Pavel Égüez, La Patria Naciendo de la Ternura [The Homeland Born Out of Tenderness], Caracas, Venezuela, 2006.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This June, we celebrate the bicentennial of the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama, the beginning of the unity and integration of Nuestra América. This gathering sought not only to reaffirm the independence won in the war against the Spanish Empire, but also to advance a project of deep social transformation that would overcome harmful legacies like slavery. It aimed to become a contribution toward achieving a universal equilibrium in which relations between nations could be conducted t without the interests of one being imposed on another. To comment on the importance of this historical milestone for our contemporary struggle, we asked Georgette Kuri—writing from Mexico, where the congress held its final sessions—to share her reflections with us:

Two hundred years after the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama convened by Simón Bolívar, we reclaim it as the first dream of Nuestra América and as the starting point of the great task that has been, then as now, to achieve Latin American unity. The weight of the United States, the ambivalence of Mexico, and the Latin American territories remaining in the neocolonial and imperialist crosshairs continue to pave the rocky path to our emancipation. However, our revolutionary agency and a clear understanding of the obstacles that have accompanied us throughout history are the lights that must guide our steps.

Alfredo Sinclair (Panama), Mujer Con Cesta De Pescado/[Woman with Fish Basket], (Unknown location).

Starting Point: The Amphictyonic Congress

Multiple factors contributed to the failure of the Amphictyonic Doctrine and its project of Latin American unity undertaken by Bolívar: the external influence of the United Kingdom and the United States, the diversity of stances among Hispanic American countries, the lack of ratification by governments, the territorial dispute between the Empire of Brazil and the United Provinces over the Banda Oriental, Peru’s invasion of Bolivia, Chile’s abstention, the embryonic Federal Republic of Central America, and Mexico’s insistence on hosting the Assembly and defining it as transitory.

Nonetheless, it is worth recognizing that moving the seat of the Assembly to Tacubaya, in Mexico City, led to its dissolution in 1828. Mexico’s preference for supporting the American League, which focused on joint military defence against potential European attempts at reconquest, reflected its concern with limiting a perceived concentration of power in other Hispanic American territories that might threaten the integrity of the nascent nations. This role as a mediator to contain hegemonies on the continent set a precedent for the subsequent annexation of Mexican territory by the United States, both due to the isolation in which Mexico experienced that process and the type of relationship that was established between the two countries.

For its part, and looking beyond Mexico, the United States always exploited the sessions of the Amphictyonic Congress to forge commercial ties with the Hispanic American countries, revealing its purely expansionist interest and escalating from bilateralism to a dispute over the project of continental unity. It aligned itself with the United Kingdom and sought agreements with Brazil, even using the estrangement and rivalry between some Hispanic American countries with that Empire as a ruse, showcasing the ancient yet deeply modern premise of divide and conquer.

Furthermore, the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 formally inaugurated the United States’ policy of intervention on our continent. This ranged from utilizing its diplomatic corps as agents of interventionism to drive external indebtedness and the financial dependence of our countries, to carrying out multiple overt actions of invasion, blockades, occupations, and territorial annexations throughout the 19th century. In 1898, this culminated in the convening of a Customs Union and the First International Conference of American States, demonstrating its active role in sabotaging Latin American unity and attempting to appropriate the project of Bolivarian integration. The 20th century witnessed Pan-Americanism camouflage itself as Inter-Americanism, alongside the militarization of Yankee imperialism and its policies of open intervention.

José Clemente Orozco (Mexico), Pueblo mexicano, [Mexican People], 1929.

Revolutionary Horizon and Latin Americanist Conviction

Given Mexico’s role in the 1826 Amphictyony, it is also necessary to remember other historical events in order to balance the scales. Once independence was consolidated, Mexico positioned itself as an insurgent vanguard against the oligarchic regimes installed in our countries, driven by the emergence of the peasant and working-class popular masses who spearheaded the first great revolution of our times.

The Mexican Revolution established agrarian reform and working-class rights as primary social demands. Its echo resonated in women’s suffrage movements across the length and breadth of the continent, in Central American National Liberation Movements, in the dissertations of José Carlos Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre in Peru, in the Guatemalan Spring, in the Cuban Revolution, in multiple and diverse guerrilla organizations—including Communist Parties—in the Sandinista Revolution, in the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, in the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and in the Bolivarian Revolution, which placed a golden seal on the rebellious and long Latin American 20th century.

During this effervescent period, Mexico had the opportunity to serve as an example of profound social and state transformations: socialist education, regional-scale cultural movements like muralism, the convening of a constituent assembly, oil expropriation, and its own paradigms of diplomacy, solidarity, and sovereignty. It also possessed the political conviction to maintain close relations with socialist Cuba and to welcome large contingents of Latin American exiles displaced by the military dictatorships between the 1960s and 1980s. Today, it continues to take in victims of political persecution and receptively hosts those who choose it as a place to live.

With the installation of neoliberalism in Mexico at the end of the 1980s, a process of discontinuity—or at times estrangement—began regarding its efforts toward Latin American unity, which irremediably diversified and unfolded across multiple dimensions. Even so, in the 1990s, Mexico served as a mediator in different peace processes in Central America, as well as in the resolution of internal conflicts in Colombia and Venezuela in the current century. This review helps understand the complex ambivalence that has characterised Mexico’s relationship with Nuestra América, a dynamic also shaped by its proximity to the United States, its economic dependence, the forty million people of Mexican origin living in that country, and its geographical location in the northern part of the continent.

For all these reasons, it is of special value today to reclaim from Mexico the ideals of unity and integration inherited by the Amphictyonic doctrine and mobilized in this 21st century by the Bolivarian geopolitics of revolutionary Venezuela.

Uban Art by Eva Bracamontes (Mexico). More information: Utopix

Forever Breaking the Imperialist and Neo-colonialist Chains

It is important to consider the hypothesis that the Amphictyony dissolved because attempts at reconquest disappeared as a common threat. Although this idea has been generally dismissed, it matters because it brings us back to the sensation of being out of danger—a feeling that has repeated itself throughout Latin American history and from which we have yet to fully learn our lesson. First, because the threats of neocolonial and imperialist conquest never disappeared. Second, because it is precisely in times of calm that we must seize the moment and march forward with a firm step.

The 21st century has been the stage for progressive advances in Latin America and the Caribbean, driven forward by our societies through popular governments. We have taken up Latin American unity once more as our horizon, with Bolivarian geopolitics—inspired also by Cuba’s internationalist solidarity—as the project that has come closest to making that dream a reality. As in the past, US imperialism is the biggest opponent, willing to commit any atrocity to prevent it, as we are currently witnessing.

This year, 2026, began with a declaration of war by the United States against our Latin American peoples, with the sister republics of Cuba and Venezuela on the front lines as the most radical and successful endeavours toward our liberation. The imperialist and neocolonial threat is more active than ever, and no one is safe. In fact, few progressive governments are resisting the imperial onslaught alongside all our peoples, particularly those most oppressed by ultra-liberal and authoritarian right-wing factions.

It is worth remembering that part of the colonial yoke is a continent atomized into republics, which are more connected to Western metropolitan centres than to fraternal territories sharing the same history, identity, and culture. We must also rid ourselves of inherited territorial hierarchies between empires, viceroyalties, and captaincies, as well as the rivalries and suspicions intrinsic to Western modernity, which serve its geopolitics of war.

It is vital to defend the geopolitics of peace and the equilibrium of the universe that Bolívar envisioned as an alternative for life. In the arduous task of achieving Latin American unity, we must break the imperialist and neocolonial chains forever. Above all, we must commit to the principle that it is precisely in moments of greatest threat when we must close ranks and radicalize our positions.

Warm regards,

Georgette Kuri,

Tacubaya-Mixcoac, Mexico City

Georgette Kuri Georgette Kuri is a Mexican Latin Americanist, professor, and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a member of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defence of Humanity. She is the co-coordinator of the Working Group “Imperialism, neocolonialism, and intervention policies” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).

Sidney Amaral (Brazil), Mãe Preta ou A Fúria de Iansã [Black Mother or the Fury of Iansa], 2014.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

There is a long, silent, and profitable war being waged in Nuestra América: the war on the poor. Although uniforms, doctrines, or slogans change—ranging from ‘pacification’ to ‘iron fist’ (mano dura) or ‘zero tolerance’—whether under the shield of the ‘war on drugs’ or the ‘war on crime’, the war produced by the inequality of the prevailing economic order is fought to simultaneously criminalise poverty and terrorise the population.

The ‘Angry Tide’ that has recently swept over the governments of Latin America has made combating the region’s perceived security crisis one of its central targets. In its strategy to discredit Latin American progressivism, the new right presents leftist forces as inefficient and incapable—even as accomplices—of criminality. Frequently, political debates use polls that reveal crime as one of the main concerns of the electorate in the region and even point out that, for this reason, the population has been favoring governments that promise a harsh and inclement iron fist against delinquency. It is not surprising, in this sense, that even though they are the most affected by policies criminalising poverty, people speak out in favour of fighting crime. According to the AtlasIntel survey, for example, 62 percent of Rio de Janeiro residents supported a police operation that left 121 victims last October. From Kast to Keiko Fujimori, right-wing campaigns have highlighted the fight against crime among their priorities. Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi himself noted in an interview that 50 percent of Frente Amplio voters also sympathise with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. “The right took the banner of security, which is a human right, and monopolised it for a long time,” he added.

