The former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, was the main speaker at the opening of the event, last Thursday, at a hotel in Mexico City.
More than a hundred delegates from leftist groups from 45 countries around the world have participated since last Thursday in the XXV seminar “The Parties and the New Society” organized by the Labor Party (PT) of Mexico. The event will conclude this afternoon, according to the group’s website.
Among the attendees are former President Evo Morales, from Bolivia, and Manuel Zelaya, from Honduras; former Colombian insurgent leader Rodrigo Londoño, formerly known as Timochenko, and Senator Iván Cepeda, and the Deputy Head of International Relations of the Communist Party of Cuba, Ángel Arzuaga. Cecilia Velasque, who is a leader of the Pachakutik movement, participates in Ecuador.
Morales was the keynote speaker at the event’s opening last Thursday. Almost two years after his asylum in Mexico, the former president returned to that country and thanked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for “saving his life” in 2019, when he left Bolivia denouncing a “coup d’état.” “Mexico will not only be my home, it is the home of all those who fight for the freedom of their peoples,” he said.
During his speech, which was picked up by the agency EFEMorales expressed his “admiration for the Cuban people and the Venezuelan people, who are facing the criminal, unilateral and immoral economic blockade” by the United States.
He reproached the United States for “organizing coups” and “promoting racism and fascism throughout the world.”
But he also called for the self-criticism of the Latin American left, since he warned that there are “comrades who are more in love with money than with the country.”
On Friday, instead, he gave a press conference in which he assured that control of lithium was behind the “coup” that supposedly overthrew him in 2019 and supported the initiative of President López Obrador that seeks to nationalize this raw material.
“The lithium industry must be in the hands of the States, not the private sector. That is our experience, ”said Morales, who was asylum only a month in Mexico after leaving the Bolivian presidency.
A few weeks ago, President López Obrador presented a proposal for a constitutional reform that limits private participation in the electricity sector and nationalizes lithium, a precious mineral for which the Mexican government will not issue operating licenses.
Meanwhile, in her inaugural speech via Zoom, the director of the PT, María Guadalupe Rodríguez, He stressed that the seminar celebrates a quarter of a century convening progressive leaders of the region with the aim of gathering ideas for a better society.
“We are looking for a stronger left, more pluralistic, more democratic and, above all, more humane, the new left must build a political theory and proposals aimed at breaking economic inequalities,” he said through his social networks.
It is expected that this afternoon a final statement of the international seminar will be issued that will include the commitments of the attendees. (I)
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