The agreement between the governments of India, Brazil and South Africa to give impetus to the call of G3, christened by some as "the G7 of the poor", represents the most ambitious turn of force for nearly half a century since the Bandung Conference. The news passed almost unnoticed. All too often, events destined to be printed just in the nick of time, spiral away from editorial staff and become lost under mountains of papers. This time the news is, in a word, important: the foreign affairs ministers of Brazil (Celso Amorim), South Africa (Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma) and of India (Yashwant Sinha), met in Brazil two weeks ago in order to found the Group of Three (G3). The initiative was started by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government as part of his strategy to reinforce cooperation between developing countries and the Third World. The objective of G3 is to strengthen this trilateral cooperation, to encourage the exchange of business and to unify the countries' positions in international forums. Although this is an embryonic project, a proposal has been put forward to include the other countries of MERCOSUR and of the Southern African Customs Union, with the possibility of including China and Russia, which would mean becoming the group of five. The three foreign secretaries took care to stress that this is not an alliance against G7: Amorim indicated that "we are not forming an exclusive club" and emphasized that "we want to talk with one voice in multilateral organizations". Nevertheless, they resolved to create the Trilateral Commission and to prepare a meeting between the heads of state of the three countries, to be held before the end of the year. In recent days, during MERCOSUR's meeting in Asuncion, India has signed an agreement to lower customs charges in bilateral trade, similar to the Preferential Trade Agreement that MERCOSUR signed with South Africa in 1998. One political goal of the new members of G3 is the inclusion of representatives from developing countries among the permanent members of the UN Security Council. No matter what the foreign secretaries say, the strengthening of relations between three important countries in the South signifies a strong challenge to the North, and in particular for Washington's diplomacy which, since the fall of the socialist bloc, is striving for a unipolar world. New multilateralism This new initiative from periphery countries will be realized in almost half a century after the first irruption of Third World countries into the international arena. In April 1955, in Bandung, the former capital of Indonesia, a group of countries from Africa and Asia - a large portion of whom had successfully obtained independence – met in search of reaffirming their own politics, different to that of the great powers. The international climate at the time goes a long way to explain the end of the conference: the war between Korea and Indochina, in which the French were defeated at the historic battle of Dien Bien Phu, had finished. Old colonialism had suffered fatal, knocks and new imperialism from the United States was being held back by the Koreans and Chinese. Although some important agreements were reached (regarding sovereignty, non-aggression, noninterference in internal matters, reciprocity and peaceful coexistence), what stands out the most is the fact that it was the first time that a group of countries from the Third World had come together without the presence of Europeans, the United States and the Soviet Union. In short, a new player had been born on the international scene. More than that, the conference coincided with the start of the second wave of de-colonization, the war in Algeria was entering its peak and shortly afterwards intervention in Vietnam began to escalate, with the effect that the movements of Third World countries began to be an unavoidable point of discussion. The changed spirit of Arab nationalism was one of the main consequences of Bandung, and one of the most explosive for United States control. The Bandung Conference was held in 1962 in the Movement of the Non-Allied Countries, made official at the Belgrade Conference, and during it Hindu Jamaharlal Nehru, Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indonesian Ahmed Sukarno, Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah and host Josip Broz Tito had central roles. Over the years, the majority of the governments of the countries represented in Bandung and Belgrade have been occupied by forces defining themselves as national liberation or socialist forces. Apart from a few worthy exceptions, these new regimes have not lived up to the expectations of its people: they have failed as a consequence of imperial pressure – a combination of uneven exchange, neocolonialism and political pressure -, they could not approach the immense economic changes that were need in order to improve the situation of the poorest members of the population, and often fell into clashes and internal wars or drifted towards corruption and nepotism. New directions Little still remains of this important movement. Not even the "non-alliance" which the Defense Secretary of the United States, John Foster Dulles considered "immoral". Yet, over the last half-century, the problems in the world have become more serious: one single superpower hopes to dominate the planet. That is why some trends which seek to avoid real unilateralism, are positive. It is for this reason that the G3 initiative is so important, above all if it takes into account its mission to unite the countries in the Southern hemisphere. It has to be said, nevertheless, that Lula's initiative is coming from behind. It started during Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government and its main protagonist is the Brazilian upper class. In May, China became the second destination for Brazilian exports after the United States. Between 2000 and the end of 2002 China received 21 Brazilian trade missions and Brazil received 24 Chinese trade missions during the same period. In May of this year exports from Brazil to China increased by 375 percent compared to three years previously, the majority of which are iron and soya products. Yet Brazilian exports to Third World countries are still very low in comparison to European and United States exports. They are, however, growing continuously: exports to India are increasing at an projected rate of 143 percent, exports to South Africa have doubled and those to Senegal have increased by 485 percent. For Latin America countries, the path cleared by Brazil is both a warning and a hope. The strengthening of MERCOSUR, its expansion to other countries such as Peru and Venezuela and the inclusion of Mexico and Cuba as players in the South-South Cooperation, represent an alternative to the dominium of the multinationals based in the United States. The victorious battle between the multinational pharmaceuticals, in which the G3 countries played a decisive role, and which led to the adoption of generic medication, has opened up cracks in the dominium of the powers. Let us be straight: it is not, in this case, about a battle for emancipation, a task that does not fall to the state but to civil society. It is, much more modestly, about twisting the arm of the imperial dominium of Washington. It is, however, a task of the first order: what is at stake is the survival of humanity. Although this survival looks, as seen in the policies of PT in Brazil, like a precise and timely alliance with the upper classes, like the Brazilians, the new black upper classes of South Africa or the more established Hindu upper classes. In this matter, and just as has been the case for numerous movements in the three continents, the issue is one of gaining time to unpick the knot that is tightening around our necks. What it is not about, as the Landless Workers' Movement demonstrates, is standing by and doing nothing. (Translation by ALAI) * Raul Zibechi, Uruguayan journalist, recent winner of the Premio Latinoamerciano de Periodismo José Martí 2003.