Celebrating our Jubilee South / Americas III Regional Assembly, representatives of social movements, grassroots organizations, religious, environmental, professional, political, sexual diversity organizations, and anti-debt coalitions from 10 Latin American and Caribbean countries gathered in Managua, Nicaragua, from June 16 to 18, 2010. We are women and men, peasants, workers, indigenous, popular activists confronting and resisting the advance of capital over our territories, cultures, and lives.

Taking stock of the ten years of struggle recently completed by Jubilee South, and after debating the close relationship between the new conditions of indebtedness imposed on the region and the advance of free trade agreements signed with the United States and the European Union in Central America and the Caribbean, as in the Andean and Mercosur regions, and the harmful effect of the accumulated ecological, social, historical, cultural, and climate debts, the participants resolve to:

Continue to strengthen the analysis of the historical causes and consequences of external debt as a tool of imperialist domination, whose economic, political, social, and environmental consequences have impacted in the lives and future of our peoples and countries, advancing strategies of struggle in order to achieve justice in the face of its illegitimacy and real solutions to its consequences, and to build alternatives of financial sovereignty in favor of life, nature and collective rights;

Ratify and promote the call for the implementation of participatory and comprehensive audits of the debts claimed from our countries, highlighting the importance of the achievements made in this regard with the undertaking of the audit by the government of Ecuador, the continuity of the Citizen’s Audit in Brazil and the establishment of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Debt in that country, and the decision of the government of Paraguay to audit the binational debts of the Itaipu Dam;

Incorporate into our work an up to date vision that will corroborate the exponential growth of the debt, both external and internal, that the current situation of global crisis imposes on our countries, and the need to continue to develop cross-cutting themes that today converge around the historic roots of the debt, its structural causes, and related issues such as ecological and climate debt, free trade, militarization and the criminalization of social protest;

Consolidate and reinforce this space of regional and South-South resistance in order to continue to defend fundamental and collective human rights to a dignified life, to “live well”, as well as the rights of nature, and to support the struggles now being advanced by movements, organizations, and coalitions based in the countries of the global South;

Continue to reject any form of pretended debt relief, launched by Northern governments and their international financial institutions, that involves new indebtedness, conditionalities, and obligations based on the expropriation of our natural resources;

Recognize the strategic importance of holding this Assembly in an international conjuncture that opens up new horizons for the strengthening of alliances in our common struggle, between peoples and resistance movements in the South together with those in the North;

Assess the challenges that we face at the regional level and that create new opportunities to expand and strengthen the ties of cooperation, solidarity, and integration of a new kind that can enhance independence from historical mechanisms of colonial domination and plunder.

As Jubilee South / Americas, and in view of the commemoration on June 28 of the first year of the coup that imperialism and the oligarchies proffered against the people of Honduras, we once again express our rejection of such an act of repression and disruption of the democratic process and of the illegitimate indebtedness accumulated by the dictatorship, and state our unconditional support for the heroic resistance of the Honduran people and their mass organizations in the struggle to recover their sacred right to freedom and to refound their country. We express our opposition to the recognition of the government of Mr. Porfirio Lobo, a government emanating from illegitimate elections, as well as our rejection of any indirect action that seeks to recognize the current government of Honduras.

We reaffirm our rejection of the economic and military occupation of Haiti, supporting its people in their struggle for sovereignty, self-determination, and life, as well as our opposition to any attempt to destabilize or overthrow the democratic processes and processes of change underway in the region, such as the one led by the people and government of Cuba for more than 50 years, among others.

Finally, in this context of crisis and new indebtedness, we appeal to the people and popular movements of Latin America and the Caribbean to recognize ourselves as the true creditors of an historical, social, ecological, financial, and climate debt, to join forces and efforts in resistance against this system of hunger, misery, and repression, and to continue united in the struggle to build another world that is possible and urgent!

Managua, June 19, 2010
Jubilee South / Americas