What is ALBA?

"It is necessary to advance towards the stability of the Continent:
in politics, in economic, and in social matters,
This model, EL ALBA, aims towards the stability.
and quoting Jesus Christ words:
“The only way to Peace, is Justice;
the brotherhood, the equality...
There will be no Peace, while there is not Justice in the world”
"Hugo Chávez Frías 

The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) is based, fundamentally, upon a model of politic, economic and social integration of countries, as the Caribbean and Latin American, which share geographic spaces, historical and cultural bonds, necessities and common potentialities.

The ALBA is then, a new scheme of integration based on principles of cooperation, solidarity and complementariness and it arises as an alternative to the neo liberal model, which has not done but that to deepen the structural asymmetries and to favor the accumulation of wealth in privileged minorities in detriment of the well-being of countries The ALBA is based on the creation of mechanisms to foment cooperative advantages among the nations allowing compensating the existing asymmetries between the countries of the hemisphere. ALBA looks for attacking the obstacles that prevent true integration such as the poverty and the social exclusion; the unequal interchange and the lack of equity conditions in the international relations, the free access to the information, to the technology and to the knowledge; it aspires to construct consensuses, to rethink the agreements of integration based on reaching a national and regional endogenous development to eradicate the poverty, to correct the social inequalities and to assure and to increase life quality for all the countries.

In that sense, the construction of the ALBA in the Caribbean will strengthen the endogenous development, sovereign and balance, of the countries of the region.

ALBA principle is based upon the cooperation through compensatory founds to correct the disparities and disadvantage of underdeveloped countries compared to those developed countries.

Therefore the proposals of the ALBA grants them priority to Latin American integration and privilege negotiation in sub regional blocks, opening new consultation spaces in the aims to deepen the knowledge of our positions and to identify spaces of common interest that they allow to constitute strategic alliances and to stand similar positions in the negotiation process.

The ALBA proposal is a focused in constructing consensuses that entail to rethink the agreements of integration based on reaching a national and regional endogenous development that eradicates the poverty, corrects the social inequity and assures an increasing quality of life for all.

The proposal of the ALBA adds efforts waking up of the conscience expressed in the developing of a new political, economic, social and military leadership in Latin America and the Caribbean; today more than ever, it agrees to re launch the Latin American and Caribbean Union.

President Hugo Chávez in his intervention in ALADI has summarized the principals of the ALBA as the following topics:

1. To promote the fight against the poverty
2. To preserve the autonomy and Latin American identity
3. The transference of technology, the technical assistance
4. The formation of human resources
5. To prioritize national companies us public beings suppliers
6. The agreements could not be obstacle to the diffusion of the scientific and technological progress
7. To face the abuse of the monopolies and oligopolies through effective mechanisms that assure fare competition
8. The foreign investors will not be able to demand the countries by the handling of state monopolies of public interest
9. Treatment special and differentiated to unequal economies to open opportunities to the weakest
10. Process of wide social participation, which can be characterized like democratic
11. Economic, social, cultural and civil rights should be interdependent, indivisible and can not be waived
12. The commercial interests of the investors will not be able to have
supremacy over the human rights or over the sovereignty of the States
13. Creation of founds of structural convergence for the correction of
asymmetries

Governing priinciiplles off tthe ALBA

1. Neo liberal integration prioritizes the liberalization of the commerce and the investments; however the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) is a proposal that focuses its attention on the fight against the poverty and the social exclusion.

2. In the proposal of the ALBA a crucial importance to the human rights, labor rights, the woman rights, and to the defense of the atmosphere and physical integration.

3. In the ALBA, the fight against the protectionist policies and the ruinous subsidies of the industrialized countries cannot deny the right of the poor countries to protect to its farmers and agricultural producers

4. For the poor countries, where the agricultural activity is fundamental, the conditions of life of million farmers and natives would be seen irreversibly affected if it happens a flood of imported agricultural goods, still in the cases in which subsidy does not exist.

5. The agricultural production is much more that the production of
merchandise, is the base to preserve cultural options, is a form of
occupation of the territory, defines modalities of relation with the nature and has to directly do with the security and nourishing self-sufficiency. In these countries agriculture is, rather, a way of life and it cannot be treated like any other economic activity.

6. ALBA must attack the obstacles integration from its root, that is to say:

7. To face such a call Reformation of the State that only took us to unfair processes of deregulation, privatization and disassembling of the capacities of public management.

8. As an answer to the brutal dissolution that the State suffered for more than one decade of neo liberal hegemony, the fortification of the State and governments, on the bases of the participation of the citizen in public matters, prevails now

9. It is necessary to question the vindication to the free market and commerce, as if only these concepts were enough to automatically guarantee the advance towards greater levels of growth and collective well-being.

10. Without a clear intervention of the State directed to reduce the disparities between countries, the free competition between unequal countries will lead us to make the damage of weakest worst.

11. To deepen in Latin American integration requires an economic agenda defined by the sovereign States, outside all ominous influence of the international organisms.