 Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, a popular resistance broadcast of hot news out of the region. In partnership with Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti, America's team, Code Pink, Common Frontiers, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Friends of Latin America, Interreligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action, and Task Force on the Americas, we broadcast Thursdays at 4.30 PM, Pacific 7.30 PM Eastern right here on YouTube Live, including channels for the Convo Couch, Popular Resistance and Code Pink. Post broadcast recordings can be found at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Telegram, RadIndyMedia.com, and now under Podcasts at PopularResistance.org. Today's episode, Reject US Imperialism, Make Our Americas a Zone of Peace. And I'm very happy for all of you to join this conversation this evening with two really fabulous activists, and I'm also honored to say really wonderful friends, personal friends, joining us to talk about Black Alliance for Peace's launch of Make Our Americas a Zone of Peace is Ajama Baraka. He is with the BAP Haiti, America's team. And Black Alliance for Peace is a broadcast partner of this program. And then also joining us this evening is Margaret Flowers. She's the co-founder and director of Popular Resistance and the host of the podcast and radio show, Clearing the Fog. And Popular Resistance hosts this project and is a sponsor of the program. So this is a really special evening to have with all of you. And I'm so happy to have two friends, longtime activists, friends and personal friends, to join the conversation. And so maybe I should give, let me give the audience a little bit of background. And then Ajama will give the floor to you because this new Black Alliance for Peace campaign is really significant, very important. And it's in this particular moment, it's really exciting as well. So let me just briefly share with the audience a couple notes. So on Tuesday, April 4th, and a not inconsequential day, the Black Alliance for Peace, along with key partner organizations, launched an effort to activate the popular movements in our region in support of the community of Latin America and Caribbean states, SELOC, C-E-L-A-C. There are two, the SELOC 2014 call to make the Americas a zone of peace. The campaign will be informed by the Black radical peace tradition with its focus on the structures and interests that generate war and state violence, including colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and all forms of imperialism. The fight for a zone of peace is an attempt to expel all of these nefarious forces from our region. So with that, Ajama, why don't you tell us how this came about? I know that you personally have been working to launch this campaign for quite some time. The launch was on April 4th. There was a fabulous press conference in Washington, D.C. I will share the link with the audience to that press conference. Well, thank you. Thank you, Terry. And it's a pleasure to be with you again. And it's always a pleasure to be with Margaret Flowers and looking forward to our conversation. Just briefly, as you indicated, we launched the campaign on April the 4th. And as your listeners know, April the 4th is a very important date. Of course, it's the date that we launched the Black Alliance for Peace back in 2017, but we launched it on the 4th for a particular reason. It's also the date that we believe elements of the U.S. state were responsible for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. And so we thought that it would be fitting to launch our organization dedicated to peace on that date to not only remind people of the forces that conspired to undermine peace efforts, but also to remind people of the outstanding work of Dr. King and the movement that produced Dr. King. Because the Black Alliance for Peace is in fact an attempt to build movement, to build organization. And that's what Dr. King was all about. That's what the Black Liberation Movement was all about. That's what the radical movements were all about in the 1960s and 1970s and even before that. So we decided that we would launch this campaign, a campaign as you indicated, we have been working on in terms of building relationships from across the region for more than a year. We were very much aware of the call by CELAC in 2014 in Havana for our Americas to be a zone of peace. And it's important to emphasize this notion of our Americas. One of the objectives of our campaign beyond trying to expel those forces that are dedicated to war and subversion, violence, that process of building the ability of the capacity to expel these forces. Also, the part of our campaign is to build a consciousness, an American-wide consciousness. Often many people in North America, the northern part of the Americas, tend to forget that they are in fact part of this region. So building an American-wide consciousness and understanding that the fate of the peoples of the global south, the southern parts of the Americas, central and southern, South America and the Caribbean is a common fate that basically those of us in the North are have interests that are completely bound up with the interest, the desire on the people for peace and prosperity that we have a common interest because we have a common enemy. So this campaign is a campaign that we believe is timely. We know that the call for a zone of peace in 2014 was a call made by the various states. There was a popular component of it that emerged for a moment, but it kind of stalled out. So what we are attempting to do is to revive that popular