[News] Venezuela's Chavez at G-15 Summit

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Speech by President Hugo Chávez, at the opening of XII G-15 Summit
Monday, Mar 01, 2004

By: Hugo Chavez

HIS EXCELLENCY NÉSTOR KIRCHNER, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARGENTINA.

HIS EXCELLENCY LUIS INACIO LULA DA SILVA, PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERATIVE 
REPUBLIC OF BRAZIL

HIS EXCELLENCY SEYED MOHAMMED KHATAMI, PRESIDENT OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF 
IRAN.

HIS EXCELLENCY PÉRCIVAL JAMES PATTERSON, PRIME MINISTER OF JAMAICA.

HIS EXCELLENCY RÓBERT GABRIEL MUGÁBE, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF ZIMBABWE.

HIS EXCELLENCY AMBASSADOR NASSIR ABDULAZIZ AL_NASSER, PRESIDENT OF THE 
GROUP OF 77.

DISTINGUISHED HEADS OF THE DELEGATIONS AND HIGH OFFICERS OF ALGERIA, 
COLOMBIA, CHILE, EGYPT, INDIA, INDONESIA, KENYA, MALAYSIA, MEXICO, NIGERIA, 
PERU, SENEGAL AND SRI LANKA.

THEIR EXCELLENCIES, FOREIGN AFFAIRS MINISTERS OF THE GROUP OF 15.

HIS EXCELLENCY RÚBENS RICÚPERO, SECRETARY GENERAL TO THE UNITED NATIONS 
CONFERENCE ON TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT (UNCTAD).

THEIR EXCELLENCIES THE HEADS OF DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS AND HONORABLE 
REPRESENTATIVES OF INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES CREDITED BEFORE THE VENEZUELAN 
GOVERNMENT.

DISTINGUISHED JOURNALISTS, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND CAMERAMEN.

FELLOW VENEZUELANS.... LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.

Welcome to this land washed by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the 
Caribbean Sea, crossed by the magnificent Orinoco River. A land crowned by 
the perpetual snow of the Andean mountains....!

A land overwhelmed by the never-ending magic of the Amazon forest and its 
millenary chants...!

Welcome to Venezuela, the land where a patriotic people has taken over 
again the banners of Simon Bolivar, its Libertador, whose name is well 
known beyond these frontiers!

As Pablo Neruda said in his Chant to Bolivar:

Our Father thou art in Heaven,
in water, in air
in all our silent and broad latitude
everything bears your name, Father in our dwelling:
your name raises sweetness in sugar cane
Bolivar tin has a Bolivar gleam
the Bolívar bird flies over the Bolivar volcano
the potato, the saltpeter, the special shadows,
the brooks, the phosphorous stone veins
everything comes from your extinguished life
your legacy was rivers, plains, bell towers
your legacy is our daily bread, oh Father.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen: Bolivar, another Quixote but not mad(as Napoleon 
Bonaparte had already called Francisco de Miranda, the universal man from 
Caracas), who on this very same land of South America tried to unite the 
Rising Republics in a single, strong and free Republic.

In his letter to Jamaica in 1815, Bolivar said talking about the Panama 
isthmus and his idea of convening there a Amphictyonic Congress:

I wish one day we would have the opportunity to install there an august 
congress with the representatives of the Republics, Kingdoms and Empires to 
debate and discuss the highest interests of Peace and War with the 
countries of the other three parts of the world.

Bolivar reveals himself as an anti-imperialist leader, in the same historic 
perspective that 140 years after that insightful letter at Kingston 
materialized in the Bandung Conference in April 1955. Inspired by Nerhu, 
Tito y Nasser, a group of important leaders gathered at this conference to 
face great challenges and expressed their wish of not being involved in the 
East-West conflict and rather work together toward national development. 
This was the first key milestone: the first Afro-Asian conference, the 
immediate precedent of the Non-Aligned Countries that gathered 29 Heads of 
State and from which the Conscience of the Southwas born.

Two events of great political significance occurred in the 60s: the 
creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961 and the Group of 
the 77 in 1964: Two milestones and a clear historic trend: the need of the 
self-awareness of the South and of acting together in a world reality 
characterized by imbalance and unequal exchange.

In the 70s a proposal, arising from the IV Summit of Heads of State of the 
Non-Aligned Countries in Algiers in 1973, becomes important: the need to 
create a new international economic order. In 1974 the UN Assembly ratified 
this proposal, which maintains full effectiveness, but ended up becoming a 
mere historical reference.