Currently, the vast media apparatus presents the so-called ‘Bukele model’ to us as the most effective formula to combat insecurity and organised crime. However, an in-depth analysis leads us to ask: whom does the order he seeks to impose serve, and upon whose bodies is it built? Bukele has built a system through policies of State dismantlement and social precariousness, shielded by the indefinite extension of a state of exception. Today, El Salvador holds the world’s highest incarceration rate, 1,650 people per 100,000 inhabitants. Childhood is criminalised through lowering the age at which children can be tried as adults, collective trials and mass incarcerations are common, and political dissent is persecuted, as in the case of human rights defender Fidel Zavala.

Among the figures that Bukele hides, however, is the increase in poverty to 9.6% or the 10,000 students who have dropped out of school.

This demonstrates that both the existing insecurity and this mirage of order and security end up hitting hardest those who live on the periphery—who, nevertheless, have directed their votes toward tangible solutions rather than more conciliatory and sociological discourses of the regional left. According to the CB Consultora poll from April 2026, Bukele leads regional popularity with a 70.1% positive approval rating, while Lula da Silva hovers around 48.4% support with 49.1% disapproval, and Gustavo Petro barely reaches a 38.2% approval rating. Lula himself has been forced in his campaign to present a plan against organised crime, promising maximum security standards in his prisons.

Rosa Mena Valenzuela (El Salvador), Calles [Streets], 1983. MARTE Collection.

This ‘pop authoritarianism’ that cultivates fear, hides behind its repression and propaganda its inability to resolve the structural inequality that leads to poverty and, at times, crime itself. It sells itself as a model against which there is no alternative, and the generation of leaders of the Angry Tide, who seek to restore colonial dominance over the entire region, obediently join the so-called Shield of the Americas, led by the United States as a solution to criminality. But it turns out there are alternatives.

Recently, political scientist Viri Ríos of Mexico Decoded noted that the progressive government of Claudia Sheinbaum has indeed been building a different proposal. In just 18 months, the daily homicide rate has fallen by 41 percent, even though its population is 20 times larger than that of El Salvador and Mexico’s security challenges go beyond gangs and criminal organizations to include large-scale transnational organised crime and drug cartels. Without implementing a state of exception, the Mexican prison population has risen by 11 percent after changing its security policy.

The key, Ríos underlines, is that the strategy does not shy away from directly confronting the sources of crime, equally abandoning the decapitation of cartels—which in previous six-year terms triggered violence exponentially—and the low-confrontation approach that predominated between 2018 and 2024. Mexican policy directly attacks the material causes of delinquency: it seeks, first of all, to halt the sources of crime financing by attacking problems at a national level according to territorial realities: fighting fuel theft in oil-producing areas, supervising customs points in border regions, attacking extortion in the countryside, among others. Ríos acknowledges that structural problems such as corruption persist in Mexico, but notes that despite its limitations, Mexico is managing to reduce criminality based on a policy that does not resort to Bukele’s unchecked violence.

Another experience from the left that is worth studying is that of the Great Peace Quadrants Mission (Gran Misión Cuadrantes de Paz) in Venezuela. Here, another decisive conceptual key is provided: the territorialization of security under a preventive logic and joint work between the community and police forces, instead of a prison-centric logic. According to official figures, the homicide rate dropped from 56 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016 to nearly 4 in 2024. By the end of 2025, authorities reported a reduction of more than 25 percent in murders compared to the previous year.

What the Peace Quadrants model proposes is that a security policy built through organised community participation, working-class neighborhoods, and not against them, as in the Bukele model, can yield effective results. It can serve as a guide for the left, since anchoring security to the construction of people’s power in the territory is more effective than punishment.

Vlady (Mexico), Mecanismo Carcelario [Prison Mechanism], (1958-1959).

Popular forces that want to dispute the electoral field in the coming years must study these solutions thoroughly and also build their own proposals. First, the issue of security cannot be ignored because it is not a whim of the elite; it is a real concern of the working population, even if at times the construction of ultraconservative narratives seeks to terrorise the population by magnifying the conditions of criminality in our countries. Security must also be assumed as a right of the working population, and their double vulnerability must be recognized: being attacked both by crime and by reactionary policies of repression.

Secondly, we must ask ourselves what concrete institutional framework a popular government must build and finance to attack crime—greater professionalization of investigative and security forces? A direct attack on the sources of crime financing and the intermediate ranks that operate it? The construction of a work agenda between communities and authorities in the territory, based on respect and collaboration rather than persecution?

Thirdly, it must be demonstrated that repression and terror, in the long term, exacerbate exclusion and foster criminal practices. Repression is costly, and it is often outsourced to mercenary or, worse yet, foreign forces, which in the long term places national sovereignty at risk.

Addressing security without mirages is fundamental for the healthy development of a society. The popular camp cannot ignore this challenge, nor minimise it. But it must, above all, convince the population that it does have a viable alternative that implies neither the dismantling of the State nor deadly repression; an alternative that, on the contrary, invites the working class to be part of its own security strategy.

The debate is open. We would like to hear your opinions.

Affectionately,

Carmen Navas Reyes and Carlos Ron

Tricontinental Nuestra América

Carmen Navas Reyes Carmen Navas Reyes is a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. She is a Venezuelan feminist and former diplomat. Her research interests include democracy and political systems, social movements, the history of the African diaspora, and Afro-descendance.

Carlos Ron Carlos Ron is co-coordinator of the Nuestra América office at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a Venezuelan former diplomat who served as Vice Minister for North America (2018–2025) and President of the Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples (2020–2025).

Taller 4 Rojo (Colombia), The Struggle Is Long—Let’s Start Now, 1973.

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Lebanese Marxist theorist Mahdi Amel noted that the intellectual “who does not fight for revolution at all times is a false intellectual, and their intellect is deceptive and superficial.” In times of a hyper-imperialist offensive and the advance of the neo-fascist right, it becomes even more urgent for the intellectuals of Nuestra América to keep their revolutionary conviction alive. For 22 years now, a group of intellectuals, artists, and social movement activists has been accompanying revolutionary and popular processes, defending the aspiration for a society of dignity for all. To learn about its history and better understand this space, we asked Ximena González Broquen, international coordinator of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity (REDH), for a contribution to this debate. It follows below:

In the fabric of power that runs across the Global South, cognitive warfare has become a decisive trench. Before it, there are tools of resistance that transcend the conjuncture and stand as beacons of hope and organized action. The Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity (REDH) is one of them. It was born out of the founding alliance between two giants, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, in the heat of the struggle against imperial aggression. Since then, it has constituted itself as a movement of thought and action: a collective trench against the hegemonic pretension of global imperialism.

The Origin: A Cry from the South Against Barbarism

The REDH was born out of historical urgency. At the end of 2003, the global shock over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq pierced the consciousness of Nuestra América like a knife. The great Mexican thinker Pablo González Casanova, concerned by the imperial offensive, convened a conclave in Mexico, bringing together figures such as Rigoberta Menchú, Evo Morales, and Eduardo Galeano. The idea germinated: it was necessary to articulate a global front of intellectuals and artists who would put their ability to create and think at the service of defending  humanity.

This call culminated in December 2004 in Caracas, with the First World Meeting of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity. The inaugural conference was led by Nobel laureate José Saramago, and the call was an act of anti-imperialist affirmation. More than three hundred thinkers from over forty countries met to build, through word and action, a collective siege against domination. It was the materialization of a shared dream, the certainty that critical intelligence must leave the ivory towers to mingle with the breath of the people.

Under the Caribbean sun, Chávez’s voice became word made flesh, tracing the course forever: “Humanity is about living day to day, becoming one in soul and flesh with what is human—what is truly human. It is about living within the human experience, filling the void—or filling the gaps—with deeply human feelings and actions. The values of the human being and that sublime value, love (…) otherwise, we will not be able to defend any form of humanity. Much less go on the attack for it, or take the offensive for it. I believe that is one of the greatest challenges in the world right now: starting with ourselves, to fill ourselves with humanity; to make humanity—that which is human—our very flesh, nerve, muscle, soul, and body.” Those words were the birth certificate of a trench that still stands today, sustained by revolutionary love as a daily practice.

Celebrating teleSUR’s 20th anniversary with the “The Birth of a New World” Grand Gala Concert, an evening of Latin American culture, unity, and resistance. Venezuela, 2025. Photo by La Radio del Sur.

Historical Importance: Beyond Words

The legacy of the REDH is concrete. One of its boldest proposals arising from that first meeting was that of Brazil’s Beto Almeida: to create a television station for the South. That idea materialized in TeleSur, which for two decades has been an informative trench from Nuestra América, breaking the imperial media siege.

The REDH also bred the Liberator Prize for Critical Thinking, an unparalleled award, a unique global recognition that celebrates the word that discomforts, that challenges elites, that puts thinking at the service of popular struggles and feeds socialism and Latin American emancipation. In its thirteen editions, it has honored Franz Hinkelammert, Enrique Dussel, István Mészáros, Marta Harnecker, Juan José Bautista, and Atilio Borón, among many others, building a living archive of intellectual rebellion from the South.