component, the people-centered component, if you will, of this call to make our region a zone of peace because we recognize that in the end, the only forces capable of pushing out those forces that perpetuate violence and suffering in our region and our nations are in fact the organized people. So this campaign we see as a tool, a tool to help to facilitate the organization of our people throughout the region, a campaign that we hope will help to strengthen the anti-imperialist character of the politics of our region and a campaign that will help us to shift in the awareness of the understanding of activists in the North or in the center of empire in the territory referred to as the United States of America, that they are part of a region and that they are at the center of a empire that sees the region as their backyard. And Biden says that, no, they see it as their front yard, which is supposed to be progressive. So we want to build a movement that will address these contradictions and take advantage of the fact that the war agenda of the US and NATO, what we refer to as US, EU, NATO access of domination requires support from the population, from the people. And because of that, we see that as a vulnerability on the part of those forces. And we want to take full advantage of that and try to win people back to a commitment to peace. Thank you, Ajamo, that's excellent. And I want to mention also that April 4th is important because in 1967, a year before Dr. King was murdered was when he gave the beyond Vietnam speech where he connected capitalism, racism and militarism. And those were connections that the state did not want people to understand, to be aware of. So that's so significant. I'm excited about this campaign and popular resistance is one of the endorsers as well because this connecting people in the Americas is critical. We have so much to learn, people in the United States have so much to learn from our Latin American and Caribbean brothers and sisters about resisting imperialism and building peaceful alternatives. And so I think as the world is changing and the United States is no longer a hegemon but the United States is going to go down aggressively militarily and suppressing social movements. So it's imperative that we learn these lessons. I wonder if you could tell the listeners a little bit about the concept of people-centered human rights and why that's part of this and what that is, why it's important. Well, the concept of people-centered human rights is a framework that emerge out of the agitation and organizing of black activists really beginning as the end of the Second Imperialist War or what people referred to as the Second World War in 1945. One of the institutions that the victorious powers committed themselves to, that theoretically was supposed to be committed to maintaining international peace was in fact the United Nations. One of the pillars of the UN in terms of its values and of indeed its political objectives was not only to maintain peace but also to be committed to the idea of fundamental human rights. The notion that every individual and even collective eventually should be seen as having a fundamental human rights. Part of that commitment required that those human rights had to be formalized. And so there are black activists who saw an opportunity to help to formulate a human rights framework that would address all of the contradictions they saw impacting people and undermining the ability of people to be able to realize their human rights. So activists like Du Bois, the activists who were organizing in a formation called the National Negro Congress, Du Bois of course was organizing with the National Association for the Advancement of Color People, the NAACP, the Council on African Affairs, Paul Robeson, William Patterson and others saw an opportunity to shape the framework. And so they involved themselves very heavily in the work of the United Nations Human Rights Commission that was tasked with the responsibility of formalizing what would become the human rights framework. And so they did that. And as a consequence of that work and as a consequence of that work, the petitions that they submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, it helped to formulate what became the framework. In fact, many people argue and I argue that it was that agitation that really reflected the potential of the framework and the potential of the United Nations. And that's precisely why the elements in the US, they saw this framework as potentially dangerous and they began to try to undermine it. So this agitation, this radical understanding of the potential of the human rights framework, this attempt that they made to connect up the contradictions they were facing with racial oppression in the United States with the ongoing colonial situation became what we call the black radical human rights tradition. And that tradition is a tradition that puts the people at the center and why it recognizes the importance of these international treaties and instruments. We don't recognize that as representing the extent of the human rights framework. We say that the human rights framework and what we see as the breadth of that framework is something that's in formation. It comes out of the people's struggles. That is the people-centered framework, a framework that rejects the notion that the human rights is something that's the neutral, objective, non-political. We say no. We say that the human rights are, in fact, human rights that have to be emanating from the contradictions and the needs of the people themselves. That we name the enemy of human rights. We name the structures that undermine human rights. So this people-centered framework is at the core of the work of the Black Alliance of Peace and the core of the work of the approach we're trying to engage in with the campaign. In the campaign, we connect up the people-centered human rights framework with the black radical peace tradition. And as Terry read a moment ago, that black radical peace tradition is a tradition that keeps the focus on those structures of oppression, of exploitation that generate the interest to drive the politics that result in militarism and war. So these two principles become the foundation of core principles and values of the work of the Black Alliance of Peace and the framework we're using to build out this campaign here in our region. Let me ask you something that you mentioned earlier, when you were talking about our Americas and I think this is so important because there's so much for us in North America to learn. But our Americas is Arctic Circle to Antarctic Circle, America, the hemisphere of the Americas. We have in the North an Anglo-Bat based America and we have in the South and in the central South and Caribbean, a Latin based and African based America. But it is one America and it was one Indigenous people in the entire hemisphere that have been removed, annihilated the genocide and the entire hemisphere has benefited from slave labor. And so it is in many respects our Americas that has to be reconstructed, all of it. There's common history and there's differentiating history, but it is still one hemisphere that needs to become peaceful. And I would, you mentioned Biden and Latin America and the Caribbean as the US's backyard. Now it's the front yard, it's the entire yard and that's basically he's continuing to support the whole notion of the Monroe Doctrine, which is 200 years old this year, 1823. And so what are the two of you think when you hear our Americas? I mean, for me, this is what I hear. Anglo-America, Latin America, Caribbean America, common, there's common history and there's uncommon history too. But there is in some, and we'll say in the chat, there's a comment to build bridges not walls. And maybe that's the best way to talk about, particularly in this moment, what is our American? I ask this because as both of you know and many in the audience know, I participate on a lot of international delegations. I also organize and lead delegations throughout the hemisphere. And there is this one common mistake that most of us from the North make. We call ourselves Americans when we're in South America. Everyone in this hemisphere is an America. So when I hear our America is like, all of us, we're all American, just for a US citizen to go to South America and say, I'm American, well, the South American citizens are Americans too, as are the people in the Caribbean, as are the people in Central America. We're all American. Well, I'm going to defer to Margaret on this. I've been talking enough. No, no, well, we really want to hear from you, but I don't use the term American to refer to myself. I say people of the United States or I'm from the United States or some people use USCN. But one of the things that I think of when I hear our America and this campaign and the point that I really want to emphasize is that I mentioned that the importance of people in the United States learning from our brothers and sisters in the other Americas, not only how to resist, but also how to create positive alternatives. There's some excellent examples of work being done on that front. But another reason that this is so important for us to understand in the United States and to participate in this campaign is that it is our government, the United States government, which is the major aggressor, human rights violator, interventionists in this region. And so we have a particular responsibility to be addressing our government and to be organizing in solidarity with people throughout the Americas to inform our government and to build the movement and to pressure it and change it. And as I said, in this moment, as the world is changing, the United States is refusing to recognize that. And in fact, is doing everything destructive against it. This is a critical time for us to be doing this type of work. Exactly. People have to have to be reminded that what binds us together, especially those of us who are in the Northern part, in the United States, who see ourselves now only as exploited workers, but also as a colonized people, is that we are connected to the ongoing anti-colonial struggles in this region. These struggles on the part of most of these nations for national self-determination, for national sovereignty, is a anti-colonial struggle. They are constructing for themselves their own forms of democracy and developing for themselves a path to development as they define it, that they are hoping will bring an owning peace but prosperity to their people. Those peoples who are in these various nation states who are oppressed, are involved in a similar kind of struggle. And so the politics is what unites us because when we talk about an anti-colonial struggle, we're talking about an anti-imperial struggle. Coloniality is real. It's not just the term that came out of academia. It's real. And the process of decolonization is a process of struggle. So what do we struggle against? We're struggling against, as Margaret just indicated, those concrete forces, that concrete reality called the United States of America and as European allies, that if this entity, this US state, this settler colonial state continues to operate as an empire and is able to impose its interests, its will