Tribuna Popular – On May 6, the Regional Meeting of the World Peace Council (WPC) was held in Santiago de Cuba with the participation of the Committee for International Solidarity and Struggle for Peace (COSI), in the person of its Secretary General, Yul Jabour, on behalf of Venezuela.
A couple of days before, the VIII International Seminar on Peace and for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases took place in the province of Guantanamo, with the participation of 80 delegates from 30 countries. Both activities were sponsored by the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP).
During his speech at the seminar, Jabour declared that this activity was held “in an international context of profound crisis of the capitalist system, which intensifies the competition and contradictions between the imperialist powers.”
“The US and NATO military presence is increasingly growing which represents a permanent threat to world peace. The Atlantic body is the main armed instrument at the service of the Western capitalist powers to protect and expand their economic interests globally,” denounced the COSI secretary general.
Jabour explained that the war in Ukraine has as its background “the fierce dispute for the control of the natural gas market and trade routes”.
“The thawing of the polar ice caps, particularly in the Arctic, a product of the effects of global warming, is opening up possibilities for new trade routes and access to potential energy sources that were previously impossible to exploit. This is also accelerating the arms race in the area between Russia, the United States and European Union countries,” the activist explained.
Jabour warned that in the Middle East and North Africa there have been important changes in the last decade “which have resulted in the emergence of new alliances such as the Abraham 2020 Agreement, which brings together Israel, Morocco and a group of Arab countries with the aim of creating a kind of NATO for the Middle East”.
“Beyond NATO, the United States remains the country with the most important military deployment globally,” the leader said as he presented some key figures.
“The United States has the largest military expenditure in the world, which is around $700 billion a year and has 173,000 troops deployed in 800 bases and military installations around the planet; 76 of them in Latin America and more than twenty strategically surround Venezuelan territory”, he detailed.
Referring to the imperialist interventionist policy in the region, Jabour stated: “the condemnation of the criminal unilateral, illegal and extraterritorial coercive measures applied today by U.S. imperialism to countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, among others”.
“From the International Solidarity Committee we demand the cessation of these measures which violate international law,” he said.
COSI committed together with the organizations present to strengthen the demand for the closure of foreign military bases, installations and enclaves and the immediate withdrawal of foreign occupation troops in the countries where they are deployed.
Tribuna Popular 