Declaración de la Cumbre de los Pueblos

THE SUMMIT OF INTELLECTUALS, PARLIAMENTARIANS
AND SOCIAL ACTIVISTS,
held within the framework of
THE SUMMIT OF THE PEOPLES,
in conjunction with the CELAC-EU SUMMIT

THE BRUSSELS DECLARATION

We men and women parliamentarians, intelectuales, and social activists, from Latin America and the Caribbean and from Europe, meeting in the city of Brussels, Belgium, on the 10th of June, 2015, at the Summit of the Peoples, in conjunction with the CELAC-EU SUMMIT, proclaim that:
We reject capital’s offensive, or what is called the Obama Doctrine, which provides the framework for imperialism’s new reactions using a geopolitics of fear, that threatens everyone in political, economic and social terms, especially the peoples and insurgent forces of Our America and Europe, who are sacrificed to the logic of neoliberal adjustments, exemplified by the situation of the Greeks, to whom we express our solidarity for their resistance to the adjustments which have also been faced by Latin American societies.
We condemn the distortions and manipulations carried out by the mainstream media regarding the processes of change in Latin America and the strugges of the progressive forces in Europe.
We denounce the imperial aggression carried out uninterruptedly during the last fifteen years, through a ferocious campaign, on the part of a press that is at the service of international reactionary forces against Venezuela, which has been submitted to an economic war that has no quarter, by means of hoarding, of overpricing and price manipulation applied by transnational companies, violent incidents that caused 43 deaths and hundreds of wounded between the months of February and April of 2014, attempting to undermine the credibility and the historic role that Bolívar’s homeland is playing.
We strongly reject any foreign military intervention or coup d’état, incited or protected by the national and international extreme right, and the incomprehension and the complicity of sectors of social-democratic sectors, as in Honduras in 2009, or the attempts against Ecuador, Paraguay and Bolivia, among others.
We affirm and take pride in the extensive progress that Venezuela has made in the area of human rights in the last 16 years. We reject the politicization of this subject by biased sectors of the press and by national and international agents who seek to claim impunity for those responsible intellectually and materially for the acts of violence carried out in Venezuela in the years 2013-2014. We express our solidarity with the campaign demanding justice and rights being carried out by the Committee of the Victims of the Guarimba [Lethal Disorder] and the Ongoing Coup. We repudiate the interference by expresidents, intitutions and human rights organizations that are striving to make invisible the victims and their relatives.
We call upon European social movements and organizations to act together with Latin America on a common platform to defend the principles of emancipation, solidarity and independence, and the alliance between the peoples that furthers what has been done in this Summit that has concentrated basically on economic matters, in order to demand:
1) respect for the sovereignty of the peoples and the legitimacy of CELAC and its institutions, and also the defense of Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace;
2) the retraction of the Obama Doctrine against Venezuela;
3) the lifting of the criminal blockade against Cuba, the return of the territory illegally occupied by the Guantanmo military base, the just indemnization of the Cuban people for damages inflicted during more than five decades and the elimination of the “Common Position” taken by the European Union toward Cuba;
4) the recognition of Argentina’s sovereign right to the territory of the Malvinas Islands, the military withdrawal from Haiti and the immediate calling of democratic elections; and independence and self-determination for Puerto Rico and the freeing of Oscar López Rivera;
5) the right for access to the sea for Bolivia;
6) Chevron’s respect for the sovereignty of Ecuador and for it to assume responsibility for the ecocide that it has caused in the Amazon basin, and for the non-interference of Exxon in the mechanisms to resolve the differences between Guyana and Venezuela;
7) an end to the migratory policies of the United States, which are causing thousands of victims, mainly Latin Americans, as well as to the violation of human rights committed against Afrodescendants in the United
States; and
8) total transparency concerning the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students and our solidarity with the demand for justice by their families and the Mexican people.
We demounce the fact that the European Union and many Latin American governments are participating in secret negotiations for a new generation of plurilateral commercial agreements pushed by the United States and its allies, such as: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). Such treaties are instruments for the capitalist expansion and accumulation which aim to perpetuate and make irreversible the “rights”granted to Direct Foreign Investment, to privatisations, to the demonopolization of publicly owned assets and the removal of regulations, in order to ensure and acquire greater control and extraction of earnings from national economies and the world economy. With this goal they propose a collection of institutional changes that are antidemocratic and infringe on the sovereignty of our countries.
At present Bilateral Treaties for Investment and Free Trade, together with Tribunals for Dispute Resolution, are created and used by transnational enterprises in order to exploit the riches of Our America and to weaken the national States that are carrying forward processes of change. We salute and express our solidarity with the denunciations of those Treaties that have been made by Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, and we support a binding measure for regulating and sanctioning the actions of Transnational Enterprises, as has been proposed by the United Nations.
Also, we express our solidarity with struggles of the European peoples affected by the politics of austerity imposed by the Troika (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the Central European Bank). We denounce the fact that the austerity policies that are in force will increase social inequalities, unemployment, poverty, job insecurity and the exploitation of labour.
We place the blame on NATO for its aggressive policies and on the EU for its migratory and xenophobic policies that have caused the human tragedy in the Mediterranean, Africa and the Middle East, with the loss of human lives due to migratory exodus, for helping terrorist fundamentalist groups and for imperialism’s threat to peace in the area, with the terrible effects of a potential war that could extend throughout the the whole region starting with the conflict in the Ukraine.
We condemn all manifestations of racism and we endorse the claims of indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples.
We exhort governments, social movements, intellectuals, artists, promoters of culture, to eradicate femicide and fatal forced gender identity. Let us promote the sovereignty of the human body, the right to decide about it and to acknowledge sexual and gender dissidences.
We support the Peace talks being held between the Government of Colombia and the FARC-EP.
Lets us rescue the transcendence and the historic role of the geopolitical thought of Simón Bolívar during the Bicentennial Year of the Jamaica Letter, since the tasks of Latin American and Caribbean integration and unity that he pointed out in 1815 are still totally valid in the present geopolitical juncture of Imperialist aggressions.
We value the efforts accomplished through the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Activists in Defense of Humanity for more than eleven years now without interruption; and we call for the strengthening of this fundamental instrument that Comandantes Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro promoted as a means of defending critical and liberating thought, in order to counteract the hegemony of capital.
In Brussels, Belgium, the 10th of June, 2015.