on the rest of us, then we are facing an existential threat because we understand that the only interest that they're concerned with is the interest of profit and domination. And so we're not gonna have peace in this region until those forces have been defeated, basically. So this campaign that we're organizing is a campaign not just making an appeal to these forces. We recognize these forces have to be politically defeated. So this campaign is a tool to help in that process, to help facilitate the organization of our peoples to develop more effective, regional-wide coordinating structures. We hope to build two structures for this campaign. One would be a regional-wide structure that will help to continue to develop the campaign and a mass-based structure that we are calling the US-NATO out of the America's network, meaning we want to expel the US from the region. And that's the people of the US, but the settler-colonial state. If the settler-colonial state has experienced continuity since 1609, now don't worry about this BS, so-called revolution that took place. That was nothing but a lateral transfer of power to a US-based bourgeoisie, okay? So that settler state has been continuous until that settler state is transformed, then we're not going to be able to be able to live in freedom in our region. So that is the target, the settler state and their European allies. So we are very, very clear about that in concrete, that this is a campaign in which the politics of this campaign have to be crystal clear. We're not sugarcoating what we are trying to do. We're building an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial movement in this region, and we're prepared to fight. You know, there is, and the audience is aware of this. There's actually two things, the movement building, which comes up, that's a theme that comes up over and over again in episodes of this program. But also, and the two of you are very aware of this, that since October of 2020, there have been elections across the hemisphere, presidential and legislative elections across the hemisphere, starting in Bolivia in 2020, all the way through Brazil this past fall, where executive, well, the presidents have changed in countries as have many of the Assembly and National Assembly's legislatures to center left. And in some cases, social democratic governments that have proposed an economy for their people all the way to radical left governments that want to completely overhaul the existing capitalist economies that they've inherited through an electoral win. But through all of these elections, people voted for, in my opinion, national sovereignty, natural resource sovereignty, and economies, candidates that were proposing economies that would benefit all the people, this people-based human rights, as you have talked about Ajah Mub. And I see the culmination of that now. This is just my opinion, my observation that this shift that you are, the Black Alliance for Peace is proposing and is going to fight for, is culminating in the South and is starting to congeal and pushing its way north. And so whatever happens in North America is gonna be a reaction to what's already happened in the South versus a proactive. And of course, a reactionary response isn't necessarily something positive or healthy or pleasant. Your thoughts, Adam? Your thoughts on what Terry just talked about. Well, I think that your observation is an insightful one. And I would add to your observation of the trajectory of political oppositional movement being from the global South to the North. I think that's correct. I would suggest though that the motion that we are seeing, as you just indicated, the progressive motion is already in place. And that the forces that are lagging in this progressive development in our region are in the US, they're in the North, they're in Canada. And so what we have to build is a movement, a politics that allow us to recognize our common interests and to not continue to be a break on the progress of developments taking place in our region. We have to struggle at the center of empire against those retrograde forces that continue to align themselves with their state, with their ruling class in opposition to these experiments and movements toward anti-colonial liberation in the global South in the Southern part and across our region. And so, yes, we recognize that this is a movement that has to be regionalized. No question about that, that's why we took a year to build the relationships we had to build with organizations outside of the US. We were very selective in who we reached out to in this first phase of the development of this campaign for endorsement, we didn't do a wide endorsement of this campaign, we were selective, because we wanted to have a representative showing of organizations from across our region. And then we achieved that. We're opening up the process for endorsements and participation now, but this is something that, but we again recognize that while we have a focus, a programmatic focus on the North, we also recognize this has to be a regionalized effort. And that's what we have to, and we're trying to in fact, build. Great. Terry, do you mind if I? Jump in. No, thank you. No, we're my friends here, it's really wonderful. I'm so pleased. Yeah, I just, the demands of this, the initial demands of this campaign, I think are very important because I suspect that people in the United States are probably not even really aware of many of the issues that are covered in the demands. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the demands came about and how they can be used to educate folks about what's happening in the U.S. role and the NATO role and the Western imperialist role in that region. Yeah, thank you so much for that. These demands and these initial demands are cork and they really represent the character of this campaign. We raise a very simple question, for example, how can we have effective national sovereignty when we have the U.S. with 76 bases throughout our region? Well, we have a Southern command in which the head of that command a few weeks ago discuss openly what the objectives of the U.S. should be in the region. The steel resources. Basically to steal the precious resources of the people of our region, they have the eye on the water, the fact that in our region, we have 32% of all the fresh water on the planet. They should talk about, I think it was General Richardson. Yeah. The lithium triangle, how important that was with 60% of the lithium on the planet in our region. So in the arrogance, they demonstrate what they all about. They don't care about the people of this region. They care about the riches of this region. They care about the labor that they can exploit in this region. They don't care about the land. They don't care about democratic development because they're anti-democratic. If they weren't anti-democratic, they would not be engaged in subversion in our region. So the initial demands, and I'm gonna read them, that we, again, we said this is a developing campaign. So the initial demands that we are organizing around are one, dismantle Southcom, shut down the 76 U.S. military bases in our region, okay? In the U.S. NATO military exercises, close foreign military bases, installations, and enclaves, as well as to withdraw foreign occupation troops in our region. We say dismantle, disband, the U.S. Sponsored State Terrorist Training Facilities that is to shutter, to close down the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, and to terminate the U.S. training of police forces across this region. We say we must oppose the military intervention into Haiti. We know that there are a number of scenarios being developed to justify a foreign intervention into Haiti. We must reject that. We need to support the People-Centered Movement for Democracy and Self-Determination in Haiti, as opposed to military intervention. We say they must return, or we must ensure that Guantanamo, the entire district of Guantanamo and Cuba is returning to the Cuban people and the Cuban state. And we say that sanctions are war. There's no question about that in our minds at all. We say in our region, we have to end illegal sanctions and blockades of our regional states, including all economic warfare, lawfare, and recognize the sovereignty of the states in our region. So these are some of the initial demands that will shape the campaign, shape the work that people are going to be engaged in in their specific national territories to link up their struggles for self-determination with the struggles to transform the social relations and the relations of power between our peoples and our nations in our region with the Hegemon to the North and their European allies. That's why we see these attempts, like in Colombia, with the idea of total peace. And we say we support the notion of the principle of total peace. Let's extend that, though, throughout our entire region. You can't have total peace in Colombia without total peace in our region. We can't have something called total peace in Colombia, and we have not addressed the question of the basis in Colombia. We can't have total peace in our region and not talk about these NATO global partners in our region. So the people are gonna demand that these kinds of issues and contradictions are addressed. So peace is what we are struggling for. Peace is what we are hoping to achieve, but we say and we remind people that without justice, there could be no peace. And without justice, without fighting, you can't achieve justice. So we are talking about building a struggle, building the capacity of our people across the region to struggle to transform ourselves and transform these relationships. I'm glad you brought up Colombia, and there's a couple of comments about Colombia in the chat as well, because it's, I mean, you live in Colombia. You've been outed. Yeah. Right. I used to try to hide that. Yeah, well, you're not there now, I'll say. But it's, you know, this is the paradox, right? There's a lot of excitement about the new administration in Colombia. And this is one of the changes, you know, through the electoral process, through constitutional means of a governmental change, left of center, Colombia last summer, summer of 2022. And this is the paradox is that there's still, you know, Colombia is a NATO global partner and there still are all those US military bases in the country, although I don't think any of us would expect the new government to get rid of those bases, you know, right after Inauguration Day, but this is an interesting and difficult paradox to kind of have to work through. And it isn't just Colombia. What else is it? Argentina is, what's the status? Major non-NATO partner with the US. And I wanna say Chile also, but I'm not sure, but definitely Colombia and Argentina. And so how does that, where do we start to, you know, dismantling that? I mean, I always say we, I see, you know, we as our Americas, because, you know, the Colombian people are, you know, sovereign people themselves to make the changes they want and need also, but those bases are US and that's gonna be, you know, our responsibility as US citizens to help dismantle that. Well, we have to start. No, we have to, first, we have to continue to raise