ALBA Pledges Solidarity with Venezuela at 14th Summit
Member states also pledged to create a legal defense fund for Latin American and Caribbean migrants in the United States.
Caracas, March 6, 2017 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) issued calls for Latin American unity and solidarity with Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution this past Sunday during its 14th summit in Caracas.
Heads of the regional bloc’s 11 member countries denounced “imperialism’s new onslaught” across the region whose principal target they identified as Venezuela.
“The defense of Venezuela and its revolution is not the exclusive problem of Venezuelans. It is the cause that brings together all of us who fight for the true independence of Latin America and the Caribbean,” reads the summit’s final declaration.
In particular, the allied leftist governments condemned the latest US sanctions targeting Venezuelan Vice-President Tareck El Aissami alongside the outgoing Obama administration’s renewal of an executive decree labeling Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security.
During the summit, the ALBA nations also commemorated the four-year anniversary of the death of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez together with the four-month anniversary of the death of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, honoring both men as “our founders, whose examples and ideas interpret and encapsulate the legacy of the liberators”.
The regional integration bloc additionally voiced its solidarity with the people of Mexico in the face of the wall that the Trump administration has promised to construct along the two countries’ shared border.
Likewise concerning the Trump administration’s expanded anti-immigrant policies, member-states vowed to create a joint legal fund to defend migrants facing deportation in the US.
“We express our concern for the treatment of our Lain American and Caribbean sisters and brothers who find themselves in the situation of migrants; in this sense, we propose to relaunch the Migrant Legal Support and Advisory Fund as part of the ALBA Bank,” the final statement reads.
The bloc also declared its support for the Peoples’ World Conference for a World Without Walls Towards Universal Citizenship, which will be held in Cochabamba, Bolivia this coming June 20-21.
The ALBA-Peoples’ Commercial Treaty was signed in 2004 by Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro as a Latin American integrationist alternative to the US-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Over the past decade, the bloc has been progressively expanded to currently include Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Dominica, Antigua and Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada.