1661023638 The Argentine President calls for the institutionalization of CELAC Espanol

The Argentine President calls for the institutionalization of CELAC Español

Alberto Fernández, host of the international seminar “The Future of Integration: Unity in Diversity” attended by international leaders, also called for an end to the blockades against Cuba and Venezuela.

  • Argentine President Alberto Fernández will chair the international seminar
    Argentine President Alberto Fernández leads the international seminar “The Future of Integration: Unity in Diversity” in the presence of Latin American and Caribbean leaders at the Kirchner Cultural Center.

Argentine President Alberto Fernandez in his capacity as pro tempore leader of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), called for the institutionalization of the body Y urged to end the blockades against Cuba and Venezuela, at the conclusion of the international seminar “The future of integration: Unity in Diversity”, in the presence of Latin American and Caribbean leaders at the Kirchner Cultural Center.

“It would be good for Argentina to start the process of institutionalizing CELAC. So far we are a group of countries holding talks and analyzing but not making joint decisions and it is time for us to do so,” the President said.

And he noted that to make this initiative a reality, he drew on the “Unasur (Union of South American Nations) commemoration” so that CELAC “gained another strength, another dimension, and also adequately represented what it gave us.” allow to form a community decision” and that this is not left to the “discretion of each country”.

“We must work together to end the blockades on this continent”said Fernandez in one sentence, followed by applause from the audience.

“We have blocked two countries and that is inexcusable”, he added regarding the situation in Cuba and Venezuela.

In this sense, the President called for “making the political choice”, “using peace and unity to achieve development and social justice”.

“We must put our Latin American rights first to achieve the goals that others before us have dreamed of: San Martín, Bolívar, Sucre, Hidalgo, Martí. Let’s copy such great beings,” he admonished.

The Pandemic and the War

The Argentine President reviewed the international context of the past two years, marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

“The 21st century has already given us the first catastrophe, the pandemic.A virus has exposed the weakness of the economic system we live in.” he showed.

“We still don’t know how many have died from the pandemic. According to the United Nations, between 6 and 10 million people… It’s a lot of people, it’s an immense tragedy. We all experienced it equally, because when the pandemic came, the world became the same, because those from the north died, those from the south died, the rich died and the poor died.”

“All of us who are here are survivors of the pandemic,” the President said to ask himself: “Don’t we have a duty to create a better world? Don’t we have an ethical obligation that the world is different?”

He also pointed this out “There is a kind of passive warmongering between Ukraine and Russia, who send weapons instead of troops and allow the conflict to escalate.”

“This is today’s world, which will certainly bring with it a new geopolitical reality that we cannot dominate, but we can dominate the path our continent takes. We can make the decision to unite to face every bad moment,” stressed Fernández.

In this sense he pointed out The region has a great opportunity and a great challenge ahead, which is to supply the rest of the world with renewable energy and food in large quantities.

“Between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina we have 60 percent that the world will need, we have the perfect conditions to develop wind energy, green hydrogen and solar energy. We must stop exporting raw materials and industrialize it because the region has all the scientific and technical conditions for it”.

He also emphasized that Latin America has “a great advantage” because it is a territory of peace, there are no war-ready countries here, although we are on the most unequal continent in the world..

“If we add unity to the peace we have, give it an institutional framework and put it at the service of the region, we have a great opportunity to make it a privileged continent,” the president noted.

The former Presidents of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero; from Colombia, Ernesto Samper; from Guatemala, Vinicio Cerezo; and Argentina’s Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero.

Mujica and Samper called for “empowering” CELAC for regional integration.

  • 1661023634 274 The Argentine President calls for the institutionalization of CELAC Espanol

Former Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Mujica and Colombian Ernesto Samper stressed the need to “empower” and “institutionalize” the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

“It’s a very long fight, there is no integration just around the corner, that requires, among other things, a cultural change among Latin Americans,” Mujica assured during the meeting in the Kirchner cultural center.

He also demanded that integration should not be an issue for the leadership, but that they should talk to “the people on the street” because the masses “do not intellectually connect the phenomenon of their interests with a defensive integration policy”.

He asked to institutionalize CELAC, but he said that there must be flexible mechanisms to “go there and come back” because one must remember “governments are short-term” and that no matter how many integration dreams they have, they end up being absorbed by local needs, while “the strategic is left aside for the long term”.

For his part, Samper stressed the “inability of multilateral mechanisms to stop current threats” and stressed the need to “change the system”.

“It has to be a more dynamic system of blocs, we are going to a multilateral system of blocs, the European, the Asian, the African, but not the Latin American because today we are not united as a bloc,” he reflected.