awareness of the fact that these bases across the region exist. People have to be reminded that we have something like 76 bases, US bases in the, I mean, across the region. We have to be reminded that, for example, we have a number of bases in places like Puerto Rico that are this part of our region and still directly colonized by the US. So it's not just Colombia. We, you know, we understand that the situation of Colombia is deeply complex. And, you know, the nominal state power that the Patriot and Marquez administration has, you know, is very precarious. The attempts to try to develop a peace process with the National Liberation Force the ELN and other forces in Colombia is very, very difficult. Right now we have a very difficult situation with an intensification of violence in the territories right at a moment that the peace process is trying to be revived, okay? And we see some strange politics and even some of our other friends states that we have in the region that we are friendly with. But that's why it's so important that we have this people-centered movement because it is the people themselves who make demands who will ensure that there's accountability with all of these progressive states. Because in the end what we are struggling for is not just people-centered human rights which is, of course, core but also our democracy, our democratic rights and our human rights are inexplicable, inextricable. That too. I would add to that, you know, you talked about naming these institutions. So things that can be done kicking out the NED, you know, they're countries that have kicked out these types of institutions and the National Endowment for Democracy, though, what's the, does the, you know, the soft work of the CIA and, you know, funding groups within countries directly injured. The Margaret Freese. I think we lost her. Margaret, maybe just turn off your video and participate via audio. Well, it should come back. So yes, those are some of the things that we have to do. They, there's some of the things that people are involved in right now. We have to have more effective solidarity work in the North. It makes no sense that the people of Peru are struggling almost by themselves, okay? I mean, there's people in the region that are providing solidarity and support. But why isn't this moral of an issue in North America? Right now, we have, we have bad folks on the ground in Peru and we, every week in the Black Agenda Report, we have reports coming directly from our activists on the ground in Peru. You would think that everybody will be flocking to that source of information, but they're not doing that. They seem not to really even care that much, okay? We are talking about flow. Yes, we're engaging in these, these naval gazing conversations around the character and nature of some of these states why imperialism is given a free hand to undermine and subvert across our region while we engage in all these abstract academic discussions. The fact of the matter is that whatever your political orientation or ideological orientation might be, it is arrogant to impose that on the peoples of these various nations. They will find their own way. They will deal with their own internal contradictions. Your responsibility is to keep the focus on your state that's responsible for most of, most all of the suffering and contradictions in our region. Do that, you know, but they don't want to do that. They want to instead pontificate and pretend like they know something about revolutionary change and they don't. Sorry about the interruption. My internet. Oh no, we're happy you're back. We're happy you're back. Oh, you froze. I got on my phone hotspot. Oh, darn it. Oh. So Mark, will you make us in some comments? Well, yeah, I was just, I was saying that, you know we have to name these institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy that does, you know the work of interfering in these countries and countries can, you know, talk about what can people do. They can demand that countries kick the NED out. I think the organization of American States, OAS is a deeply corrupt. Oh my goodness. Yeah. See if it helps doing audio only, no video. Okay, let me try that. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes, great. My internet connection is unstable, but so sorry. That's all right. Yeah, so I was, you know saying that the OAS is another institution that's controlled by the United States and countries are, you know working to leave the OAS, to hold the leader of the OAS accountable, Luis Amalgro, to build alternatives to that. And then as people living in the United States we have to recognize that most of what we see in the corporate media about what's happening in Latin America is manipulated and propaganda and false. And so we need to this network, this, you know America's wide network is important so that we have connections with peoples in other countries so that we can get accurate information about what's actually happening in those countries and not the falsehoods that we hear so frequently in the United States. I hope you got all that. Yes, we did. So let's go back to Peru just briefly in the beginning and flowers is the black lion for peace. Activist and correspondent on the ground. And I did, you know, I had the great honor of meeting her while I was there in February. And in fact, she did, the audience probably remembers she was a guest on this program for part of a report back with activists. And the biggest thing, the most common thing, the loudest thing that the Peruvian people are asking for is to have their story brought into the international community. So, and so that they