The REDH has woven its own geography: eleven world meetings in Caracas (Venezuela), and meetings in Italy, Bolivia, and Belgium, demonstrating that its articulation knows no borders. In parallel, it has developed seven International Philosophy Forums, where collective reflection on capitalism, socialism, revolutionary humanism, alienation, the State, and hegemony became militant practice.

Violeta Parra (Chile), Untitled (unfinished), 1966. Embroidery on sackcloth, 136 x 200 cm.

The REDH Today: At the Global Crossroads

The multiple wars of the present—expressions of imperialism—are intertwined in the same tangle. The genocide in Palestine, the criminal blockade of Cuba, the aggression against Iran, the multifaceted aggressions against Venezuela, the looting of Africa—with the Congo as an open wound—, the incessant exploitation of Haiti, and the advance of neo-fascist expressions in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and other nations that dismantle rights and criminalize protests: all of this is the imperial hydra showing its heads. Everything springs from the same imperialist, colonial, and patriarchal matrix.

Cognitive warfare does not seek to convince with arguments, but to pierce the perception of reality through narratives, emotions, and algorithms. It fragments the social fabric to install a brutal premise: there are lives that matter and lives that do not. It operates in the daily life of social networks and the media, designed to capture attention and reinforce isolated identities.

Faced with this offensive, the REDH assumes liberating epistemic sovereignty as its compass: the capacity of peoples to narrate, govern, and protect themselves collectively. From there, it deploys several battles that share a single heartbeat. To dismantle fragmentation by showing the historical continuity of each aggression is to fight for the liberation of consciousness. To dispute the power to name—saying “kidnapping” where they impose “arrest”—constitutes an act of self-determination of thought. To deactivate the traps of division implies that living memory, as historical reparation, strengthens the community fabric. And to cultivate trust as a political act, because in a world where suspicion is a weapon of war, trust based on the shared memory of struggles and resistance becomes revolutionary. Thus, relational sovereignty is woven: South-South unity as collective self-defense constitutes the horizon of struggle for the REDH.

The REDH unfolds in a horizontal structure that embodies the communal principle, that web of self-government and solidarity that has crossed Nuestra América since ancient times. National chapters in more than 30 countries, from Latin America to Africa, Oceania, and the Iberian Peninsula, and a base of 9,000 contacts, are the expression of this communalization in motion. Its thematic nodes—the World Poetry Movement, Canto de Todos [The Song of All], the feminist collective “Libertadoras,” REDH Communication, REDH-Artists, and youth in REDH—are living cells of the same network of resistance, from which forums, talks, seminars, concerts, and training spaces are co-organized.

In its daily work, its website functions as a digital insurgent agora. There, the “Miradas desde la RED” (Views from the Network) columns are published and spread weekly, along with critical articles, essays, reviews, interviews, militant poetry, dossiers, and statements of condemnation, weaving internationalist sorority as one more weapon in the offensive for humanity.

Poster from the exhibition “20 años del No al ALCA”, organized by the Tricontinental Institute, ALBA Movimientos, and UTOPIX, 2025.

Conclusion: The Offensive for Humanity

The REDH is a living structure, a movement in permanent construction that knows that the defense of humanity is not an abstraction. It is at stake in every devastated territory, every besieged people, every resistance that rises against imperialism. That is why it raises the offensive cry: it is not just about resisting, but about creating, thinking, and organizing a new world of collective construction (it remains, as indicated). Let poetry temper the steel of dawn. Let living memory weave futures of liberation. Let the network be more of a plot every day, more of an embrace, more of a certainty that, from the South, a shared victory is being built.

Greetings to all,

Ximena González Broquen

Ximena González Broquen Ximena González Broquen is the International Coordinator of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity – REDH. She holds a PhD in Political Studies and Philosophy and is the head of the Center for the Study of Social Transformations at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (CETS IVIC).

Paulina Veloso (Chile), Untitled, 2021. Available at capiremov.org.

Greetings from the Nuestra América desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This March 8th, a day in which the world honors the working woman, we pay tribute to the anti-imperialist women of our continent. With their body-territories, their intellect, and their example, they are writing the most dignified pages of the contemporary history of Nuestra América.

We are moving through a stage marked by Trump’s aggression—a deepening of hybrid warfare—and a neocolonial war deployed through financial impunity and voracious extractivism. The advance of the far-right in the region is no coincidence; it seeks to impose a model of plunder where the weight of debt strangles the peoples’ sovereignty. In the face of resistance to direct invasion and the silent war of Unilateral Coercive Measures (UCMs) against Cuba and Venezuela, popular feminism emerges not only as a protest but as the backbone of survival and dignity.

Women at the Monument for the Heroines of Resistance and Independence, Caracas. 2025 (Prensa MinMujer).

1. The 3 Lessons of Trump’s Aggression and the Neocolonial War in Latin America

The recent history of Nuestra América, marked by the shadow of the Monroe Doctrine and its update under the “Trump Corollary”—which persists as State logic in Washington—leaves us with three fundamental lessons regarding the nature of the current war against sovereignty.

1. The Woman’s Body as the First Territory of Defense

The attack of this past January 3rd against Venezuela was not just a military incursion; it was an affront to the dignity of a people that has decided to be free. On that day, 12 women gave their lives in combat. Nine of them were soldiers, members of the Presidential Honor Guard.

Imperialism understands that to break a nation, it must break the will of those who sustain the social fabric. In hybrid warfare, the woman is not a passive victim but a combatant cadre who reorganizes the collective will in every commune and every territory.

This lesson is intertwined with the “sowing” of Berta Cáceres in Honduras. A decade ago, the extractivist elite believed that by assassinating Berta, they would extinguish the voice of the Lenca people. They did not understand that her body, like those of the Venezuelan female militia (a component of the Bolivarian National Armed Force) and communards, represents resistance against dams and transnational capital.

The illegal detention of social activist Cilia Flores is yet another attempt to kidnap this symbol of dignity and political resistance. Illegally detained in the United States, Cilia Flores is a renowned social and political activist. She was the lawyer for the officers who rose up during the military insurrections of 1992, including Commander Hugo Chávez. On this day, women of the world call for her release and return to Venezuela.

2. The Resistance Economy is Feminine

In Cuba, the “silent war” of UCMs has taken the form of an unprecedented energy siege. By preventing the arrival of fuel, Washington seeks to transform daily life into a hell of scarcity. However, on the island, resistance has the face of a woman. It is they who, through popular organization and community bonds, invent daily solutions to sustain life in the face of the blockade.

This resistance economy does not seek profit, but rather the reproduction of life. While the international financial system uses debt to discipline nations, Cuban and Venezuelan women oppose it with an economy of collective care. In Venezuela, 80% of the leaders in communes and communal councils are women. They decide, plan, and execute the projects that keep the social structure afloat under the blockade. The lesson is clear: socialism in Nuestra América survives because women have transformed the private sphere into a space for political management and economic resistance against imperialist aggression.

3. Solidarity and Peace as People’s Diplomacy

The recent action by Claudia Sheinbaum’s government in Mexico, sending ships with 1,200 tons of aid to Cuba, breaks the logic of financial submission. “Sorority” is not just an interpersonal concept, but an international political category.

We also see this in the mobilization of popular organizations that, defying external pressures, coordinate the delivery of aid and mutual support between besieged nations. March 21st, saw the arrival of the Nuestra América Convoy, organized by various movements and popular organizations. This grassroots solidarity is what allows Cuba to resist and Venezuela to deepen its communal model.

When Mexico defies Washington’s pressure to give aid to the island, and when women organize themselves into feminist brigades like the “Cilia Flores Internationalist Brigade for Peace,” they are practicing a form of feminism that prioritizes the lives of families and communities above the dictates of transnational capital. Solidarity is the tenderness—and the strategy—of the people.

Gabriela Barraza (Argentina), Viviremos y venceremos [We Will Live and We Will Overcome], 2021. Available at thetricontinenal.org.

2. The 3 Tasks Popular Feminisms Call Us to Undertake

1. Institutionalize the Communal Management of People’s Power

In Venezuela, nearly 80% of leadership roles in communal councils are held by women. They are the street spokeswomen, the ones who plan projects and execute the sovereign budget. Faced with the advance of the far-right, the response is greater people’s power. The urgent task is to strengthen the National Popular Consultation and the commune model. It is there where popular feminism manages resources and responds to the imperialist offensive.

We must ensure that the territory’s resources are managed by those who inhabit and defend them, blocking the path for the impunity of militias (in Brazil, parapolice and paramilitary armed groups) and illegal power structures like those that tried to silence Marielle Franco in Brazil.

2. Dismantle the Impunity of Neocolonial Extractivism

We cannot move toward the future without closing the wounds of impunity. The stories of Berta Cáceres in Honduras and Marielle Franco in Brazil are beacons, but also reminders of the ferocity of capital.

• Justice for Berta: Ten years after her assassination, the task is to dismantle the extractivist model that murders those who defend the commons. Punishment for the intellectual authors of Berta’s murder is an outstanding debt for the entire region in the fight against transnationals.
• Justice for Marielle: The recent conviction of the Brazão brothers in Brazil is a victory against paramilitary militias and parastatal power. The task is to eradicate the structures of political violence that damage the social fabric and attempt to silence Black women, faveladas, and dissidents who occupy spaces of power.

