By Ecosocialist Horizons, December 19, 2017
THE FIRST ECOSOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL: WEAVING OURSELVES TO MOTHER EARTH
October 31 – November 3, 2017, Cumbe of Veroes, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
October 31 – November 3, 2017, Cumbe of Veroes, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
It has been one year since “The Calling of the Spirits” in Monte Carmelo, Lara, when, with spirited minds and seeds in our hearts, we initiated a convocation titled “The Cry of Mother Earth.” Those who responded to this cry are now here: around 100 people from 19 countries and five continents, 12 original peoples from Our America, and ecosocialist activists from 14 states of Venezuela. We are here in the Cumbe* of Veroes, cradled in the enchanted mountains of Yaracuy, where the guardian goddess of nature lives. From the 31st of October until today, the 3rd of November, 2017, we have done the work demanded of us: the articulation of a combined strategy and plan of action for the salvation of Mother Earth.
We have made the decision and the collective commitment to constitute the First Ecosocialist International: To reverse the destructive process of capitalism; to return to our origins and recuperate the ancestral spirituality of humanity; to live in peace, and end war.
We recognize that we are only a small part of a spiral of spirals, which has the profound intention to expand and include others until all of us are rewoven with Mother Earth; to restore harmony within us, between us, and among all the other sister beings of nature.
The First Ecosocialist International is not just another meeting, nor another conference of intellectuals to define ecosocialism. We believe that ecosocialism will define itself to the extent that it is reflected and conceptualized in praxis; based on what we do and what we are. Nor is the First Ecosocialist International a single organization or a rubber stamp in constant danger of becoming a bureaucracy. It is a common program of struggle, with moments of encounter and exchange, which anyone may join, by committing themselves to fulfilling one or more of the various actions agreed upon here in order to relieve our Mother Earth. No person or process can be owner or protagonist of that which is done and achieved collectively.
We invite all peoples, movements, organizations, collectives and beings in the world to join the First Ecosocialist International, and to undertake the collective construction of a program for the salvation of Mother Earth. By restoring a lost spirituality we may arrive at a new one; a new and sometimes ancient ecosocialist ethic, sacred and irreverent, fed by the sun of conscience. We are recreating our spirituality with a new imagination and a new heartbeat, which may carry us to unity and diversity. The understanding and practice of this new spirituality will have the power to repel empire and capitalism which are powered by greed, and it will be able to strengthen our peoples and cultures which are conditioned by necessities. Because right now we are not living – we are merely surviving. We confront a contradiction: restore life, or lead it to extinction. We must choose.
We don’t have any doubts. We are radicals; we shall return to our roots and our original ways; we shall see the past not only as a point of departure but also as a point of arrival.
A collective birth towards a loving upbringing; we are an immortal embryo… Let’s dream, and act, without sleeping!
*Cumbe: A territory of resistance dedicated to an inter-cultural way of life; a form of organization, production and insurgency pioneered by maroons, who escaped slavery and built alternative societies based on ancestral principles of solidarity and reciprocity and not on competition.
COMBINED STRATEGY AND PLAN OF ACTION
As daughters and sons of Mother Earth and of the Commanding People, we had concluded in the preparatory process, as we wrote clearly in the call to this First Ecosocialist International: “the social relation of greed – for which there are too many people and not enough planet for the accumulation of profits to continue – has generated a global crisis. A total war against life has been launched in order to eliminate the surplus and to control the scarcity that this social relation have falsely conceived.” (The Cry of Mother Earth, 2016) Those of us who responded to the Cry of Mother Earth know and understand that in reality the only surplus is this system, and that what is lacking is not an alternative to this system, nor the necessity of creating another possible world nor new models, but to recognize that we are the original model. They have cheated and confused us, made us dizzy and imposed their counter-model, their alternative to our ways of living based on ancestral principles and practices, which those of us here either never lost, or are in the process of reclaiming.
Based on this, and on the transformative actions of the organizations, collectives and movements who form part of the First Ecosocialist International by adhering to its plan of action, we shall first of all listen to and accompany the struggles of the original peoples of the five continents of the world, in the recuperation of their ancestral lands, cultures and spiritualities, recognizing them as our elder sisters and brothers, as our highest teachers, and as the first and original ecosocialists in the world. We are fully conscious that our best way to imagine a future thousands of years ahead is to return to the paths which humanity has been walking for thousands of years in the past. For this reason, many of the actions contained in this plan are framed in this context.
The earth receives heat from the sun, and should return a part of this heat through the atmosphere. However, due to the greenhouse gases produced by big capital such as carbon dioxide and methane, this heat cannot be returned, and the resulting warming causes the melting of the poles. Many parts of the South Pole have melted, causing the deaths of many species, and the disappearance Arctic ice causes accelerated warming, as the mirror shrinks which reflects the heat from the sun. With the thawing of the tundra and the North Pole, methane is being released, and if it continues to escape it will cause an irreversible catastrophe. There are corporations who are happy about this warming, because they want to exploit these areas for oil.
Global warming is causing an increase in the number of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events. Global warming has caused floods and the melting of glaciers worldwide. In the Cordillera of the Andes the springs are drying out and the rivers become ever more shallow, affecting the surrounding populations and their ecosystems. We must fight the capitalist enterprises which are causing global warming.
Another example is Lake Titicaca, which receives water from various rivers, and there is a river called Desaguadero that drains from it. This river carries water from Lake Titicaca to Lake Poopo, which has almost completely disappeared; and all over the world there are lakes that will probably disappear. The situation of ecosystems in general is alarming, and for this reason many of the actions contained in this plan are directed towards reversing this situation.
If the situation of Mother Earth is grave in relation to losses in the biosphere, it is equally so in relation to the losses in the ethnosphere. The cultural diversity of the symbolic systems where the cultures, myths, legends, oral traditions and songs of many peoples are encoded, is today under grave threat at the hands of a hegemonic globalization and the cultural imposition of patriarchal and anthropocentric western modernity, which loots, dominates, and destroys life. With the certainty that there are other ways of thinking and feeling, other intellectual and spiritual beliefs and ways of relating to our Mother Earth, we define here many collective actions focused on resolving this desolate panorama.
As members of grassroots organizations who form parts of the First Ecosocialist International, who are opposed to the domination which confronts us in competition and war, we propose to accompany with strength and true relationships the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles that the peoples of the world are fighting. We are putting ourselves at the service of their recognition and liberation, so that their words may move the solidarity of nations. Thus we shall speak the truth and teach the truth about the empire and capitalism which are destroying life; we shall remove their disguises so we can recognize and identify them as our enemies. Ecosocialism symbolizes insurgency and love, it is spiritual, pluri-cultural and multi-ethnic, and it teaches decolonization and anti-imperialism. In this spirit we have outlined at the end of this document a Route of Struggle, where several actions and encounters are proposed to carry this out this plan.
The logic of the system which murders life is cunning; it robs us to feed itself, and disguises itself to continue existing. To escape from this logic and its ability to constantly recycle itself, we have decided to adopt a pluricosmovisionary perspective.*
We invite everyone who believes in this dream, and who walk their talk to achieve it, to commit themselves to the fulfillment of this plan. Let us do this on the foundation of the heroic resistance of our peoples, who have kept alive their old ways, their native forests, and their sources of clean water. Let us do it with our own seeds and our ancestral cosmovisions, without poisons or patrons!
We have organized our proposals amongst the five elements: Aether, Water, Earth, Fire and Air, interwoven into the spirit, the milk, the body, the energy and the voice of Mother Earth; harvesting our ancestral cultures so that they may be dispersed as seeds throughout the four sacred directions of the world.