are not forgotten. And I, you know, I agree with you, this is our work in the North. And this is for the Peruvian people specifically those in the South, they are principally indigenous or first original people as they call them in Peru and Camposino and they live on land that has abundant fresh water and lithium as well as other precious metals. And this is a 500 year struggle for them. It's the same paradigm, it's the same structure. It's the same pilfering, privateering, you know, extraction of natural and human resources for the global North. There's one thing that is worth looking at on a map for all of us to look at where the lithium fields are. And it is, and as you said, Ajamu and Latin America is a huge percentage of the world's lithium fields starting in the triangle with Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, including Peru and in Mexico. And where have all the recent whose political disruption been? Pretty much if you look at where the lithium is and where the attempts to either buy lawfare or electoral fraud, whatever, you have the lithium fields and then you have these forced changes of government. They overlap almost exactly all the way up to Mexico. And now we can even argue there's a, not argue there is very clearly a negative or an anti-omlo narrative coming out of the States towards Mexico. And of course, the president of Mexico nationalized the lithium fields last year, spring of 2022. This is the same model that Latin America and the Caribbean well, and even the native peoples of North America have experienced for 500 years. Nothing's changed. And so this campaign of Black Alliance for Pieces, this zone of peace, this is huge. And this is not something, this is gonna be a struggle for perhaps generations even to dismantle and not just dismantle, but then there's gonna have to be rebuilding. And this is where I would argue this need. And I think in the global South, they're much more successful. They have a much better understanding of movement building. We don't quite get that in the global North or in the States where all of us are from. This need, this movement building, labor, social, political, where you can keep a project going generation to generation, where you can keep your influence on the political powers and on the business powers. That movement building has just got to happen and match to continue a project such as yours. You absolutely right. And the, I hate to be, some people think overly dramatic, but I refer to them as the enemy. The enemy also recognizes this and they are making moves to undermine the progressive developments in our region. And they're using some tried and true methods to do that. One of the reasons why we have some of the political challenges we have in the North is because of the weaknesses of our organizations. Why are our organizations so weak? Part of it is, can be explained by the, the pervasive NGO-tization of the movement in the North. That has resulted in the fragmentation of our movements, the opportunism and the careerism. There's so much a part of the political life in the North and the reformism that is the resulted politics. Well, folks, there is a veritable in the North well, folks, there is a veritable invasion taking place in Central and South America by somebody's same forces, these foundations. They are coming into the region. And I call it an invasion and I don't think that's an exaggeration with the same kinds of methods to fragment the radical opposition. They're not gonna be as successful because of the traditions of radicalism we have across the region, but they can be pretty disruptive and we're already seeing some results of that. So, as you said, Terry, this will be a struggle and it's about movement building. I don't think it's gonna be generations because the contradictions facing in this region and globally are such that we don't have generations. If there's not a check on global capitalist power, well, we are able to construct methods of cooperation, dealing with these global challenges like climate change. We're not gonna be here. If we're not able to build a movement that can put a check on these maniacs who are making policy in the US and Europe, we're not going to survive because you see the kind of dangerous politics that these amateurs are pursuing with this manufactured crisis in Ukraine and you see the effectiveness of propaganda in the US where you have massive public opinion who precedes the Russians as the enemy and Putin some kind of nut or whatever. I mean, it's so incredibly effective and they are already creating their conditions to pivot to China. And they understand they have even more juicy target with China because of the fact that while the Russians have been ejected from whiteness back in 1917, they still look European and so there's still some degree of sympathy for them in some places, even though the Slavs have always been seen as basically pretend to be Europeans. But the Chinese, the full force of white supremacist ideology will be in place. Okay, we already see it. And so if you have these sophisticated so-called leftists who want to engage in these abstract conversations around the nature of these various states as opposed to doing the tough and necessary work of building an anti-imperialist movement directed at the enemy of humankind, then we are facing the possibility of not only escalation with the Russians into a nuclear confrontation, but if we escape the possibility of that happening with the Chinese, why are these freaks agitating the Chinese? Why are they, they had a one China policy for decades now. What are they trying to do? Do they really want war with the Chinese? Do they- They want all of the lithium. They said they want all of the lithium. Here's a state that has a war and major conflicts is the Second World War and they didn't even win that one. And now they want to fight the Russians and the Chinese simultaneously. This is madness now. It is madness, but the scary thing is and so many knowledgeable people have been saying this, Ray McGovern and others who've been on the inside, these people actually believe that the United States can win in these conflicts. Despite all of the evidence, we don't have the resources to fight these wars. We, the world is not with the United States. 