Latin America is the Achilles Heel of U.S. imperialism in today’s political reality. As a triumphalist and arrogant Washington prepares for aggression in Iraq to redivide the resources and political map of the Middle East, its Latin American "backyard" is mired in financial and economic crisis, smoldering with social rebellion, and mounting progressive mass action.

The period of so-called "neoliberalism" --a fancy name for the intensification of imperialist exploitation through the mechanisms of debt slavery, unequal exchange in trade, and the sell-off of national patrimony to imperialist capital-- has entered the stage of economic and social breakdown and permanent political crisis. This is opening the road to a series of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary explosions that will --in time-- pose the realization of workers and popular power in the South America continent for the first time since the period of the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

It is important to grasp that this crisis-ridden neoliberal period had its origin in a definite, concrete political context. Neoliberalism has been a decade-long detour ushered in by the historical defeats of revolutionary struggle in Central America and the Caribbean.

Specifically, the collapse and defeat of the Grenadian Revolution in 1983, the collapse and defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution in the late 1980s --after, it must be said, the military crushing of the contras-- and the failure of the Salvadoran revolutionaries to overturn the U.S.-backed neocolonial regime.

The judgment of history will show that none of these defeats were inevitable.

These defeats, plus the political disorientation when the regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe disintegrated and disappeared from the face of the earth, resulted in a profound demoralization and disillusionment across the board --among working people and especially progressive intellectuals-- in our hemisphere.

This was registered in the rightward shift by intellectuals such as Teodoro Petkoff in Venezuela, Fernando Cardosa in Brazil, and Jorge Castañeda in Mexico --all of whom renounced their leftist pasts and took up posts in neoliberal regimes.

U.S. imperialism and the so-called "Washington Consensus" --neoliberalism-- gained a big momentum.

It must be said that during the darkest days of the 1990s, socialist, revolutionary Cuba --under the incredible pressures of the "Special Period" and the intensification of Washington’s economic and political war-- continued to struggle, to survive, and to hold high the banner of socialism while others were running the other way. This will also go down in history.

As we enter a new period of struggle, we must express our deepest gratitude to our Cuban sisters and brothers for their courage, inspiration, and example. But, beyond fine words, we must move to deeds to meet our responsibilities in our own lands in this new period. This is also the best solidarity we can give to the Cuban Revolution.

Who else but our Cuban comrades have organized conferences like these to provide an forum and direction to our fighting peoples?

The neoliberal period, this reactionary detour, is breaking down. This is registered in a generalized, mounting rise in popular resistance amid the deepening financial and economic crisis of the system: the onset of synchronized economic recession in all three centers of world imperialism --the United States, Western Europe, and Japan-- the shrinking of export markets, and the subsequent intensification of competition between the imperialist powers. For the so-called Third World --including Latin America and the Caribbean-- this has meant currency collapses, increased imperialist protectionism, and the ballooning of debt.

The crisis has begun to set the exploited mass in motion, well ahead of the emergence of worth revolutionary leadership.

There is not a single country that has not seen this development of mass resistance, which is still uneven of course, These struggles --of which the tossing out of the de la Rua-Cavallo regime in Argentina has been the most dynamic so far-- are also reflected in the bourgeois electoral arena which has noticeably shifted to the left.

The FTAA is Washington’s attempt to reverse the wave of resistance in Latin America and regain the initiative for neoliberalism and increased imperialist exploitation.

On the ground of course the Bush Administration --with the gusano Otto Reich as their point man-- is stepping up their political, covert, and overt intervention to counter the new paradigm in Latin America. In Venezuela, they have not stopped for a single day the destabilization of the Chávez regime; in Colombia they are deepening direct military intervention. They are putting intense pressure on the incoming regime of President-elect Lula da Silva in Brazil to toe the line and lower the expectations of Brazil’s workers and peasants. They continue to demand more unemployment and more starvation in Argentina.

This breakdown in neoliberalism in Latin America is still in its embryonic stages. This has been reflected in a series of elections over the past few years --Chávez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Gutierrez in Ecuador that raise the expectations of working people. Elections scheduled next year in Argentina will no doubt continue the pattern. In Uruguay there has been a collapse in support for the neoliberal, anti-Cuba Batlle regime.

As expectations increase so does class struggle and subsequent class polarization. This increases the threat of U.S.-backed military coups, such as was beaten back by mass mobilizations of working people last April in Venezuela. But we should also note that the profoundly hated and demoralized neocolonial army in Argentina has been politically unable to leave its barracks throughout the current crisis.

The fight against FTAA presents us with an opportunity to link up and unite the workers, peasants, and popular resistance to imperialism and capitalism throughout Latin America.

As a U.S. trade unionist who is also a Marxist, I want to say that while the workers and farmers in the United States are potentially a great --even decisive-- ally in your struggles, you should have no illusions in the anti-FTAA words and rhetoric of the officials of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.

These leaders opposition to FTAA, like their opposition to NAFTA, is largely a reactionary protectionist, U.S. nationalist one, despite some occasional throwaway lines regarding your low wages and sweatshops. They are without exception in the pocket of the imperialist Democratic Party, which under Clinton --the signer of Helms-Burton and the promoter of Menem and Cardosa-- began the FTAA initiative which Bush is continuing.

The transformation of the U.S. labor movement into a movement of genuine internationalism and solidarity is intimately tied up with your deepening struggles. These are destined to open up historic possibilities for your allies in the belly of the imperialist beast.

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