CLOC: Solidarity With the People and Their Struggles

Quito, Ecuador, October 8-16, 2010

Since September 11, 2001, with the fall of the twin towers, the USA has dealt a planetwide blow, and American power has become a global state of domination. It imposes on the planet a strategy of violent repression that employs diverse mechanisms such as open war, the wars on drugs, terror, and crime, paramilitarism, and humanitarian aid for disaster relief. In this way, social struggles and movements are criminalized.

With this end, American military bases have been expanded and cooperative operations between the US, NATO, and the police and armed forces of our countries have been reinforced. At the same time, we see on our continent the resurgence of groups determined to incite coups, who had success in Honduras due to the strong support of the United States, but who were defeated by popular mobilization in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The organizations of CLOC will remain mobilized and on alert to impede new groups of this kind.

The people are constantly being forced into mass migrations, so that big business can count on having industrial armies on reserve. The move from the country to the city is due to the scarcity and dispossession of land, military and paramilitary action, the loss of productive goods, poor quality of life, and the climate crisis. The result of this migration is the formation of strings of poverty in the cities, which many endure, living in misery and begging on the streets to feed their children. Transnational immigrants don’t have the same rights as local workers, including the rights to health and education, and their children are often without nationality.

In general on the Latin American continent, the human rights of farmers, Natives, and African-descendant people have been violated systematically and persistently by dominant powers bound up with national and transnational capital, like a historical inheritance from the Conquista. Today, it is a strategy of capitalism to disarticulate and destroy popular struggles and appropriate natural goods, to guarantee their looting from mines to the open sky, by means of dams, the massive exploitation of the ocean, the forced displacement of Native people, genetically modified monocultivation, and monopolistic control of food. The violation of human rights has become a state policy in many countries, including in their constitutional law. Femicide is the deepest and gravest form of human rights violation in Latin America, employing systematic kidnapping, rape, and murder.

The human rights of farmers, Native, and African-descendant peoples are systematically and persistently violated in Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico and Panama. The assassinations and disappearances of unionists and social leaders and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of farmers are recurrent.

We live and suffer from capitalism’s capacity for destruction and devastation. However, the force of our struggles, the forms of unity that we continue to build, the growing value of our contributions, our visions and cultures, and the reemergence of life that we see in our triumphs, all assure us that our work will allow us to dismantle capitalism and build a country and a world that guarantee dignity and well-being for all.

In this way,

We express solidarity with the brave people of Haiti, who have mobilized en masse against military occupation and plundering and the imposition of genetically modified seeds, despite the tremendous subsequent difficulties of the earthquake.

We express solidarity with the people of Colombia, who suffer systematic aggressions, state crimes, and paramilitarism, but resist them without surrender, and we demand political and diplomatic resolution of this social and armed conflict.

We reiterate our permanent solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban people who have resisted 50 years of blockades on the part of the United States, and we demand the liberation of the five Cuban revolutionaries held prisoner by imperialism.

We also express solidarity with the struggle of the Mapuche people, and with those who after almost three months of hunger striking succeeded in forcing the hand of the Chilean state, and broadened the social sectors dedicated to fighting for the revocation of a spurious antiterrorism law.

We express solidarity with the popular resistance in Honduras, which despite the continued coup has achieved majority support in the constitutional assembly.

We express solidarity with and we support the struggles of the people affected by hydroelectric and other dams. We affirm our commitment to the fight against mining dams and against the privatization of energy and water, as states the declaration of our meeting. We affirm that water and energy are not merchandize. Water and energy should serve sovereignty and be under the control of the people.

We express solidarity with the Amazonian peoples and nations affected by the hydrocarbon projects in the Yasuní National Park.

We celebrate the triumph of social struggles in Bolivia and Ecuador, which have started deep processes of national transformation and have allowed the adoption of revolutionary national constitutions. We salute the Ecuadorian organizations that mobilized decisively and overcame an attempted coup in this country.

Globalize the fight, globalize hope!

Against the looting of capitalism and imperialism, America fights!

For the land and sovereignty of our people, America fights!