Artwork by El Cometa Ludo (Chile). Courtesy of the artist.

I. The Proscription of the Socialist Hypothesis

For more than three decades, from the negotiated transition to democracy to a democratic order constrained by the guardianship of the 1980 Constitution, Chile underwent a methodical ideological operation: the proscription of the socialist hypothesis from public debate. This exclusion was partly legal, but above all cultural and semantic. Chilean neoliberalism did more than privatise social rights; it severed our political imagination.

One of those obstacles was legal: a rigged Constitution, drafted behind closed doors by the Ortúzar Commission, with Congress remained shut down and thousands of Chileans detained and disappeared by the civil-military dictatorship.

This Constitution, designed to be unamendable, entrenched a single economic model through principles such as the ‘subsidiary’ role of the State: neoliberalism, the system that made Chile one of the most unequal countries in the world. Compounding this economic straitjacket were the ‘locks’ on democracy: a two-thirds supermajority was required to reform its core chapters, including those related to social rights. For three decades, attempts to guarantee rights such as housing or abortion were repeatedly met with the argument that such reforms were unconstitutional, while no governing coalition ever secured the two-thirds majority threshold. The dictatorship understood what it was doing and what it had done.

During this period of retreat, the dominant hegemony imposed a suffocating dogma: the only possible politics was the efficient management of the existing order. ‘Socialism’ gave way to the friendlier but toothless label of ‘progressivism.’ Tomás Moulian described this impasse:

The transformism of the Chilean political system operated by dismantling the imaginaries of rupture and replacing the will of popular sovereignty with a mythology of consumption and technocratic governability. Democracy was reduced to the ritual of voting while decisions about life and work remained shielded by the fetish of the market. (Chile actual: anatomía de un mito, 1997).

To think about socialism today, we must break free from this ideological blackmail. We must recognise that the compassionate management of the existing model has reached its historical limit, and that Chile’s organic crisis can only be resolved through an alternative that is anti-oligarchic, popular, and socialist.

Artwork by El Cometa Ludo (Chile). Courtesy of the artist.

II. Breaking with a Progressivism That Has No Horizon

Why is progressivism insufficient to meet the demands of the working class? Because it rests on the illusion that the State is a neutral instrument, one that can be adjusted through regulatory tweaks without challenging the underlying system of accumulation or the relationship between capital and labour. By separating immediate gains from the building of popular power, progressivism ultimately demobilises the very forces responsible for those gains. Unless reforms challenge the ownership of the means of production and the foundations of finance capital, they will be co-opted or reversed when the ruling classes counterattack.

This is what Chile is living today under José Antonio Kast’s government. The oligarchy is not merely defending its interests; it is disciplining the popular classes through cuts to social spending, aggressive collection of student debt under the State-Guaranteed Credit (CAE), and the shifting of market costs onto families. In doing so, it undermines rights won through years of struggle. This is the Pinochetist restoration, stripped of the ‘intellectual foundation’ it once claimed to have. What remains is farce and the shameless abuse of State power.

In her polemic with Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg issued a warning about the limits of progressivism:

People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society. (Reform or Revolution, 1899).

This does not mean dismissing reforms. In Marxist theory, reform and revolution are two moments within a single dialectical whole. Struggles over working hours, wages, and public health are the ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ through which the working class becomes aware of its own strength. Progressivism’s mistake is to treat reform as an end in itself, cut off from popular self-organisation and confined to whatever big business is willing to tolerate.

Artwork by El Cometa Ludo (Chile). Courtesy of the artist.

III. Marxism as a Creative Force

Thinking about socialism also means avoiding two deviations: the pragmatic accommodation of existing institutions, and the dogmatic tendency to mechanically apply twentieth-century formulas to the hyper-digitalised and fragmented reality of the twenty-first century. We embrace the lesson of José Carlos Mariátegui: ‘We certainly do not want socialism in America to be a tracing and a copy. It must be a heroic creation.’ (‘Aniversario y balance,’ Amauta, 1928).

Mariátegui’s call for heroic creation resonates with Badiou’s understanding of communism, not as a teleology of history, but as an emancipatory hypothesis and a creative impulse capable of intervening in the fissures of reality. It points to the possibility t of rupture in which those who ‘do not exist’ within a system assert themselves as political subjects. Gramsci teaches us that the struggle for power is a hegemonic struggle, consisting of forming a historical bloc of subaltern classes capable of dismantling bourgeois common sense. Ultimately, socialism is the radical democratisation of existence: the leap from the prehistory of necessity to the conscious realm of freedom, the freedom of the people and of organised majorities.

From this follow four theses:

1. Socialism does not emerge automatically when capitalism’s contradictions become unsustainable. It is an alternative way of organising production, distribution, and the market. In fact, crises can just as easily give rise to more intensified forms of capitalism.
2. Because socialism presents an alternative, socialist spaces can exist within capitalism. The challenge, therefore, is to organise these ‘microsocialisms’ that bring them into conflict with capital.
3. Socialism is above all a political task: the conscious organisation of the subjective and objective conditions, without mandatory preliminary stages.
4. There is no final victory. Either system can be defeated. Socialism must be chosen and built every day, as a task that is never complete.

Artwork by El Cometa Ludo (Chile). Courtesy of the artist.

IV. The Global Chessboard: Multipolarity and Experiences in Nuestra America

We are witnessing the decline of U.S. unipolar hegemony and the rise of a multipolar order in which China plays a decisive role. Its model of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ based on sovereign planning, scientific leadership, and ‘common prosperity,’ demonstrates that modernisation need not follow the U.S. model, whose wars have left entire regions collapsed in the Middle East and elsewhere. Socialism, by contrast, offers large-scale development without resorting to warmongering imperialism. It opens the way and anticipates a new global geopolitical vision: humanity aboard a common vessel, a Noah’s Ark we all inhabit together.

Regardless of our borders, global data reveal not only capitalism’s inability to redistribute wealth, but also its teleology of accumulation. The G20’s first report on global inequality (2025) found that, between 2000 and 2024, the richest 1% of the world’s population captured 41% of all new wealth, while the poorest 50% received just 1%. This trend shows no sign of reversing and appears to be deepening. Socialism, by contrast, has expanded literacy worldwide and, in China alone, has lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

In Nuestra América, Cuba remains, despite the blockade, a model of sovereignty, solidarity without borders, and internationalism. Mexico’s Fourth Transformation, which identifies itself as centre-left, has driven profound changes with exceptional popular support. Colombia’s Government of Change demonstrated both the power of mobilisation to challenge entrenched oligarchies and the institutional and media obstruction that capital mobilises against any attempt at redistribution.

The lesson is clear. A sovereign project in Chile requires coordination across Latin America and a shared horizon for building a more just, multipolar world grounded in common prosperity. Above all, it requires a strong popular base capable of confronting transnational capital. Today, it demands a committed and active popular movement capable of countering the narratives amplified by artificial intelligence on social media. Perhaps this is where we begin to answer the question: Which socialism?

Artwork by El Cometa Ludo (Chile). Courtesy of the artist.

V. Prefigurative Practice: Socialism Can Only Be Reached Through Socialism

Socialism is not a future event; it is a prefigurative practice in the present, a way of living today the society we seek to build. Like democracy, socialism is both a means and an end, and the only path to it runs through its practice. In Chile’s revolutionary tradition, this understanding has a name and a face: Luis Emilio Recabarren. He did not wait to win the presidency before beginning to build socialism. He built it in the nitrate miners’ mutual-aid associations (mancomunales), in the workers’ printing presses, in proletarian theatres, and in popular cultural centres. For Luis Emilio, the self-organisation of the people was both the weapon in and of the struggle and the seed of a new society.

An urgent task is to draw a clear distinction in our work with the masses between targeted welfare programs and the charity of the neoliberal model—which treats the people as passive clients or beneficiaries—and the socialist praxis that recognises communities as active agents of transformation. We must reclaim core social values, starting with solidarity. Solidarity is socialist because it is rooted in cooperation and empathy among equals. It prefigures the society we are building and allows us to live in it here and inhabit it. This principle must guide our work in local government and in social movements alike.

Community pharmacies (Farmacias Populares), fair-rent housing programs (Arriendo a Precio Justo), and free community college-prep courses are not merely side projects. They challenge the logic of the commodity. Proof that health, housing, and education can be organised around social justice rather than profit.

Concrete victories, such as reducing the work week to 40 hours, raising the minimum wage, or making university education free, strengthen labour’s position against capital. But these gains will endure only if they are rooted in an organised critical mass of people who are conscious of their historical role and recognise their responsibility to defend and advance the socialist revolution.

Artwork by El Cometa Ludo (Chile). Courtesy of the artist.

VI. Our Historical Task: Putting the Socialist Hypothesis Back on the Table

Finally, and this is no minor point, in recent years the left-wing and progressive forces have increasingly taken refuge under the banner of ‘anti-neoliberalism.’ Yet we must state clearly, and with dialectical rigour, that anti-neoliberalism is no longer enough.

From a dialectical perspective, to define oneself as ‘anti-neoliberal’ is to remain at the level of negation: a reactive, defensive position. It seeks to preserve the few remaining protections of the welfare state or to loosen the market’s grip. Anti-neoliberalism tells us what we reject, but it lacks the creative force, the historical project, and the utopian vision that the present moment demands.