Two events that were very important for the struggles in the South occurred 
during the 80s: the creation of the Commission of the South in Kuala Lumpur 
in 1987 under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, the unforgettable fighter 
of Tanzania and the world.

Two years later, in September 1989, the Group of the 15 is born within the 
framework of the meeting of the Non-Aligned Countries, with the purpose of 
strengthening the South-South cooperation.

In 1990, the South-Commission submitted its strategic proposal: A Challenge 
for the South. And later on... later on came the Flood with the fall of the 
Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union; unipolarity appears and 
the happy 90sarrived, as Joseph Stiglitz said.

All those struggles, ideas and proposals sunk in the Neo-liberal Flood and 
the world began to witness the so-called end of Historyand the triumphant 
chant of the Neo-liberal Globalization, which today, besides an objective 
reality, is a weapon of manipulation intended to force us to passiveness 
faced to an Economic World Order that excludes our South countries and 
condemns them to the never-ending role of producers of wealth and 
recipients of leftovers.

Never before had the world such a tremendous scientific-technical 
potential, such a capacity to generate wealth and well-being. Authentic 
technological wonders that have made any place in the world to be always 
close with regard to distances and communications and have not been capable 
of bringing well-being for everybody, but only for a meager 15% living in 
the countries of the North.

Globalization has not brought the so-called interdependence, but an 
increase in dependency. Instead of wealth globalization, there is poverty 
wide spreading. Development has not become general, or been shared. To the 
contrary, the abysm between North and South is now so huge, that the 
unsustainability of the current economic order and the blindness of the 
people who try to justify continuing to enjoy opulence and waste, are evident.

The face of this world economic order of globalization with a neo-liberal 
sign is not only Internet, virtual reality or the exploration of the space.

This face can also be seen, and with a greater dramatic character in the 
countries of the South, in the 790 millions of people who are starving, 800 
millions of illiterate adults, 654 millions of human beings who live today 
in the south and who will not grow older than 40 years of age. This is the 
harsh and hard face of the work economic order dominated by the 
Neoliberalism and seen every year in the south, the death of over 11 
millions of boys and girls below 5 years of age caused by illnesses that 
are practically always preventable and curable and who die at the appalling 
rate of over 30 thousand every day, 21 every minute, 10 each 30 seconds. In 
the South, the proportion of children suffering of malnutrition reaches up 
to 50% in quite a few countries, while according to the FAO, a child who 
lives in the First World will consume throughout his or her life, the 
equivalent to what 50 children consume in an underdeveloped country.

The great possibilities that a globalization of solidarity and true 
cooperation could bring to all people in the world through the 
scientific-technical wonders, has been reduced by the neo-liberal model to 
this grotesque caricature full of exploitation and social injustice.

Our countries of the South were repeated a thousand times that the sole and 
true sciencecapable of ensuring development and well-being for everybody, 
without exception, was synthesized in leaving the markets operate without 
regulation, privatizing everything and creating the conditions for 
transnational capital investment, and banning the State from intervening 
the economy.

Almost the magic and wonderful philosophers stone!!

Neoliberal thought and politics were created in the North to serve their 
interests, but it should be highlighted that they have never been truly 
applied there, but they have been spread throughout the South in the past 
two decades and reached the disastrous category of a single thought.

Through the application of the sole thought, the world economy as a whole 
grew less than in the three decades between 1945 and 1975, when the 
Keynesian theories promoting market regulation through State intervention 
were applied. The gap separating the North and the South continued to grow, 
not only with regard to economic indicators, but also in he strategic 
sector of access to knowledge, from which the fundamental possibility of 
integral development in our times arises.

The countries of the North with 15% of the world population count with over 
85% of Internet users and control 97% of the patents. These countries have 
an average of over 10 years of schooling, while in the countries of the 
South schooling hardly reaches 3.7 years and in many countries is even lower.

The tragedy of underdevelopment and poverty in Africa, which historic roots 
lay in colonialism and the slavery of millions of its children, is now 
reinforced by the neoliberalism from the North. In this region, the rate of 
infant mortality in children under 1 year of age is 107 per each thousand 
children born alive, while in the develop countries this rate is 6 per each 
thousand children born alive; also, life expectancy is 48 years, thirty 
years less than in countries of the North.

In Asia, economic growth in some countries has been remarkable, but the 
region, as a whole, still presents a delay with regard to the North in 
basic economic and social development aspects.

We are, dear friends, in Latin America, the favorite scenario of the 
neo-liberal model in the past decades. Here, neoliberalism reached the 
status of a dogma and was applied with greatest severity.