These actions are proposed for the short term – a time of struggle, for the medium term – a time of construction, and the long term – a time of utopia, understanding the long term as approximately 500 years, or a Pachakutik (an era in the Aymara calendar).
*Pluricosmovisionary: A plurality of visions of the cosmos; a perspective which goes beyond the “multidisciplinary” or the “transdisciplinary,” which combine the perspectives of various disciplines, but within the same western and academic epistemology.
AETHER
The Spirit of Mother Earth
The Spirit of Mother Earth
Strategies and actions to reclaim control of our cultures, models of civilization, and ancestral cosmovisions
We set out to question, reformulate, and redefine the symbolic meanings which the alienating development model of transnational capitalist modernity has imposed on mother earth and on our relation to her. Our ancestral cultures have their own meanings, whose vision of nature is a holistic and ecological ensemble; a wholesomeness composed of living beings who are interrelated, interdependent, complementary and in solidarity with each other. We are conscious of these interrelationships, and we propose as a people that the horizon of civilization and life shall be based on caring for nature. We oppose all aggression towards any of nature’s beings, because any such aggression is an attack against life itself, and ultimately an attack against ourselves.
SHORT TERM
Anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles
Anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles
> We commit ourselves first of all to weave ourselves into the diverse struggles of the original peoples of the five continents, to reclaim and demarcate their lands and territories. We understand that in their cosmovisions (visions of the cosmos), the land forms an indissoluble part of their cultural identity. Their ancestral traditions, their sacred sites, and their sovereignty over their lands must be respected. To guarantee this, the expulsion of transnational corporations, paramilitary groups and landowning mafias is required. In the case of Venezuela, the demarcation of the lands of the indigenous peoples of the Sierra de Perija is still not complete, and the struggle continues to detain the plans for mega-mining and coal-burning electric plants, which popular mobilization and Commander Chavez had brought to a halt. We will also lead the reclamation of urban lands for decolonization.
> We recognize the struggle of the Lakota people – as an example of dignity and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistance, which leads the way in unceasing insurgency – towards the recognition of their culture, their forms of life, and their ancestral land, in conflict with the transnational oil corporations which seek to dispossess this original nation. We call for solidarity and unity in this struggle against their historic enemy, in the process of reclaiming their lands, and for the development of initiatives which involve the social movements of the world and the other original peoples of the continent. Thus we seek to fulfill the ancient prophecy of the union of the eagle and the condor.
> We accept our responsibility to recuperate, to study, and to detain the loss of the original languages of the world, because in these languages are the codes which our ancestors left us as their legacy. In these languages many ways of protecting life are encrypted. When we rescue the linguistic niches which are in danger of being lost, we also rescue our original cultures. With these we will construct our own meanings together with all our peoples, in order to fight the alienation of the international capitalist development model and its side effects. It is our duty to recuperate our linguistic sovereignty, in all the aspects in which this may be expressed. It is true that this is a long term task, and precisely because it will take a long time, it is the first which must be initiated in the short term.
> We will actively support the Indigenous Governing Council and its spokeswoman Marichuy (María de Jesús Patricio Martínez) not only in the campaign for the presidency of Mexico in June 2018, but in their permanent struggle for organization, for the deepening of consciousness, and for the construction of autonomy.
MEDIUM TERM
Recovery of historical memory / Hip hop and other manifestations of inclusive art / Pluricosmovisionary perspectives / Rights of mother earth / Decolonization of thought / Reconfiguration of indigenous nations
> We will spread the wisdom of the People’s Teachers (also known as Living Books), and reclaim oral traditions. The concept of People’s Teachers (“Maestro/Maestra Pueblo”) is used in Venezuela to redeem those non-academic teachers whose wisdom and ancestral knowledges are not based on formal institutional recognitions, but on experiential and symbolic knowledge which is based on praxis.
Recovery of historical memory / Hip hop and other manifestations of inclusive art / Pluricosmovisionary perspectives / Rights of mother earth / Decolonization of thought / Reconfiguration of indigenous nations
> We will spread the wisdom of the People’s Teachers (also known as Living Books), and reclaim oral traditions. The concept of People’s Teachers (“Maestro/Maestra Pueblo”) is used in Venezuela to redeem those non-academic teachers whose wisdom and ancestral knowledges are not based on formal institutional recognitions, but on experiential and symbolic knowledge which is based on praxis.
> We will foster participative and protagonistic research by teachers, communities and children, about our ancestral knowledges, in order to transmit this knowledge to other children, adolescents and teachers.
> We will recollect the ancestral cuisine of each territory, based on the memories of grandparents, and we will return it to our schools and communities as recipe books. We will use these books in our schools and communities to feed ourselves with the production of small farmers, re-inventing the traditional gastronomy of our territories, and ensuring that local culture is not lost.
> We will recover, promote and reclaim our ancestral African values, along with their aesthetics (for example luango hairstyles) in all of the global African diaspora. We will also pursue this in relation to the cultural identities of all the indigenous and original peoples of the five continents. We commit ourselves to transmitting these values and aesthetics to future generations, using multiple strategies of communication.
> We will use the musical, artistic, cultural and spiritual power of the hip hop movement, as one of the voices of Mother Earth, to reach higher levels of ecological consciousness, and to reclaim our ancestral cultures. We will work to incorporate it into the curricula of all the different educational systems in the world.
> We will support with all of our commitment as daughters and sons of Mother Earth, to include in the new constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela a chapter which consecrates the Rights of Mother Earth, and everything which forms part of her, such as water. Mother Earth is living being with rights, as a mother, as a sacred space, and thus as a subject of dignity, love, respect and protection. To this end we will engage in struggles, debates, conversations, information and communication campaigns, demonstrations and marches, with the goal of generating the pressures necessary to consolidate our purpose. We propose to do the same in the constitutions of all the countries of the world. We propose as well to no longer use the word ‘resource’ to refer to nature or human beings.
> We will construct solidarity through communality and voluntary service; walking the cultural, spiritual, gastronomical, and musical pathways in all directions of the world.
> Department of the Rainbow of Wisdom: We will promote the creation of schools for open wings and open classrooms. Through multi-ethnic arts, these schools will foster the liberation, education and decolonization of the senses of our children, adolescents and teachers, and will grow to include all places, persons and methodologies based on ecosocialist ethics.
> We will critically reflect upon ourselves to decolonize our culture and knowledge. In the case of Venezuela, we will overcome the parasitism of our revolution and fortify the organizational autonomy of the communal councils, cooperatives, and communes, with the goal of converging towards the greatest community: the universal commune!
> In the medium term, but in relation to the actions put forward in the short term, we will create alliances to protect all peoples and cultures in struggle and resistance.
LONG TERM
The collective construction of knowledge / Transcultural art /
Ancestral knowledge as a mirror of the past in the future / The spiritual identity of the planet
> We will hear and answer the calling of true spiritual sisterhood and brotherhood; recovering through love the connections between mind, spirit, heart and body.
The collective construction of knowledge / Transcultural art /
Ancestral knowledge as a mirror of the past in the future / The spiritual identity of the planet
> We will hear and answer the calling of true spiritual sisterhood and brotherhood; recovering through love the connections between mind, spirit, heart and body.
> In the long term, in relation to peoples in struggle, we will achieve a return to the beginning, when all were one.
> Whatever our spiritualities may be, we will return to our ancestral and spiritual identity in order to form and inform our present and future.
WATER
The Milk of Mother Earth
Strategies and actions to reclaim the management of our water and other common goods
We question and problematize the development model of transnational capitalism. It is the cause of the destruction of nature and the alienating deterioration of humanity’s harmonious relationship with nature. It is causing global warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases, and it is causing the scarcity of water due to its use in industrial agriculture and mining.