This insufficiency is dangerous because the vacuum left by the absence of an alternative project is being filled, both globally and locally, by the advance of the far right and fascism. We are witnessing the rise of a new fascism: ignorant, loud, and anti-intellectual. It exploits popular discontent, captures the anger of the dispossessed, and redirects it toward the hatred of migrants, hostility toward women and LGBTQ+ people, and an obsession with repressive authoritarianism.

In confronting a fascism that mobilises raw emotion and offers simplistic solutions, we cannot rely on the lukewarm, watered-down, technocratic discourse of progressivism or ‘anti-neoliberalism.’ The fascist advance will not be stopped by compassionately managing the existing model. It will be defeated only by confronting the structural causes rooted in capital itself. That is why we categorically affirm: being anti-neoliberal is not enough. We must be decisively socialist.

To be decisively socialist means recovering our ability to propose a fundamentally different society, based on social ownership of strategic resources, democratic economic planning, and popular sovereignty. It means treating political education and grassroots organising not as academic exercises, but as our primary means of confronting far-right demagoguery. We are not condemned to manage the existing order, nor to fear neo-fascist barbarism. Let us rebuild the socialist hypothesis with theoretical rigour, political combativeness, and love for our people. For the renewal of critical thought. For the heroic creation of socialism in Nuestra América.

Kind regards,

Millaray

This text is adapted from a presentation by Millaray Huaquimilla Neyra, executive secretary of the Alejandro Lipschutz Institute of Sciences (ICAL), at the event ‘Which Socialism?’, held last August and co-organised by ICAL, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and the Centre for Public Policy Studies on Territory and Community.

By Elizabet Cerqueira da Conceição

Art by Túlio Carapiá and Clara Cerqueira (Brazil) for ‘To Hope, 100 Years of Paulo Freire’, a poster exhibition, 2021. Available at Tricontinental’s website.

Comrades,

Greetings from the Nuestra America office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

September is a month filled with anniversaries. Naturally, for the peoples of the continent, it also marks another anniversary of the events of September 11, 1973, which shook the heart of the Third World:  the CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against President Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity project in Chile. To learn more, we recommend Dossier 68, which we published on the 50th anniversary of the coup.

However, September is also a month of celebration, as two dates coincide that call on us once more to reflect on our political practice and our most urgent tasks. International Literacy Day falls on September 8, followed on September 19 by the birth anniversary of Brazilian educator and popular pedagogue Paulo Freire. He not only developed a literacy method rooted in the material reality of his students—using generative words as a first approach to written language—but also developed a methodology of popular education that, to this day, enables hundreds of thousands of people to gain critical awareness of their reality and tirelessly pursue its radical transformation.

Photo: MST’s Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade (Zambia).

With this anniversary in mind, we asked the Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) to share the experience of the Fred M’Membe Literacy and Agroecology Campaign, developed in Zambia, Africa, for our September bulletin. Below are their words:

Five years ago, a political decision crossed the ocean: not to wait. Driven by this challenge, the Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), in partnership with the Socialist Party of Zambia, launched one of the movement’s boldest literacy projects, bringing Brazilian popular education to rural and urban communities in southern Africa. The result is the Fred M’Membe Literacy and Agroecology Campaign, which has already taught more than 5,000 people to read and write across four provinces with the help of about 350 volunteer educators.

The Scenario: A Colonial Legacy

To understand the process, one must understand its context. Zambia possesses immense cultural and linguistic wealth, with over 70 local languages, yet English remains the sole official language. This linguistic hierarchy is a legacy of British colonial rule, when English was imposed as an instrument of administration and control and eventually became a symbol of social prestige and access to power. Today, over half of the population (55.3%) cannot read or write in English, with women—particularly those living in rural areas—making up the majority of this group.

The inequality is stark. According to the 2018 Demographic and Health Survey, one-third of women and 18% of men in Zambia are illiterate. In the Eastern and Western provinces, half of women aged 15 to 49 cannot read. Moreover, access to formal education is not fully guaranteed by the state: after the initial years of state-funded schooling, families are required to pay fees, pushing a large portion of the population out of the school system.

Art by shenby (United States) for ‘To Hope, 100 Years of Paulo Freire’, a poster exhibition, 2021. Available at Tricontinental’s website.

A Methodology Built Collectively

At the outset of the dialogue between the MST and the Socialist Party of Zambia, the Cuban method ‘Yo sí puedo’, developed by educator Leonela Relys Díaz in 2001, served as the primary reference. This method has since been used to teach more than ten million people in 30 countries. However, it soon became clear that simply transplanting a method from Cuba or Brazil would not respond to Zambia’s specific realities. The campaign therefore became a laboratory for collective construction, drawing on the Cuban experience, Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, and the knowledge generated within the communities themselves.

From this convergence emerged their own method: To Talk, To Read, To Write the Words and the World. Its name reflects the educational philosophy of the process: first to speak, because every person already carries a history, a culture, and an understanding of reality; then, to master words as tools for autonomy; and at the same time, to read and write the world, to understand the social relations that shape it in order to transform it. As Elizabet Cerqueira, the brigade’s coordinator in Zambia, reaffirms, the project draws from Paulo Freire the principle that no one educates anyone alone, and from the MST the understanding that education and popular organisation must go hand in hand.

The literacy process in Zambia defies any notion of the traditional classroom. There are no rows of desks, projectors, or libraries. Instead, classes take place in improvised spaces: community schoolrooms with exposed-brick walls, corners of churches, social centres, and open-air spaces where a tree’s shade serves as a roof. Amid tall grass or seated on straw mats, students and educators gather in circles—often with babies sleeping in chitenges tied to their mothers’ backs—using a simple wooden blackboard as the centrepiece of their learning.

It is in this precarious setting that the method To Talk, To Read, To Write the Words and the World comes to life. Words do not come from distant textbooks, but from generative themes rooted in the communities’ own reality: the seed being planted, the rain that fails to fall, the price of corn, the illness that arrives with the floods, or the name each person dreams of learning to sign.

Grounded in Freirean principles, the process begins with words from the learners’ daily lives to build reading and writing skills. This entire effort is sustained by volunteer work: around 350 educators, mostly young students and local peasants, give their time and energy without compensation, driven by the conviction that teaching is also a form of learning and that real transformation begins with collective commitment. Far from being a weakness, this material improvisation highlights the project’s political strength: people build their own school with what they have, where they are, and in whatever ways they can, turning literacy into a first act of collective organisation.

Photo: MST’s Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade (Zambia).

Literacy and Agroecology: A Single Process

The most unique aspect of the campaign is the integration of literacy with agroecology. This is no accident: 1.5 million small-scale farmers produce 90% of Zambia’s food, and peasant families are highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change. In rural areas, most students are also farmers—men and women whose hands bear the marks of field labour. Learning to read and write therefore also means learning to understand the world around them and gaining tools to improve their production and living conditions.

In Lusaka, at the graduation ceremony for the campaign’s second phase, Socialist Party President Fred M’Membe captured the political significance of the moment: “For the first time I am in a room in this country where everyone knows how to read and write. This is today a liberated zone.” More than 350 people, mostly women, completed that stage of the campaign.

Education As a Right, Not a Privilege

A foundational principle of the campaign is that participation is completely free. In a country where many families live on less than two dollars a day, removing the costs of fees, materials, and transportation ensures that no one is excluded. In several communities, bicycles were even provided to help educators travel to classes. Instruction takes place where people are: in community schools, churches, social centres, and beneath the shade of trees.

The initiative has experienced steady expansion. First mobilised in 2019 and officially launched in 2021, the campaign initially reached rural communities in the Eastern and Western provinces enrolling 2,130 students. In its second phase, it expanded to urban areas in Lusaka, Copperbelt, and Central, surpassing 4,000 participants who learned to read and write. By 2022, the stated goal was to alphabetise 10,000 peasants. In March 2024, another 400 students graduated, and classes continue today across the Central and Eastern provincial corridors.

Art by Antony Corrêa (Brazil/MST) for ‘To Hope, 100 Years of Paulo Freire’, a poster exhibition, 2021. Available at Tricontinental’s website.

An Act of Resistance and Internationalism

The political dimension of the process is explicit. As Cosmas Musumali, general secretary of the Socialist Party, notes, ‘the ability to read, write, and express oneself is fundamental for emancipation, especially for women, who are marginalised from political processes and the economic sector.’ Literacy is also tied to popular health. In January 2024, amid a national cholera outbreak, the MST and the Socialist Party organised a grassroots health clinic to serve local communities.

As Amílcar Cabral wrote to Paulo Freire, education must spring from the heart of the people and restore to peasants the dignity stripped away by colonisation. The Zambian campaign honours and carries forward the struggles of Cabral, Freire, and the African peoples who have always known that words, like seeds, only bloom in fertile soil. Five years on, the lesson is clear: when people organise, paths can be built even where they were told it was impossible. Speak. Read. Write the words and the world. The campaign continues.

Elizabet Cerqueira da Conceição

By Laura Capote

Altar for Fidel during the IV Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements (Pedro Pablo Chaviano).

Dear comrades,

Greetings from the Nuestra América office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

During the month of August, in every corner of our continent, we witnessed the celebration of the centennial of the birth of the Commander in Chief of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro. At Tricontinental we have prioritised paying tribute by recovering his legacy. In that context, we also participated in the IV Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements, held in Havana, Cuba, from August 6 to 9, to commemorate Fidel’s centennial and sending a message of solidarity to the people of Cuba and of unrestricted defence of its Revolution —one of the main battlefields of this new offensive of imperialism on our continent.

