2019 PEOPLES’ SUMMIT DECLARATION
Para la declaración en español, ver abajo
Over December 2-7, 2019, hundreds of organizations, men, women, indigenous and afro-descendant peoples, migrant communities, peasants, workers, youth, girls and boys from Chile, Latin America and the world have been part of the milestone Peoples’ Summit, at the University of Santiago de Chile.
In the midst of a city and a country in a state of rebellion which challenges an unjust and predatory neoliberal system and a violent and abusive State, the public University, rightfully fulfilling its role, has opened its doors for us to debate on the planetary crisis and its multiple social and environmental expressions, national or regional, to share our struggles, denunciations and demands, and imagine together another possible world.
Over 40 activities were organized including panels, workshops, town-hall meetings, conversations and other formats, all self-managed by the participating organizations; two permanent spaces –the Women’s Tent and the Peace Village; cultural and artistic activities, and the central panels and plenary sessions of the
Peoples’ Summit welcomed the active participation of approximately 1,500 registered participants.
From the fraternal experience lived and shared during these 5 days, the organizations of the Peoples’ Summit declare:
1. We reiterate our commitment to the peoples of Chile and other Latin American countries that have risen against structural adjustment, the usurpation and privatization of common goods, social precarization, structural violence against women, systemic racism, and the violation of rights by the neoliberal system; and we demand justice in the face of the killings and human rights violations with which States have responded to such mobilizations.
2. We support the demand of social movements and territorial assemblies that call for a true Constituent Assembly in Chile, entirely made up of citizens, without privileges for political parties, and that takes gender parity and significant quotas for indigenous peoples into account.
3. We do not conceive of a constituent process generated following to the rules of a political-electoral system that has been one of the pillars of the Chilean neoliberal model, and whose political class has given a new demonstration of subordination to corporate interests by approving in Parliament the so-called “anti-looting” law, which includes articles that openly criminalize legitimate social protest.
4. We support the aspirations of organizations and communities in Chile to establish a political constitution endowed with the principles of plurinationality, feminism, and the recognition of the rights of nature.
5. Within the framework of the climate negotiations at the COP25 in Madrid:
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- We condemn that the presidency of the COP has been kept in the hands of the Government of Piñera that has been responsible for murders, torture, rapes, mutilations, injuries, humiliation, arbitrary detentions and other human rights violations committed by State agents.
- We reject the adoption of false solutions to climate change, which deepen the crisis and strengthen the model that generates it, such as carbon markets, hydroelectricity and other corporate-based energies, carbon sinks based on tree monocultures and agrofuels, industrial energy generated from forest biomass, incineration, geoengineering and hydraulic fracturing or fracking.
- We demand effective measures to prevent corporate control over negotiations, and allow for large corporations and more polluting countries to radically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and pay for the damages caused, mainly in the more vulnerable territories.
- We call for greater visibility to climate migrations and promote migration policies that have a human rights focus.
- We call for effective promotion of a just transition and truly sustainable solutions, outside markets and extractivism, based on territorial sovereignty, local practices, cultures and economies, decent work and living conditions, as well as in the solidarity exchange between peoples and communities.
6. We reject the impulse of extractivism by governments and international organizations, in collusion with corporate power, which conceives all territories as potential areas of sacrifice, and advances through the destruction of ecosystems, displacing communities or affecting their lifestyles and local economies including the promotion and subsidy of metallic or non-metallic mining, forest plantations, agribusiness and conventional livestock farming, which also entails a high dose of cruelty to animals.
7. We claim and take in as our own the demands of indigenous and afro-descendant peoples, especially regarding the demilitarization of their territories –particularly the Wallmapu, the return of their ancestral lands and the full exercise of their political, social and cultural rights.
8. Quoting the declaration of the Women’s Tent, “we claim feminist economy as a strategy of resistance and transformation for the lives of women and their communities, as a way of recognizing and valuing knowledge, domestic work and care that sustains life and that, in this capitalist system, is undertook by women.”
9. We celebrate the strength and active participation of youth, girls and boys in the spaces of the Summit and recognize the leading role they have taken on by denouncing the crisis and promoting structural changes.
10. We demand the deprivatization of water in Chile, the effective and integral protection of glaciers, the restoration of land for peasants and the promotion in the territories and in public policies of agroecological models that are free from GMOs and chemical pesticides and based on food sovereignty and on the recovery and exchange of products and seeds, as well as prioritizing ecosystem conservation, regeneration and restoration.
11. We demand policies and we promote community initiatives aimed at generating fairer and friendlier cities, harmonizing city-countryside relationships, deprivatizing basic services, promoting truly participatory territorial planning, implementing zero waste models and sustainable urban mobility systems.
12. We demand the radical transformation of energy models, based on sovereignty, sufficiency and solidarity criteria, through distributed generation systems based on clean and diverse community-based sources.
13. We reject the signing of free trade and investment agreements that benefit corporations, violate social rights and undermine local economies and food sovereignty. We demand the final withdrawal of Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement from Parliament.
14. We call to build Latin American and international movements and articulations, integrating organizations engaged in struggles for ecological and climatic justice, feminism, indigenous and afro-descendant peoples, migrants, working peasants, youth, boys and girls, to stop a model that privatizes common goods and to raise alternative paradigms such as ‘buen vivir’ and others that arise from peoples’ worldviews.
15. Finally, quoting the declaration of the Peace Village, “we invite ourselves to collectively co-create a way of relating to nature and also a conscious and loving way of relating to ourselves. (…) We understood the need to incorporate the rights of nature and of all living beings that sustain the planetary fabric, as constituents of our lives and the laws of peoples. ”
PEOPLES’ SUMMIT 2019
Santiago, December 7, 2019
“SAVE THE EARTH, CHANGE THE SYSTEM”
- Condenamos la mantención de la presidencia de la COP en manos del Gobierno de Piñera, responsable de asesinatos, torturas, violaciones, mutilaciones, heridas, vejámenes, detenciones arbitrarias y otras violaciones a los derechos humanos cometidas por agentes del Estado.
- Rechazamos el impulso de falsas soluciones al cambio climático, que profundizan la crisis y robustecen el modelo que la genera, como los mercados de carbono, la hidroelectricidad y otras energías de base corporativa, los sumideros a base de monocultivos de árboles y agrocombustibles, la energía industrial a partir de biomasa forestal, la incineración, la geoingeniería y la fractura hidráulica o fracking.
- Demandamos la toma de medidas efectivas para evitar la captura corporativa de las negociaciones, así como para que las grandes corporaciones y países más contaminantes reduzcan de manera radical sus emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero y paguen por los daños y perjuicios causados, fundamentalmente en los territorios más vulnerables.
- Llamamos a dar mayor visibilidad a la migración climática y promover políticas migratorias con enfoque de derechos humanos.
- Llamamos a impulsar de manera efectiva la transición justa y las soluciones verdaderamente sustentables, fuera de los mercados y el extractivismo, basadas en la soberanía territorial, en las prácticas, culturas y economías locales, en condiciones de trabajo y vida dignas, así como en el intercambio solidario entre pueblos y comunidades.