Berta and Marielle taught us that defending indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant territories and defending life in the cities is the same struggle. Their names are beacons that feed and sustain our daily resistance against patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and capitalism.

3. Push for Popular Agrarian Reform and Food Sovereignty

As our peasant sisters of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) teach us, an urgent task for grassroots feminism is the defense of the land. Popular agrarian reform is the right of women to decide over production and seeds in the face of extractivist agribusiness. For women, land is the space for the reproduction of culture and life. Without food sovereignty, national sovereignty is incomplete. We must strengthen the ties between peasant women and urban workers to guarantee that food is a right and not a commodity of debt.

3. Message from Berta Cáceres

For the women of Nuestra América, the struggle is for life itself. Berta Cáceres, guardian of the rivers and the dignity of the peoples, left us a mandate that shakes the conscience of the entire continent:

Awaken, humanity! There is no more time. Our consciences will be shaken by the fact that we are contemplating self-destruction based on capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. In our worldviews, we are beings born of the earth, water, and corn. Of the rivers, we are ancestral custodians… Let us give our lives, if necessary, for the defense of humanity and the planet!

This cry from Berta is our compass. Faced with neocolonial aggression, our response is unity, the guardianship of our land, and unbreakable rebellion.

Long live the women who fight! Long live a free and sovereign Nuestra América! We shall overcome!

Greetings to all,

Carmen Navas, Maisa Bascuas and Pilar Troya

Carmen Navas Carmen Navas is a Venezuelan political scientist, researcher at the Nuestra América Desk at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Maisa Bascuas Maisa Bascuas is an Argentine political scientist, professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, and Co-Coordinator of the Department of Feminisms of the Global South at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Pilar Troya Pilar Troya is an Ecuadorian researcher and feminist activist. She has worked on public policies for equality and the women’s movement, and serves as Co-Coordinator of the Department of Feminisms of the Global South at Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Illustration by Kael Abello (Venezuela/Utopix) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

Greetings from the Nuestra América desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

One of the core values of neoliberalism is individualism, and it has shaped the generations that emerged since its global implementation. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase serves as the ideological synthesis of this project, which sought to undermine all forms of collective life: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.” In social terms, this is one of the foundations of the current phase of capitalism, which concentrates wealth in the hands of a few while making life increasingly unsustainable for the majority of the world’s population. This accumulation logic can only be sustained by increasingly authoritarian and violent policies, exemplified by various far-right regimes worldwide, but primarily by the leading imperialist power: the USA. Its government sponsors the genocide of the Palestinian people, the kidnapping of a legitimately elected president, and the murderous economic blockade against Cuba in an attempt to stifle that revolutionary experience, alongside many other wars around the globe.

In contrast, the working classes and the peoples of the world resist collectively through their organization in movements, parties, unions, and collectives. These groups aim to fight against inequalities of all kinds—social, gender, sexual, racial, and class-based. In Nuestra América, this tradition of struggle dates back to the colonial period when Europeans invaded our territories to steal our wealth, meeting fierce resistance from the original peoples who lived here, as Eduardo Galeano eloquently demonstrated in his classic, Open Veins of Latin America.

The historical project for the emancipation of workers is primarily based on the social theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two German revolutionaries whose main concern and life goal was to destroy capitalism and build a society that was not based on the exploitation of one human being by another.

Illustration by shenby g (United States) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

On February 21, 1848, in London, a small pamphlet of fewer than 30 pages was published changing the history of society and social struggles: The Communist Manifesto. In this short text, written as a political program for an international workers’ organization—the Communist League—the two authors analyzed the then-nascent capitalism, highlighting its potential and its limits. There, they primarily emphasized the possibility and the necessity of workers organizing to build a new society.

Since then, this text has inspired all revolutionary processes, whether in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, or the liberation struggles of the African continent, among many others. In the countries of the Global South, the development of this tradition was enriched by the specific elements of each region’s struggle, becoming a synthesis of political practice and revolutionary theory. This recalls V.I. Lenin’s formulation: “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”

In Nuestra América, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui provided a creative interpretation of the Marxist tradition, concluding that our socialism cannot be “a copy or imitation. It should be a heroic creation” of our peoples. This construction has been forged through the historical experiences of Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and the resistance struggles of the peoples of our continent.

This tradition remains alive in Nuestra América through the organized action of rural and urban popular movements, which keep the flame of revolution and the historical project of the workers alive through organization and popular struggle. These social forces also understand as fundamental what Fidel Castro, Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Revolution, called the “Battle of Ideas”—the struggle for hearts and minds to build a new society.

Illustration by Ignacio Minaverry (Argentina) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

Martha Harnecker, one of the leading Marxists of Nuestra América, dedicated her life to reflecting on various revolutionary processes to advance social transformation on our continent. After the implementation of neoliberalism and analyzing the temporary defeat of leftist forces in our region, she identified three major crises: the project crisis, the program crisis, and the organization crisis. Overcoming these three crises is both a practical and theoretical challenge.

Inspired by this tradition of struggle, various popular organizations around the world—following the call of leftist publishers organized in the International Union of Left Publishers—began celebrating Red Books Day in 2020. This is a day to celebrate the leftist culture embodied in books that question the logic of capital, announce the construction of a new society, and contribute to overcoming capitalism. It is also a date to challenge, in practice, the value of individualism emphasized by neoliberalism and to reclaim collective life. It is a day for gathering, where people meet to collectively read “Red Books” that fuel our indignation and our struggle.

In these six years, different people across all regions of the world, from Chile to South Korea, have participated in the celebration of Red Books Day, strengthening a leftist culture and a set of ideas that prioritize life, the human being, and the collective.

Illustration by César Mosquera (Venezuela/Utopix) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

In 2026, we also celebrate the centenary of Fidel Castro and the 60th anniversary of the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana. At the same time, we remain on extreme alert against imperialist offensives, such as the genocide in Gaza, the invasion of sovereign countries, and the kidnapping of presidents. In this sense, we invite everyone to join this initiative to celebrate collective life—reclaiming a central value of the society we wish to build—and to spread the ideas that challenge the death regime of capital and announce the hope of a new society.

This is a vital way to strengthen the struggle of our peoples and the spirit of internationalism, recalling two formulations by José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence: “Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone” and “Homeland is humanity.” Gathering to read “Red Books” on February 21 carries this meaning, keeping alive our hope for the construction of a society where we no longer live through the exploitation of one human being by another, but, as Marx formulated: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Greetings to all,

Miguel Yoshida

Miguel Yoshida Miguel is a member of the Nuestra America desk in Brazil, a researcher at the Art Department of the Tricontinental Institute and an editor at Expressão Popular.

Elías Taño (Tenerife), Aquí hay un pueblo digno [Here Is a Dignified People], 2026.

Greetings from the Nuestra América Desk at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research,

On January 3, 2026, the United States executed a large-scale military operation against Venezuela, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve” by Washington. This act of war by the world’s leading military power against the Bolivarian Revolution left a toll of at least 100 people dead—among them 32 Cuban internationalists—more than a hundred wounded, damage to the country’s military and civil infrastructure (such as medicine warehouses for kidney patients), and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady and National Assembly Member Cilia Flores, who currently remain kidnapped as prisoners of war in New York City.

However, contrary to what any political analyst or historian might have thought, the revolutionary government was not overthrown. It remains standing and heads an organized resistance to preserve peace, stability, and the country’s sovereignty. This apparently paradoxical fact reveals the internal contradictions of the imperial project and the strength of processes rooted in popular organization.

The brutality of the attack may have surprised us, but there had been clear signs announcing it. Project 2025, drafted by the Heritage Foundation and its allies to prepare an army of bureaucrats ideologically committed to the second Trump Administration, recommended a “re-hemisphering” of the continent. The National Security Strategy, published weeks earlier, revived the Monroe Doctrine and added a Trump Corollary: the United States will take all necessary measures—including the unilateral use of military force—to ensure that no foreign power can seize the resources of the American continent that it considers to be in its interest. In practice, this means it will condition the sovereignty of the nations of the continent on their willingness to serve the needs of the superpower.

Iván Lira (Venezuela), Dtrump, 2025.

From the new Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, we can extract 3 lessons:

1. The offensive of hyper-imperialism is brutal and seeks to impose a new world order through force: It began in September 2025 with extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers on the high seas—some of them Colombian and Trinidadian fishermen, as denounced by the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro—and opened this year with a military attack that, in less than two hours, violated the United Nations Charter, the Rome Statute, and the United States Constitution itself, which reserves the exclusive power to declare war for the U.S. Congress.

The policy of “peace through strength” is the new method for advancing the U.S. agenda. Long gone are the attempts to co-opt and instrumentalize multilateral organizations, as well as the so-called “rules-based order” that Washington selectively invoked. It is no longer necessary to keep up appearances. Imperialism relies on its brute force to create a new international order, and anyone wishing to dispute it, must show its own. Meanwhile, the United States is reconfiguring its dominance over the continent: It intervened in the elections in Argentina and Honduras, continues to threaten Colombia and Mexico with anti-narcotics operations in their territories, demands an agreement from Cuba “before it is too late,” expands its military presence in Ecuador, Panama (seeking to exercise control over the Canal) and Haiti (pushing a “gang suppression force” through the UN), and most recently, issued an ultimatum to Denmark and other NATO partners to cede control of Greenland or it will take it “the hard way.”