Our model or horizon of life and civilization is with the original indigenous cultures of Our America, which share philosophical principles with all the original peoples of the rest of the world. Our model of civilization in Venezuela is at least 15,000 years old. The original communities and civilizations of Bolivia and Peru are between 20,000 and 30,000 years old, as are the original peoples all over the world.
We uphold the wisdom of solidarity, the mandate of horizontal collectivity, and the rotation of responsibilities. This horizon of civilization is part of our culture and forms the base of the ecosocialist constitutional model which we want for ourselves. With this we will replace the capitalist model which seeks to continue dominating us by making us dependent on its products, technologies and forms of organization and decision making.
SHORT TERM
Anti-corporate struggles / Anti-extractivist struggles / Pollution
Anti-corporate struggles / Anti-extractivist struggles / Pollution
> We recognize the vital and spiritual role of water in our lives: Water is an inheritance which we must protect. All life as the right to water. We recognize the importance of guaranteeing and assuring its protection through constituent processes in all countries, through constitutions and public legislations, prohibiting the pollution, privatization, appropriation, and/or commercialization of any part of the water cycle. Therefore we propose:
1. In the case of Venezuela, the new constitution must clearly establish that the consent and approval of peoples and communities shall be required for any decision which may affect, pollute, divert, or interrupt any aspect of the water cycle (surface water, ground water, rainwater, potable water, gray water, etc). Criteria to reach this consent include first of all the participation of all actors without any exclusion, giving absolute priority to the affected communities, and in second place to the state, in taking decisions about the construction of dams, channeling of rivers, construction of aqueducts, canals and other infrastructures which involve water. For example, Article 47 of the Mining Law is insufficient to critically evaluate and prevent the contamination of the Orinoco watershed and other watersheds, which could be caused in the Arco Minero and the Orinoco Petroleum Belt, not to mention the extensive livestock industry, indiscriminate logging, and by the waste water produced by big cities, among others.
2. All over the world, private corporations such as Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, and Polar, among others, appropriate and commercialize water. We require legislations which prohibit this, based on the notion that water is a common good of humanity and all other species.
> We will organize ourselves internally as peoples and communities to confront development projects such as coal-fired power plants and mining. We will establish joint responsibility between original peoples and the state in all decisions, respecting and obeying the rights of the Pachamama, and the cosmovisions and cultural patrimony of indigenous peoples.
MEDIUM TERM
Guardians of water / Access, quality and storage of water / The conservation of watersheds, mangroves, wetlands, rivers, oceans, lakes, glaciers and other bodies of water / Water in cities
> We will work to make visible to the world the achievement of 10 years of struggle of the revolutionary environmentalist movement of Venezuela in its real and important dimension: the decree, on the Day of Water this year of 2017, establishing the Caura National Park, the largest national park of tropical forest in the world, and the second largest in size, with 7,532,952 hectares, which represents eight percent of the national territory, and constitutes the largest protected reservoir of carbon and the largest protected producer of oxygen in the world.
Guardians of water / Access, quality and storage of water / The conservation of watersheds, mangroves, wetlands, rivers, oceans, lakes, glaciers and other bodies of water / Water in cities
> We will work to make visible to the world the achievement of 10 years of struggle of the revolutionary environmentalist movement of Venezuela in its real and important dimension: the decree, on the Day of Water this year of 2017, establishing the Caura National Park, the largest national park of tropical forest in the world, and the second largest in size, with 7,532,952 hectares, which represents eight percent of the national territory, and constitutes the largest protected reservoir of carbon and the largest protected producer of oxygen in the world.
> We will organize ourselves in communities to make maps of our territories, in which we will locate:
1. Our wise elders, the People’s Teachers, who inhabit our watersheds; our grandmothers who preserve memory.
2. With their help, we will map the watercourses; the rivers, lagoons, springs, and wetlands. We will locate which ones are alive in order to protect them, and which ones have been lost in order to rescue them. We will protect and reintroduce the species of flora and fauna which our grandparents remember living in those places, which are vital parts of the water cycle.
3. We will identify in our watersheds all the organizations and institutions which are involved in the protection of nature, and we will organize ourselves in communities to defend our rivers. We will also include in these maps sacred sites, and the trails of wild animals.
4. We will identify on these maps the families and.or agribusiness transnationals which maintain monocultures and use agrochemicals which contaminate the water, in order to collectively question as communities the causes and effects of this model, and to share knowledges, technologies and techniques which will allow us to return to the original models of agriculture in harmony with nature.
5. We will identify on these maps the zones of logging and we will organize ourselves to stop it.
6. We will identify on these maps the enterprises of national or transnational capital; the means of communication, the organizations, institutions and actors (armed, foreign, military, religious, visiting, etc), who have appropriated and are commercializing our surface, ground or rain water. We will also map the national laws which permit this.
> We question the concentration of population in cities, and the engineering, habits and way of life associated with it. These include the indiscriminate and irrational use of potable water in daily life; its waste and squandering through inappropriate habits, its contamination with detergents and with human excrement and urine which generates wastewater. In the case of Venezuela, the model which the state is using to build new housing aggravates the problem of water, because it repeats and induces this model. Therefore we propose:
1. We will conduct local and regional workshops to teach about water management, and the uses of human excrement and urine for agriculture.
2. We commit ourselves to registering, measuring, projecting and systematizing the amount of water we waste and contaminate in our daily lives, and to investigating the technologies and solutions which we can apply.
3. It is urgent at the level of the community and at the level of the state to develop new technologies tackle the irrational use of potable water in homes, schools, urban planning, state buildings, etc. Therefore we have decided to organize ourselves into Maroon Committees of Science and Technology, to question this situation and incorporate technologies such as the productive houses of Fruto Vivas, composting toilets, biodigesters, collection centers, the utilization of black metal sheets to evaporate urine, along with other technologies to improve the standards of potable water for human consumption, such as living filters, in all our communities. We call upon the state to incorporate technologies into their buildings which don’t waste water.
> We will support all the necessary actions towards the goal that the rivers of the state of Yaracuy, where the First Ecosocialist International was realized, become once again navigable, and to reverse the process of contamination.
LONG TERM
The belief in the return of clear water / The restoration of paradise on earth
The belief in the return of clear water / The restoration of paradise on earth
> The rivers, oceans, lakes and all other bodies of water in the world will once again be completely decontaminated and de-acidified, and it will be as it was in the beginning when life began in the water.
> The rivers, oceans, lakes and all other bodies of water in the world will be navigable once again, as they were in the beginning; communicating between different territories and socio-bioregions. In the particular case of South America, the watersheds of the Orinoco, the Amazon and the Plata will be reunited, and the rivers which compose it will allow reconnection and peace in the interior of the Great Mother and Fatherlands.
EARTH
The Body of Mother Earth
Strategies and actions to reclaim management of our food and health
We will not leave food sovereignty only in the hands of the state; rather we will take responsibility for it as communities. We will preserve the culture of the conuco, based on its carriers – conuqueros and conuqueras– and based on the conuco itself.* The conuco is not only a form of production based on polyculture and social property, but also a model of civilization. In the conuco we care for the soil, the water, the seeds and embryos, and pass them on to new generations. With the conuco we safeguard our own forms of production, germination, distribution, processing, cuisine and seed saving (with sunlight, breeze, salt, clay, smoke, ash, etc), and we also provide for animal protein (chickens, turkeys, ducks, pigs, rabbits, etc) and donkeys for transportation. The conuco is not backwards. We promote conuconsciousness, or consciousness of the conuco, in all its expressions and translations which it has in the different ancestral cultures of Mother Earth. Along with native, indigenous and campesino seeds, we will also sow the seeds of solidarity, and care for them until the harvest; practicing this with everyone at all moments and all places
* Conuco: The conuco is the ancestral mode of production practiced by indigenous people in Venezuela. It corresponds to the words for similar indigenous agricultural forms such as the allyu (in Bolivia), the chacra (in Argentina), and the milpa and chinampa (in Mexico), among many others.