The current conjuncture we are undergoing is not simple. On this we have not only arrived at a common understanding, but we have established it as one of the main priorities for the research we carry out at Tricontinental’s Nuestra América office. As you can see on our website, we are carrying out a series of projects that, on the one hand, seek to map the current characterisation of the Left in our continent, taking into account the strengthening of far-right governments in the region, and the political and organisational challenges that this moment places upon the popular classes. Likewise, we are asking ourselves about the future, as we developed in the Institute’s Dossier 100, and what those disputes are from our continent.

Celebrating Fidel is, undoubtedly, an opportunity to delve deeper into these two questions. In a dialectical relationship, the construction of the future is only achieved in our present, which compels us to ask ourselves how, in daily life, we take accurate steps toward the only horizon of possibility for humanity: socialism.

Opening of the FIDEL X 100 exhibition in the Varona Building of the University of Havana during the IV Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements (Utopix).

In Havana, nearly 200 delegates from 27 countries and 132 organisations spent four days debating not only on the necessity, but the urgency, of building socialism as a guarantee for the defence of sovereignty and continental integration, with a unified vision regarding the enemy before us, which continues to perpetuate a silent genocide against the people of Fidel. Amid the rich debates, we were able to see Cuba’s absolute determination to defend its Revolution to the ultimate consequences, despite the devastating effects of the intensification of the energy blockade measures imposed since January of this year, which have compounded the previous 60 years of the illegal blockade on the island by the United States.

ALBA Movements is a continental coordination of social and popular movements bringing together nearly 400 organisations from 25 countries in the region, and which, like Tricontinental, is part of the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA). In this newsletter, we want to share some excerpts from the Final Declaration of the 4th Assembly of ALBA Movements, which we believe crystallise some of the main challenges we face as a region. Tricontinental, as a research institute working hand-in-hand with social movements, has prioritised researching these topics.

‘The offensive against Cuba reflects the nature of an imperialism in a profound hegemonic crisis, which faces the proven incapability to offer a future for anyone on the planet. The wars and genocides it drives are the clearest proof of its decadence, and the sign that before dying, the monster intends to take everything it considers its own down with it. Our continent is situated within that predatory fantasy of the US, and the old formula of the Monroe Doctrine is revived more fiercely than ever to punish our peoples and destroy any possibility of social transformation of the capitalist system.

Posters from the FIDEL X 100 exhibition displayed at the University of Havana (Utopix).

The imperialist boot never left our region. Through disguised methods, it was always present in Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, however, the remilitarization of the continent stands as one of the main threats to our sovereignty and integration. Under the pretext of the struggle against ‘international terrorism,’ imperialism pushes forward the project of a Shield of the Americas over the continent, and within that framework, an enormous deployment of the Southern Command has been unleashed across the region with the so-called ‘Western Hemisphere Joint Task Force.’

That offensive has made the Caribbean region its main theatre, serving as the first imperial border. Here, across these immense seas full of wealth and diversity, the scenarios that marked the anticolonial path of struggle for independence and sovereignty throughout our entire continent unfolded. Today, this is precisely the central theatre of this period of remilitarization. Under the pretext of the war on drug trafficking, for months we witnessed bombings and the deliberate killing of Caribbean fishers perpetrated by the US, aimed at justifying the military offensive in the region, which crystallised in the attack against the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela in the early morning of January 3.

Today, the political map of our region has changed radically. The rise of extreme right-wing governments with fascist characteristics in the countries of our region implies not only a threat to our peoples and to the gains we were able to achieve over these years. This fascist extreme right criminalises those who struggle, and for that reason we demand the release of political prisoners, fighters who are victims of it. This advance does not only occur within institutions; it also threatens the very existence of democracy itself. The crisis of liberal democracy is still the fruit of neoliberalism itself; therefore, we emphasise that we defend another model—not just any democracy, but a popular, participatory, and protagonist democracy, where the people are the ones who guide the destiny of the Homeland.

Posters from the FIDEL X 100 exhibition displayed at the University of Havana (Pedro Pablo Chaviano).

The peoples of Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and many others, must today confront the fascist and criminalizing violence of their governments, while seeking to advance the historic demands of the popular classes: agrarian reform and land redistribution, labour rights, the right to education, universal access to health systems, etc. We know that this project designed by US imperialism seeks to eliminate the organised political power we have built as peoples over centuries, especially the organised sectors of our region such as Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, women, and youth.

Comrades, we have no other path than to advance as peoples. Retreating is not even a remote possibility. We must strengthen our capacities in those terrains where the enemy has waged a cognitive war that has yielded significant results for them so far: the use of artificial intelligence, the utilization of mass media and social networks, and the handling of algorithms are territories that we have the duty to understand and master, so we can direct this knowledge produced by humanity and the working class toward the emancipation of our people.

This Assembly marks a milestone in our coordination. We arrived in Cuba under the slogan ‘for socialism: a hundred years walking with Fidel.’ We leave reaffirming that socialism is not only urgent, but necessary, and that building it demands a radical commitment —in every school, every neighbourhood, every rural community, every territory, every workplace. The best way to honour that horizon and make it a reality is not merely to proclaim it, but to dedicate our efforts and our lives to the struggle, never lowering our arms until inequality and exploitation have been eradicated from the planet.

Performance by La Colmenita at the cultural closing of the IV Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements at the Martí Theatre in Havana (Pedro Pablo Chaviano).

The struggle against imperialism and its fascist expressions is our highest priority. We cannot build this path without internationalism, without popular feminism, and without the participation of Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and rural and urban workers. On this foundation, together with our sister networks in the region and the world, we are forging a path of coordination and convergence toward a broad articulation that allows us to take accurate and effective steps toward this objective. From ALBA Movements, we stand today and always, we stand with the peoples of Palestine, Sudan, the Sahel region, and all those who, through their historic resistance and courage, set an example of dignity.’

Just as Fidel Castro defended the legacy of José Martí as a member of the Centenary Generation of the Apostle’s birth in 1953, so too will we carry forward the legacy of the Commander in Chief. We are the new Centenary Generation, and from the Trench of the Battle of Ideas and Emotions, through the production of critical thought, and committed, rigorous social research by and for the emancipation of the peoples—will continue to build the necessary path of organisation and consciousness to achieve the socialist future.

Laura Capote

Laura Capote Laura is a Colombian social militant and researcher. She holds a degree in Social Communication Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires and is a master’s candidate in International Relations at the National University of La Plata. She has been with Tricontinental since 2019 and researches the political and social reality of Latin America and the Caribbean. She is currently Co-Coordinator of the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental, and since 2018 has been a member of the Continental Operational Secretariat of ALBA Movements.

Enrique Sobisch (Argentina), Dawn, 1989.

Dear friends:

Greetings from the Nuestra América office at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This month found us in Quixotic quests that are by no means comparable, which have taken us from one extreme to another on the emotional scale. We are still suffering alongside our compatriots in Venezuela, who continue struggling to remake themselves after the devastating double earthquake with its epicentre in La Guaira. The World Cup would have been an unbeatable stage to promote a solidarity campaign with an unquestionable humanistic spirit, but it is the World Cup of millionaires, who steamroll the world with tickets costing thousands of dollars, their online betting systems, and the individualism typical of runaway capitalism.

Yet Russia has not participated due to the sanctions weighing on it over the war with Ukraine, but the genocidal Trump has strutted around, shining his shoes on the head of the FIFA president while announcing new bombings in Iran. The outstanding performance of the countries of the Global South, the championship for a young Lamine Yamal, who has not forgotten Palestine, and the snub by the Argentine centre-back pair towards Trump during the medal ceremony, among other events, accompany the defiant message of resistance shown by the Argentine players after their epic victory over England: ‘The Malvinas are Argentine.’

Luisa Vernet (Argentina), Puerto Soledad, Malvinas, 1829. Currently at the Malvinas Museum, Núñez, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Meanwhile, in Brazil and Argentina, Tricontinental has been driving the Artificial Intelligence agenda, with its eyes set on the Future, as we indicated in our Dossier No. 100. The visit of comrade Jeff Xiong from China has allowed us to explain why it is relevant to put ourselves at the forefront of this inevitable development, but also why it is fundamental to go beyond the tentacles of Silicon Valley. The model of U.S. corporations seeks to take us to the abyss of the past, to the moment when our countries fell prey to imperialism and the devastating capitalism of our common goods. That Agro-Exporter Model forged at the end of the 19th century — and by no means ever completely buried — seeks to reinvent itself a century and a half later as the Data-Exporter Model. Yes, data, the increasingly valued production factor in the era of platforms and tech capitalism. At every meeting we went to with Jeff, with university authorities, congress members, officials, trade unions, and journalists, the sceptical question was never missing: ‘isn’t it just changing one master for another?’

Still on Argentina, a country that never ceases to surprise: on the same day that the streets were filled with young people shouting, ‘whoever doesn’t jump is an Englishman!’, President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza was trying to push through Congress a bill that would eliminate limits on foreign ownership of land, particularly in border areas. Opposition to the bill was fragmented and weak, yet its debate was postponed until August 6th. While celebrations over the national team’s advance continued, fellow researchers who promoted the Land Observatory took on the task of teaching the pedagogy of libertarian colonialism: they explain that the current discussion over the elimination of articles from the Land and Glacier laws stems from a country that has already left some 13 million hectares in foreign hands — 5% of its territory, an area similar to that of England. But they add that the real magnitude of the phenomenon appears at the local level, in regions where water courses, aquifers, or areas with strategic minerals are located. In departments like General Lamadrid, in La Rioja, more than half of their territories are in foreign hands. What would happen once even those limits were gone?