2. The new mood of the Global South is strengthened by concrete gains of the people, not by idealism or fearfulness: Despite overwhelming military power, the United States did not militarily occupy Venezuela nor overthrow the government. The country’s stability has been guaranteed by the Bolivarian Revolution, an alternative project to the imperialist logic which managed to consolidate itself through territorial organization (communes), productive creativity, political participation, and social consciousness.

There is a new mood in the Global South that is contrary to unilateral action and supports cooperation through multilateralism and regional unity to confront it. Solidarity plays a fundamental role, and the defense of Venezuela’s sovereignty was felt in places as distant as Kerala, Rome, Pretoria, and Havana, to name a few of the hundreds of places that demonstrated their rejection of the U.S. attack. What these peoples are defending is the right for real and transformative political alternatives to exist. It is these projects that can lead a new future for the Global South. In December, a BRICS People’s Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, where Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and other movements defended the elaboration of concrete proposals to carry out cooperative and social enterprise projects. It is real transformations—and not proposals that are unachievable due to their idealism, or that are timid in contesting schemes of domination—that generate stability and unity.

3. The new right occupies increasingly more space but is easily discardable in the hyper-imperialist offensive. The United States surprised many by imposing an increase in tariffs against Brazil and unilateral coercive measures against the judge who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to prison. Through threats on social media and in the press, the Trump administration accused Brazilian institutions and the government itself of persecuting its main ally in the country.

However, with Bolsonaro convicted, hyper-imperialism quickly changed its strategy, fostering a dialogue with Lula. In a similar operation, María Corina Machado, who received the Nobel Peace Prize after being nominated by the Secretary of State himself, was discarded as a political option in Venezuela for lacking sufficient support or legitimacy. While the right-wing is occupying spaces left open by the weaknesses of the popular camp, hyper-imperialism will not hesitate to discard them in any strategic situation. This reveals that we must urgently work for a common minimum project that allows popular causes to advance without depending on the internal contradictions of the enemy camp.

Olfer Leonardo (Perú), Abyayala contra Trump [Abyayala Against Trump], 2026.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx reminds us that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already”. After this abrupt start to 2026, let us assume our historical tasks in the face of the circumstances we have had to undergo:

1. Multipolarity is not enough; we must seek the “balance of the universe”: Two hundred years ago, the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama took place. It attempted to create the unity of the American continent to safeguard its independence and sovereignty. Unlike the Pan-Americanism promoted from Washington, this congress did not intend to impose tutelage, but rather bet on achieving what Bolívar conceived as the balance of the universe: “…all these parts [of the world] must try to establish a balance between themselves and Europe, to destroy the preponderance of the latter.” The world order built after the Anti-Fascist World War divided the world into zones of influence to be distributed in the Cold War. What we need to build today, more than plain multipolarity, is a balance between all international actors that guarantees cooperation, just and shared development, and the resolution of major threats such as war and climate change.

2. Our struggle must be common and simultaneous: Sixty years ago, the Tricontinental Conference of Havana was held, where for the first time the struggles of what we now call the Global South were united. There, Commander Fidel Castro presented in his closing speech a formula that is more relevant than ever:

“In Latin America, there must not be even one, or two, or three peoples fighting alone against imperialism. The imperialists’ correlation of forces on this continent, the nearness of their home territory, the zeal with which they will try to defend their dominions in this part of the world require, on this continent, more than anywhere else, a common strategy, a joint, simultaneous struggle.”

During May 2026, and within the framework of the centennial of Fidel, the IV Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements will be held in Cuba. It will be the ideal setting for grassroots movements and popular organizations of the continent, with a realistic view of the challenges, to trace a new strategy of common and simultaneous struggle to preserve sovereignty and dignity in the face of the hyper-imperialist advance.

Kael Abello (Venezuela), Venceremos: Bolívar vs Donroe [We Shall Overcome: Bolívar vs Donroe], 2026.

A message from Bolívar: In 1825, a few months after the Battle of Ayacucho which forever sealed South American independence from the Spanish empire, France was contemplating an invasion of Colombia. Bolívar, in command of Peru, sent a harsh letter to Santander in Colombia, charged with realism, pragmatism, and, above all, strategic vision.

Given the military superiority of the French, he recommended not resisting frontally to avoid more destruction to the country. He preferred to retreat to the south and undertake guerrilla warfare; and within a year or two, start the active war that would bring victory. Bolívar advocated for the unity of the Panama Congress and for strengthening alliances with foreign powers, while contemplating astute measures. “Even if I sacrifice my popularity and my glory, I want to save Colombia from its extermination in this new war. I will be happy if I succeed and, if I fail as well, because I will have taken the last step for salvation.”

The scenario today, frankly, is not encouraging. The military incursion in Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president has been a hard blow, as have the threats to other countries throughout the region, electoral defeats, economic and social challenges, and the absence of a common minimum project for the new times.

But at the same time, Nuestra América is not a subjugated region. Patience must be strategic and determination unwavering, even in the face of adversity. It is time to build a new, more favorable moment based on the achievements accomplished. As the Liberator wrote in his letter, “we must know how to lose at the beginning, to know how to win later.”

Greetings to all,

Carlos Ron

Carlos Ron Carlos Ron is Co-Coordinator of the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexico), Birth of Fascism [El nacimiento del fascismo], 1936.

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Last November, Mexico experienced protests by the right-wing opposition under the guise of “Generation Z,” which promoted violent tactics and an extreme right-wing agenda against the current Mexican government. To understand the context of these events, we asked Rodrigo Guillot, who holds a degree in International Relations and is an activist with Mexico’s National Regeneration Movement (Morena), for this contribution to the debate:

In November 2025, the Mexican right called for simultaneous marches in all Mexican capitals under the banner of the anime One Piece, which was used in the recent past by predominantly young Nepalese protesters against  restrictive measures by their government. The choice of a foreign image, decontextualized from Mexican reality, seems bizarre because it is. It is a symptom of the lack of concrete causes and distinct identities experienced by reactionary sectors in Mexico since the arrival of the Fourth Transformation in 2018.

Under the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024), the same political actors who took to the streets last November held similar demonstrations, primarily against what they understood as the destruction of liberal institutions: a process of restoring state capacities initiated by López Obrador against the neoliberal precepts that governed the country for the six presidential terms preceding his government.

The nature of the protests against Mexico’s progressive government during Claudia Sheinbaum’s term shifted alongside the geopolitical landscape. In a world where the right has successfully bet on fascism, xenophobic identity politics, and the call for an extreme free-market society, the Mexican right abandoned the discourse of institutional defense and opted for that of liberty. The great orchestrator of this shift is Ricardo Salinas Pliego, owner of Banco Azteca, the Elektra store chain (known for offering unpayable credit to the lowest-income sectors), and concessionaire of TV Azteca, one of the two most powerful television networks in Mexico.

During the final stretch of Andrés Manuel’s term and the first months of Claudia’s government, the businessman toughened his opposition stance against the Mexican government due to litigation against him that could force him to pay billions of Mexican pesos in back taxes. His flight forward strategy has included threats of becoming a presidential candidate, an idea that appeals to certain sectors of Mexico’s right-wing political parties.

The seventy-year-old tycoon labeled the November marches as the Generation Z March. To stir public conversation around it, he used a team of paid influencers, fake accounts on the X/Twitter social media, and pundits employed directly by his media consortium. For weeks, they spoke of the stunt as if it were an organic movement emerging from within civil society, calling to remove the left from state power.

During the mobilization for the march, Mexico was shaken by the murder of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan, Michoacán, known for confronting organized crime in his state. The organizers of the opposition march maneuvered to place a demand for security at the center of their demonstration and included the image of the murdered mayor in their iconography. Carlos Manzo’s wife, Grecia Quiroz—who assumed the mayoralty in Uruapan to replace her husband—was forced to publicly distance herself from the march.

Coletivo Subterráneos (México), Cucarachas fascistas {Fascist Cockroaches], 2025.

The result was that on November 15, in various cities across the country, different groups and sectors opposed to the Mexican government gathered in public squares without a common cause or unified discourse, other than the call to overthrow President Claudia Sheinbaum. However, in Mexico City’s Zócalo—the country’s main public square—groups of hooded individuals armed with metal tools and chains physically assaulted members of the police force.

In general, the opposition has been characterized by the violent use of language, but during the six years of López Obrador’s government, no physically violent event had occurred during opposition demonstrations. This fact coincides with the strategic shift of the Mexican right and is being investigated by the Mexico City Congress, as there are indications that two mayors from the National Action Party (PAN) may have financed the agitators.

The Mexican opposition undoubtedly considered the rehearsal a success, as by the following day, a second march was already being called for November 20 in Mexico City. They planned a route that intersected with the military parade held annually on that date to celebrate the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. The President announced a change in the parade route to avoid any acts of violence, but the incident highlights the right’s determination to provoke violence.

Frida Khalo (México), El marxismo dará salud a los enfermos [Marxism will give health to the sick], ca. 1954.

The second call to action failed. Not only did it not  provoke a confrontation between civilians and members of the Mexican army, but it barely gathered two hundred people. Nevertheless, it clearly signals the intentions of opposition groups: to push conditions to the limit to provoke a violent confrontation with the State.

