JUBILEE SOUTH/AMERICAS DECLARATION ON DEBT, THE FTAA, AND MILITARIZATION CHALLENGES FOR HEMISPHERIC EMANCIPATION Quito, May 25, 2002 1. Our campaign "Yes to Sovereignty and Life, No to the FTAA", understands the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to be a strategy for resolving the problem of overproduction in the United States. Structural adjustment, privatizations, trade liberalization, unconditional openness for foreign investments, patents, etc., are different ways to: a) Reorient surplus products in the United States to the countries of the periphery; b) Subordinate all the geo-economic spaces of the continent to U.S. based transnational capital; and c) Create a regional block, dominated by the United States, that is capable of confronting competition from the European Union and the Asian block in the dispute for global economic, geopolitical and cultural hegemony. For the countries of the periphery in the Americas, the FTAA represents a plan to appropriate, via both production and commercialization, the surpluses generated by our peoples. It seeks to reduce us definitively to the role of consumers of the goods produced in the North and suppliers of natural resources, primary goods or low value-added manufactured goods. The FTAA is rooted in a philosophy of integration based on the maximization of inequalities, superexploitation, and the productive and commercial annexation of our countries to the empire. 2. The Debt also fulfills a role of appropriation of the surpluses in our countries via financial channels. Over indebtedness is a mechanism of exploitation that forms part of the legacy of the colonial conquest, subordinating the countries of the periphery through a permanent hemorrhaging of their capitals, natural resources, and production. The debt, amply repaid many times over, has converted the continent into a net exporter of capitals. This phenomenon is even more serious if we analyze it in relation to the unequal terms of trade and the flows of profit repatriation to the headquarters of the transnational corporations. The schemes of interest capitalization, the payment of interest on interest, and the chronic trade deficit of Latin America and the Caribbean give rise to the vicious circle of "the more you pay, the more you owe", and reduce debtor governments to submission in the face of the conditionalities imposed by the creditors. Among them, the compression of public spending in order to make possible the payment of interest, provoking an unsustainable deterioration in our economies, the quality of life of our peoples, and our ecosystems. The IMF charges a stiff price for its loans, and it benefits from an important volume of the flow of liquidity transfers. It is a factor in the decapitalization and the loss of sovereignty of our countries. The unpayable nature of most of the debt of Latin America and the Caribbean should be analyzed in relation to its illegitimacy, and urgent measures demanded in order to stop the hemorrhaging and revitalize our economies. The settling of the historical, social, and ecological debt due to our peoples poses the moral challenge of reparations. Finally, the debt fulfills an essentially political function of transferring the power of decision over economic policy to the governments of the creditor countries and their multilateral puppets. 3. Militarization, at the same time, functions as an armed guarantee of: a) the hemispheric and global hegemony of the United States, and b) the perpetuation of the model of structural concentration and exclusion, directed by the United States. The ideology of terror and war is at the root of the expansion of military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, the rise in military and police spending, and the broadening of intelligence services, and the gathering of information on the popular movements and those who oppose the imperial order. The intensification of repression takes place in an atmosphere of growing criminalization of social movements. 4. The FTAA, overindebtedness, and militarization are three complementary strategic axes of a single project of expansion and consolidation of the U.S. empire. All three are at the service of objectives which can be summarized in the monetary subordination of the continent to the United States' dollar, the plunder, control and usufruct of our natural and genetic resources and our wealth by the transnational corporations, the productive and commercial annexation of our economies, and geopolitical dominion over the continent that converts our rights to self-determination and national and popular sovereignty into things of the past. Our campaign seeks to build from this systemic and strategic vision of the contemporary challenge to pose as a paradigm the urgent necessity of a complete break with the present system of domination, an integration and a globalization based on the values of respect for the cultural and national diversity of peoples and collaboration and solidarity among them. We propose not only to denounce and struggle against the imperial project expressed in the FTAA, the debt, and growing militarization, but also to build concrete alternative forms of integration based on the right of peoples to their own development as well as new models of development which are respectful of the environment, based on gender equity and respect for human rights, and capable of guaranteeing a dignified human existence for all in an atmosphere of justice, fraternity, and peace. Yes to Life and Popular Sovereignty Stop the FTAA - Cancel the Debt No to Militarization Another America is Possible! With the participation of representatives of member movements and campaigns in: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, and Venezuela