And what does land have to do with Artificial Intelligence? The answer is: Peter Thiel. It seems strange, but it makes sense. Thiel is the most powerful investor in Silicon Valley, co-founder of PayPal, the first outside investor in Facebook, and founder of Palantir, the surveillance and data analysis company that handles databases containing information on all 45 million Argentines. But he is also an ideologue: of extreme libertarianism, the anti-state, and the radical divorce between democracy and freedom. That’s why he embraced Milei in Davos and California, calling him a ‘true libertarian.’ For Thiel, Milei’s Argentina presents itself as a laboratory for his dystopia of territorial and digital occupation. That is also why he embraced him in Buenos Aires a few weeks ago. He arrived, bought one of the city’s most expensive mansions, and went on to dictate to the president and his Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, a bill to reform the General Companies Law that includes so-called ‘automated companies’ and ‘non-human corporations.’ DAOs — Decentralized Autonomous Organizations — are entities governed by blockchain without human intervention. And this pro-government project seeks to grant these entities full legal personality.

But the imperialist design is more complex. Days earlier, Milei presented another bill — we are now referring to at least three — dubbed the ‘Super RIGI.’ It is an expanded incentive scheme specifically for tech infrastructure, data centres, and AI investment. The so-called ‘Bases Law’ approved in 2024 had created the original RIGI, already exempting data centre projects from the restrictions of the Land Law through its Article 174. The logic of the chain is clear: land — data centres — non-human corporations. This is the core of the 21st-century Data-Exporter model.

Roberto Aizenberg (Argentina), Figures on Landscape, 1953.

Unashamedly, this is how Milei and Sturzenegger presented it in an op-ed published last month in the Financial Times, London’s leading newspaper. In it, these big tech agents in charge of the Argentine government argued that it was necessary to free oneself from the ‘mortal hand’ of state regulation, advocated for a management model of the country in the hands of companies ‘without responsible humans,’ and in their unbridled fascination with the historical injustices of capitalism, launched the slogan: ‘May Buenos Aires become to AI what Amsterdam was to the age of navigation — the place where the legal imagination met the technological moment, and the world changed,’ they wrote. The machine and the legal person were ‘the double helix of modern prosperity.’

In taking us back to the past, these ‘true libertarians’ have not deprived us of examples: the Dutch East India Company is the beacon that illuminates their path to the future. But what exactly was this company, which competed in ambition and cruelty with the English and French companies for West and East? In the 19th century, Karl Marx used the case of the East India Company — the English one — to study the way in which commercial capital and the monarchical State merged into a monopolistic braid that first transformed the company from a commercial enterprise into a territorial and military corporate power, with its own army and navy, only to later succumb to internal corruption, costly wars, and over-indebtedness. He did so on several occasions, particularly when he spoke of violence as an ‘economic power’ and when he recalled that the Dutch colonial system was nothing but ‘an unsurpassed picture of treachery, bribery, murder, and infamies.’

It is no coincidence that, today, while some choose to raise the flags of this history of abuse and violence, others recall that even Adam Smith harshly attacked the role of these companies and that they now represent not-so-distant precedents for companies that currently violate human rights. Ultimately, it was colonial plunder, the return of slavery on a global-scale, and the development of war — not legal innovation — that drove capitalism at the time.

Is there an alternative? Always.

Xul Solar (Argentina), Other Logs [Otros Troncos], 1919.

We must remember that the Agro-Exporter Model was replaced, following a process of economic transformation and social struggle, by the Industrialist Model. We already know what that is about. Must we exchange one master for another? AI technology is not a purely technical phenomenon or a neutral tool for ‘modernization’: it is a process of global transformation that cries out for state intervention, infrastructure, regulation, and a fight against opacity in data management and the creation of racist, warmongering, and consumerist biases. It also — as Jeff Xiong points out — demands specialized training and a massive campaign for digital literacy. In short, ‘digital sovereignty.’

Is Latin America up to the challenge? If the cry ‘The Malvinas are Argentine’ can transcend an unforgettable football victory, then let it serve as a beacon for the defence of our lands, our data, and the construction of a sovereign digital life: the human being always comes first.

Greetings,

Alejandro Jasinski

Alejandro Jasinski Alejandro is a researcher at Tricontinental in Argentina. He is a journalist, PhD in History, and an eternal aspirant for just causes. He researches, writes, and teaches at the University of Buenos Aires. He works at the National Secretariat for Human Rights, collaborating with judicial processes for crimes against humanity committed in Argentina. His latest book is called El encanto del tanino (Prometeo, 2023). He is also the author of the book Revuelta obrera y masacre en La Forestal and co-coordinator and co-author of the report Corporate Responsibility in Crimes Against Humanity.

Pavel Égüez, La Patria Naciendo de la Ternura [The Homeland Born Out of Tenderness], Caracas, Venezuela, 2006.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This June, we celebrate the bicentennial of the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama, the beginning of the unity and integration of Nuestra América. This gathering sought not only to reaffirm the independence won in the war against the Spanish Empire, but also to advance a project of deep social transformation that would overcome harmful legacies like slavery. It aimed to become a contribution toward achieving a universal equilibrium in which relations between nations could be conducted t without the interests of one being imposed on another. To comment on the importance of this historical milestone for our contemporary struggle, we asked Georgette Kuri—writing from Mexico, where the congress held its final sessions—to share her reflections with us:

Two hundred years after the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama convened by Simón Bolívar, we reclaim it as the first dream of Nuestra América and as the starting point of the great task that has been, then as now, to achieve Latin American unity. The weight of the United States, the ambivalence of Mexico, and the Latin American territories remaining in the neocolonial and imperialist crosshairs continue to pave the rocky path to our emancipation. However, our revolutionary agency and a clear understanding of the obstacles that have accompanied us throughout history are the lights that must guide our steps.

Alfredo Sinclair (Panama), Mujer Con Cesta De Pescado/[Woman with Fish Basket], (Unknown location).

Starting Point: The Amphictyonic Congress

Multiple factors contributed to the failure of the Amphictyonic Doctrine and its project of Latin American unity undertaken by Bolívar: the external influence of the United Kingdom and the United States, the diversity of stances among Hispanic American countries, the lack of ratification by governments, the territorial dispute between the Empire of Brazil and the United Provinces over the Banda Oriental, Peru’s invasion of Bolivia, Chile’s abstention, the embryonic Federal Republic of Central America, and Mexico’s insistence on hosting the Assembly and defining it as transitory.

Nonetheless, it is worth recognizing that moving the seat of the Assembly to Tacubaya, in Mexico City, led to its dissolution in 1828. Mexico’s preference for supporting the American League, which focused on joint military defence against potential European attempts at reconquest, reflected its concern with limiting a perceived concentration of power in other Hispanic American territories that might threaten the integrity of the nascent nations. This role as a mediator to contain hegemonies on the continent set a precedent for the subsequent annexation of Mexican territory by the United States, both due to the isolation in which Mexico experienced that process and the type of relationship that was established between the two countries.

For its part, and looking beyond Mexico, the United States always exploited the sessions of the Amphictyonic Congress to forge commercial ties with the Hispanic American countries, revealing its purely expansionist interest and escalating from bilateralism to a dispute over the project of continental unity. It aligned itself with the United Kingdom and sought agreements with Brazil, even using the estrangement and rivalry between some Hispanic American countries with that Empire as a ruse, showcasing the ancient yet deeply modern premise of divide and conquer.

Furthermore, the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 formally inaugurated the United States’ policy of intervention on our continent. This ranged from utilizing its diplomatic corps as agents of interventionism to drive external indebtedness and the financial dependence of our countries, to carrying out multiple overt actions of invasion, blockades, occupations, and territorial annexations throughout the 19th century. In 1898, this culminated in the convening of a Customs Union and the First International Conference of American States, demonstrating its active role in sabotaging Latin American unity and attempting to appropriate the project of Bolivarian integration. The 20th century witnessed Pan-Americanism camouflage itself as Inter-Americanism, alongside the militarization of Yankee imperialism and its policies of open intervention.

José Clemente Orozco (Mexico), Pueblo mexicano, [Mexican People], 1929.

Revolutionary Horizon and Latin Americanist Conviction

Given Mexico’s role in the 1826 Amphictyony, it is also necessary to remember other historical events in order to balance the scales. Once independence was consolidated, Mexico positioned itself as an insurgent vanguard against the oligarchic regimes installed in our countries, driven by the emergence of the peasant and working-class popular masses who spearheaded the first great revolution of our times.

The Mexican Revolution established agrarian reform and working-class rights as primary social demands. Its echo resonated in women’s suffrage movements across the length and breadth of the continent, in Central American National Liberation Movements, in the dissertations of José Carlos Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre in Peru, in the Guatemalan Spring, in the Cuban Revolution, in multiple and diverse guerrilla organizations—including Communist Parties—in the Sandinista Revolution, in the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, in the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and in the Bolivarian Revolution, which placed a golden seal on the rebellious and long Latin American 20th century.

During this effervescent period, Mexico had the opportunity to serve as an example of profound social and state transformations: socialist education, regional-scale cultural movements like muralism, the convening of a constituent assembly, oil expropriation, and its own paradigms of diplomacy, solidarity, and sovereignty. It also possessed the political conviction to maintain close relations with socialist Cuba and to welcome large contingents of Latin American exiles displaced by the military dictatorships between the 1960s and 1980s. Today, it continues to take in victims of political persecution and receptively hosts those who choose it as a place to live.