Its catastrophic results can be easily seen and are the explanation for the 
growing and uncontrollable social protest that the poor people and the 
excluded people of Latin America have been expressing, every day more 
vigorously, for some years now, claiming their right to life, to education, 
to health, to culture, to a decent living as human beings.

Dear friends:

I saw with my own eyes, a day like today but exactly 15 years ago, the 27 
of February 1989, when an intense day of protest broke out on the streets 
of Caracas against the neo-liberal package of the International Monetary 
Fund and ended in a real massacre known as The Caracazo.

The neo-liberal model promised Latin Americans greater economic growth, but 
during the neo-liberal years growth has not even reached half the growth 
achieved in the 1945-1975 period with different politics.

The model recommended the most strict financial liberalization and exchange 
freedom to achieve a greater influx of foreign capitals and greater 
stability. But in neo-liberal years the financial crises have been more 
intense and frequent than ever before, the external regional debts 
non-existent at the end of the Second World War amounts today to 750 
billion dollars, the per capita highest debt in the world and in several 
countries is equal to more than half the GDP. Only between 1990 and the 
year 2002, Latin America made external debt payments amounting to 1 
trillion 528 billions of dollars, which duplicates the amount of the 
current debt and represented an annual average payment of 118 billions. 
That is, we pay the debt every 6.3 years, but this evil burden continues to 
be there, unchanging and inextinguishable.

¡¡It is a never-ending debt!!

Obviously, this debt has exceeded the normal and reasonable payment 
commitments by any debtor and has turned into an instrument to 
undercapitalize our countries additionally to the imposition of socially 
adverse measures that subsequently generate powerful politically 
destabilizing factors for the governments that insist in their implementation.

We were asked to be ultraliberal in trade and to lift any barrier, which 
may obstruct the imports coming from the North, but the oral champions of 
free trade actually are the champions in the praxis of protectionism. The 
North spends 1 billion dollars a day in practicing what has been banned 
from doing, that is, subsidizing inefficient products.

I want to tell you and this is a true and verifiable data­ that each cow 
grazing in the European Union receives in its four stomachs 2.20 dollars a 
day in subsidies, thus having a better situation than 2.5 billion poor 
people in the South who hardly survive with an income less than 2 dollars a 
day.

With the FTAA, the government of the United States wants us to reach a zero 
tariff situation in their benefit and wants us to give away our markets, 
our oil, our water resources and biodiversity, in addition to our 
sovereignty, whereas walls of subsidies for agriculture keep access closed 
to the market of that country. It is a peculiar way of relieving the huge 
commercial deficit of the United States, to do exactly the contrary to what 
they present as a sacred principle in economic policy.

Neoliberalism promised Latin American people that if they accepted the 
demands of the multinational capital, investments would overflow the 
region. Indeed, the incoming capital increased. A portion to buy 
state-owned companies sometimes at bargain prices, another portion was 
speculative capital to seize the opportunities involved in the financial 
liberalization environment.

The neo-liberal model promised that after a painful adjustment period 
necessary to deprive the State of its regulatory power over economy and 
liberalize trade and finance, wealth would spread over Latin America and 
the long-lasting history of poverty and underdevelopment would be left 
behind. But the painful and temporary adjustment became permanent and 
appears to become everlasting. The results cannot be concealed.

Taking 1980 as the conventional year of the commencement of the neo-liberal 
cycle, by that time around 35 percent of the Latin American population were 
poor. Two decades thereafter, 44 percent of Latin American men and women 
are poor. Poverty is particularly cruel to children. It is a sad reality 
that in Latin America most of the poor people are children and most 
children are poor. In the late 90s, the Economic Commission for Latin 
America reported that 58 percent of children under 5 were poor, as well as 
57% of children with ages ranging from 6 to 12.

Poverty among children and teenagers tends to reinforce and perpetuate 
inequalities of access to education, as shown by a survey conducted by the 
Inter-American Development Bank on 15 countries where householders in 10 
percent of the population with the highest income had an average schooling 
of 11 years, whereas among householders in 30 percent of the lowest income 
population such average was 4 years.

Neoliberalism promised wealth. And poverty has spread, thus making of Latin 
America the most unequal region over the world in terms of income 
distribution. In the region, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population 
those who are satisfied with neoliberalism and feel enthusiastic about the 
FTAA- receive nearly 50 percent of the total income, where the poorest 10 
percent those who never appear in high class society chronicles of the 
oligarchic mass media barely receive 1.5 percent of such total income.

This exploitation model has turned Latin America and the Caribbean into a 
social bomb ready to explode, should anti-development, unemployment and 
poverty keep increasing.