SHORT TERM
Anti-consumerist struggles / Struggles against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) /
Pollution / Medical militias
Anti-consumerist struggles / Struggles against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) /
Pollution / Medical militias
> We will foster hard-hitting information campaigns about the negative and problematic social and environmental effects generated by the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and agrochemicals. We will promote debates, conversations and assemblies in both rural and urban communities; in schools, universities, workplaces and beyond.
> We will design and promote communication campaigns in the five continents about the reclamation and revaluation of the ancestral kitchen. We will take note of the conscious uses and customs of our grandparents, and the nutritional, spiritual, symbolic and healing properties of what they consumed, along with how much. These campaigns will be conducted through social networks, infographics, murals, graffiti, literary creations, newspaper-murals, magazines, radio spots, among other audiovisual media.
> We will create an education and consciousness raising campaign in schools to minimize the negative effects on the environment of the indiscriminate use of disposable plastics. We will also promote the creation of legal instruments such as laws and decrees, which regulate and limit the use of plastic in our territories.
> We will implement and realize work days of mutual aid, kayapa and trueke, as strategies to foment ancestral customs, and to build the community, solidarity and shared responsibility necessary for good life (buen vivir). Trueke can be translated literally as “barter,” but beyond this it is a social movement in Venezuela built around anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist visions of eliminating money and returning to the ancestral mode of production, consumption and distribution. Kayapa is a term which designates an indigenous ancestral form of shared labor and collective effort, by which the community is gathered to plant or harvest or clear a neighboring road, etc, bearing always in mind to help the most needy or incapacitated; an exchange of services with solidarity and without monetary compensations.
> We will work to transmit and multiply the experience of the creation of the anti-GMO, anti-patent Popular Seed Law of Venezuela, which protects local, indigenous, afro-descendant and campesino seeds in their diverse territories, and considers the seed as the foundation of life, sovereignty and liberty. We find it necessary to spread the word about this experience, in conversation, in print, on screen and beyond.
> The movements and organizations who together form parts of the First Ecosocialist International collectively adhere to the intercontinental alliance against the transnational agribusiness corporations, led by MonBayer (Monsanto and Bayer), enemies of life on the planet. We will move in solidarity with the peoples most effected by these poisons, such as the archipelago of Hawai’i (Kanaka Maoli) where an extremely high percentage of GMOs are produced, and where there is an advanced struggle towards the definitive defeat of biopiracy, at the hands of the organized and mobilized peoples of the world.
> We will create medical militias, made up of contingents of traditional healers, midwives, nurses, community doctors, and conuqueros; the wise, the old, People’s Teachers, shamans, people who are living books, etc, who thread together knowledges and practices that promote the self-management of medicine in our communities.
MEDIUM TERM
Guardians of Seeds / Reclaiming of the conuco, the chacra, the allyu, the chinampa, and other forms of the original agriculture / Food security and sovereignty / Agroecology / Forest and mountain conservation / Solid waste management / Healthy eating / Holistic community medicines / Generic medicines / Mental health
> We will support and bring to light the work of seed savers in all their diverse territorial realities, committing ourselves to their recognition as the ultimate defenders of our cultural and nutritional sovereignty and identity. We will promote their self-organization into popular councils for the protection of the seeds of local, indigenous, afro-descendant and small-holding farmers throughout the length and breadth of Mother Earth. These councils shall act as stitches in a strategic weave for the care, multiplication and dissemination of seeds. In the case of Venezuela, we will strive for the constitutional recognition of these councils as supreme autonomous organizations, charged with the right and the duty to give continuity to our Popular Seed Law, an instrument backed up by grassroots movements not only in Venezuela but also in Ecuador and Bolivia. This law and alliance shall serve as a universal reference to support and motivate struggles and initiatives of our sister and brother countries.
Guardians of Seeds / Reclaiming of the conuco, the chacra, the allyu, the chinampa, and other forms of the original agriculture / Food security and sovereignty / Agroecology / Forest and mountain conservation / Solid waste management / Healthy eating / Holistic community medicines / Generic medicines / Mental health
> We will support and bring to light the work of seed savers in all their diverse territorial realities, committing ourselves to their recognition as the ultimate defenders of our cultural and nutritional sovereignty and identity. We will promote their self-organization into popular councils for the protection of the seeds of local, indigenous, afro-descendant and small-holding farmers throughout the length and breadth of Mother Earth. These councils shall act as stitches in a strategic weave for the care, multiplication and dissemination of seeds. In the case of Venezuela, we will strive for the constitutional recognition of these councils as supreme autonomous organizations, charged with the right and the duty to give continuity to our Popular Seed Law, an instrument backed up by grassroots movements not only in Venezuela but also in Ecuador and Bolivia. This law and alliance shall serve as a universal reference to support and motivate struggles and initiatives of our sister and brother countries.
> In all of our territories, in our communities, schools, universities, social organizations and other spaces, we will realize and inspire local investigations about native plants and seeds: their protection and conservation, the ancestral technologies for sowing, multiplying, and protecting them; their properties as foods and medicines; and how to process and use them while respecting ancestral cosmovisions.
> We will increase the planting of local plants free of GMOs, patents or agrochemicals, according to the diverse realities of our territories. We will preserve, conserve and multiply their seeds through conucos/chacras/allyus, farms and urban gardens, as spaces which promote them.
> We will carry out programs of production, distribution and use of organic agricultural inputs, starting from the collection of organic wastes in urban and rural communities. Through the diffusion and formation of techniques for the holistic and ecological management of productive spaces we will also revalorize and reclaim our ancestry.
> We will bring about the decriminalization of all the sacred plants, for their uses in foods and medicines, so that they will no longer be marginalized. In this way we will undercut the policies and politics serving the transnational pharmaceutical industries which criminalize, displace and patent these plants. We shall recover our ancestral and traditional medicines, knowledges, methods and practices, and include them in all public and private health centers, with training and practice programs. We will promote legislations in favor of ancestral and natural medicines, which permit their recognition, revaluation and application, which decriminalize their uses, and which prohibit the patenting of collective knowledges.
> We will foster the original model of the Latin American Institute of Agroecology “Paulo Freire,” as a strategy for training rural social movements in agroecology, and adapt and replicate it throughout the other continents of the world. At the Latin American Institute of Agroecology, members of rural social movements from Venezuela and other countries of Latin America come to study, with the commitment to return to their countries and movements once they have graduated to share their knowledge.
> We will make known the advances and experiences of institutional or community natural park guards who are sensitive to ecosocialism, who have worked to make protected areas into ecologically productive spaces, and who promote a new conception and perception of these protected areas; with the goal of transforming them from commodities for predatory tourism only for human enjoyment, into spaces of coexistence and a new socio-territorial order without divisions.
> We will foster the multiplication on all the continents of the politics implemented by the Latin American School of Medicine “Dr. Salvador Allende.” These shall serve as universal spaces to teach holistic medicine. This practice will be based on ancestral cosmovisions such as indigenous, traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, where we recognize and take responsibility for the sacred and indivisible links between life-giving seeds, foods and medicines. We will build this practice through alliances and connections between the diverse organizations struggling for the self-management of health; those who sustain life in all the cardinal points of our planet.
> We understand that just like Mother Earth, we human beings too are contaminated. Therefore we will foster and uplift the exchange and sharing of knowledges about ancestral and millenarian techniques that may help us to find internal peace and harmony. We will do this as individuals and collectives, without implying any economic benefit for the people who have a mastery of these knowledges.
