On the Road to a Regional Citizens Assembly in 2010

General objective

The overall objective is to start up a collective thinking process on the future of the region as part of the planet. Such a process, using a variety of methods, is intended to achieve considerably greater density in discussions, dialog, networking, thinking, cooperation, programs, and joint actions among the different social, cultural, and political actors of Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela. It is seen as indispensable to structure a regional-integration process based on values of complete freedom and social justice, and, through these values, to build citizenship as a whole in the seven countries, thanks to the active participation of the previously mentioned actors in this regional-integration process.

Specific objectives

1) To define:
 a) the foundations and objectives of the process,
 b) the minimum necessary resources,
 c) an organization support network, and
 d) a team of human resources, which will schedule its stages and development methods, manage them, and coordinate them.

2) To develop the dissemination and use of communication media for the development of the process, which will make it possible to centralize as well as to open up a multilateral system to share knowledge and practices, through:
 a ) a Web site and
 b) printed magazines, where existing documents will be pooled and debated (Charter of Human Rights, Charter of Human Responsibilities, the Cuzco Declaration on the South American Community of Nations, etc.) and new tools will be developed (debates on the Latin American Social Charter, the Bolivian demand for access to sea, the free trade agreement (TLC) or the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA), universal thought and own thought, etc.).

3) To define and develop a network for communication, discussion, collective thinking, and experience sharing among 300 social, political, and cultural organizations from Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela, based on a multidimensional, participatory process directed toward the regional integration of the South Cone.

4) To establish thematic foci for the articulation and dynamics of the process: dialogue for peace, youth, own thought, Charter of Human Responsibilities, culture, ecology, education, economy, citizenship, migration, women, armed forces, regional political models, and others that could arise as the process develops. These will serve to guide a debate on the demands and opportunities to respond, on the basis of own practices and thinking, to the complex problems, transformations, and current crisis that we share.

5) To develop a permanent dialog - and possibly links and articulations - with other similar regional initiatives: Social Forum, Boliviaran network, etc., as part of the process.

6) To develop a permanent and growing series of specific bi-, tri- or multinational discussions (on travel and visits, communications and agreements, etc.) among actors working in specific fields: cultural, social, political, etc., as part of the process.

7) To develop forums and experiences for multinational meetings and lobbying: Youth Meeting; Assembly preparation; territorial actors; and to close the process (for this stage) with the Regional Citizens Assembly of the South Cone with at least 300 representatives from the seven countries in 2010.

8) To achieve the adoption by the Regional Citizens Assembly of the South Cone of a Charter including the substantial agreements that were reached and a Program-Agenda of objectives and actions, in addition to specific plans at various levels.

Founding considerations

A new, unprecedented context of changes, transformation and crisis, in progress in the global and particularly in the regional area in the South Cone of Latin America, is generating multiple and complex problems for the adaptation of political communities, expressed through tensions and shocks, such as: relations between society and the environment, the state and the market, civil and public actors, regional and national phenomena, the urgency of inclusion and exclusion processes, among many others.

Simultaneously, and this is of the greatest importance, these problematic phenomena are generating possibilities (sometimes even imposing them) for the emergence of new ways of thinking and doing, as much political as social and cultural. Citizen actors of different kinds are promoting practices and thinking based on re-created forms of social knowledge and practices, thus enhancing those that have already been accumulated regionally, in which general consensuses are compatible with specificities.

However, these experiences, feelings, and ideas suffer from insufficient inter-regional connection and cooperation, particularly in the South Cone. National political, social, and cultural barriers are still hindering a more fluid dialog, often managing to impose visions, rhetoric, and segregation or opposition practices, and reinforcing anti-values and socially harmful concepts, hampering or thwarting an integration process of a new kind.

It is then, useful, necessary, and even urgent to develop processes that will articulate and enable these opportunities, while combating and reducing the risks and obstacles presented by reality for a regional integration of a new kind for the South Cone. Theses processes are intended to increase, quantitatively and qualitatively, numerous links of mutual and inter-regional cooperation among all types of civil and public actors, to enhance mutual knowledge, experience sharing, the sum of knowledge and thinking, and joint action, as well as to encourage and sustain the tendencies toward a regional integration of a new kind.

The regional-integration political agenda is imposing active participation on the peoples. Current realities, such as compulsive migration, the growing and all-pervading flows of communication and ideas, the trans-nationalization of consumption, of production processes, and subsequently of employment, the environmental threats and pandemics, among many others, no longer exclusively involve institutional political actors as agents in foreign policy in general and in regional integration in particular; they have necessarily transformed us all into agents in international relations.

We need to translate these (objective) realities into collective meaning (awareness, subjectivity). Foreign policy, because is it pegged to domestic policy, finds sustenance and legitimacy only if the government that implements it has domestic support. Thus, regional integration as foreign policy, and social justice and inclusion within each country appear as mutually conditional. In addition, true regional integration is only possible if it is experienced in everyday life by ordinary men and women as a civic practice, as a cultural structure. This, moreover, will also push out the hidden agendas of the various de facto powers that promote -and hide behind - chauvinist and anti-integration rhetoric. To achieve this, we are building this process for a Regional Citizens Assembly of the South Cone.

Preparatory meeting: read Antofagasta: el inicio del camino