Even though the social struggles are growing sharp and even some 
governments have been overthrown by uprisings, we are told by the North 
that the neo-liberal reform has not yielded good results because it has not 
been implemented in full.

So, they now intend to recommend the formula of suicide. But we know, 
brothers and sisters, that countries do not commit suicide. The people of 
our countries awake, stand up and fight!

As a conclusion, their Excellencies, because of its injustice and 
inequality, the economic and social order of neo-liberal globalization 
appears to be a dead-end street for the South.

Therefore, the passive acceptance of the excluding rules imposed by this 
economic and social order cannot be the behavior to be exercised by the 
Heads of State and Government who have the highest responsibility before 
our peoples.

The history of our countries does not admit any doubt passivity and 
grieving are useless, instead, the joined and firm action is the sole 
conduct enabling the South to rise from its sad role of exploited and 
humiliated rearguard.

Thanks to the heroic struggle against colonialism, the developing countries 
broke the economic and social order condemning them to the condition of 
exploited colonies. Colonialism was not defeated by the accumulations of 
tears of sorrow or by the repentance of colonialists, but for centuries of 
heroic fights for independence and sovereignty in which the resistance, 
tenacity and sacrifice of our peoples worked wonders.

Here, in South America, this year we are precisely commemorating 180 years 
of the heroic deeds of Ayacucho battle, where people joined and became a 
liberating army after almost 20 years of revolutionary wars under the 
bright leadership of José de San Martin, Bernardo OHiggins, José Inacio 
Abreu e Lima, Simon Bolivar and Antonio José de Sucre, sending away the 
Spanish empire hitherto extended from the warm Caribbean beaches to the 
cold lands of Patagonia, thus ending 300 years of colonialism.

Today, vis-á-vis the obvious failure of neoliberalism and the great threat 
that the International Economic Order represents for our countries, it is 
necessary to retake the Spirit of the South.

That is where this Summit in Caracas is heading for.

I propose to re-launch the G-15 as a South Integration Movement rather than 
a group. A movement for the promotion of all possible trends, who walks 
towards the Non-aligned Movement, the Group of 77, China& The entirely 
whole South!!

I propose that we retake the proposals of the 1990 South Commission:

Why not focus our attention and our political actions to the proposals for 
granting several thousands of the Grants of the Southper year to students 
from underdeveloped countries to continue studies in the South; or 
multiplying cooperation in health to decrease infant mortality, provide 
basic medical care, fight AIDS and many other actions that would only be 
possible if we would foster them with the solidarity necessary to ease the 
dark panorama of life in the South and thus face the expensive and 
ineffective dependency from the North?

Why not create the Debtors Fund as an elemental defense tool to have 
consultations and coordinate collective action policies, taking into 
account the full operation of the creditors forum structured by different 
bodies to protect their interests?

Why not advance the system of trade preferences among developing countries 
that only exists symbolically, whereas the protectionism of the North 
expels our countries from the markets?

Why not promote the compensation trade and investment flows within the 
South instead of competing in a suicidal fashion among us offering 
concessions to the multinationals of the North?

Why not establish the University of the South?

Why not create the Bank of the South?

These and other proposals retain their value and await for our political 
will to become true.

But finally, dear friends, I would like to mention in particular a 
proposal, which, in my opinion, has great significance within this set of 
proposals:

In the South we are victims of the media monopoly of the North, which acts 
as a power system responsible for disseminating in our countries and 
planting in the minds of our citizens, information, values and consumption 
patterns that are basically alien to our realities and that have turned 
themselves into the most powerful and effective tool of domination. Never 
is domination more perfect than when the dominated people think like the 
dominators do.

To face and begin to change this reality, I dare to propose the creation of 
a TV channel that could be seen throughout the world showing information 
and pictures from the South. This would be the first and fundamental step 
to crush the media monopoly.

In a very shot time this TV channel of the South could broadcast throughout 
the world our own values, our own roots and tell the people in the world in 
the words of the great poet Mario Benedetti, a man from the deep South, 
Uruguay, where the La Plata River opens so much that it looks like a silver 
sea, and washes my dear Buenos Aires and bluish Montevideo:

THE SOUTH ALSO EXISTS

With its French horn
and its Swedish academy
its American sauce
and its English wrenches
with all its missiles
and its encyclopedias
its stars war
and its opulent viciousness
with all its laurels
the North commands,
but down here
close to the roots
is where memory
no remembrance omits
and there are who undies
and who unlives
and thus, all together
work wonders
be it known:
the South also exists.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much


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