The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) promotes other ways of life where inconclusive and repressed projects are reborn, recovering a vision of the world from our Latin America and the Caribbean to integrate human capacities and territories, looking to meet social and cultural needs of the people living in these lands with horizons to come.
As Judith Valencia points out: «The ALBA had a point of departure, in the manifest desire of the commander Hugo Chávez, in December 2001, when he exposed the magic of union among peoples, opposing the ALCA as a mandate of the Empire. The ALBA starts when collective imaginaries recognize and endorse the intention expressed in the enunciated desire «.
The dawn of the Alliance takes place on December 14 in 2004 in Havana, at the time of signing the Joint Declaration of the then presidents Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, with the perspective of generating structural transformations of the international relations system and thus enabling the construction of new worlds.
The social dimension of the ALBA-TCP is specified in the missions or social mandates, where the universalization of the social rights of the peoples is established in areas such as health and education.
One of them is Robinson International, based on the literacy method «Yo si puedo» (I can do it), that was created by the Latin American and Caribbean Pedagogical Institute of the Republic of Cuba, which served as the basis for the development of love missions destined to reappropriate the sovereignty of the people.
We also have the Latin American School of Medicine «Salvador Allende», which since its creation has graduated about twenty nine thousand new doctors. Also we have The Missions of attention to people with disabilities, with different names in Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Nicaragua, Mexico and Cuba, based on equity and respect for diversity.
Finally, the International Mission Miracle, which was born in Venezuela in 2004, during the first operational evaluation of «Barrio Adentro I», where it was detected that blindness and eye diseases are the most common diseases in low-income populations resources. In a current scenario of tensions, the panorama of integration is neutralized. The aspirations for transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean face many shadows and few lights. One of the hardest blows was the departure of Hugo Chávez, the main strategist of this revolutionary project; his absence is one of the most important challenges that the ALBA-TCP must overcome to advance and consolidate.
Ximena Roncal Vattuone
PhD in Political Economy of Development