> We will strengthen and continue to promote the experiences we have consolidated, (spirals of urban family production, trueke systems, and occupy, among others) which inspire autonomous practices based on ancestral cultures, and which have a positive influence on individual and collective mental health. These practices are healing because they promote more healthy relationships between human beings and Mother Earth; based on the reality of what we are; generating solutions from the micro to the macro; reconstructing a great transformative and pluricosmovisionary quilt. Thus we shall transform ourselves and our world through concrete and interconnected examples, which will open cracks in the great fraud of the disassociating capitalist society in which we are submerged.
> Through spaces like farmers’ markets and others, we will promote healthy, local, tasty and sovereign nutrition. We will work in everyday places like schools, communities, universities, parks, plazas and workspaces, to facilitate the sharing, multiplication and demonstration of popular and ancestral knowledges of native cuisine.
> Around the world, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, we will plant moringa oleifera, amaranthus, and phylanthum niruri ; towards the harvest of sovereignty over our food and medicine.
> We will sequester the excess of atmospheric carbon with plans for a planetary sowing. We will investigate the plants and techniques which have the highest carbon-sequestration properties, and we will plant and apply them; from planting trees to tossing seed-balls, according to the respective social and ecological conditions of our territories.
> We will design and establish forest gardens, according to the diverse territories and realities which will allow us to guarantee food, oxygen, and the recovery of native seeds and animals.
LONG TERM
The reflection of natural ancestral medicine into the future / Rehumanized health /
Nutritional identities of everyone who lives well in every territory
The reflection of natural ancestral medicine into the future / Rehumanized health /
Nutritional identities of everyone who lives well in every territory
> We will re-establish the ancestral forms of social life and optimum levels of organization which make a good life possible, such as the conuco, the milpa, the chacra, among other ways of life and production. We will develop their full potentials, towards the construction of cosmic communities; overcoming at last the effects of the propaganda and indoctrination which the cultural patrons of capitalism have imposed.
FIRE
The Energy of Mother Earth
Strategies and actions to reclaim our economies of mutual aid, our ecologically and social appropriate and appropriable technologies, and our sources of renewable energy.
SHORT TERM
Anti-capitalist struggles / Anti-nuclear struggles
Anti-capitalist struggles / Anti-nuclear struggles
> We declare a special recognition of the people of Taria, Palmarejo and Agua Negra, in the municipality of Veroes and the state of Yaracuy, in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, as exemplars of ecosocialist practice.
> We will launch campaigns of information and concrete action all over the world against fracking and nuclear war, as they endanger Mother Earth, the human species and all life.
MEDIUM TERM
Trade unions / Trueke systems and solidarity economies / Renweable energies and ecological technologies / Climate justice / Cooperative industries / Migration to an ecosocialist economy
> We will promote the radical transformation of trade unions, convoking them to lead from within, with organizational and economic strength, a global migration towards ecosocialism. In the first place, to divest from the extractivist economy of Wall Street, and to invest in solidarity economies, for example by supporting productive agroecology projects, cooperative industries, or enterprises of social property. Unions must also take responsibility for their principal role in the re-appropriation of social capital captured by the capitalist class and their transnational corporations.
Trade unions / Trueke systems and solidarity economies / Renweable energies and ecological technologies / Climate justice / Cooperative industries / Migration to an ecosocialist economy
> We will promote the radical transformation of trade unions, convoking them to lead from within, with organizational and economic strength, a global migration towards ecosocialism. In the first place, to divest from the extractivist economy of Wall Street, and to invest in solidarity economies, for example by supporting productive agroecology projects, cooperative industries, or enterprises of social property. Unions must also take responsibility for their principal role in the re-appropriation of social capital captured by the capitalist class and their transnational corporations.
> All over the world we will activate, spread, and consolidate systems of trueke – or solidarity exchanges, either by direct barter or with local tokens, but without the use of money – towards the free association of prosumers (conscious producers and consumers), for which the practices of original peoples and the experiences of trueke in Venezuela may serve as references. These systems have functioned as spaces of anti-consumerism, struggle, resistance, and recovery of the sense of community and identity, strengthening the bonds of friendship and de-commodifying our lives. They have also served to revalorize and restore the spirituality of our ancestors, to rescue and multiply our seeds and embryos for organic agriculture, and to offer Mother Earth new spiritual economies of mutual aid, based on need and not on greed.
> We will create, develop and promote economies of solidarity which are explicitly anti-capitalist and based on ecology; for example the alternative socio-productive units which incorporate the principles agreed upon in this First Ecosocialist International, along with other systems, cooperatives, forms of production and ways of life. These will attend to human needs and not to the satisfaction of greed. They will not depend on the capitalist system, and they will be used as foundations for a migration to an ecosocialist economy. They will move us towards creating new ways of thinking, and undermine capital.
> We will foster the awakening of the peoples of the United States, the European Union and other “developed” nations, that they may become conscious of their shared responsibility to both put an end to the system of death which endangers the human species, and to migrate towards a system in harmony with Mother Earth, which is none other than ecosocialism. This may be expressed in multiple and different ways. For instance they might better control those who govern them; they may demand from their governments the payment of economic reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialism, for the wounds they have caused the world with their wars and with climate change, and for an ongoing genocide against Latin Americans and Africans, among others.
> We will advance an international and communitarian solar energy project, focused on collectively raising funds to finance three to four solar farms every year, between the organizations and communities who form part of the First Ecosocialist International.
> We will launch the creation of Universities of High Technology around the world, to develop the production of renewable energy, and to spread and share them with communities so that they may be reproduced. In the case of Venezuela, we request that the Bolivarian Republic re-start the wind farms in Guajira and Paraguana which are already installed, for the empowerment of the “Sembrando Luz” program, using solar and wind energy. There is already enough human expertise in our countries necessary for these kinds of projects, and the context of economic warfare in which we live makes it all the more urgent to diversify the economy and develop alternatives to oil.
> We propose to the people and to the revolutionary government that Venezuela should lead a transition to 100% renewable energy in Latin America. Part of its oil may be used to implement an energy and technology system based on solar, wind, geothermic and other energies. This initiative could guarantee a migration to ecosocialism and towards solar communism; to create a possible world which uses energy from the sun and other renewable sources without the negative impacts caused by fossil fuels. This could work as an initiative of cooperation between Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Cuba, among others, including negotiations with China; towards an exchange of oil for the provision of solar and wind technology. The purpose is not only to produce energy, but to share it with other peoples.
LONG TERM
The reflection of ancestral communitarian socialism into the future / Economic autonomy and self-sufficiency at the territorial level
The reflection of ancestral communitarian socialism into the future / Economic autonomy and self-sufficiency at the territorial level
> We take responsibility for our utopia as an eternal journey, with stops and retreats; towards realizing the happiness which is possible in our dreams. We encounter ecosocialism in the aboriginal and ancestral peoples of humanity, in indigenous, afro-descendant and campesino peoples.
> We will harvest the socialism of the 21st century and all centuries, until we arrive at a communism of the sun, wind and water, receiving all spiritualities together, towards the defense of the common, and the free integration of languages and forms of exchange, without any loss of autonomy or originality. We will be united in diversity.
AIR
The Voice of Mother Earth
Strategies and actions to reclaim the management of our liberating education and communication, for the defense of peace, rights, and living the good life
The rural woman has a fundamental role in cultural resistance, defending different models of life and ancestral agricultures, but the patriarchal mentality remains dominant. Therefore the anti-patriarchal training of men and women is vital, in order to pass on the culture of care for life. This must be carried out in our political practices and in our daily lives, in order to eradicate the criminalization of our sisters and brothers who struggle for their rights as indigenous peoples and nations.
