A left-wing Pan-Americanism?

Critical notes on a declaration signed by the Broadbent Institute and some NDP MPs

Introduction

The Ottawa-based Broadbent Institute, which functions increasingly as a think-tank for the federal NDP leadership, was a major participant in the third Panamerican Congress. The Congress met in Montevideo, Uruguay in mid August. It was attended by representatives of left-wing parties from throughout the Western Hemisphere. A press release issued August 25 by the Canadian delegation states:

 The Panamerican Congress is the only permanent parliamentary forum where democratic and progressive forces from across the hemisphere come together to develop common positions on the shared challenges facing their people. The Canadian delegation to the 2026 Congress included Broadbent Institute Executive Director Jen Hassum, Director of Policy and Engagement Clement Nocos, MP Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway), MP Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre), Chief of Staff to the Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada Savhanna Wilson, and NDP Principal Secretary Peyton Veitch. [Emphasis in original]

The Congress concluded with the adoption of the Montevideo Declaration, which calls for more equal dialogue between the Global North and Global South and the construction of broad coalitions and alternative mechanisms through which to defend a crumbling international order. The event took place at a bad moment for the regional left: in the year that passed since the last such conference, the Left has lost power in Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia, while Venezuela – its President Maduro kidnapped by the United States – is now under US tutelage. Cuba, for decades the inspiration of the hemisphere’s progressive forces, faces economic collapse and imminent threat of US invasion.

In view of the prominence assigned to this event by the Broadbent Institute and some federal NDP leaders, I think North American socialists would benefit from consulting a critique of the Congress and its Declaration by a major left-wing Latin American website, the Red América Latina, published on August 27. The following is a translation of this critical text, which I believe was authored by Lautaro Rivara, an Argentine revolutionary socialist. The footnotes are mine. – Richard Fidler

 

A left-wing Pan-Americanism?

27/08/2026

Some critical notes on the Montevideo Declaration and the third Pan-American Congress that took place in Montevideo between August 21 and 23.

From August 21 to 23, the third Pan-American Congress was held in Montevideo, Uruguay, which brought together more than 150 officials, legislators and former presidents from 15 countries in the region. Among them only two Caribbean countries, with the notable absence of Cuba – as well as that of Venezuela and Nicaragua – but with the presence of parliamentary representatives from the United States and Canada.

Under the slogan “solidarity among peoples, sovereignty among nations” the participants shared numerous activities in the Legislative Palace of Montevideo and in the Mercosur Building. However, the large participation seems to contrast with the reduced political and social impact it had in the region, significantly less than that of its two previous editions, held respectively in Bogotá (2024) and Mexico City (2025).

We would like to share here some critical comments on the document resulting from the Congress, the so-called “Montevideo Declaration.” What follows are not the isolated shots of a lone sniper, but the appreciations of a militant convinced of the necessary unity of the left and organically committed to the ideology and integrationist project of Our America. I hope that these ideas will serve to stimulate a respectful and fraternal debate.

To begin with, it is necessary to clarify that the unionist doctrine of the independence leader Simón Bolívar, cited in the document, is called Bolivarianism or “Amphyctyonic”, due to the inspiration found in the ideology and organization of the old Hellenic amphictyonic leagues, known through figures such as Emeric Crucé, the Duke of Sully, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and above all mediated in its Latin American reception by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Our first intellectuals and integrationist leaders – such as Francisco de Miranda, José Cecilio del Valle or Bolívar himself – knew, adapted, realized and greatly enriched this tradition.[1]

“Pan-Americanism,” on the other hand, is a totally antagonistic and subsequent conception promoted by the hegemonism of the United States since the end of the nineteenth century, starting with figures such as former Secretary of State James Blaine, promoter of the First International Conference of American States in Washington D.C., in 1889. The idea of a subordinate customs union that we saw emerge strongly in the Free Trade Area of the Americas project has its distant roots in this original project. But it would be the early Cold War and the founding of the OAS [Organization of American States] in 1948 that would give political and institutional flesh to the so-called “inter-American system” under the tutelage of the great North American hegemon.

This is what any politician, intellectual, or citizen of Latin America and the Caribbean commonly understands by “Pan-Americanism.” For this reason, it is a serious mistake to refer to the historical integrationist project – Bolivarian, amphictyonic, Our American – in this way, even if it contemplates – as in fact it always did – the practice of international solidarity with the American people, its subordinate subjects, and its anti-imperialist organizations. From the time of the Civil War to the emergence of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and Black Power in the 1950s and 1960s, there have always been close networks of collaboration and exchange in the political, cultural, and even military fields between the United States and Our America.

On the other hand, the “doctrine of domination” or “unilateral supremacy” that the document mentions several times so timidly and elusively is called “imperialism” and “neocolonialism.” That is what our independence patriots called it; this is how our most brilliant intellectuals studied it. From Simón Bolívar’s early warnings about the United States “destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom” to “the turbulent and brutal north” of which José Martí warned us, passing through the long and dizzying twentieth century until reaching our days, we have generated a very rich anti-colonial and anti-imperialist heritage and legacy; Why deny it, silence it or throw it overboard now?

As in any document, what is omitted is as important or more important than what is declared. Thus, the text refers, in the abstract and in the plural, to the problem of the “kidnappings of Heads of State.” We doubt that they refer to Manuel Noriega in 1989 or to the “extraction” of other extracontinental leaders, so we have to deduce that the document refers to nothing less than the kidnapping of the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, in the early hours of January 3. The curious thing is why Maduro is, in the several pages of the statement, the only person who is not mentioned by name.[2]

It may seem like a detail, but this indirect and almost spectral allusion is not accidental, if we consider that many of the signatories of the declaration omitted and fail to make further statements about the extralegal and extraterritorial capture of the Venezuelan president. If as progressives or leftists we have to juggle so much to condemn the bombing of a sovereign country and the kidnapping of its Head of State, we are in the presence of a serious problem; we are faced with the manifest inability to draw “red lines” and to establish the lowest common denominators around our sovereignty and our national and regional self-determination, regardless of the economic or institutional model that the sector or process may promote.

