On April 15-18, 1998, about 1,000 men and women from nearly every nation of the hemisphere gathered for a Peoples' Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile. We gathered to express our collective rejection of the dominant "neo-liberal" agenda that promotes trade and investment liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and market- driven economics as the formula for development.

The Peoples' Summit focused on building a hemispheric social alliance around concrete, viable alternatives. Meanwhile, the Presidents and Prime Ministers of our nations were also meeting in Santiago, attempting to negotiate a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It is expected that the FTAA will follow the pattern of existing agreements like NAFTA and expand neo-liberalism throughout the hemisphere. This document expresses our determination to construct an alternative to the FTAA based on the proposals described herein.

Driving this effort on alternatives is the sense that the neo-liberal economic model has been a disaster for most of the peoples of the hemisphere.

• Peasants whose labour once fed their nations and themselves are forced to export risky "cash crops" to bring in foreign currency and to provide the well-to-do in the North with meat and fresh produce throughout the year. This has resulted in hunger for many and reduced food quality for others, and has driven hundreds of thousands of small farmers from their lands.

• This growing export dependency has added to the plight of landless peasants, particularly in countries where the ownership of the bulk of agricultural land is concentrated in a small number of hands. In Brazil, for example, despite decades-long promises of land reform, one percent of land owners control 44 percent of the lands. Over the past decade, private militias and police have killed several hundred landless peasants participating in peaceful occupations of idle or underused lands belonging to wealthy landowners.

• With the decline of subsistence agriculture, young women and indigenous peoples have often been forced into our hemisphere's export processing zones, particularly in Mexico and Central America. Paid less than a living wage, they are forced to live in squalor and often subjected to sexual harassment. Long working hours strain their family ties and limit their educational opportunities.
• Peasants forced to abandon their lands sometimes come to the cities of our hemisphere to seek work. But what many find is unemployment and poverty and a life in the "informal economy," since much domestic manufacturing has been eliminated by the penetration of transnational corporations and rules which prohibit efforts to strengthen the domestic economy.

• Other displaced peasants come north and are met by the militarization of the U.S. border with Mexico, new laws that violate their civil rights, and racist hysteria promoted by right-wing politicians and their constituencies.

• Neo-liberal rules to deregulate capital markets, combined with new telecommunications technologies, have opened our nations to the vagaries of hot money. Speculators pull their money in and out of our nations at will, leaving misery in their wake as usurious interest rates and currency devaluations slash the buying power of our wages and drastically reduce opportunities for liveable wage work.

• U.S. and Canadian workers have felt the pain of the elimination of hundreds of thousands of living wage manufacturing jobs. Many have been unable to find comparable work and their sons and daughters are facing the prospect of either no work at all or jobs that are temporary or part-time, with pay below what it takes to live a decent life in these countries.

• In the U.S. and Canada, the governments are destroying publicly subsidized housing and housing programs as the ranks of the homeless soar. This has had a disproportionate effect on women, especially poor women. Public funds for basic subsistence living-food, clothing and medical care: programs won by workers' struggles of the past-are being eliminated, and people are told to find non-existent jobs. Meanwhile, in both the U.S. and Canada, the call to balance budgets is further straining workers and the poor as programs in health care, education and public transportation are privatized, eliminated, or seriously cut back.

• Throughout the hemisphere, there is a stratum of society that is doing very well by neo-liberal policies. The speculators, the transnational corporations and those in their service proclaim the wonders of the market. But for most of us, the past 25 years have meant declining living standards and in many cases abject poverty.

A quarter of a century later, U.S. President Clinton came to Santiago for the launching of FTAA negotiations and proclaimed Chile to be "the model for the hemisphere." His praise reveals the intent of the most powerful government of the Americas to use the FTAA to promote the most extreme form of neo-liberalism. By contrast, Luis Anderson, President of the Interamerican Regional Workers' Organization (ORIT), stated at the Peoples' Summit the very next day: "When young children must come and beg for food, we must be clear that Chile is no model."

Neo-liberalism entails the imposition of a set of rules that govern not only the economy but also the social fabric of our societies. The issue for us, therefore, is not one of free trade vs. protection or integration vs. isolation, but whose rules will prevail and who will benefit from those rules.

The Peoples' Summit in Santiago brought to the light of day the fact that there is a rising movement of resistance. This movement is one of the peoples of the Americas telling those political leaders, financial speculators and the transnational corporations who promote neo-liberalism that their agenda is unacceptable. It is a movement of the peoples of the Americas demanding their very humanity. They do so by stating that nutritious food, a comfortable place to live, a clean and healthy environment, health care and education are human rights. And they declare that respect for the rights of workers, women, indigenous peoples, black peoples, and Latinos living in the U.S. and Canada must be central to any process of integration.

Supporters of neo-liberalism are attempting to counter the resistance of the peoples of the Americas in a number of ways. In the United States, corporate giants have launched a massive propaganda campaign to "educate" the public on the benefits of free trade. In many countries, an extreme response has been to utilize the nation state as an instrument of terror against its own peoples-a return to neo-liberalism's birth in Pinochet's bloody dictatorship.

Under the guise of a "war against drugs," counter-insurgency efforts, often fuelled by U.S. funds, training and military hardware, have become a plague in our hemisphere. Furthermore, the suppression of the popular movements throughout Mexico, Central and South America attempts to limit the demands of the peoples of our nations. At times, this suppression has taken the form of brutal terrorism, such as the Acteal massacre in Mexico, the assassination of thousands of Colombian union and popular-sector leaders over the past several years, and the savage assassination of Bishop Gerardi of Guatemala. Although our leaders publicly condemn this violence, we wonder if they might be secretly breathing a sign of relief because these abominable acts serve to silence those who have challenged and will continue to challenge neo-liberalism's onslaught.

While transnational corporations, speculators and their government sponsors will continue to act in their self-interests, we now are beginning to unite across borders and across sectors in order to oppose these self-interests with those of the vast majority of the residents of our hemisphere. While the building of such a social alliance is in its early stages, this urgent task has begun.

History teaches many things. One lesson can be found in the words of the great African-American emancipator, Frederick Douglass: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress... Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will...Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong...The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

Another lesson of history is that no amount of oppression can stop people from declaring their own humanity and acting on that declaration.

The Summit of the Peoples of the Americas did not stop with the negation of the neo-liberal rules; it began a dialogue about alternatives. This document, a product of the dialogue, is thus rooted in the aspirations of the peoples of our hemisphere to live and develop as full human beings. These aspirations to build a more egalitarian and respectful society throughout the hemisphere transcend national boundaries and have a long historical tradition in the Americas. They go back at least as far as the struggles to create free and independent countries in the American hemisphere. Almost two centuries ago, Simón Bolivar, who led the movement to liberate a large part of South America from colonialism, declared: "Yo deseo más que otro alguno ver formar en América la más grande, nación del mundo, menos por su extensión y riquezas que por su libertad y gloria." ("I wish, more than anything else, to witness the creation in America of the greatest nation in the world, not so much because of its immense territory or wealth, but rather because of its freedom and glory.")

Alternatives for the Americas is not solely an economic doctrine, but is rather an approach to social integration through which the ideas, talents and wealth of all of our peoples can be shared to our mutual benefit. It is a living document that will be altered and expanded as we exercise our rights to continue the debate and discussion.

General Principles