Original article by Pablo Meriguet republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

The meeting in Mar del Plata paid tribute to the moment when several Latin American presidents defeated the US attempt to establish a regional free trade agreement.

In the same place where the regional free trade project was “buried” two decades ago, 150 delegates from various social movements in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Portugal, Haiti, Palestine, Chile, Nicaragua, Peru, and Paraguay gathered to reaffirm the anti-imperialist spirit that led to the regional rejection of the FTAA project, they say.

“The world faces greater levels of inequality, injustice, and authoritarianism, with a growing concentration of financial and technological power that deepens poverty and limits the autonomy of countries in the Global South,” the delegates said in the event’s final declaration.

The meeting was also attended by the governor of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, who stated that the rejection of the FTAA in 2005 was a “new declaration of independence” for Latin American countries. “The rejection of the FTAA was a victory for Latin American sovereignty, voiced by a group of presidents with enormous courage, represented in our country by Néstor Kirchner. Twenty years after that historic milestone, we have a responsibility to continue building unity, because there is no possibility of development for our countries outside the framework of regional integration. We cannot afford not to have a project on behalf of our people, because Argentina and the countries of Latin America are not anyone’s backyard,” Kicillof wrote in X.

For his part, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Argentine Workers’ Central Union (CTA), Adolfo Aguirre, stated: “In this very place, in front of the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and before the eyes of the whole world, our peoples, workers, together with leaders such as Néstor Kirchner, Hugo Chávez, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, marked a turning point. We said no to surrender, no to dependence, no to the model that wanted to turn our America into the backyard of economic power.”

Twenty years ago, the anti-imperialist slogan was born

Twenty years ago in Argentina, several political leaders from the Latin American left gathered at a People’s Summit, whose fundamental slogan was the rejection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), an initiative promoted, among others, by the George W. Bush administration. The FTAA sought to significantly reduce customs barriers between American countries.

According to popular and left-wing forces in Latin America and the Caribbean, the agreement would have promoted a regional market in which the United States would have had an enormous advantage over other countries and which, in the long run, would have led to the destruction of the still immature regional industry to benefit the interests of large US companies.

However, the economic and geopolitical project did not prosper due to fierce and coordinated opposition from several Latin American presidents, including Néstor Kirchner (Argentina), Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), among others. The political maneuver took place in Mar del Plata, during the Summit of the Americas, where Bush and his entourage suffered a severe setback. Thus, the proposal that had been in the works and planned since 1994 in Miami and was definitively defeated.

The Summit of the Americas is considered by several experts to be a turning point in the geopolitical relations of the American continent. New progressive and pro-sovereignty processes joined those of Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, giving rise to an attempt at regional integration that to this day is pushed by progressivism and boycotted by Washington’s neoliberal allies.

While the summit was taking place, thousands of people from left-wing and progressive movements and political parties gathered at a parallel conference with the slogan “No to the FTAA,” which was eventually attended by several political leaders. Among them, Hugo Chávez made a statement in his speech that would go down in history: “ALCA (FTAA in Spanish), al carajo! (FTAA, go to hell!)”.

A historic event

The region has undoubtedly changed its political composition. The seemingly unstoppable rise of progressive governments is now fragmented due to the emergence of new right-wing and neoliberal projects, such as those of Javier Milei in Argentina and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, and the recent victory of the Bolivian right after more than 20 years of left-wing governments, among others.

However, in several countries, progressivism managed to regain government, as in the case of Lula da Silva himself, or managed to remain in power, as in the case of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Also, in other countries such as Colombia with Gustavo Petro and Mexico with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum, progressive governments took office for the first time in their recent history.

In this sense, the dispute over governments in Latin America remains open, and much of the structure of that dispute can be found in what happened in Mar del Plata 20 years ago, where one regional project was buried and another was established, for almost a decade, as the model for regional integration around a position that, although it had its clear limits, always declared itself sovereign and independent.

Original article by Pablo Meriguet republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.