In a national context where the National Action (PAN) and Institutional Revolutionary (PRI) parties openly call for U.S. intervention under the pretext of drug trafficking, and accuse the Mexican government of being authoritarian and communist, the intensification of the right and its shift toward fascist and openly violent positions can only be understood as a tactic functional to the interventionist strategy of the United States.

Greetings to all,

Rodrigo Guillot

Rodrigo Guillot Rodrigo Guillot has a degree in International Relations, is a Morena activist, and political communications adviser.

Mundano (Brazil), O Brigadista da Floresta (The Forest Firefighter), 2021. A 46-meter-high mural made of ashes collected from 4 Brazilian biomes devastated by fire. Reinterpretation of O Lavrador de Café (The Coffee Farmer) (1934), by Cândido Portinari.

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research,

The 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or COP30, was just held in the Brazilian Amazon. To better understand the dynamics in place, we asked Bárbara Loureiro from Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST) to contribute to this debate:

COP30, held in Belém do Pará, deep in the Amazon, between November 10 and 21, centered the debate on the climate crisis. At the same time, it clearly revealed the extent to which environmental policy remains captured by corporate interests, financial capital, and the colonial rationale that transforms forests, rivers, sun, wind, and peoples into objects of management for the benefit of rich countries and economic elites.

More than a diplomatic meeting, COP30 served as a mirror: on one side, the celebration of the so-called “market solutions” and financial decarbonization; on the other, and in a parallel and autonomous way, the growing strength of the popular movement, which made Belém a territory for denunciation, internationalist solidarity, and the construction of real alternatives. This tension ran through all the debates, decisions, and disputes that marked the event.

The dominant climate policy is based on the idea that it is possible to tackle the ecological crisis without confronting its drivers, believing that the only way to address it is by aligning it with market principles: capitalist accumulation, colonial exploitation and the expropriation of territories, and the power of transnational corporations.

In Belém, this contradiction became even more evident in the context of the celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Despite being widely hailed as a historical landmark, the Agreement has failed to put the world on a viable path to address global warming. In practice, it only served to deepen the regulation and spread of mechanisms for the financialization of nature, without tackling the structural causes of the climate crisis.

Official projections indicate warming of around 2.5ºC by the end of the century, while the deep cuts in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions needed to keep warming to “just” 1.5ºC remain distant and politically blocked.

COP30 made it even clearer that contemporary environmental policy is profoundly subordinate to capital and structured by a colonial rationality that persists in the 21st century. International climate decisions—which supposedly should address the ecological crisis—do not stem from the conservation and recovery of ecosystems, but from the need to guarantee the continuity of accumulation, transforming forests, rivers, sun, wind, and territories into strategic financial assets.

This logic is articulated around two central pillars: the absolute primacy of accumulation (which places market solutions above ecological integrity) and the colonial view that treats the Global South as sacrificial zones, intended to provide “environmental services” to maintain the standard of living and consumption of the Northern powers. Thus, while the Amazon and its biomes are sliced up into carbon metrics, “management plans,” and so-called renewable energies, there is no international willingness to confront the core of the problem: the capitalist mode of production, which continues to define technological, regulatory, and financial standards that bind the Global South in a subordinate role.

MAHKU Collective (Brazil), Rashuaka, 2022.

Trillion-Dollar Promises, Symbolic Deliveries

The so-called Baku to Belém Roadmap promised to mobilize $1.3 trillion for mitigation and adaptation. But it is a paper giant: it mixes international resources with national funds that many countries don’t even possess, lacks monitoring mechanisms, and follows the logic of financial capital, which favors low-risk projects with high economic returns—exactly the opposite of the adaptation needs of peripheral countries.

Governments, scientists, and experts criticized the lack of binding mechanisms, the absence of clarity regarding the true origin of resources, and the imprecision of goals. The final COP30 document was widely interpreted as insufficient and disconnected from the climate urgency. The main criticism is that there are no guarantees of implementation and no accountability instruments. In practice, the countries only agreed to ‘strive’ to triple funding, but without specifying who pays, how much, and where the financial resources come from.

Without robust and redistributive climate finance, NDCs (national emission reduction plans) remain fragile and insufficient. In the Brazilian case, for example, although the country presents goals to reduce emissions by 59% to 67% by 2035 (relative to 2005), zero illegal deforestation by 2030, and eliminate all deforestation by 2035, there is no indication that the agribusiness production model—the origin of deforestation—will be confronted. This is a model that continues to expand, especially over the Amazon biome, even if its narrative claims that this predatory expansion is not part of a supposed “rational, modern, and technological agribusiness,” but rather an outdated part of the agricultural sector.

Furthermore, the Brazilian government remains surrendered to agribusiness, which captures public structures like public companies, universities, and research centers in pursuit of a “greening” effort. One consequence of this capture is that the government refuses to impose specific and restrictive targets on the sector, which is precisely the country’s largest GHG emitter. Thus, climate promises coexist with the continuity of an agricultural model that blocks real progress and prevents the necessary structural transformation.

The Brazilian Showcase and the People’s Trap

The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), a proposal from the Brazilian government to create a global and permanent financing mechanism for the conservation of tropical forests and announced as a major innovation for protecting forests, synthesizes the colonial logic of financialization. It is devised based on the idea that the forest will only be preserved if it has economic value. That is, the forest does not have value in itself but will only be preserved if a price is assigned to it. Billions of dollars would be raised by multilateral banks which would buy public and private bonds from the Global South, and these countries end up paying interest to the very agents who “finance” their preservation. It is a mechanism that transfers wealth from the South to the North while turning forests into assets, and territories and ways of life into risk metrics.

With payments of at most four dollars per hectare and criteria that criminalize traditional practices, the TFFF neither reduces deforestation nor addresses its causes, but merely reinforces financial control over the Amazon. Not by chance, European countries backed away due to the “high risk.” Initial expectations of $125 billion proved to be a fantasy; even the reduced goal of $10 billion was not reached by the end of this COP.

The most worrying aspect is that this initiative was accepted by some progressive segments and even defended by these sectors as a step forward, despite representing a deepening of the financialization of nature, as the TFFF will price not only carbon but several other “environmental services.” This thesis follows the supposed defense of the international leadership of the Lula government on the environmental issue. However, this leadership will be devoid of meaning if its content does not point to concrete solutions for the environmental crisis constructed by the people.

Denilson Baniwa (Brazil), Natureza morta 1 (Still Life 1), 2016.

The Protagonism of Corporations at the COP

COP30 consolidated the corporate capture of the climate crisis. Banks and large transnational corporations transformed pavilions, events, and thematic houses into centers for lobbying and business opportunities. Corporate media received environmental sponsorships from companies with extensive social and environmental liabilities, affecting the independence of the coverage. A revealing scene showed 1,602 fossil fuel lobbyists freely circulating in the negotiations, a presence larger than that of almost all countries, except for the Brazilian delegation itself.

Although Brazil advocated for the construction of a “Transition Away from Fossil Fuels Roadmap”, the final text did not include any concrete commitment to eliminate the use of these resources, did not set dates for the end of oil, gas, and coal production, and ignored scientific recommendations for a rapid phase-out of fossil sources. The absence of this commitment was considered by international experts a “structural failure” of COP30 and is due to direct pressure from the lobby of producing countries and companies in the sector.

Agribusiness: The Invisible General of the COP

Agribusiness acted as one of the most organized and influential blocks at COP30. Its objectives were clear: to present itself as the protagonist of the climate solution through technological fixes, to expand its access to public and private financing, to block stricter environmental regulations, and to direct the global climate debate according to its interests.

To achieve this, it exhaustively used terms like “regenerative agriculture,” “tropical agriculture,” and “bioeconomy”—discourses that seek to greenwash practices based on monocultures, intensive use of pesticides, and territorial expansion. This strategy relies on the narrative that Brazilian agribusiness is highly technological and, therefore, automatically sustainable, even when its environmental impacts indicate the contrary.

The Agrizone, the space led by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) during COP30, was heavily sponsored by corporations like Bayer and Nestlé, in addition to hosting structures of the federal government itself. It served as a privileged showcase for that project: business environment, lobbying, and reputation engineering that reinforces the corporate capture of climate policy.

It is worth remembering that Brazil is one of the countries with the highest number of murders of environmentalists and leaders of rural and forest peoples in the world. This act is the front line before the deforestation of forests. Data from the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) reveal an alarming picture: 2024 presented the second-highest number of conflicts in rural areas since 1985. The Amazon remains the most vulnerable region, and the state of Pará, site of COP30, leads the records of murders and attempted murders. That scenario of structural violence is directly linked to the expansion of agribusiness and its model of conservative modernization, which deepens historical contradictions regarding the use, tenure, and ownership of land in Brazil, as well as different ways of understanding the relationship between humanity and nature.

Hulda Guzmán (Dominican Republic), “Come Dance” -Asked Nature Kindly, 2019-20.

The People’s Summit and the Popular Counterpoint

While COP30 expressed the advance of financial enclosures over nature, the People’s Summit, held from November 12 to 16 in parallel with the official Conference, expressed the strength of the resistance. Over 25,000 registered participants, more than 1,200 articulated organizations, and an internationalist boat protest with over 200 vessels; the global march had 70,000 people. Delegations from 60 countries produced a document denouncing environmental racism, the power of corporations, and the false solutions of green capitalism, identifying capitalism as the engine of the climate crisis.

The Summit reaffirmed that there is no climate solution within the system that created the crisis, and that only popular organization can confront the common enemy: capitalism in its imperialist, racist, and patriarchal expressions.

The number of demonstrations in various spaces within COP30 and at the Agrizone also expressed discontent with the incapacity of these global governance structures, led primarily by the UN, to present effective solutions to the various global conflicts.

COP30 demonstrated that the climate debate is also a debate about the model of society, as shown by the dossier from the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, The Environmental Crisis Is a Capitalist Crisis. For popular movements, there are three urgent and necessary tasks:

1. Politicize the Environmental Dispute: It is essential to continue building the environmental struggle by directly confronting agribusiness and mining, sectors that remain untouched at the center of emissions and territorial destruction. Politicizing the dispute also means denouncing the false solutions that are gaining traction, based on the financialization of nature, carbon markets, and “green” funds that deepen dependencies and render the structural causes of the crisis invisible.
2. Expand Popular Mobilization: For the climate agenda to become a transformative social force, it is urgent to broaden the capacity for popular mobilization, strengthening grassroots organizations, localizing the environmental debate, and connecting issues such as housing, sanitation, food, transportation, energy, and access to land with the climate struggle.
3. Build Its Own Program for a Just and Popular Ecological Transition: Movements need to project a transition program that confronts corporate power, recovers the centrality of common goods, and reorganizes the economy based on the needs of the people. This implies massifying the production of healthy food, strengthening agroecology, guaranteeing energy sovereignty, and placing water, soil, forests, and energy outside of financial markets.

COP30 clearly exposed that dominant climate policy remains aligned with capital, and that there is no solution capable of addressing the structural causes of the ecological crisis within these frameworks. At the same time, it showed that there is an insurgent path, built by peoples, movements, and territories that, in their daily lives, produce the only solutions truly rooted in life and socio-environmental justice.

The historical task before us is to transform that social force into a political project: a popular, anti-colonial, agroecological, and anti-capitalist ecological transition, because there is no real way out of the climate crisis without a rupture with the capitalist model, and there is no possible rupture without popular organization, without collective struggle, and without confronting the structures that profit from devastation.

Greetings to all,

Bárbara Loureiro

Bárbara Loureiro Bárbara Loureiro is part of the national coordination of the MST and has a master’s degree in Environment and Rural Development.

Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), Introducción a la esperanza (Introduction to Hope), 1963.

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research,

As we approach the 20th anniversary of the Summit that said NO to the FTAA in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 2005, we believe it is important to reflect on some aspects of this sovereign achievement that marked a turning point in the struggle for regional unity.

In the context in which the idea of the FTAA was developing in the United States, Europe was taking important steps to form the European Union, and Japan was reemerging from the ashes as an economic power with strong technological development. Both territories, rebuilt with US support after World War II, were beginning to cast a shadow over US hegemony.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was the most ambitious project of the United States to materialize the Monroe Doctrine on our continent. This treaty began to take shape in 1994 during the first Summit of the Americas organized by the OAS, at the height of the Washington Consensus. That same year, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the United States, and Canada was entering into effect, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation emerged publicly in opposition to it.

The extension of NAFTA to the rest of the Americas was presented as a perfect strategy to reinforce imperial power: it guaranteed approximately 800 million consumers for US companies, control over natural resources, and political control over 34 countries, with the exclusion of Cuba.

At that first Summit, a work agenda was established, which included technical team commissions, meetings between economy ministers, and presidential meetings over ten years, with the specific goal of finalizing and approving the treaty at the 2005 Summit.

Túlio Carapiá and Clara Cerqueira (Brazil), O Imperialista (The Imperialist), 2020.

The FTAA proposal consisted of creating a free trade zone throughout the continent. This implied opening up borders for the commercialization of goods and services, without taxes or tariffs, as recommended by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Countries were also urged to modify their laws to liberalize the entry of foreign investment, eliminate subsidies and anti-dumping barriers, and establish common rules for intellectual property and rules of origin. This, amidst many soothing words that advocated the need for —institutional— consensus for the signing of the agreement, with arguments about improving jobs for the supposed egalitarian development of countries and the pursuit of poverty abolishment in the region—which were no more than euphemisms that sought to conceal the true neocolonial nature of the agreement.

However, as the agenda of presidential and ministerial meetings scheduled for the constitution of the FTAA advanced, the history of the nations and peoples of Nuestra América unfolded.

Comando Creativo (Venezuela), El Morral del comandante Chávez (Commander Chavez’s Backpack), 2015.

Between 1994 and 2005, we lived through the takeoff and the forced landing that the application of the neoliberal model in our countries entailed. We experienced the destruction of our productive apparatuses, the disintegration of the idea of the welfare state, the loss of labor rights, the privatization of national strategic resources, external debt and the conditionalities of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and, above all, the deepening of inequality, unemployment, and poverty.

During these years, a multiplicity of social explosions took place in most countries of the region; popular organizations took over universities, unions, barracks, streets, highways, and in some cases, governments.

The discussion about the consequences of signing the FTAA treaty became real in the voice of intellectuals and politicians critical of the model, but also in the assemblies of social movements, Bolivarian circles, unions, and political parties throughout the region. The mirror of NAFTA’s consequences for Mexico was the clearest reflection to look at. There was no more development, there was more dependence. There was no greater added value, there were maquiladoras. There were no better wages, but worse ones. There was no free circulation of people, there was deportation.

By 2005, we arrived in a state of alert and mobilization. George W. Bush was the President of the United States and had the task of successfully concluding the treaty. Meanwhile, as the influence of the United States weighed like an oppressive yoke on each of the presidents gathered at the IV Summit of the Americas, Néstor Kirchner, Lula da Silva, and Commander Hugo Chávez spoke of sovereignty, democracy, and decent work for the peoples.

On the other side was the People’s Summit. The ALBA Train, the internationally confederated trade unions, the São Paulo Forum, social movements, and political parties mobilized to exert popular pressure. The panorama was diverse: recognized artists heading the march for the NO to the FTAA, the Cuban delegation was present with its sports teams, Diego Maradona with the “Bush War Criminal” t-shirt, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with the “Bush Out” banner, the flag with Fidel, Chávez, Kirchner, Lula, and Tabaré Vásquez that spoke of a new unity, and Chávez rallying the masses in the Mar del Plata World Cup stadium.

Discurso del Comandante Chávez en Mar del Plata (Speech by Commander Chávez in Mar del Plata), 2005. Photo: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association (Argentina). Visual intervention carried out by the Art Department, Tricontinental Nuestra América.

The NO to the FTAA was the seed for the creation of Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), for Argentina to cut ties with the IMF, for Evo Morales to expel the United States ambassador, for the birth of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Treaty of Commerce (ALBA-TCP) and ALBA Movements, for the creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), for the regional pronouncement against the coup in Honduras in 2009, against the attempted coup against Correa in 2010, against the institutional coup against Lugo in 2013, and the strength of a region that in those years, working together, was able to regain a sovereign position, reduce poverty and inequality.

Today, looking back, with an Argentinian president who speaks of free trade with the United States, who returns to adopting a subservient position before Trump, a few days before the signing of a treaty that will undoubtedly compromise Argentine sovereignty, that November 5, 2005, when we said NO to the FTAA, seems more than distant.

With that spirit, we want to remember this feat and bring our history to the present: to know where we come from and where we arrived, to know that the history of the peoples’ struggle cannot be erased.

Just as Venezuela and Cuba resist the US blockade, as Brazil jailed Bolsonaro for the attempted coup against Lula, as Mexico and Colombia rebelled against US political domination and are now the spearhead of regional resistance, just as Maradona continues to dribble past war criminals across the Mediterranean Sea, from Tricontinental we continue to combat hyper-imperialism and work for a new development project from and for the peoples of the Global South.

Greetings to all,

Lucía Converti, militante de Nuestramérica e investigadora de Tricontinental

Lucía Converti Lucia is an organizer from Nuestramérica Movimiento Popular who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She holds a degree in economics and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Latin American social studies at the University of Buenos Aires. She recently secured a diploma in data science and artificial intelligence at the San Martín National University (UNSAM). Always focused on economic policy issues, she was a researcher at the Latin American Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica (CELAG) and worked in the public sector for more than ten years in several areas, at the local, regional and national levels.

Oswaldo Guayasamín (Ecuador), Homenaje al hombre latinoamericano (Homage to the Latin American Man), 1954.

Greetings from the Nuestra América office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research,

In recent months, the judiciary has played a leading role in our region: from the lawfare orchestrated against the former president of Argentina to the historic convictions of former presidents of the regional far right, such as Álvaro Uribe Vélez in Colombia and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. However, it is worth clarifying that, contrary to what the hegemonic press tries to portray about the similarity between cases of lawfare and those of justice for proven crimes, the two are very different in nature. To better understand lawfare as a strategy of imperialism in Nuestra América , we asked Claudia Rocca of the American Association of Jurists to contribute to this debate:

Lawfare is a political war waged through the courts and the media, which responds to economic, political, and geopolitical interests. It involves judges, prosecutors, media corporations, journalists and opinion leaders, police, embassy officials, and intelligence agents, both local and foreign.