With the installation of neoliberalism in Mexico at the end of the 1980s, a process of discontinuity—or at times estrangement—began regarding its efforts toward Latin American unity, which irremediably diversified and unfolded across multiple dimensions. Even so, in the 1990s, Mexico served as a mediator in different peace processes in Central America, as well as in the resolution of internal conflicts in Colombia and Venezuela in the current century. This review helps understand the complex ambivalence that has characterised Mexico’s relationship with Nuestra América, a dynamic also shaped by its proximity to the United States, its economic dependence, the forty million people of Mexican origin living in that country, and its geographical location in the northern part of the continent.

For all these reasons, it is of special value today to reclaim from Mexico the ideals of unity and integration inherited by the Amphictyonic doctrine and mobilized in this 21st century by the Bolivarian geopolitics of revolutionary Venezuela.

Uban Art by Eva Bracamontes (Mexico). More information: Utopix

Forever Breaking the Imperialist and Neo-colonialist Chains

It is important to consider the hypothesis that the Amphictyony dissolved because attempts at reconquest disappeared as a common threat. Although this idea has been generally dismissed, it matters because it brings us back to the sensation of being out of danger—a feeling that has repeated itself throughout Latin American history and from which we have yet to fully learn our lesson. First, because the threats of neocolonial and imperialist conquest never disappeared. Second, because it is precisely in times of calm that we must seize the moment and march forward with a firm step.

The 21st century has been the stage for progressive advances in Latin America and the Caribbean, driven forward by our societies through popular governments. We have taken up Latin American unity once more as our horizon, with Bolivarian geopolitics—inspired also by Cuba’s internationalist solidarity—as the project that has come closest to making that dream a reality. As in the past, US imperialism is the biggest opponent, willing to commit any atrocity to prevent it, as we are currently witnessing.

This year, 2026, began with a declaration of war by the United States against our Latin American peoples, with the sister republics of Cuba and Venezuela on the front lines as the most radical and successful endeavours toward our liberation. The imperialist and neocolonial threat is more active than ever, and no one is safe. In fact, few progressive governments are resisting the imperial onslaught alongside all our peoples, particularly those most oppressed by ultra-liberal and authoritarian right-wing factions.

It is worth remembering that part of the colonial yoke is a continent atomized into republics, which are more connected to Western metropolitan centres than to fraternal territories sharing the same history, identity, and culture. We must also rid ourselves of inherited territorial hierarchies between empires, viceroyalties, and captaincies, as well as the rivalries and suspicions intrinsic to Western modernity, which serve its geopolitics of war.

It is vital to defend the geopolitics of peace and the equilibrium of the universe that Bolívar envisioned as an alternative for life. In the arduous task of achieving Latin American unity, we must break the imperialist and neocolonial chains forever. Above all, we must commit to the principle that it is precisely in moments of greatest threat when we must close ranks and radicalize our positions.

Warm regards,

Georgette Kuri,

Tacubaya-Mixcoac, Mexico City

Georgette Kuri Georgette Kuri is a Mexican Latin Americanist, professor, and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a member of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defence of Humanity. She is the co-coordinator of the Working Group “Imperialism, neocolonialism, and intervention policies” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).

Sidney Amaral (Brazil), Mãe Preta ou A Fúria de Iansã [Black Mother or the Fury of Iansa], 2014.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

There is a long, silent, and profitable war being waged in Nuestra América: the war on the poor. Although uniforms, doctrines, or slogans change—ranging from ‘pacification’ to ‘iron fist’ (mano dura) or ‘zero tolerance’—whether under the shield of the ‘war on drugs’ or the ‘war on crime’, the war produced by the inequality of the prevailing economic order is fought to simultaneously criminalise poverty and terrorise the population.

The ‘Angry Tide’ that has recently swept over the governments of Latin America has made combating the region’s perceived security crisis one of its central targets. In its strategy to discredit Latin American progressivism, the new right presents leftist forces as inefficient and incapable—even as accomplices—of criminality. Frequently, political debates use polls that reveal crime as one of the main concerns of the electorate in the region and even point out that, for this reason, the population has been favoring governments that promise a harsh and inclement iron fist against delinquency. It is not surprising, in this sense, that even though they are the most affected by policies criminalising poverty, people speak out in favour of fighting crime. According to the AtlasIntel survey, for example, 62 percent of Rio de Janeiro residents supported a police operation that left 121 victims last October. From Kast to Keiko Fujimori, right-wing campaigns have highlighted the fight against crime among their priorities. Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi himself noted in an interview that 50 percent of Frente Amplio voters also sympathise with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. “The right took the banner of security, which is a human right, and monopolised it for a long time,” he added.

Currently, the vast media apparatus presents the so-called ‘Bukele model’ to us as the most effective formula to combat insecurity and organised crime. However, an in-depth analysis leads us to ask: whom does the order he seeks to impose serve, and upon whose bodies is it built? Bukele has built a system through policies of State dismantlement and social precariousness, shielded by the indefinite extension of a state of exception. Today, El Salvador holds the world’s highest incarceration rate, 1,650 people per 100,000 inhabitants. Childhood is criminalised through lowering the age at which children can be tried as adults, collective trials and mass incarcerations are common, and political dissent is persecuted, as in the case of human rights defender Fidel Zavala.

Among the figures that Bukele hides, however, is the increase in poverty to 9.6% or the 10,000 students who have dropped out of school.

This demonstrates that both the existing insecurity and this mirage of order and security end up hitting hardest those who live on the periphery—who, nevertheless, have directed their votes toward tangible solutions rather than more conciliatory and sociological discourses of the regional left. According to the CB Consultora poll from April 2026, Bukele leads regional popularity with a 70.1% positive approval rating, while Lula da Silva hovers around 48.4% support with 49.1% disapproval, and Gustavo Petro barely reaches a 38.2% approval rating. Lula himself has been forced in his campaign to present a plan against organised crime, promising maximum security standards in his prisons.

Rosa Mena Valenzuela (El Salvador), Calles [Streets], 1983. MARTE Collection.

This ‘pop authoritarianism’ that cultivates fear, hides behind its repression and propaganda its inability to resolve the structural inequality that leads to poverty and, at times, crime itself. It sells itself as a model against which there is no alternative, and the generation of leaders of the Angry Tide, who seek to restore colonial dominance over the entire region, obediently join the so-called Shield of the Americas, led by the United States as a solution to criminality. But it turns out there are alternatives.

Recently, political scientist Viri Ríos of Mexico Decoded noted that the progressive government of Claudia Sheinbaum has indeed been building a different proposal. In just 18 months, the daily homicide rate has fallen by 41 percent, even though its population is 20 times larger than that of El Salvador and Mexico’s security challenges go beyond gangs and criminal organizations to include large-scale transnational organised crime and drug cartels. Without implementing a state of exception, the Mexican prison population has risen by 11 percent after changing its security policy.

The key, Ríos underlines, is that the strategy does not shy away from directly confronting the sources of crime, equally abandoning the decapitation of cartels—which in previous six-year terms triggered violence exponentially—and the low-confrontation approach that predominated between 2018 and 2024. Mexican policy directly attacks the material causes of delinquency: it seeks, first of all, to halt the sources of crime financing by attacking problems at a national level according to territorial realities: fighting fuel theft in oil-producing areas, supervising customs points in border regions, attacking extortion in the countryside, among others. Ríos acknowledges that structural problems such as corruption persist in Mexico, but notes that despite its limitations, Mexico is managing to reduce criminality based on a policy that does not resort to Bukele’s unchecked violence.

Another experience from the left that is worth studying is that of the Great Peace Quadrants Mission (Gran Misión Cuadrantes de Paz) in Venezuela. Here, another decisive conceptual key is provided: the territorialization of security under a preventive logic and joint work between the community and police forces, instead of a prison-centric logic. According to official figures, the homicide rate dropped from 56 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016 to nearly 4 in 2024. By the end of 2025, authorities reported a reduction of more than 25 percent in murders compared to the previous year.

What the Peace Quadrants model proposes is that a security policy built through organised community participation, working-class neighborhoods, and not against them, as in the Bukele model, can yield effective results. It can serve as a guide for the left, since anchoring security to the construction of people’s power in the territory is more effective than punishment.

Vlady (Mexico), Mecanismo Carcelario [Prison Mechanism], (1958-1959).

Popular forces that want to dispute the electoral field in the coming years must study these solutions thoroughly and also build their own proposals. First, the issue of security cannot be ignored because it is not a whim of the elite; it is a real concern of the working population, even if at times the construction of ultraconservative narratives seeks to terrorise the population by magnifying the conditions of criminality in our countries. Security must also be assumed as a right of the working population, and their double vulnerability must be recognized: being attacked both by crime and by reactionary policies of repression.

Secondly, we must ask ourselves what concrete institutional framework a popular government must build and finance to attack crime—greater professionalization of investigative and security forces? A direct attack on the sources of crime financing and the intermediate ranks that operate it? The construction of a work agenda between communities and authorities in the territory, based on respect and collaboration rather than persecution?

Thirdly, it must be demonstrated that repression and terror, in the long term, exacerbate exclusion and foster criminal practices. Repression is costly, and it is often outsourced to mercenary or, worse yet, foreign forces, which in the long term places national sovereignty at risk.

