CELAC calls for peace
The tenth anniversary of the proclamation of the region as a zone of peace
The VIII Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC for its initials in Spanish) was opened on March 1, 2024, by an official ceremony commemorating the tenth anniversary of the declaration of the region as a zone of peace. The declaration was signed by representatives of all thirty-three member states of CELAC at its Second Summit held in Havana in 2014.
Four heads of state gave speeches during the commemorating ceremony: Miguel Díaz-Canel, President of Cuba; Xiomara Castro, President of Honduras, who assumed during the Summit the presidency pro tempore of CELAC for 2024; Gustavo Petro, President of Colombia, who will head CELAC in 2025; and Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, who is the host of the March 1, 2024 Summit, concluding the English-speaking island nation’s year as President pro tempore of CELAC.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel declared that the 2014 declaration is emblematic, and it is an honor for Cuba to have been the place where the historic Summit took place, but the credit goes to everyone who mobilized the political will to make it possible. He further declared that the proclamation is a symbol of hope for millions of people, whose main concern is survival in a world convulsed by violence and war. He further maintained:
Peace is not only a legitimate right of all peoples and of every human being, it is a fundamental condition for the enjoyment of all human rights.
The region and the world need peace, in order to concentrate all its capacity, intelligence and resources on confronting the real enemies of our species: hunger, poverty, climate change, illiteracy, disease, the depletion of natural resources, and the growing marginalization to which the vast majority of the world's population is subjected today.
Defending peace implies the firmest rejection of unilateral coercive measures and blockades imposed by powerful countries, which seek to act as universal judges to isolate and subjugate sovereign States.
To support peace is to defend the right of each people to freely choose its political model and its own path toward economic and social development.
To advance the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean, it is essential to preserve peace. Peace allows us to listen to each other in order to understand each other, to move toward what unites us and to discuss differences in a civilized and respectful way.
The Cuban President called for dialogue and cooperation before differences and challenges. We must defend peace above war and violence.
Xiomara Castro arrived to the presidency of Honduras in January 2022 as the candidate of the Party of Liberation and Refoundation, a coalition of alternative political parties, social movements, and the radical wing of the two established political parties. In her inaugural address, she outlined a program that included free energy and free school lunches for the poor and the stimulation of agricultural production toward the production of food. And she declared a foreign policy characterized by complementary and mutually beneficial trade relations with the nations of the region and the world. See “Xiomara Castro assumes presidency in Honduras: An alliance of parties and movements seeks a socialist refoundation,” January 28, 2022.
In her remarks during the commemoration of the declaration of the region as a zone of peace, the Honduran President declared that “today we must ratify our commitment that no country in Latin America and the Caribbean will ever use violence against a sister country." Problems and differences "must be resolved among ourselves, without interference or external pressure; with dialogue as a tool, and always with orientation toward the wellbeing of the region and the self-determination of peoples.” Peace, she declared, emerges from commitment to justice, to historical memory, to truth, and to the principle of the right of children to a school. Peace involves combatting poverty, and seeking to end hunger, which is the worst form of violence. Peace in Latin America and the Caribbean, she pointed out, must be based on respect for the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of states, national sovereignty, and the self-determination of peoples.
The Colombian Peace process of 2012-2116 led to a peace agreement between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), ratified by the Congress on November 29-30, 2016. Although it was a significant step forward in ending a conflict that was initiated in the 1960s, it has not been completely successful in normalizing the countryside and in protecting the security of the ex-combatants, problems that were particularly evident during the right-wing government Ivan Duque from 2018 to 2022.
Gustavo Petro was sworn in as President on August 7, 2022, and he is considered the first left-wing president in the history of Colombia. He obtained congressional approval for a law for “total peace,” which has included negotiations with illegal armed groups of the Right and criminal gangs as well as leftist armed groups such as the Army of National Liberation and FARC dissidents that have not accepted the 2016 agreement. Efforts are made to include the community in the negotiations. These efforts have been supported by the United Nations, and they have resulted in progress in negotiations with the Army of National Liberation.
In his discourse at the commemoration ceremony, Gustavo Petro maintained that the increase of violence and war is one of the principal problems that humanity confronts today. There is a structural explanation for this, he pointed out, in that the imperialist countries can no longer sustain their power on the base of the civilized international relations and international law that they constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War. So they turn to increasing their military power and to pressing the buttons of bombs, as they are doing now in Palestine.
Petro asserted that violence is a central part of the reality of Latin America and the Caribbean, which we have to recognize. During the last fifty years, the region has been the most violent in the world, even more than regions where direct wars occurred. The violence throughout the region has been genocidal, and it has produced a mass exodus from Central America and South America to the North, where prisons and machine guns await the people, when they do not die on the way. The solution is not any alliance with a great military power. “It is naïve to think that we are going to construct a zone of peace if we are aligned with the great blocs of military powers.” He called upon Latin Americans and Caribbeans to “think about autonomy in military security and defense.” He declared that “it is time to deepen the mechanism where our armies, our police forces, our security forces are used to serve the common political objectives of Latin America and the Caribbean, with an autonomous policy.”
Ralph Gonsalves is Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, a nation formed by small Caribbean islands. Affectionately known as Comrade Ralph, he has been involved in politics since his student days at the University of West Indies in the 1960s. First elected Prime Minister in 2001, he has been re-elected for five consecutive terms. He possesses an exceptional understanding of world affairs, and he is known for his teaching that the central conflict of our time is the conflict between imperialism and anti-imperialism.
“Comrade Ralph speaks: The false frame of democracy versus autocracy,” October 3, 2023
In his discourse commemorating the anniversary of the declaration of the region as a zone of peace, Gonsalves declared that the peace and security of the region are being suffocated by the exportation of arms that arrive to the hands of criminals who kill, rob, and terrorize citizens. Most of these arms, he declared, come from the United States of America. He pointed out that in the United States there is the defense of the right of citizens to bear arms, in accordance with the values of the Northern nation. But those values, he declared, lead to the adoption of policies that do not have our permission, which have consequences for our region. He expressed his support for the measures adopted by the government of Mexico against the fabrication of arms in the United States, and he hoped that the U.S. Court will support the Mexican demand. This would help to maintain security in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Gonsalves further observed that, as any politically mature person understands, imperialism and hegemony are the natural enemies of peace. Peace is anti-imperialist and anti-hegemonic. Anyone in our region who supports war, he declared, is objectively supporting imperialism and hegemony. But we do not have to go down that road, he declared. Peace is the means to justice, prosperity, and the civilized life.
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Final considerations
Marx formulated an analysis of human history, philosophy, and political economy from the vantage point of the worker, based in the political activity of the working class in nineteenth century Western Europe. Lenin, writing from the vantage point of the Russian Revolution, understood the revolutionary subject as consisting of workers and peasants led by workers with advanced revolutionary consciousness, and he projected that the nations of the East (which today we call the South) would become the epicenter of the world socialist revolution.
During the course of the twentieth century, the colonized and neocolonized peoples emerged as the revolutionary subject, forging anti-colonial and anti-imperialist revolutions, seeking to construct an alternative international economic order based on mutual respect and cooperation among nations, as against a world shaped by inter-imperialist competition for profit through control of the natural resources and labor of the planet.
One of the observable characteristics of the Third World anti-colonial and anti-imperialist revolutions is that they lift up exceptional leaders with a high level of commitment and an advanced understanding. We see this phenomenon in the commemoration of March 1, as Latin American and Caribbean leaders, each with his or her journey of formation and growth in determined political contexts, speaks of the need to construct peace on a foundation of justice for the neocolonized peoples of the earth.
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