We will foster the transformation of the educational system from pre-school to the doctorate level. As schools are an instrument of capital, we shall take responsibility for the debates about what is taught in them. We will transform education to create a new relationship with Mother Earth. This will be based on learning by doing, and learning by playing, without impositions of any kind. The teaching of ecosocialism to our daughters and sons, beginning with preschool, will be decisive towards creating and proliferating community child-care centers as spaces for the socialization of new generations. These will be given an ecosocialist and collective character of nurturing, in the function of the good life of our peoples. This must be carried out towards the transformation of the productivist model which is promoted in all the schools of Venezuela and the world. We will decolonize ourselves.
SHORT TERM
Anti-machista and anti-patriarchal struggles / Anti-xenophobic struggles /
Experiences of popular education and communication
Anti-machista and anti-patriarchal struggles / Anti-xenophobic struggles /
Experiences of popular education and communication
> We will form circles of anti-patriarchal and pro-feminist women and men all over the world, who will gather in favor of harmony and equilibrium, towards horizontal equity and diversity, seeking the care of themselves and their relationships with others, with families, communities, peoples, territories and Mother Earth. These circles have the purpose of fighting against the destruction of life in our surroundings; including violence against women, non-heterosexual, and gender-diverse peoples. These circles will also be spaces to promote care for sexual and reproductive health, and to foster conversations directed towards creating new forms of thinking. These circles will promote anti-patriarchal fatherhoods and motherhoods, which imply shared responsibilities in unpaid housework and community work, based on a feminist and ecosocialist ethics of responsibility and care.
> We will continue the struggle for the liberation of political prisoners, wherever in the world they may be found.
> We will continue the construction of a school for the training of ecosocialist leaders/facilitators at the service of the other diplomacy (the understanding between peoples in harmony with Mother Earth). The purpose of this school is to make possible the viability of the plan of action and the route of struggle of the First Ecosocialist International. It upholds as ethical principles: training based on the permanent exchange of experiences; entrusting ourselves to the ecosocialist collective, in opposition to capitalist individualism; and the implementation of self-management, self-reliance, and autonomy. This school will have fixed and mobile bases on the five continents. Its curriculum shall include: strengthening the roots and sense of belonging of its participants; the knowledge and the integration of the social movements of the world; the methodologies of liberatory popular education which empower the participation of the people (making their situations visible, so that their voice may be heard and listened to) and the use of multiple languages.
> We will foster indigenous curricula, which correspond to the essence of the human being more than to the atrophied colonial structures. These will recognize the existence of the knowledges which have preserved and conserved native seeds and the original agriculture; which redeem our ancestral cultures and knowledges, so that they may be passed on to our children and adolescents.
> We will promote the example of the Maestras Cimarronas (Maroon Teachers) of Veroes, who work on the projects of the Productive Sociocultural Calendar; towards the recollection and recovery of seeds, embryos, cuisines, crafts, dances, music, trueke and the conuquero school, the sowing of water and the reforestation of watersheds. The goal is to ensure the recovery of water in every part of the planet for ten generations ahead. All of these projects will be developed as pedagogical practices and instruments which make possible the participation of children, families and their schools. The Productive Sociocultural Calendar is a program of liberatory popular education developed over many years in Venezuela, which has facilitated diverse innovative pedagogical tools. Its curriculum is based on the knowledge of the community.
> We will promote and work to strengthen traditional schools, based on the exemplary experience of Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa, the Guardians of Water School of the Lakota people, and their work with children. The purity, ingenuity and tenderness of children are elements which represent a lighthouse in the struggle against capitalism and its elements of domination, such as patriarchy. The process of training which we develop alongside our children constitutes a monumental responsibility which converts us into facilitators over the medium and long term to achieve the connection with the earth and the stars. These schools are based on ancestral knowledges of the original cultures, which are the guarantors of this historic cycle towards the conformation of a new humanity.
> We recognize the work developed by the Taring Padi artist collective of Indonesia, which involves the children and families of rural and urban workers in visual arts. The graphic arts are converted into a motor for the liberation of consciousness of the people. We believe in the importance of replicating these kinds of experiences in other parts of the world, as a tool and as training to confront and overcome violence. Given the importance of visual art as a tool f communication and training, we commit ourselves to the elaboration of illustrated materials for children and adults, which will reflect aspects of the cultural lives of our peoples, to share and spread their knowledges. With this perspective, we constitute ourselves into a team of companions in the First Ecosocialist International to elaborate and publish these materials.
> We have decided to unite and interweave our struggles into an alliance. Therefore:
1. We unite for the salvation of Mother Earth. We will weave alliances to carry this information to every forum and encounter. The international delegates to the First Ecosocialist International in particular commit themselves to developing campaigns so that other sister and brother countries of the world may know about our collective plan of action.
2. We will share our experiences, opening everything we are discussing here into formation, information, diffusion and communication, via email, a Wikipedia page about the First Ecosocialist International, social networks, websites, radio shows, printed publications and others; nationally and internationally, based on each local context.
3. We open for contributions the journal Lucha Indigena, where a special section will be inaugurated dedicated to spreading the news about actions taken in the course of fulfilling the plan and the route of struggle of the First Ecosocialist International. News and analysis of the struggles of indigenous peoples and/or about ecosocialist actions may be sent to this email address: luchaindigena@gmail.com
> We will make use of new technologies and social networks in order to maintain exchange between us, with the goal of sharing the information, skills, knowledges, struggles and actions related to this plan. But above all we understand that the virtual does not substitute for physical, and we will push for further meetings where we may experience the magic of encounter, as a space which makes nearness, looks in the eye, and mutual recognition possible.
MEDIUM TERM
Displacement / Political and climate refugees / Women / Peace militias / Social Movements
Displacement / Political and climate refugees / Women / Peace militias / Social Movements
> We face migratory processes which are caused by climate change, wars, aggressions, problems of political order, and more. We recognize the dispossessed, the victims of uprootedness; the political and climate refugees of the world, as new social actors and as potential revolutionary subjects of a new era. To attend to and support them must be our priority, alongside other peoples in struggle. We believe that the elaboration of “maps of origin” may be helpful in developing a process of recuperation of identities, for preserving historic memory, for ethnic and territorial recognition, and for the strengthening of the spirit in the face of the suffering they face at the hands of terrorism, the terminal stage of capitalism.
> We will promote the socialization and analysis of existing laws which pertain to the environment, water, soil, and others, when this may help to activate organized collectives; to empower ourselves to become the guarantors of their application and accountability.
> We will work in all the territories of the planet towards a world where everyone may give birth and be born with love and pleasure, with respect and confidence, creating the legal and human conditions so that this sublime and primary act may be the most desired, sensed, loved and cared-for moment. We will empower ourselves as mothers and fathers to decide how, when, where and whether or not to have children. We will struggle for the rights of children, and for the rights of women to a life free of obstetric violence. We will promote natural births in homes, and support traditional midwives who accompany the bringing of new life into the world; favoring everyone’s right to a good birth. We will encourage the recognition of the ancestral knowledge of midwives, and we will favor their inclusion into public legislations and constitutional texts. We will stimulate the creation of schools for natural birth in all the countries of the world.
> All adherents of the First Ecosocialist International who may have children, commit ourselves to implementing this plan of action first of all within our own families. (We will teach our children the original languages of their territories; we will share with equity unpaid housework, etc.)
> We commit ourselves to advance in raising levels of consciousness; conforming ourselves into an instrument of mass education and a bridge between already existing radical projects and forces of economic and environmental justice. We will strive to make possible the greater interconnection of all socio-political organizations and movements with ecosocialist profiles via the First Ecosocialist International and its plan of action. We will act in an interrelated and harmonious way as catalysts of new forces and initiatives, towards reaching economic, ecological and climate justice in every country in the world.