Addressing security without mirages is fundamental for the healthy development of a society. The popular camp cannot ignore this challenge, nor minimise it. But it must, above all, convince the population that it does have a viable alternative that implies neither the dismantling of the State nor deadly repression; an alternative that, on the contrary, invites the working class to be part of its own security strategy.

The debate is open. We would like to hear your opinions.

Affectionately,

Carmen Navas Reyes and Carlos Ron

Tricontinental Nuestra América

Carmen Navas Reyes Carmen Navas Reyes is a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. She is a Venezuelan feminist and former diplomat. Her research interests include democracy and political systems, social movements, the history of the African diaspora, and Afro-descendance.

Carlos Ron Carlos Ron is co-coordinator of the Nuestra América office at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a Venezuelan former diplomat who served as Vice Minister for North America (2018–2025) and President of the Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples (2020–2025).

Taller 4 Rojo (Colombia), The Struggle Is Long—Let’s Start Now, 1973.

Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Lebanese Marxist theorist Mahdi Amel noted that the intellectual “who does not fight for revolution at all times is a false intellectual, and their intellect is deceptive and superficial.” In times of a hyper-imperialist offensive and the advance of the neo-fascist right, it becomes even more urgent for the intellectuals of Nuestra América to keep their revolutionary conviction alive. For 22 years now, a group of intellectuals, artists, and social movement activists has been accompanying revolutionary and popular processes, defending the aspiration for a society of dignity for all. To learn about its history and better understand this space, we asked Ximena González Broquen, international coordinator of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity (REDH), for a contribution to this debate. It follows below:

In the fabric of power that runs across the Global South, cognitive warfare has become a decisive trench. Before it, there are tools of resistance that transcend the conjuncture and stand as beacons of hope and organized action. The Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity (REDH) is one of them. It was born out of the founding alliance between two giants, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, in the heat of the struggle against imperial aggression. Since then, it has constituted itself as a movement of thought and action: a collective trench against the hegemonic pretension of global imperialism.

The Origin: A Cry from the South Against Barbarism

The REDH was born out of historical urgency. At the end of 2003, the global shock over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq pierced the consciousness of Nuestra América like a knife. The great Mexican thinker Pablo González Casanova, concerned by the imperial offensive, convened a conclave in Mexico, bringing together figures such as Rigoberta Menchú, Evo Morales, and Eduardo Galeano. The idea germinated: it was necessary to articulate a global front of intellectuals and artists who would put their ability to create and think at the service of defending  humanity.

This call culminated in December 2004 in Caracas, with the First World Meeting of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity. The inaugural conference was led by Nobel laureate José Saramago, and the call was an act of anti-imperialist affirmation. More than three hundred thinkers from over forty countries met to build, through word and action, a collective siege against domination. It was the materialization of a shared dream, the certainty that critical intelligence must leave the ivory towers to mingle with the breath of the people.

Under the Caribbean sun, Chávez’s voice became word made flesh, tracing the course forever: “Humanity is about living day to day, becoming one in soul and flesh with what is human—what is truly human. It is about living within the human experience, filling the void—or filling the gaps—with deeply human feelings and actions. The values of the human being and that sublime value, love (…) otherwise, we will not be able to defend any form of humanity. Much less go on the attack for it, or take the offensive for it. I believe that is one of the greatest challenges in the world right now: starting with ourselves, to fill ourselves with humanity; to make humanity—that which is human—our very flesh, nerve, muscle, soul, and body.” Those words were the birth certificate of a trench that still stands today, sustained by revolutionary love as a daily practice.

Celebrating teleSUR’s 20th anniversary with the “The Birth of a New World” Grand Gala Concert, an evening of Latin American culture, unity, and resistance. Venezuela, 2025. Photo by La Radio del Sur.

Historical Importance: Beyond Words

The legacy of the REDH is concrete. One of its boldest proposals arising from that first meeting was that of Brazil’s Beto Almeida: to create a television station for the South. That idea materialized in TeleSur, which for two decades has been an informative trench from Nuestra América, breaking the imperial media siege.

The REDH also bred the Liberator Prize for Critical Thinking, an unparalleled award, a unique global recognition that celebrates the word that discomforts, that challenges elites, that puts thinking at the service of popular struggles and feeds socialism and Latin American emancipation. In its thirteen editions, it has honored Franz Hinkelammert, Enrique Dussel, István Mészáros, Marta Harnecker, Juan José Bautista, and Atilio Borón, among many others, building a living archive of intellectual rebellion from the South.

The REDH has woven its own geography: eleven world meetings in Caracas (Venezuela), and meetings in Italy, Bolivia, and Belgium, demonstrating that its articulation knows no borders. In parallel, it has developed seven International Philosophy Forums, where collective reflection on capitalism, socialism, revolutionary humanism, alienation, the State, and hegemony became militant practice.

Violeta Parra (Chile), Untitled (unfinished), 1966. Embroidery on sackcloth, 136 x 200 cm.

The REDH Today: At the Global Crossroads

The multiple wars of the present—expressions of imperialism—are intertwined in the same tangle. The genocide in Palestine, the criminal blockade of Cuba, the aggression against Iran, the multifaceted aggressions against Venezuela, the looting of Africa—with the Congo as an open wound—, the incessant exploitation of Haiti, and the advance of neo-fascist expressions in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and other nations that dismantle rights and criminalize protests: all of this is the imperial hydra showing its heads. Everything springs from the same imperialist, colonial, and patriarchal matrix.

Cognitive warfare does not seek to convince with arguments, but to pierce the perception of reality through narratives, emotions, and algorithms. It fragments the social fabric to install a brutal premise: there are lives that matter and lives that do not. It operates in the daily life of social networks and the media, designed to capture attention and reinforce isolated identities.

Faced with this offensive, the REDH assumes liberating epistemic sovereignty as its compass: the capacity of peoples to narrate, govern, and protect themselves collectively. From there, it deploys several battles that share a single heartbeat. To dismantle fragmentation by showing the historical continuity of each aggression is to fight for the liberation of consciousness. To dispute the power to name—saying “kidnapping” where they impose “arrest”—constitutes an act of self-determination of thought. To deactivate the traps of division implies that living memory, as historical reparation, strengthens the community fabric. And to cultivate trust as a political act, because in a world where suspicion is a weapon of war, trust based on the shared memory of struggles and resistance becomes revolutionary. Thus, relational sovereignty is woven: South-South unity as collective self-defense constitutes the horizon of struggle for the REDH.

The REDH unfolds in a horizontal structure that embodies the communal principle, that web of self-government and solidarity that has crossed Nuestra América since ancient times. National chapters in more than 30 countries, from Latin America to Africa, Oceania, and the Iberian Peninsula, and a base of 9,000 contacts, are the expression of this communalization in motion. Its thematic nodes—the World Poetry Movement, Canto de Todos [The Song of All], the feminist collective “Libertadoras,” REDH Communication, REDH-Artists, and youth in REDH—are living cells of the same network of resistance, from which forums, talks, seminars, concerts, and training spaces are co-organized.

In its daily work, its website functions as a digital insurgent agora. There, the “Miradas desde la RED” (Views from the Network) columns are published and spread weekly, along with critical articles, essays, reviews, interviews, militant poetry, dossiers, and statements of condemnation, weaving internationalist sorority as one more weapon in the offensive for humanity.

Poster from the exhibition “20 años del No al ALCA”, organized by the Tricontinental Institute, ALBA Movimientos, and UTOPIX, 2025.

Conclusion: The Offensive for Humanity

The REDH is a living structure, a movement in permanent construction that knows that the defense of humanity is not an abstraction. It is at stake in every devastated territory, every besieged people, every resistance that rises against imperialism. That is why it raises the offensive cry: it is not just about resisting, but about creating, thinking, and organizing a new world of collective construction (it remains, as indicated). Let poetry temper the steel of dawn. Let living memory weave futures of liberation. Let the network be more of a plot every day, more of an embrace, more of a certainty that, from the South, a shared victory is being built.

Greetings to all,

Ximena González Broquen

Ximena González Broquen Ximena González Broquen is the International Coordinator of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity – REDH. She holds a PhD in Political Studies and Philosophy and is the head of the Center for the Study of Social Transformations at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (CETS IVIC).

Paulina Veloso (Chile), Untitled, 2021. Available at capiremov.org.

Greetings from the Nuestra América desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This March 8th, a day in which the world honors the working woman, we pay tribute to the anti-imperialist women of our continent. With their body-territories, their intellect, and their example, they are writing the most dignified pages of the contemporary history of Nuestra América.

We are moving through a stage marked by Trump’s aggression—a deepening of hybrid warfare—and a neocolonial war deployed through financial impunity and voracious extractivism. The advance of the far-right in the region is no coincidence; it seeks to impose a model of plunder where the weight of debt strangles the peoples’ sovereignty. In the face of resistance to direct invasion and the silent war of Unilateral Coercive Measures (UCMs) against Cuba and Venezuela, popular feminism emerges not only as a protest but as the backbone of survival and dignity.

Women at the Monument for the Heroines of Resistance and Independence, Caracas. 2025 (Prensa MinMujer).

1. The 3 Lessons of Trump’s Aggression and the Neocolonial War in Latin America

The recent history of Nuestra América, marked by the shadow of the Monroe Doctrine and its update under the “Trump Corollary”—which persists as State logic in Washington—leaves us with three fundamental lessons regarding the nature of the current war against sovereignty.

