When Kirchner, Chávez and Lula organized the No to …

“Patotear with a simple majority, ideas that have so much to do with the life of our peoples, help very little to the coexistence of peoples”, ordered Néstor Kirchner before the furious look of the President of Mexico, Vicente Fox and the gesture of boredom George Bush. The Argentine president was frank. Lula and Hugo Chávez looked at him with a knowing smile and Tabaré Vázquez remained thoughtful: as head of Mercosur, he will have to negotiate the text of the Summit of the Americas. The US and its allies wanted to support the FTAA but Mercosur argued the meeting should be about jobs.

Using the term “patotear” because of what Bush was doing to force a declaration on the FTAA showed an Argentine president who fell below the historical average. Nestor was not afraid of him, as he said in another speech referring to the military of the dictatorship. But at the same time, he showed that the alliance with Lula in Brazil and Chávez in Venezuela was capable of redefining the historic hegemonic relationship of the United States in the region.

This unusual scene in Latin American diplomacy occurred at the IV Summit of the Americas, which took place on November 4 and 5. At the same time, the Peoples’ Summit was held in parallel in Mar del Plata, from 1 to 4. The fierce debate was not due to a mere mention in a document of the meeting of the leaders of the continent and the Caribbean. . Bush’s intention was to block the regional integration process that was starting to unfold in Mercosur also with the Uruguayan Tabaré Vázquez and the Paraguayan Nicanor Duarte Frutos.

Mercosur’s resistance to the North American initiative was not ideological. The United States subsidized agricultural and food production and sought to impose conditions on local production. The same situation happened with Brazil. Accepting these conditions would have jeopardized the nascent rebound of the economy after the 2001 crisis.

The pressure had been very strong on Vice-Chancellor Jorge Taiana, who had to reject several attacks during preparatory meetings. Bush was expected to get to the bottom of the Presidents’ Plenary in Mar del Plata. The vote was 29-5 (the four from Mercosur, plus Venezuela) but the document had to be released by consensus. The State Department had obtained the most dubious affirmative vote. The bishops of the United States were the Mexican Vicente Fox, the Colombian Alvaro Uribe, in addition to Bush and Paul Martin, the Canadian representative.

The meeting was tough, as the host it was chaired by Kirchner. And he spread the word of Fox when the Mexican made the first attempt to change the agenda to introduce the subject of the FTAA. “This issue is not on the agenda,” Kirchner said. Bush stood up and shook hands with the Mexican in solidarity. Kirchner thought he had outdone himself and commented to Taiana: “I never liked these parliamentary things.”Chávez, Lula and Kirchner had come up with a strategy. Lula opened the point with a speech in which he described the region’s trade asymmetries with the United States and demanded that they talk about job creation.. Fox responded, which was interrupted by Kirchner. The presidents of Panama and Colombia supported Bush. Chávez said that Néstor told him “you stretch out as long as you can, Bush is going mad”. And the Venezuelan spoke for nearly half an hour without breathing as the US president shifted in his seat.

It was a real diplomatic battle where the fate of the region was at stake. The outcome of this dispute by rejecting the FTAA, laid the foundations for the consolidation of Mercosur and then founded Unasur and CELAC (Community of Latin America and the Caribbean), in which neither Canada nor the United States participated, but joined Cuba blocked the interregional system. Shortly afterwards, of the 29 countries that voted in favor of the FTAA in Mar del Plata, they remained within CELAC, with the exception of the two northern powers. The integration process which had been promoted in Mar del Plata in 2005 took the initiative of Washington and moved forward in a design that promoted intraregional communication and transport infrastructure, as well as trade and the operation of the bloc on issues such as the Falklands, the lifting of the North American blockade of Cuba and peace in Colombia. Since the Second Summit of the Americas, held in Santiago de Chile in 1998, popular organizations in the region have held a side meeting called< Sommet des peuples >>. It consisted of workshops on popular issues with a plenary who approved a document. At the same time, acts and demonstrations were organized to reject North American hegemony. During Fernando de la Rúa’s presidency, Argentina promised to host the 2005 Summit. Kirchner accepted the challenge. For security reasons, he had been informed that the meeting would take place in Bariloche. But Nestor preferred that Mar del Plata “be close to the people”, aware of the popular act that the People’s Summit would take in rejecting the presence of Bush.Chávez was the main speaker of the parallel summit which was prepared as a unitary act with the participation of deputies and leaders from the left and Peronism, trade unions and social movements in the World Cup stadium in Mar del Plata. A caravan of a thousand buses left from Buenos Aires, in addition to the ALBA Train in which Diego Maradona, Emir Kusturika, an Evo Morales who was not yet president of Bolivia, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other personalities.Since November 1, workshops have taken place. The train arrived at dawn on the 4th. A massive march left the station to the stadium with slogans against Bush and the FTAA. Silvio Rodríguez, Amaury Pérez and Daniel Viglietti sang in front of the speakers. Indigenous Ecuadorian leader Blanca Chancoso read the meeting’s conclusions and then spoke about Cindy Sheehan, mother of an American soldier killed in the war in Iraq; Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General and emblem of the fight against the Vietnam War, and Javier Couso, brother of the Spanish journalist assassinated in Baghdad in 2003 by American troops who bombed the Palestine Hotel.

Finally, between standing ovations, Chávez spoke for two hours and called Maradona and Evo Morales to his side. “We Argentines have dignity. Let’s get rid of Bush,” cried on the 10th. “ALCA, ALCA, ALCA, to hell. Who buried the FTAA? The people of America,” Chávez said, and said elicited a standing ovation.

But the real burial was carried out the next day by the leaders of Mercosur and Venezuelan when they thwarted Bush’s attempt. The Mar del Plata meeting had an impact on the unipolar system that operated on the planet after the fall of the USSR. Kirchner, Chávez and Lula set a cap that allowed Latin America to take the path of unity and integration, unlike the division and confrontation historically promoted from outside the region, when each country focused more on Washington or Europe.