Statement of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humankind

A Glowing Fire against the Dark Night

Red de Intelectuales y Artistas en Defensa de la Humanidad

01/08/2011

Opinión

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After 500 years of resistance and at the moment of celebration of the bicentennials of the Independence, the planet faces a new, devastating offensive on the part of the United States and the powerful of the world. The stubborn struggle of vast popular movements and revolutionary and progressive governments in favor of democracy, social justice and the right to exert their identity—in Northern Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America—is confronted with new war scenarios with multiple modalities that comprise all dimensions of life and of the territories.

The civilization created by capitalism, incapable of solving the problems caused by its own development, aggravates them in its implacable advance against nature and humankind.

Our America holds a relevant place in this general crisis. The presence of new realities, which is evidenced in the integration, cooperation in solidarity and hope represented by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) and organizations like the Union of Nations of the South (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), about to be born, face the renewal in an extended scale of old risk elements and draw a scenario of total occupation.

With 20 new military bases of the United States; with coups d’Etat as old-new imperial strategy; with security agreements, invasion of the sovereignty of the peoples; with training exercises and permanent patrolling; with mega-projects such as the Puebla Panama Plan and the Integration of the South American Regional Infrastructure, conditions are created for the mass transformation of our water, biotic, energy and mining riches into a new natural capital, and of our cultural wealth into human capital and intellectual commodities.

In the face of the civilizing catastrophe, the alternative is life or death. New forms of dominion, appropriation and expansion of capitalism lead to new challenges that our knowledge must learn to face. It is necessary to strengthen our understanding capacities to decipher and overtake in this suicidal race.

It is urgent to consolidate the foundation on which to build an emancipated world, without colonialisms, without colonies or empires, without slavery or racisms, without submission of any form of life.

The dialogue between the world view and the liberating traditions of humankind, poetry, chants, dance, art and the creative imagination of our peoples, will contribute to find the new languages and decisive roads for the material, cultural and spiritual emancipation, in the embrace with all peoples of the Earth.

For this reason, we, intellectuals and artists from Latin America and the Caribbean, intend:

1. To mobilize against wars and territorial expansions of the powerful of the world, wherever they take place.

2. To struggle for a participating democracy with a wide popular basis respectful and inclusive of our diversities, that expands political spaces according to the different visions and cultural practices, and ensures justice, peace, self-determination and independence of all the peoples.

3. As part of the general emancipation process, to celebrate and defend the achievements and conquests of the social movements and of the revolutionary and progressive governments, without failing to transcend them in favor of attaining the wide horizons drawn in our utopias.

4. To mobilize all our energies to achieve the demilitarization and the exit of foreign troops from Haiti, an offense to the dignity, justice, democracy, sovereignty and intelligence of a people that was capable of conducting the first struggle for independence in the planet against the genocidal expansion with which the capitalist world system was founded. We need to create an approach in solidarity of the peoples of the world with Haiti—such as the one maintained by Cuba and Venezuela—in the face of the ravages caused by the offensive to which it has been submitted by the imperial interests.

5. To strive for the creation of conditions to achieve a lasting peace for the Colombian people, knowing that it is necessary to ensure democratic conditions and fair peace in all our territories. To urge UNASUR and all regional and international bodies to work in favor of democracy and peace in a country where there are already more than 600 000 dead in a continued and permanent genocide. Colombia is a mirror for the future of several of our countries.

6. To participate in the wide debate on the situation and outlook of Our America and the world on the eve of the Summit of Rio + 20 led by thinkers and social movements throughout the planet.

7. To create an ample debate on senses and meanings of a complex and disjointed reality that modifies itself and deepens its contradictions, while at the same time it opens multiple utopian horizons and demands new energies and knowledge for the emancipation struggle.

8. To face the media war with a systematic and consistent work in the battle of ideas and the building of common senses of emancipation and committed with the liberation of our peoples. To search for forms of expression and communication that involve the entire spectrum of our languages, world views and the wealth of our cultures; that support the existing initiatives of alternative communication and that appropriate the new technological tools without disregarding the old ones.

9. To expand our active involvement in the struggle against impunity under all its forms, daily and almost invisible like those that operate in micro spaces and of great scope like the invasions, bombardments or blockades to some territories of the world. To demand unceasingly the lifting of the blockade to Cuba, and justice and punishment to all genocides, wherever they may be.

10. To celebrate and commit the political will of the Network in the articulation with the mobilizations of the peoples, of the youth, of women, of the natives, the excluded, the sexual diversities, the different, the angry, the offended and the fighters in the entire world. Their struggles are our struggles.

The Network of intellectuals and artists In Defense of Humankind joins and convokes all organizations and networks of critical thinkers, social fighters and committed artists, to strengthen the efforts to build the new, non-capitalist world foreseen by our goals.

The challenge is huge.

No effort or struggle is dispensable

No people are to be sacrificed.

The time is near when our dear fatherland, America, will become that glorious part of the globe that nature wanted it to be.

Francisco de Miranda

Havana, July 30, 2011

https://www.alainet.org/es/node/151607