1. The Woman’s Body as the First Territory of Defense

The attack of this past January 3rd against Venezuela was not just a military incursion; it was an affront to the dignity of a people that has decided to be free. On that day, 12 women gave their lives in combat. Nine of them were soldiers, members of the Presidential Honor Guard.

Imperialism understands that to break a nation, it must break the will of those who sustain the social fabric. In hybrid warfare, the woman is not a passive victim but a combatant cadre who reorganizes the collective will in every commune and every territory.

This lesson is intertwined with the “sowing” of Berta Cáceres in Honduras. A decade ago, the extractivist elite believed that by assassinating Berta, they would extinguish the voice of the Lenca people. They did not understand that her body, like those of the Venezuelan female militia (a component of the Bolivarian National Armed Force) and communards, represents resistance against dams and transnational capital.

The illegal detention of social activist Cilia Flores is yet another attempt to kidnap this symbol of dignity and political resistance. Illegally detained in the United States, Cilia Flores is a renowned social and political activist. She was the lawyer for the officers who rose up during the military insurrections of 1992, including Commander Hugo Chávez. On this day, women of the world call for her release and return to Venezuela.

2. The Resistance Economy is Feminine

In Cuba, the “silent war” of UCMs has taken the form of an unprecedented energy siege. By preventing the arrival of fuel, Washington seeks to transform daily life into a hell of scarcity. However, on the island, resistance has the face of a woman. It is they who, through popular organization and community bonds, invent daily solutions to sustain life in the face of the blockade.

This resistance economy does not seek profit, but rather the reproduction of life. While the international financial system uses debt to discipline nations, Cuban and Venezuelan women oppose it with an economy of collective care. In Venezuela, 80% of the leaders in communes and communal councils are women. They decide, plan, and execute the projects that keep the social structure afloat under the blockade. The lesson is clear: socialism in Nuestra América survives because women have transformed the private sphere into a space for political management and economic resistance against imperialist aggression.

3. Solidarity and Peace as People’s Diplomacy

The recent action by Claudia Sheinbaum’s government in Mexico, sending ships with 1,200 tons of aid to Cuba, breaks the logic of financial submission. “Sorority” is not just an interpersonal concept, but an international political category.

We also see this in the mobilization of popular organizations that, defying external pressures, coordinate the delivery of aid and mutual support between besieged nations. March 21st, saw the arrival of the Nuestra América Convoy, organized by various movements and popular organizations. This grassroots solidarity is what allows Cuba to resist and Venezuela to deepen its communal model.

When Mexico defies Washington’s pressure to give aid to the island, and when women organize themselves into feminist brigades like the “Cilia Flores Internationalist Brigade for Peace,” they are practicing a form of feminism that prioritizes the lives of families and communities above the dictates of transnational capital. Solidarity is the tenderness—and the strategy—of the people.

Gabriela Barraza (Argentina), Viviremos y venceremos [We Will Live and We Will Overcome], 2021. Available at thetricontinenal.org.

2. The 3 Tasks Popular Feminisms Call Us to Undertake

1. Institutionalize the Communal Management of People’s Power

In Venezuela, nearly 80% of leadership roles in communal councils are held by women. They are the street spokeswomen, the ones who plan projects and execute the sovereign budget. Faced with the advance of the far-right, the response is greater people’s power. The urgent task is to strengthen the National Popular Consultation and the commune model. It is there where popular feminism manages resources and responds to the imperialist offensive.

We must ensure that the territory’s resources are managed by those who inhabit and defend them, blocking the path for the impunity of militias (in Brazil, parapolice and paramilitary armed groups) and illegal power structures like those that tried to silence Marielle Franco in Brazil.

2. Dismantle the Impunity of Neocolonial Extractivism

We cannot move toward the future without closing the wounds of impunity. The stories of Berta Cáceres in Honduras and Marielle Franco in Brazil are beacons, but also reminders of the ferocity of capital.

• Justice for Berta: Ten years after her assassination, the task is to dismantle the extractivist model that murders those who defend the commons. Punishment for the intellectual authors of Berta’s murder is an outstanding debt for the entire region in the fight against transnationals.
• Justice for Marielle: The recent conviction of the Brazão brothers in Brazil is a victory against paramilitary militias and parastatal power. The task is to eradicate the structures of political violence that damage the social fabric and attempt to silence Black women, faveladas, and dissidents who occupy spaces of power.

Berta and Marielle taught us that defending indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant territories and defending life in the cities is the same struggle. Their names are beacons that feed and sustain our daily resistance against patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and capitalism.

3. Push for Popular Agrarian Reform and Food Sovereignty

As our peasant sisters of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) teach us, an urgent task for grassroots feminism is the defense of the land. Popular agrarian reform is the right of women to decide over production and seeds in the face of extractivist agribusiness. For women, land is the space for the reproduction of culture and life. Without food sovereignty, national sovereignty is incomplete. We must strengthen the ties between peasant women and urban workers to guarantee that food is a right and not a commodity of debt.

3. Message from Berta Cáceres

For the women of Nuestra América, the struggle is for life itself. Berta Cáceres, guardian of the rivers and the dignity of the peoples, left us a mandate that shakes the conscience of the entire continent:

Awaken, humanity! There is no more time. Our consciences will be shaken by the fact that we are contemplating self-destruction based on capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. In our worldviews, we are beings born of the earth, water, and corn. Of the rivers, we are ancestral custodians… Let us give our lives, if necessary, for the defense of humanity and the planet!

This cry from Berta is our compass. Faced with neocolonial aggression, our response is unity, the guardianship of our land, and unbreakable rebellion.

Long live the women who fight! Long live a free and sovereign Nuestra América! We shall overcome!

Greetings to all,

Carmen Navas, Maisa Bascuas and Pilar Troya

Carmen Navas Carmen Navas is a Venezuelan political scientist, researcher at the Nuestra América Desk at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Maisa Bascuas Maisa Bascuas is an Argentine political scientist, professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, and Co-Coordinator of the Department of Feminisms of the Global South at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Pilar Troya Pilar Troya is an Ecuadorian researcher and feminist activist. She has worked on public policies for equality and the women’s movement, and serves as Co-Coordinator of the Department of Feminisms of the Global South at Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Illustration by Kael Abello (Venezuela/Utopix) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

Greetings from the Nuestra América desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

One of the core values of neoliberalism is individualism, and it has shaped the generations that emerged since its global implementation. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase serves as the ideological synthesis of this project, which sought to undermine all forms of collective life: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.” In social terms, this is one of the foundations of the current phase of capitalism, which concentrates wealth in the hands of a few while making life increasingly unsustainable for the majority of the world’s population. This accumulation logic can only be sustained by increasingly authoritarian and violent policies, exemplified by various far-right regimes worldwide, but primarily by the leading imperialist power: the USA. Its government sponsors the genocide of the Palestinian people, the kidnapping of a legitimately elected president, and the murderous economic blockade against Cuba in an attempt to stifle that revolutionary experience, alongside many other wars around the globe.

In contrast, the working classes and the peoples of the world resist collectively through their organization in movements, parties, unions, and collectives. These groups aim to fight against inequalities of all kinds—social, gender, sexual, racial, and class-based. In Nuestra América, this tradition of struggle dates back to the colonial period when Europeans invaded our territories to steal our wealth, meeting fierce resistance from the original peoples who lived here, as Eduardo Galeano eloquently demonstrated in his classic, Open Veins of Latin America.

The historical project for the emancipation of workers is primarily based on the social theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two German revolutionaries whose main concern and life goal was to destroy capitalism and build a society that was not based on the exploitation of one human being by another.

Illustration by shenby g (United States) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

On February 21, 1848, in London, a small pamphlet of fewer than 30 pages was published changing the history of society and social struggles: The Communist Manifesto. In this short text, written as a political program for an international workers’ organization—the Communist League—the two authors analyzed the then-nascent capitalism, highlighting its potential and its limits. There, they primarily emphasized the possibility and the necessity of workers organizing to build a new society.

Since then, this text has inspired all revolutionary processes, whether in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, or the liberation struggles of the African continent, among many others. In the countries of the Global South, the development of this tradition was enriched by the specific elements of each region’s struggle, becoming a synthesis of political practice and revolutionary theory. This recalls V.I. Lenin’s formulation: “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”

In Nuestra América, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui provided a creative interpretation of the Marxist tradition, concluding that our socialism cannot be “a copy or imitation. It should be a heroic creation” of our peoples. This construction has been forged through the historical experiences of Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and the resistance struggles of the peoples of our continent.

This tradition remains alive in Nuestra América through the organized action of rural and urban popular movements, which keep the flame of revolution and the historical project of the workers alive through organization and popular struggle. These social forces also understand as fundamental what Fidel Castro, Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Revolution, called the “Battle of Ideas”—the struggle for hearts and minds to build a new society.

Illustration by Ignacio Minaverry (Argentina) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

Martha Harnecker, one of the leading Marxists of Nuestra América, dedicated her life to reflecting on various revolutionary processes to advance social transformation on our continent. After the implementation of neoliberalism and analyzing the temporary defeat of leftist forces in our region, she identified three major crises: the project crisis, the program crisis, and the organization crisis. Overcoming these three crises is both a practical and theoretical challenge.

Inspired by this tradition of struggle, various popular organizations around the world—following the call of leftist publishers organized in the International Union of Left Publishers—began celebrating Red Books Day in 2020. This is a day to celebrate the leftist culture embodied in books that question the logic of capital, announce the construction of a new society, and contribute to overcoming capitalism. It is also a date to challenge, in practice, the value of individualism emphasized by neoliberalism and to reclaim collective life. It is a day for gathering, where people meet to collectively read “Red Books” that fuel our indignation and our struggle.