It is characterized by the abuse of preventive detention, plea bargains, and verdicts constructed without respect for due process, through harassment and demoralization via the media. It includes raids on political headquarters and the homes of activists, persecution and threats to family members, forcing situations of exile and political refuge, manipulation, and the spread of fear among those involved in certain political processes.

In recent years, these tactics have been used against dozens of political leaders and/or former government officials in Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and El Salvador, linked to governments, programs, or projects that question neoliberal orthodoxy to a greater or lesser extent.

This war operates “from above,” through a judicial apparatus that places itself above the legislative and executive branches, expanding the room for maneuver and power for judges, who become involved in political operations, triggering a loss of checks and balances between powers, allowing for a growing “juristocracy,” and in many cases normalizing the double standard of the law. This historical process of repositioning the judiciary above the other branches of government is characteristic of neoconstitutionalism, the predominant legal order in much of Europe and Latin America in recent decades.

The elevation of the judicial apparatus and selectivity in court cases is linked to the leading role played by the media, which works to criminalize political sectors or leaders. Added to this are the voices of “specialists,” many from US “think tanks,” who are attributed a supposed “force of truth” in the mainstream and social media.

The role played by US government agencies such as USAID and others, as well as US private sector interests, is striking: both are involved in judicial processes as well as in the outcomes and events that follow, demonstrating the instrumentalization of the judicial-media apparatus in favor of foreign economic, political, and geopolitical objectives, which share interests and business with privileged local minorities.

But this mechanism is not limited to the internal spheres of countries. For those nations in which the new Western economic power has not managed to undermine national and sovereign political processes, the same recipes are applied using the international system of currency flows, tariffs and trade routes, money laundering prevention systems, immigration control systems, with sanctions and unilateral coercive measures, with charges and accusations, based solely on decisions made by administrative offices and, therefore, are merely political decisions of the US administration.

Lucy Tejada (Colombia), Atados (Tied), 1977.

Several military publications consider lawfare to be one of the components of new “unconventional” wars, such as hybrid warfare. This type of warfare can be carried out by state or non-state actors, who use all the modalities of this type of warfare, including conventional military capabilities, unconventional tactics and combat units, or other terrorist actions, planning chaos through acts of violence, cyberwarfare, financial warfare, or media warfare.

It is enough to invoke the “illegality” of the laws/norms of other states that do not adhere to Western standards for them to be classified as violent (“unusual and extraordinary threat”), thus seeking to legitimize attacks that today take on multiple dimensions.

Although, as we have said, lawfare is a tool used by the state, the government, or privileged minorities at the local level, it is also used at the transnational level, implemented from the Global North.

For the nations that submit to it, this is the core of colonial relations and dependence exacerbated by the expansion of capitalism. Within the framework of this unequal relationship, the US and its allies reorganize the scenario in favor of the interests of a transnational power network, creating a kind of “legitimate legal order”; and they define the scope of their jurisdiction, with disregard to the sovereignty of weaker states that do not have the capacity to impose their law by force or to exercise resistance.

Jurisdiction is not simply a rule, but determines which rules will be applied, where, how, and by whom. Therein lies the power of subjugation of the Western power center over our Latin American countries, conveyed through lawfare.

The installation of this “juristocracy” has resulted in the judicialization of high politics and democracy, because by delegitimizing and neutralizing political leaders who are inconvenient for certain economic and geopolitical interests, they have not only affected the individuals directly involved, but also undermined the democratic foundations of the affected states, compromising their capacity for self-determination and promoting subordination to external agendas.

Tricontinental Institute, Hybrid Wars, 2020.

The Argentinian Case

The judicial persecution of political and social leaders in Argentina has developed since the end of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s last term in office, when figures who paraded through the media began to take center stage, denouncing the alleged corruption of Kirchnerist officials, without any probative arguments, but with great spectacle and impact provided by the mass media. The attacks were particularly focused on the President, and even went so far as to suggest that she was the mastermind behind the death of prosecutor Nisman, despite the fact that all the evidence gathered in the investigation pointed to suicide.

The federal criminal court, together with other senior officials in the judiciary, became the main opposition party. This process was decisive for the victory of Mauricio Macri, whose administration plunged the country into a process of deindustrialization, concentration of wealth through financial speculation, surrender of strategic resources, and weakening of the state’s capacity, while multiplying the cases that criminalized Kirchnerism in particular and social leaders of the popular camp in general. Milagro Sala is the most paradigmatic example. In the last part of his term, Macri incurred in formidable debt in record time. The nearly $50 billion granted by the IMF in a completely irregular manner is part of the amount that fled the country afterwards.

As a result of the obvious unviability of this government program and the social and economic deterioration it caused, Peronism won the presidential elections in 2019. But clearly, it did not gain power. Lawfare did not yield an inch.

One of the emblematic cases is undoubtedly the so-called “Vialidad” case, in which Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was sentenced to six years in prison for the crime of fraudulent administration. In the context of this trial, the guarantees of defense in court, emanating from Article 380 of the National Criminal Procedure Code, based on Article 18 of the National Constitution and reinforced by the treaties that make up International Human Rights Law, have been violated; the set of rules on judicial conduct known as the Bangalore Principles (adopted by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in its Resolution E/CN.4/2003/65/Annex of November 2002, formally approved on January 10, 2003) have been violated, given the public and notorious lack of impartiality of the judge and his evident links to the prosecution. The judicial arbitrariness manifested in the proceedings against the Vice President shows the same patterns of persecution as in the political proscriptions of other Latin American leaders, and this is clearly evident from a ruling that is in no way related to the evidence produced in the case file, where no evidence has been included to prove the conduct attributed to the former President.

After confirmation by the Court of Cassation—which did not address any of the above arguments—in just two months, the Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina upheld the conviction, while other cases await years or even decades. With the now customary advance and accurate announcement by the media, the unconstitutional ruling achieved its purpose from the outset: the proscription of Cristina.

Carlos Alonso (Argentina), Carne de primera (Prime Meat), 1972.

We can affirm that lawfare was a central factor in the rise to power of Javier Milei, a sinister figure promoted and supported by three centers of economic power: speculative finance and investment in strategic resources (such as JP Morgan, BlackRock, and others), the groups known as “techno-feudal lords”—masters of the networks—and the media.

Since taking office, Milei has carried out a process of dismantling the state; emptying public policies for development, human rights, inclusion, gender, and diversity, within the framework of a process of economic devastation; the deployment of repressive measures with the expansion of security forces and agencies, aimed at silencing social protest in the face of the dismantling of a state system for the effective protection of economic, social, and cultural rights; and the brutal impoverishment of the population.

There have been massive layoffs, while companies, strategic resources, and other public assets have been privatized. The attempt to suppress labor rights, combined with the persecution of trade unions, social organizations, and popular economy organizations—criminal charges, removal of food and other benefits guaranteed by social programs that were abruptly discontinued—reflect a political project of accumulation in favor of concentrated sectors of the economy and financial speculation. In the context of inflationary pressures, due to the deregulation of essential economic factors such as services, benefits, and prices in general, there was a sharp decline in the purchasing power of wages and an increase in unemployment and poverty.

In 2024, small and medium-sized enterprises recorded a loss of more than 217,000 jobs and the closure of 9,923 companies, according to Industriales Pymes Argentinos (IPA). The sectors most affected were construction and industry, with 69,738 and 25,186 fewer jobs, respectively. In the public sector, between November 2023 and May 2025, more than 180,000 jobs were eliminated. There was an increase in informal work and semi-slavery working conditions.

The loss of purchasing power of incomes, as a result of the change in economic policy implemented by the current government, represented the largest monthly drop in the last 30 years (8.4 percent year-on-year in purchasing power).

There was a greater contraction in consumption in supermarket and self-service sales, as well as in retail stores in various sectors. In 2025, inflation is easing, solely as a result of an unprecedented economic recession and deterioration of all factors. The consequences in human terms are now evident and alarming.

This accelerated process of devastation was accompanied by fascist practices and rhetoric, reflecting contempt for the human condition, a supremacist, patriarchal conception, and the most servile and undignified submission to the interests of the United States and the genocidal Zionist government of Israel, vociferously proclaimed by the Argentine president.

In conclusion, we could attempt at this point to define fascism in the 21st century as a social practice that manifests itself through political movements, driven by the new economic power prevailing in the West, which use hatred and polarization as strategies to undermine liberal democracy, break with the social order, and the rule of law. They thus install authoritarian regimes and nepotism, with economic programs that promote accelerated processes of wealth concentration, benefiting the transnational groups to which they respond and favoring financial speculation. The consequences are the destruction of social organizations, the exclusion of large majorities, economic devastation, and repression as a method of social control.

The Argentine example—like so many others—shows us that submission to the current Western economic power represented by the United States only brings consequences infinitely more tragic than the cost of resisting it. Not only is there no benefit or mercy, but it leaves us without a horizon and without a future. Therefore, yielding or submitting is not an option for a sovereign people.

Greetings to all,

Claudia Rocca

Claudia Rocca Claudia Rocca is President of the Argentine branch and Second Continental Vice President of the American Association of Jurists, a lawyer, and a university professor specializing in public law and economic law.