Halifax

Roundtable Discussion -- ALBA: Latin America's New Dawn

7:00pm
- 9:00pm
Thursday October 3 2013

A roundtable discussion with the Ambassadors to Canada from:
Bolivia: Edgar José Torrez Mosqueira
Cuba: Julio Garmendía Peña
El Salvador: Oscar Mauricio Duarte Granados
Venezuela: Ana Rodríguez de Febres-Cordero
Sponsors: Dalhousie (IDS; Spanish & Latin American Studies); Canadian Network on Cuba; Nova Scotia Public Interest Group; Canadian Union Of Postal Workers

What Is ALBA?

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) was conceived by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and was created by Venezuela and Cuba in 2004 as an alternative to the U.S.-led Free Trade Area of the Americas that aims for social, political, and economic integration in Latin America and the Caribbean.

ALBA, which means "dawn" in Spanish, has as its main goals the alleviation of poverty and the promotion of socioeconomic reform through trade agreements that meet each country's needs, rather than through the neoliberal, or free-market, economic policies that dominated the region's economic planning and growth strategies in the 1990s.

Essentially, supporters of ALBA find its programs to be worthy alternatives to the economic policies of many international lending organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

With a total population of over 70,000,000 people the member nations are Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Venezuela. Suriname and Saint Lucia were admitted to ALBA as guest countries and Haiti is pending full membership.

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