In these six years, different people across all regions of the world, from Chile to South Korea, have participated in the celebration of Red Books Day, strengthening a leftist culture and a set of ideas that prioritize life, the human being, and the collective.

Illustration by César Mosquera (Venezuela/Utopix) for the Red Books Day 2026 calendar.

In 2026, we also celebrate the centenary of Fidel Castro and the 60th anniversary of the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana. At the same time, we remain on extreme alert against imperialist offensives, such as the genocide in Gaza, the invasion of sovereign countries, and the kidnapping of presidents. In this sense, we invite everyone to join this initiative to celebrate collective life—reclaiming a central value of the society we wish to build—and to spread the ideas that challenge the death regime of capital and announce the hope of a new society.

This is a vital way to strengthen the struggle of our peoples and the spirit of internationalism, recalling two formulations by José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence: “Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone” and “Homeland is humanity.” Gathering to read “Red Books” on February 21 carries this meaning, keeping alive our hope for the construction of a society where we no longer live through the exploitation of one human being by another, but, as Marx formulated: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Greetings to all,

Miguel Yoshida

Miguel Yoshida Miguel is a member of the Nuestra America desk in Brazil, a researcher at the Art Department of the Tricontinental Institute and an editor at Expressão Popular.

Elías Taño (Tenerife), Aquí hay un pueblo digno [Here Is a Dignified People], 2026.

Greetings from the Nuestra América Desk at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research,

On January 3, 2026, the United States executed a large-scale military operation against Venezuela, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve” by Washington. This act of war by the world’s leading military power against the Bolivarian Revolution left a toll of at least 100 people dead—among them 32 Cuban internationalists—more than a hundred wounded, damage to the country’s military and civil infrastructure (such as medicine warehouses for kidney patients), and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady and National Assembly Member Cilia Flores, who currently remain kidnapped as prisoners of war in New York City.

However, contrary to what any political analyst or historian might have thought, the revolutionary government was not overthrown. It remains standing and heads an organized resistance to preserve peace, stability, and the country’s sovereignty. This apparently paradoxical fact reveals the internal contradictions of the imperial project and the strength of processes rooted in popular organization.

The brutality of the attack may have surprised us, but there had been clear signs announcing it. Project 2025, drafted by the Heritage Foundation and its allies to prepare an army of bureaucrats ideologically committed to the second Trump Administration, recommended a “re-hemisphering” of the continent. The National Security Strategy, published weeks earlier, revived the Monroe Doctrine and added a Trump Corollary: the United States will take all necessary measures—including the unilateral use of military force—to ensure that no foreign power can seize the resources of the American continent that it considers to be in its interest. In practice, this means it will condition the sovereignty of the nations of the continent on their willingness to serve the needs of the superpower.

Iván Lira (Venezuela), Dtrump, 2025.

From the new Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, we can extract 3 lessons:

1. The offensive of hyper-imperialism is brutal and seeks to impose a new world order through force: It began in September 2025 with extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers on the high seas—some of them Colombian and Trinidadian fishermen, as denounced by the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro—and opened this year with a military attack that, in less than two hours, violated the United Nations Charter, the Rome Statute, and the United States Constitution itself, which reserves the exclusive power to declare war for the U.S. Congress.

The policy of “peace through strength” is the new method for advancing the U.S. agenda. Long gone are the attempts to co-opt and instrumentalize multilateral organizations, as well as the so-called “rules-based order” that Washington selectively invoked. It is no longer necessary to keep up appearances. Imperialism relies on its brute force to create a new international order, and anyone wishing to dispute it, must show its own. Meanwhile, the United States is reconfiguring its dominance over the continent: It intervened in the elections in Argentina and Honduras, continues to threaten Colombia and Mexico with anti-narcotics operations in their territories, demands an agreement from Cuba “before it is too late,” expands its military presence in Ecuador, Panama (seeking to exercise control over the Canal) and Haiti (pushing a “gang suppression force” through the UN), and most recently, issued an ultimatum to Denmark and other NATO partners to cede control of Greenland or it will take it “the hard way.”

2. The new mood of the Global South is strengthened by concrete gains of the people, not by idealism or fearfulness: Despite overwhelming military power, the United States did not militarily occupy Venezuela nor overthrow the government. The country’s stability has been guaranteed by the Bolivarian Revolution, an alternative project to the imperialist logic which managed to consolidate itself through territorial organization (communes), productive creativity, political participation, and social consciousness.

There is a new mood in the Global South that is contrary to unilateral action and supports cooperation through multilateralism and regional unity to confront it. Solidarity plays a fundamental role, and the defense of Venezuela’s sovereignty was felt in places as distant as Kerala, Rome, Pretoria, and Havana, to name a few of the hundreds of places that demonstrated their rejection of the U.S. attack. What these peoples are defending is the right for real and transformative political alternatives to exist. It is these projects that can lead a new future for the Global South. In December, a BRICS People’s Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, where Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and other movements defended the elaboration of concrete proposals to carry out cooperative and social enterprise projects. It is real transformations—and not proposals that are unachievable due to their idealism, or that are timid in contesting schemes of domination—that generate stability and unity.

3. The new right occupies increasingly more space but is easily discardable in the hyper-imperialist offensive. The United States surprised many by imposing an increase in tariffs against Brazil and unilateral coercive measures against the judge who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to prison. Through threats on social media and in the press, the Trump administration accused Brazilian institutions and the government itself of persecuting its main ally in the country.

However, with Bolsonaro convicted, hyper-imperialism quickly changed its strategy, fostering a dialogue with Lula. In a similar operation, María Corina Machado, who received the Nobel Peace Prize after being nominated by the Secretary of State himself, was discarded as a political option in Venezuela for lacking sufficient support or legitimacy. While the right-wing is occupying spaces left open by the weaknesses of the popular camp, hyper-imperialism will not hesitate to discard them in any strategic situation. This reveals that we must urgently work for a common minimum project that allows popular causes to advance without depending on the internal contradictions of the enemy camp.

Olfer Leonardo (Perú), Abyayala contra Trump [Abyayala Against Trump], 2026.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx reminds us that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already”. After this abrupt start to 2026, let us assume our historical tasks in the face of the circumstances we have had to undergo:

1. Multipolarity is not enough; we must seek the “balance of the universe”: Two hundred years ago, the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama took place. It attempted to create the unity of the American continent to safeguard its independence and sovereignty. Unlike the Pan-Americanism promoted from Washington, this congress did not intend to impose tutelage, but rather bet on achieving what Bolívar conceived as the balance of the universe: “…all these parts [of the world] must try to establish a balance between themselves and Europe, to destroy the preponderance of the latter.” The world order built after the Anti-Fascist World War divided the world into zones of influence to be distributed in the Cold War. What we need to build today, more than plain multipolarity, is a balance between all international actors that guarantees cooperation, just and shared development, and the resolution of major threats such as war and climate change.

2. Our struggle must be common and simultaneous: Sixty years ago, the Tricontinental Conference of Havana was held, where for the first time the struggles of what we now call the Global South were united. There, Commander Fidel Castro presented in his closing speech a formula that is more relevant than ever:

“In Latin America, there must not be even one, or two, or three peoples fighting alone against imperialism. The imperialists’ correlation of forces on this continent, the nearness of their home territory, the zeal with which they will try to defend their dominions in this part of the world require, on this continent, more than anywhere else, a common strategy, a joint, simultaneous struggle.”

During May 2026, and within the framework of the centennial of Fidel, the IV Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements will be held in Cuba. It will be the ideal setting for grassroots movements and popular organizations of the continent, with a realistic view of the challenges, to trace a new strategy of common and simultaneous struggle to preserve sovereignty and dignity in the face of the hyper-imperialist advance.

Kael Abello (Venezuela), Venceremos: Bolívar vs Donroe [We Shall Overcome: Bolívar vs Donroe], 2026.

A message from Bolívar: In 1825, a few months after the Battle of Ayacucho which forever sealed South American independence from the Spanish empire, France was contemplating an invasion of Colombia. Bolívar, in command of Peru, sent a harsh letter to Santander in Colombia, charged with realism, pragmatism, and, above all, strategic vision.

Given the military superiority of the French, he recommended not resisting frontally to avoid more destruction to the country. He preferred to retreat to the south and undertake guerrilla warfare; and within a year or two, start the active war that would bring victory. Bolívar advocated for the unity of the Panama Congress and for strengthening alliances with foreign powers, while contemplating astute measures. “Even if I sacrifice my popularity and my glory, I want to save Colombia from its extermination in this new war. I will be happy if I succeed and, if I fail as well, because I will have taken the last step for salvation.”

The scenario today, frankly, is not encouraging. The military incursion in Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president has been a hard blow, as have the threats to other countries throughout the region, electoral defeats, economic and social challenges, and the absence of a common minimum project for the new times.

But at the same time, Nuestra América is not a subjugated region. Patience must be strategic and determination unwavering, even in the face of adversity. It is time to build a new, more favorable moment based on the achievements accomplished. As the Liberator wrote in his letter, “we must know how to lose at the beginning, to know how to win later.”

Greetings to all,

Carlos Ron

Carlos Ron Carlos Ron is Co-Coordinator of the Nuestra América Office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.