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Final Declaration of the Peoples’ Summit

Panama City, Panama

April 11, 2015

Translated and edited by Charles McKelvey.

     Editor’s Note.  The Seventh Summit of the Americas, held April 10-12, 2015 in Panama, brought together heads of state of the nations of the two Americas: the America to the North, consisting of the United States and Canada; and the America of the South, consisting of the thirty-three nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.  As a result of the emergence of a new political reality in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1995, the Summits of the Americas have evolved to have a character completely different from the First Summit of the Americas, held in Miami in 1994, in which the principal agenda was the imposition by the United States of a Free Trade Area of the Americas.  FTAA was shipwrecked at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in 2005 at Mar del Plata, Argentina, as a result of the opposition of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

     The Seventh Summit of the heads of state was accompanied by five parallel events:  the Summit of the Peoples, the Business Summit of the Americas, the Summit of University Rectors, the Youth Forum, and the Forum of Civil Society.  The most colorful of these was the Summit of the Peoples, consisting of delegates of social movements, labor unions, and student and indigenous organizations.  Four thousand delegates arrived to participate in the Summit of the Peoples and to issue a Declaration that affirms the need for a new society with social justice.  And English version of the Declaration, distributed in Spanish, is produced in full below, with minor editorial changes for purposes of clarity and style.  
 

     We, the Peoples of Our America, convoked in the Summit of the Peoples, of Labor Organizations, and of Social Movements meeting at the University of Panama from April 9 to April 11, 2015; with more than 3,500 delegates representing hundreds of our worker, union, peasant, indigenous, student, women’s, and social organizations of the popular movement; in a setting of unity and fraternal and supportive debate in fifteen work sessions of the Peoples’ Summit; declare:

     We, the Peoples of Our America, express our firm backing of the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace and free of colonialism, as was unanimously agreed upon by all the governments of Our America in January of 2014 by the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

     Accordingly, we reject all forms of military aggression, threats and harassment that the United States and its strategic allies deploy against our region in the form of military bases, sites of operation and installations, which merely in the last four years have increased from twenty-one to seventy-six in Our American, twelve of them in Panama; and we demand the repeal of the Pact of Neutrality, which permits North American military intervention in the Republic of Panama. 

     Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Mali, the Central African Republic, Pakistan, the Congo, Mauritania, Libya, and Yemen are merely some of the most recent North American military interventions, with the consequences of death and desolation.  We do not want such a situation in Our America.

     Therefore, we support the declarations of the General Secretary of the South American Union of Nations (UNASUR), which solicits the exclusions of all military bases in our regions of peace and the affirmation that no country has the right to judge the conduct of another and much less to impose sanctions or punishments unilaterally.

     We, the Peoples of our America, support the Cuban people and their Revolution; we welcome the return home of the five Cuban heroes, the result of international solidarity and the tireless struggles of their people.  We demand, joined with all the peoples of the world, the immediate and unconditional lifting of the genocidal blockade against the Republic of Cuba by the government of the United States, and the immediate closing of the military base of Guantanamo, unconditionally, in accordance with international laws and the United Nations Charter.

     We, the Peoples of America, express our unconditional and unlimited support for the Bolivarian Revolution and the legitimate government headed by compañero Nicolás Maduro.   

     Therefore, we reject the unjust, interventionist, and immoral Executive Order of the government of the United States, which has tried to present the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as a threat to its national security, and which has received the deserved unanimous rejection of all the countries of Our America.

     We, the Peoples of America, reaffirm that Puerto Rico is a Latin American and Caribbean nation, with its own unmistakable identity and history, whose rights to independence and sovereignty are violated by a colonial tutelage imposed for more than a century in an arbitrary manner by North American imperialism.  In the historic struggle to attain the sovereignty and self-determination of Puerto Rico, many have been purged and imprisoned, among them Oscar López Rivera, for whom we demand immediate liberty.

     We, the Peoples of America, reiterate our solidarity with and hopeful support for the Dialogues of Peace in Colombia that bare being conducted between the Government of Colombia and FARC-EP.  We solicit the initiation of a similar roundtable with the ELN, with the goal of moving toward the construction of a firm and lasting peace with social justice.  We applaud the gestures made by different governments in order to facilitate the success of the process.

     We, the Peoples of America, reiterate our permanent and unconditional support for the Republic of Argentina in its action taken for the recuperation of the Malvinas Islands, as well as our backing of the Plurinational State of Bolivia in its just and long-deferred aspiration for its own access to the sea.  We demand the immediate withdrawal of the occupation troops in Haiti, an action that would permit its self-determination.  We call upon the government of Mexico to present alive the forty-three teachers’ school students that have been forcefully abducted and are missing.

     We, the Peoples of America, declare the urgent need for the construction and advancement of a new society, with social justice, with gender equity, with the active participation of youth and the various social actors, and with solidarity as the fundamental principle for the integral development and sovereignty of our peoples.  Today in Our America there are lackeys of imperialism who intend to sustain and impose the neoliberal model as the solution to the problems and needs of our peoples, a model that has shown itself to be the most efficient instrument for the deepening of poverty, misery, inequality, exclusion, and the most unjust distribution of wealth that is known.

     Confronting this situation, we express and we convoke to struggle and to the defense of our natural resources, of biodiversity, of food sovereignty, of our common good, of mother earth, of the ancestral rights of the original peoples, and of the social rights that we have gained.  We convoke struggle for employment, work and decent salary, social security, pensions, collective bargaining, unionization, the right to strike, freedom to organize unions, occupational health, economic and social rights, respect for migrants and afro-descendants, and the eradication of child and slave labor; and for justice with gender equality.   

     At this is and will be possible, if we work in unity and with the objective of building a correlation of forces that would allow the substitution of the dominant power bloc with a social and political power that defends the interests of our peoples. (Italics added).

     Ten years following the defeat of FTAA, we reaffirm our struggle against new forms of treaties of free commerce, such as FTAs and the Alliance of the Pacific.  We also continued to sustain that the external debt is unpayable and irrecoverable, inasmuch as it is illegitimate and immoral.

      We, the Peoples of America, applaud the process of integration that gives primacy to the self-determination and the sovereignty of our peoples, processes like ALBA and CELAC, which have strengthened Latin American unity.  We believe it necessary to complement these processes with the participation of social, labor, and popular organizations, in order to foment even more an integration from and for the peoples.

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