As poets, writers and artists of Our America and the world, we live with deep concern the remilitarization of the Caribbean and the rearmament of our entire America, with the promise of new bases, “security cooperation” agreements and joint military exercises between our countries and the United States.
But above all, we urgently need to denounce the direct interventionist threats that the Americans have deployed against Venezuela in recent weeks, in a maritime deployment unprecedented since the 80s of the last century.
During these hours, a war fleet with dozens of ships and thousands of military personnel is prowling the southern Caribbean and menacingly surrounds the Bolivarian Republic and neighboring countries with the ruse of fighting drug trafficking and illicit economies. But as the peoples of our region know well, militarization has never brought anything but death, destruction, violence and loss of sovereignty. Only a policy based on peace, equality, well-being and the promotion of life in all its manifestations can cope with the economies of death.
At the same time, we regret that the Norwegian Nobel Committee have chosen to award a peace prize to such a belligerent and violent figure as the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, infamous for having accompanied the coup d’état that overthrew Hugo Chávez Frías in 2002, for inciting the street violence of the so-called “guarimbas”, for calling for foreign military intervention of her own country and for celebrating the unilateral economic measures that have caused so much pain to the people of Velezolano, having a direct and extremely harmful impact on their arts, culture and literature.
We poets are part of the collective memory of our peoples, and we remember in a lacerating way what the policy of the “big stick” and the “diplomacy of the gunboats” meant for our region throughout the twentieth century. Too many poets lost their lives fighting with the pen or the sword for our self-determination and sovereignty, but we don’t want new collective martyrologies.
We raise our voice for peace, we advocate for dialogue and peaceful coexistence and we put our hopes in the capacity of the integration and coordination mechanisms of Our America and the world to cut this new escalation of aggressions in its tracks.
WORLD POETRY MOVEMENT
Coordinating Committee