> We will protect and promote wildlife, so that it may grow in abundance, without any perspective of economic benefit, as an indispensable condition for the recovery and restoration of Mother Earth.
> We will promote the training of the women of the world in self-defense and use of weapons, for their protection and freedom.
> We commit ourselves to struggle permanently until we achieve the abolition of bullfights and other similar aberrant attacks and violations against the rights of animals, which promote a culture of death, suffering and torture as spectacle.
> We recognize the practices developed by the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement of Sri Lanka, and particularly their Peace Army (Shanti Sena), which intervenes in zones of war and conflict with direct actions of a non-violent character, including meditation as an instrument of struggle to demobilize and/or deactivate the hatred, xenophobia, confrontation and fear which seek to terrorize and intimidate our people. We commit ourselves to a quest to replicate these practices on the five continents, and to activate them in the face of any imminent risk of fascism or world war.
> We will create a campaign of consciousness, education and action to regulate, minimize and in the long run eliminate the internal combustion engine. We will also promote the creation of legal instruments such as laws and decrees which regulate and limit the use of private cars in all of our territories, so that we may breathe!
LONG TERM
To return to the apprenticeship of the young with the old, as a mirror of the past in the future /
The reading of reality and nature
To return to the apprenticeship of the young with the old, as a mirror of the past in the future /
The reading of reality and nature
> In all our communities and territories, we will all be trained in the reading of reality and the reading of nature (observation and apprenticeship with nature). This will allow us to interact with our political, social, and economic contexts, and also with local energies; with the plants, insects, waters, and animals in our surroundings. This kind of literacy is an instrument of encounter, introspection and for the enjoyment of communal living.
> All human beings will speak at least two languages; an original language of their territory, and a language which allows them to communicate with other territories and continents. We also imagine that we will evolve our communicational abilities, and learn/remember to speak with animals, plants and even with the stars.
ROUTE OF STRUGGLE OF THE FIRST ECOSOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL
> We acknowledge the gathering which founded the First Ecosocialist International in the Cumbe of Veroes as a reference point for methodology and social relations: it has been based on an exchange of experiences which allowed communities and peoples to recognize each other, and cradled healthy collective living and apprenticeship with other cultures based on mutual aid and respect. For these reasons we propose that this experience and method be replicated as much as possible in the future encounters of the First Ecosocialist International; in the fulfillment of its plan and on its route of struggle.
> Every year between October 31st and November 3rd, we will organize days of shared and synchronized work on a planetary scale for the fulfillment of this plan of action.
> We will facilitate “The First International Encounter of Sowers and Guardians of Water” in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, in November of 2018. The Bolivian people will decide on the exact location, but we suggest the following criteria:
* To recognize the communities of Cochabamba and their struggle for water.
* That it be hosted by grassroots communities and movements
* To recognize water as a tool for the construction of unity between all peoples who struggle for peace and their right to water.
* That it be hosted by grassroots communities and movements
* To recognize water as a tool for the construction of unity between all peoples who struggle for peace and their right to water.
> We will develop a route of regional conversations and seminars during 2018 and 2019 to promote and strengthen the First Ecosocialist International, focusing on gathering the forces of the five continents of the world to Reweave Pangaea.
> We will realize new encounters and convergences of the First Ecosocialist International, according to the criteria which seek to support those peoples who are most under siege and attack by the empire and the great powers of the world: We shall begin with Palestine, Puerto Rico (Boricua) and Hawai’i (Kanaka Maoli), as emblematic examples of decolonization struggles, and as stops on a Route of Struggle which will advance including all other peoples and territories who meet these criteria.
> To follow up and amplify the plan of action of the First Ecosocialist International, we will program a PanAfrican convergence, to promote the interrelationship of Our America with Our Africa.
> To follow up and amplify the plan of action of the First Ecosocialist International, we will program a PanAsian convergence in Sri Lanka, to promote the interrelationship of Our America with Our Asia.
DEMANDS AND DENUNCIATIONS
> We demand that President Maduro accelerate the plans for the introducing native fish species into all the dams and other standing waters in Venezuela. We invite other social movements of the world to follow this example.
> We will push for the approbation of the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth by the United Nations.
Justice has not yet been done to the intellectual authors of the assassination of Cacique Sabino Romero.
Justice has not yet been done to the intellectual authors of the assassination of Cacique Sabino Romero.
> We demand liberty for the young Yukpa farmers Rodolfo and Leonardo Fernandez, the children of Cacica Carmen Fernandez, who struggles for the earth.
> We demand freedom for political prisoners Milagro Salas and justice for the disappearance and later murder of Santiago Maldonado, in both cases denouncing the guilt of the Argentine government of Mauricio Macri.
THANK YOU!
We thank first of all everyone in the towns of Agua Negra, Taria and Palmarejo, and their hosting organizations: Colectivo de Maestras Cimarronas de Veroes, Red de Konuker@s Biorregion Occidente, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas “Cumbe Adentro” and the Red de Organizaciones Afro de Veroes.
We thank first of all everyone in the towns of Agua Negra, Taria and Palmarejo, and their hosting organizations: Colectivo de Maestras Cimarronas de Veroes, Red de Konuker@s Biorregion Occidente, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas “Cumbe Adentro” and the Red de Organizaciones Afro de Veroes.
We also express our gratitude to: The Alcaldía Bolivariana del Municipio Veroes, Gobernación Bolivariana del Estado Yaracuy, ZODI Yaracuy, Zona Educativa Yaracuy, Central Azucarera Santa Clara, Corpesca, The Ministry of Popular Power for Women and Gender Equality, the Ministry of Popular Power for Ecosocialism and Water, The Ministry of Popular Power for Culture, Cancillería de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, Casa de las Primeras Letras and to everyone who in one way or another contributed so that the First Ecosocialist International could be born in the cradle of the maroon movement, and in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the first country in the world which has committed itself to ecosocialism in its plan of government.
HOW TO BE PART OF THE FIRST ECOSOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL
In the first place, we believe along with Jose Marti that “the best way to say is to do.” The best way to be part of the First Ecosocialist International is to commit yourself to fulfilling one or more of the actions in this collective strategy and plan of action. In this way, your collectives, organizations, and movements will be “part of the First Ecosocialist International.” No individual or group is the First Ecosocialist International alone; it is only when we are. If you would like the name of your collective, organization or movement to appear alongside others on a list that will be compiled, or to send pictures or reports about actions taken which contribute to the fulfillment of this plan, they will be welcome at the following addresses: llamadodelosduendes@gmail.com (in Spanish) / prefiguration@gmail.com (in English).
INVITED PARTICIPANTS FROM THE FOLLOWING PEOPLES AND ORGANIZATIONS:
Indigenous Peoples of Venezuela:
Bare, Piaroa, Piapoco, Jivi, Yebarana, Yanomami and Kurripaco from the state of Amazonas; Wayuu and Yukpa from the Sierra de Perija.
Bare, Piaroa, Piapoco, Jivi, Yebarana, Yanomami and Kurripaco from the state of Amazonas; Wayuu and Yukpa from the Sierra de Perija.
