From April 16 to 18, leaders and activists from social movements throughout our Americas will converge on Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, for the Fourth Summit of the Peoples. This major encounter brings together organizations of farmers, workers, youth, women, indigenous people, social movements, and the many networks that have struggled for the cancellation of debt and against free trade and militarization, among other issues.
The Summit of the Peoples coincides with the Fifth Summit of the Americas, which since its inception in 1994 has had as its centerpiece the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Social movements quickly identified this neoliberal plan as a grave threat to the well-being of the hemisphere’s peoples and organized a broad, anti-neoliberal movement known as the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA).
After the first Summit of the Americas, in Miami, every subsequent meeting (Santiago, 1998; Quebec City, 2001; and Mar del Plata, 2005) has been met with a powerful counter-summit, organized and hosted by the HSA. Through continuous mobilization, this movement helped ensure the FTAA’s defeat in 2005. But even though this component of the neoliberal agenda is dead and buried, other threats remain.
When this year’s Summit of the Americas convenes in Port of Spain, the geopolitical map of the hemisphere will look radically different than it did in 1994. Following the election of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez in December 1998, we have seen left and center-left governments come to power throughout Latin America. These changes—which have their own characteristics and contradictions in each country—would not have happened without the direct actions of the region’s social movements, most of which are part of the HSA.
Today, governments in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Paraguay, and possibly El Salvador—at the time of this writing the parliamentary elections had just been held—have been elected with parties and/or leaders that have at various times and to varying degrees taken positions against the Washington Consensus. The last two Summits of the Americas were attended by George W. Bush, whose agenda has been partly criticized by Barack Obama, who is slated to attend in April.
This installment will therefore take on a very different Latin America engaging a new U.S. administration. And the outcome of this engagement will critically depend on the social movements’ agenda. But this is just one reason why the upcoming Summit of the Peoples is of crucial importance.
We will be meeting in the context of the most severe crisis of capitalism since the 1929 Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression of the 1930s. The owners and managers of global capital are clearly in deep trouble and seem not to have any solutions for the crisis that they created by massive speculation and greed, among other factors. The political representatives of this class and their agents in the international financial institutions are equally clueless. Each time a finger is placed in the leaking dike, another larger, more problematic hole opens.
If the working people and poor of the hemisphere are to avoid bearing the burden of this crisis, they have to analyze the nature of the crisis and identify the way forward. Indeed, the crisis, while fraught with danger, also presents a real opportunity to advance the struggle for “another world.” The Summit of the Peoples presents an opportunity for this dialogue.
Being held for the first time in a Caribbean country, this peoples’ counter-summit also creates a space for an invaluable interaction between the social movements of Latin America and the Caribbean, together with the sharing of experiences of the movements in North America. Social movements in the Caribbean, and in particular the English-speaking region, have generally not been an integral part of the HSA and the anti-FTAA struggles.
Given that the impact of the neoliberal model’s collapse is being felt ever more acutely throughout the Caribbean, the Summit of the Peoples will be a moment for the region’s social movements to deepen their capacity for the struggles that are undoubtedly to come.
David Abdulah, an economist, has served as chief education and research officer at the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union, Trinidad and Tobago, since 1978. He is president of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions and NGOs (FITUN).
