In relation to the recent announcement by outgoing President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia’s imminent accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the communication networks and social movements brought together in the Communication Forum for Integration in Our America issued a statement that we reproduce in full below.
Declaration of the Communication Forum for the Integration of Our America
Colombia’s accession to NATO threatens the peace and integration in Latin America and the Caribbean
The Communication Forum for Integration in our Americas states that:
Colombia’s announced accession to NATO threatens the peace in Latin America.
It is a break with the Declaration of Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace and with the advances that the installation of the Defence Council in UNASUR meant for the region.
It calls for a possible NATO intervention on the Colombian borders with Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, and opens up the routes along its coasts in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to any NATO maneuver or intervention.
It is evident how, in order to make this alliance possible, Latin American and Caribbean integration processes have been conspired against.
The resolution of President Juan Manual Santos -without the explicit support of the citizenship- conditions, shortly after the end of his own mandate, the actions of the next Colombian government.
It stimulates the regional arms race by squandering resources that must be invested in the well-being of populations beset by flagrant inequality.
It enlists Colombia in the U.S. war environment by dragging the region into a highly dangerous global theatre.
It degrades the declaimed peace process and the Nobel Prize, revealing servility towards the mandates of the North (mega-projects, militarization against illicit crops, appropriation of energy resources).
The Communication Forum for the Integration of Our America joins the voices of citizens and social movements that repudiate this fact, which has serious consequences for peace and integration aspirations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
COMMUNICATION FORUM FOR THE INTEGRATION OF OUR AMERICA
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The Forum is an initiative of networks, media and social coordination committed to the integration of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.
More information: http://integracion-lac.info
email: foro@integracion-lac.info
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