National Organizations:
Movimiento Ambientalista Venezolano, Colectivo INDIA (Instituto de Investigación y Defensa Integral Autogestionaria) de Caracas, Circulo de Hombres de Caracas, Calendario Productivo Socio Cultural, Escuelas Populares de Semillas y de Piscicultura de Apure, Sistema de Trueke de Mérida, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas Los Mintoyes de Mistajá, Escuela de Parteras AMAY KARA de Mérida, Red de Konuker@s Biorregion Andina de La Azulita, Mérida, Unidad de producción Audiovisual Semilla de Paz, Comuna Agroecológica El Tambor de La Azulita, Mérida, Red de Konuker@s “Cumbe Adentro” de Veroes, Yaracuy, Colectivo de Maestras Cimarronas de Veroes, Yaracuy, Asociación Tambores de Taria, Veroes, Yaracuy, Konukos Escolares de Veroes, Yaracuy, Cumbe Afro Agua Negra, Veroes, Yaracuy, Cumbe de Conuqueros El Esfuerzo de Taria, Veroes, Yaracuy, Red de Organizaciones Afro de Yaracuy, Sistema de Trueke Urachiche, Yaracuy, Comuna Ali Primera de Urachiche, Yaracuy, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas de Yaracuy, Epatu Konuko de Aragua, Guerrilla Republik Vzla, Sistema de Trueke Paraguachoa de Nueva Esparta, Sistema de Trueke L@S Pariagotos de Sucre, Sembradores de Agua de Maturincito la Cumbre, Sucre, Diseminadores de Semillas de Lara, Consejo de Sabios, Monte Carmelo, Lara, Universidad Campesina de Venezuela “Argimiro Gabaldón” de Lara, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas “Renato y El Caiman” de Monte Carmelo, Lara, Colectivo Investigacion “El Maestro Cafe” de Sanare, Lara, Emisora Sanareña 101.9 FM de Sanare, Lara, Movimiento Agroecológico Paulo Freire de Barinas, Sistema de Trueke Guapotorí Guaicaipuru de Los Teques, Miranda, Taller Urquía Amaru de Miranda, Colectivo Tapiramo, Frente de Campesinos Argelia Laya, Municipio Páez, Miranda, Proyectos Productivos CLAP Fco de Miranda Mpio. Guasimo de Táchira, Compañía de Títeres Kirimarí de Táchira, Colectivo Todo es Creación, Valera, Trujillo, Red de Comuner@s del Valle del Momboy, Valera, Trujillo, Colectivo Cimarrón de Maracaibo, Zulia, Organización Maikiraalasalii –Los que no se venden, de la Sierra de Perija del Socuy de Zulia, Movimiento Onda Comunal de Portuguesa.
Movimiento Ambientalista Venezolano, Colectivo INDIA (Instituto de Investigación y Defensa Integral Autogestionaria) de Caracas, Circulo de Hombres de Caracas, Calendario Productivo Socio Cultural, Escuelas Populares de Semillas y de Piscicultura de Apure, Sistema de Trueke de Mérida, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas Los Mintoyes de Mistajá, Escuela de Parteras AMAY KARA de Mérida, Red de Konuker@s Biorregion Andina de La Azulita, Mérida, Unidad de producción Audiovisual Semilla de Paz, Comuna Agroecológica El Tambor de La Azulita, Mérida, Red de Konuker@s “Cumbe Adentro” de Veroes, Yaracuy, Colectivo de Maestras Cimarronas de Veroes, Yaracuy, Asociación Tambores de Taria, Veroes, Yaracuy, Konukos Escolares de Veroes, Yaracuy, Cumbe Afro Agua Negra, Veroes, Yaracuy, Cumbe de Conuqueros El Esfuerzo de Taria, Veroes, Yaracuy, Red de Organizaciones Afro de Yaracuy, Sistema de Trueke Urachiche, Yaracuy, Comuna Ali Primera de Urachiche, Yaracuy, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas de Yaracuy, Epatu Konuko de Aragua, Guerrilla Republik Vzla, Sistema de Trueke Paraguachoa de Nueva Esparta, Sistema de Trueke L@S Pariagotos de Sucre, Sembradores de Agua de Maturincito la Cumbre, Sucre, Diseminadores de Semillas de Lara, Consejo de Sabios, Monte Carmelo, Lara, Universidad Campesina de Venezuela “Argimiro Gabaldón” de Lara, Consejo Popular de Resguardo de Semillas “Renato y El Caiman” de Monte Carmelo, Lara, Colectivo Investigacion “El Maestro Cafe” de Sanare, Lara, Emisora Sanareña 101.9 FM de Sanare, Lara, Movimiento Agroecológico Paulo Freire de Barinas, Sistema de Trueke Guapotorí Guaicaipuru de Los Teques, Miranda, Taller Urquía Amaru de Miranda, Colectivo Tapiramo, Frente de Campesinos Argelia Laya, Municipio Páez, Miranda, Proyectos Productivos CLAP Fco de Miranda Mpio. Guasimo de Táchira, Compañía de Títeres Kirimarí de Táchira, Colectivo Todo es Creación, Valera, Trujillo, Red de Comuner@s del Valle del Momboy, Valera, Trujillo, Colectivo Cimarrón de Maracaibo, Zulia, Organización Maikiraalasalii –Los que no se venden, de la Sierra de Perija del Socuy de Zulia, Movimiento Onda Comunal de Portuguesa.
International Organizations:
OCEANIA: Taring Padi and Survive Garage (Indonesia). ASIA: Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement (Sri Lanka) Mesopotamian Ecology Movement (Kurdistan) Barefoot Doctor (China). AFRICA: Kenya Debt Relief Network and Africa Mother’s Foundation (Kenya) Community Change Africa (Ghana) United African Alliance Community Center (Tanzania) Kebetkache Women’s Development and Resource Center (Nigeria) Amandla! Collective (South Africa). EUROPE: Spring Forward Network (Switzerland) Capitalism Nature Socialism (Italy). AMERICAS: Bolivarian Circles of New York (USA) Cooperation Jackson (USA) Labor Community Strategy Center (USA) Ecosocialist Horizons (USA) a new black arts movement (USA) Resistance in Brooklyn (USA) International Fellowship of Reconciliation (USA) War Resisters International (USA) International Peace Research Association (USA) Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (USA) Climate Justice Project (USA) The Dazzling Swamp (USA) Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Guardians of Water School – the Lakota Nation) Afro-Yaqui Music Collective (The Yaqui Nation) Ojos de la Tierra (Mexico) Peyizam Papaye Movement (Haiti) Campesino Federation of Peru and Lucha Indigena (Peru) Comite de Defensa del Patrimonio Nacional de Bolivia (Bolivia) Family member of a person disappeared for political reasons (Argentina) Guardian of Seeds (Ecuador).
OCEANIA: Taring Padi and Survive Garage (Indonesia). ASIA: Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement (Sri Lanka) Mesopotamian Ecology Movement (Kurdistan) Barefoot Doctor (China). AFRICA: Kenya Debt Relief Network and Africa Mother’s Foundation (Kenya) Community Change Africa (Ghana) United African Alliance Community Center (Tanzania) Kebetkache Women’s Development and Resource Center (Nigeria) Amandla! Collective (South Africa). EUROPE: Spring Forward Network (Switzerland) Capitalism Nature Socialism (Italy). AMERICAS: Bolivarian Circles of New York (USA) Cooperation Jackson (USA) Labor Community Strategy Center (USA) Ecosocialist Horizons (USA) a new black arts movement (USA) Resistance in Brooklyn (USA) International Fellowship of Reconciliation (USA) War Resisters International (USA) International Peace Research Association (USA) Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (USA) Climate Justice Project (USA) The Dazzling Swamp (USA) Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Guardians of Water School – the Lakota Nation) Afro-Yaqui Music Collective (The Yaqui Nation) Ojos de la Tierra (Mexico) Peyizam Papaye Movement (Haiti) Campesino Federation of Peru and Lucha Indigena (Peru) Comite de Defensa del Patrimonio Nacional de Bolivia (Bolivia) Family member of a person disappeared for political reasons (Argentina) Guardian of Seeds (Ecuador).
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