Mercosur, geopolitics and ethnoexclusion (international analysis)

02/09/2016
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The former president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez Frias, undoubtedly was an architect in regional geopolitics, in order to deconstruct forms of integration dictated from Washington by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and 120 monopolistic companies of the United States, under the umbrella of the Washington consensus.

 

The governments of both President Bill Clinton and George Bush had raised the proposal of neoliberal integration in the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), with the purpose of controlling markets and the riches of the Americas and the Caribbean.

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Chávez succeeded in changing the rules of the game of this type of integration, proposing as a starting point the Bolivarian Alternative of the Peoples, integrated by Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent, Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica with a total of 76.381.000 inhabitants.

 

Later, he created Petrocaribe integrated by Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Saint Vincent and Surinam, serving a total benefited population of 111.557.000.

 

Afterwards, Chávez would express that our "North is the South", beginning his long road towards integration with this strategic regional block (Mercosur), which Venezuela entered on June 29, 2012. At that moment president Chávez expressed: "You must remember - because they will decontextualize it - Venezuela asked to enter Mercosur when I had not assumed the Presidency in 99, and then several years went by: Lula comes to the Presidency of Brazil and Néstor Kirchner to that of Argentina, and it is when they started taking this request formally". "Our entry had not been possible in spite of Venezuela having signed the protocol of adhesion, in Caracas, on July 4 2006".  But then we found an impedimient in the Paraguayan congress, this same one that made the coup d'état against Lugo. That same congress, furious against Venezuela, accusing me and causing harm to Mercosur and to Paraguay itself."

 

Paraguay was left high and dry in the face of Chavez’ position to denounce the new strategy of the regional and international extreme right of trying to bring down the progressive governments in Latin America, as was successfully achieved with the Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo and Manuel Zelaya (Honduras), and now they have repeated it with Dilma Rousseff (Brazil). Today, that same Paraguayan extreme right, in its return to power, together with the interim president of Brazil, Michel Temer and the neoliberal president Macri, of Argentina, are attempting to deny the presidency of Venezuela in this important regional block (Mercosur) that has nearly three hundred million people, a GDP of almost 5 trillion dollars, representing 83% of the economy in South America. That is to say, it is a prize that the empire cannot lose.

 

Radicalization of etnoexclusion

 

The three opposition men who deny the pro tempore presidency that rightfully belongs to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, have exacerbated exclusion in their countries, starting with Paraguay, which denies the Afro Paraguayan enclave known as the Kambakua, the recovery of a hundred hectares that since colonial times they had ceded to General Artigas. At the time of the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), the dictator snatched fifty hectares of the hundred they had, and today its direct descendant, the current president of Paraguay and his Ministry of the Interior continue plunging the Kambakua population into poverty in a seven hectares apartheid zone.

 

Meanwhile the Argentine Macri, in his address on reaching the presidency, said Argentina had been founded by European immigrants, and failed to mentioned all the afros, who have joined the million poor that this neoliberal President has left in the Mar del Plata region.

 

President Temer in Brazil has reversed the progress that Afro-Brazilians had achieved with the Quilombolas, affirmative actions and the inclusion in public policies. Finally, the efforts for opening a process of integration and equality among Afrodescendant peoples of Mercosur, launched in March 2015 at a meeting of ministers and senior officials on the rights of Afrodescendants people known as RAFRO, will surely be thrown into the cesspool of racial discrimination.

 

 

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/179984?language=en
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