of breaking with capitalist power and, “above all, clarified the possibility of re-founding the region…”
In this sense, she highlighted that the ALBA-TCP proposal is an excellent synthesis of this process and of the approaches that Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro were able to organize and systematize to produce this proposal of systemic change. The integration project of ALBA-TCP “is the most significant project that the region has managed to place before future scenarios, and this not only because of the strategic perspective of building a common agenda in the face of the onslaught of globalization, but also because it opens a range of possibilities for the delineation of geopolitical, economic, and sociocultural initiatives ascribed to the configurations of a multipolar world.”
Professor Pedro Sassone, director of the Pedro Gual Institute of Higher Diplomatic Studies of the Venezuelan Foreign Affairs Ministry, in his lecture “A Doctrinary Vision of the Union,” conceptualized unity as a doctrine which, in the region, is rooted in the basic concept of integration.
“Bolívar’s concept of union is a central concept to achieving independence,” since the Liberator conceived the republic as a “construction of unity,” the expert said, highlighting the need to transcend the traditional thinking of integration, beyond purely economic integration, and to conceive of unity with a comprehensive viewpoint covering political, economic, social, security and defense fields, and, ultimately, of unity in terms of the fundamental problems of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Cuban researcher Félix Valdés García, associated with the Institute of Philosophy of Havana, specializing in the Caribbean, presented a historical account of the regional attempts at integration. Throughout centuries, Latin America and the Caribbean have tried to resist the onslaught of imperialism. Valdés García presented an overview of the approaches of great leftist theorists in his talk entitled “Latin American and Caribbean Unity as a Protective Armor Against Imperial Domination.”
Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein, researcher associated with the new People’s Institute, spoke on “ALBA: Proposal for the Future for Latin America and the Caribbean.” He recounted the attempts made in several countries of the region to provide continuity to the Bolivarian ideal of Latin American unity, which had been extinguished with the death of the Simón Bolívar in 1830. “The first great option for freedom that persists today was the Cuban Revolution that triumphed on January 1, 1959 and brought to Latin America a different option, and, two decades later, in 1979, the popular Sandinista Revolution triumphed in Nicaragua, which also made its contribution.”
He added that, subsequently, Commander Hugo Chávez, who triumphed in the 1998 presidential elections in Venezuela, began to rescue the Bolivarian project and bring the peoples of various countries closer together. In addition, Gelfenstein exalted the principles of ALBA-TCP, such as complementarity, respect for the sovereignty of the member states, and equitable participation.
Mireya Bolett, professor of the Simón Rodríguez University of Venezuela, in her talk titled “The Latin American and Caribbean Union in the Face of Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Current Project of Globalist Domination: A Look from Psychopolitics,” explained what the current globalizing domination project represents for regional unity, through the dissemination and use of content made by generative artificial intelligence, “which is centered on the creation of systems capable of generating contents imitating the human creative process.”
She warned about the “hidden mechanism” behind AI technology, stating that “there is an ideological political concession, there are biases of interest, there are stereotypes, false information that they call hallucinations… there is an intention of cultural domination.”