One of the mentions that most caught our attention has to do with so-called “lawfare.” But contrary to what the declaration suggests, legal warfare mechanisms are not used either primarily or exclusively against “elected officials.” This is, in fact, a presumption and a typical error of those same “elected officials,” who fail to see the extent and depth of the phenomenon of lawfare, and its inscription in the more general modalities of hybrid war, neo-interventionism and new counterinsurgency doctrines.

Lawfare, as an instrument of criminalization, persecution, imprisonment and demoralization of political, social and geopolitical dissidence, also affects – and in general with little or no possibility of defense – trade unionists, social leaders, environmental, indigenous and Afro-descendant referents, as well as human rights defenders, journalists, students or intellectuals.

One of the most worrisome drifts of the document refers to the explicit replacement of peoples, nations and organizations by the “legislators who represent them,” which is symptomatic of the course followed by a good part of the Latin American, Caribbean and “hemispheric” meetings of recent years. From diverse, multitudinous and controversial conclaves – such as the São Paulo Forums in the 90s or the meetings of social movements in this century – to increasingly bureaucratized and restricted spaces for the socialization of progressive elites; expensive meetings without previous objectives, resulting goals, clear responsible, or subsequent follow-up, whose biggest footprint seems to be the carbon footprint of the guests’ planes.

This tacit conception, at the antipodes of the protagonist democracy that animated the progressive, integrationist and leftist cycle of recent decades, emulates – or rather imitates – the historical liberal positions, which consider that “the people do not deliberate or govern except through their representatives,” as summarized in the famous Article 22 of the Constitution of the Argentine Republic, the legatee of the original Magna Carta of 1853.

In line with the above, it is a gross mistake to consider that “democratic rights and freedoms” are those that have inspired and animated our last “centuries of struggle.” This liberal revisionism ignores the fact that nationalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism and social liberation have been the communicating vessels that connect the different cycles of continental struggle in the history of Our America.

We find similar errors if we move from the spectrum of political-institutional problems to that of economic-social ones. Thus, the declaration states that what is at stake is to seek a “sovereign and shared prosperity,” which seems to replace the anti-neoliberal critique and the post-neoliberal attempts – more or less radical, more or less successful – that defined the meaning and delimited the very subject of the progressive and leftist cycle. In fact, sovereignty and prosperity are completely antagonistic to a neoliberalism that in our region was unequal, exclusive, authoritarian and colonial from its very origins, “dripping blood and mud through every general strike” up to the coup d’état against the Popular Unity government in Chile, on September 11, 1973.

Within this rhetoric, which owes much to the Cepal technocracy[3] and to a kind of ambiguous and decaffeinated multipolarism – and which seems to have wiped the slate clean of Latin American and Caribbean theories of dependency – “productive integration” replaces economic integration and political unity in the region.

On the other hand, it is symptomatic that having met in the Pan-American Congress and having published this declaration in the very month of Fidel Castro’s centenary, his name has been cavalierly ignored. We could not blame it on a mere oversight, considering that there have been dozens – if not hundreds – of events throughout the region that have celebrated and valued the political and intellectual legacy of the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution.

We believe that this is not a fortuitous event, given that Castro was a bitter opponent of Pan-Americanism, even of its liberal and “progressive” variants, which he grimly had to confront, both in the times of the Alliance for Progress and amidst the sweeping triumph of the single-minded neoliberal thought that seduced so many former comrades who went over with bag and baggage in tow to the enemy camp.

In a nutshell, the Montevideo Declaration says little, errs a lot and concedes too much. But ideological and political retrenchment may not be the best strategy to confront the reactionary and imperial wave that is laying waste to Our America. But the program can only be explained by the subject. The fact that officials replace the people, the liberal-progressives the left, and Pan-Americanism our Americanism, is a result of conclaves that have become increasingly distant, selective, and palatial.

The simple fact that former Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who liquidated the social outburst and the constituent process and handed over his country to neo-Pinochetism on a silver platter, was the deluxe guest of the meeting, is perhaps the best characterization we can provide for it. Instead of being accountable to his fellow citizens for the devastating consequences of his extreme-centrism, he is now allowed to lecture on radicalism in international conclaves, while he is shaping up for an unlikely new candidacy for La Moneda or – with much greater probability – to occupy some space as prestigious as it is harmless in the United Nations system.

To be fair, the criticisms that can be made of the Montevideo Declaration and the Third Pan-American Congress are common to many other spaces that we inhabit, and that have also been sclerosed or condemned to insignificance over the years. Revitalizing the project of Latin American and Caribbean union involves both recovering our historical emancipatory traditions – and not buying ideological trinkets from any liberal huckster – and reposing to ourselves concrete questions, but above all imposing precise militant tasks on us.

What does the Congress propose – and what do we propose – to prevent the imminent invasion of Cuba, to stop the genocide in Gaza, to confront the reactionary wave and its annihilatory fantasies or to put a stop to the greed of imperialism and the big digital corporations? The answer, no matter how necessary an international event may be, will not be found among the cold stones of a palace, but in the embers, still burning, of social and popular resistance, and in the atavistic memory of our internationalist practice.

 

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[1] The text recalls the legacy of the Amphictyonic Congress of 1826, held in Panama, which laid the foundation of the first dream of regional integration.

[2] Also ignored, as the text states later, was the name of Fidel Castro.

[3] CEPAL/ECLAC: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a United Nations regional commission established in 1948 to establish economic cooperation.