90% of the world is not with the US and it's conflict in Ukraine. And alliances regionally in the world are changing significantly and the US is now becoming just kind of a, I call the US the one guido of the world. It's just a joke. It's the US is not being included like it used to be in certain things and alternatives are being built to shut us out. So, but the people in power literally believe that we could launch a nuclear war and that somehow we could actually win this. And they truly believe this and that this is why another reason, they have the many reasons why this work is so critical. And for people in the United States to learn and to educate themselves is a crucial part of this struggle. The zone of peace. Yeah. How do people find out and join? You said people can, yeah, you're opening the indoor. I have been posting the link to the Black Alliance, to the specific page genre, the Black Alliance Zone of Peace campaign. I posted it multiple times in the live chat and it is also included among other additional links in the program notes which will be in the description of the episode. On the YouTube channel. Yeah, Black Alliance for Peace. We appreciate that, yes. I mean, that is to go there, go to the page and you can determine how you want to relate to the campaign. We are building out the, please check the box where you joined the US NATO out of the America's network. That's what we have. That's the mass-based structure we're going to build. Be on a lookout for information coming from the Alliance. But remember this, this is an initiative that the Black Alliance for Peace has taken the lead on. But this is an initiative that it requires our key allies like popular resistance. We have no illusions about trying to do this by ourselves. And that's why we took a year to build relationships. This has to be, it will be a regional-wide effort of organizers who are going to build out the rest of this campaign. We put in place the skeletal element of the campaign and now the next stage is building out the campaign and encouraging real work. There's not going to be a paper campaign. We don't do that. Revolutionary discipline. It's groundwork. Real stuff. Yeah, groundwork, movement building, yeah. It's fabulous. And that's what we need to learn from our Latin American brothers and sisters. They have that revolutionary discipline and that's why they've had this, been able to wage these fights. Exactly, yeah. So thank you both of you for such a fabulous conversation and thank you, Ishamu, for all of your work at Black Alliance for Peace and Beyond. This is such an important campaign. Again, it's the Black Alliance for Peace zone of peace campaign. And you can find it at blackallianceforpeace.com slash zone of peace. Again, the link has been posted multiple times in the chat and you can find that link as well as how to follow both Ishamu and Margaret on social media. Those links are all in the program notes as well. So, and also I did include the YouTube link, the Black Alliance for Peace YouTube channel link for the press conference on Tuesday, April 4th, which was the launch of the zone of peace campaign. So be sure to take a look at that everyone when you can. It was an excellent launch of the campaign. And we're so thankful. And we launched Havana and Imported Prince. Right, three places. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was the DC one, but that was one of three, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, just for the audience, I think you all know because you have watched, you know, Ishamu Jamima Pierre was on in the fall when there was this overt US narrative of US intervention in Haiti, which still continues, but she did a fabulous episode with us on what was happening in that particular moment. And for the audience, it's really important the work that Black Alliance for Peace does in connecting the continent and peoples of Africa through Haiti to the Americas. That history is so important to understanding the Americas and in my opinion, the global South as a whole. So Haiti is such an important link that we need to be talking about more. And I'm thankful. Hey, thank you for your work and for bringing us all together. Oh, it was a great conversation. So wonderful to work with both of you in one space at one time. It really was a wonderful conversation. So for the audience, I just wanna remind all of you you've been watching what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean where a popular resistance broadcast and you can find us on three YouTube channels simultaneously on Thursday evening, 730 p.m. Eastern Convo Couch, popular resistance or code pink action and post broadcasts. Recordings can be found on Apple or Spotify wherever you get your podcasts and also now at popular resistance.org. They have our own page there. So thank you, everyone. Thank you, Wajamu. Thank you, Margaret. And thank you to our audience for joining us. Really wonderful to see all of you and we'll catch you next week.