On Wednesday 14th December 2004, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) was founded.
On that day, the agreement between Venezuela and Cuba, the founding members of the alliance, was signed during an event held in Havana to celebrate the meeting that 10 years earlier, in 1994, the Commanders Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez had for the first time.
The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) is an integration platform for the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
It puts emphasis on solidarity, complementarity, justice and cooperation, which has the historical and fundamental purpose to join the capacities and strengths of the countries comprising it, in a view to producing the structural transformations and the relations system necessary to achieve e integral development, required for the continuity of our existence as sovereign and just nations.
Additionally, it is a political, economic, and social alliance in defense of the independence, self-determination and the identity of the peoples comprising it.
Integration is for the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, an indispensable condition to aspire to development in the middle of the increasing formation of huge regional blocs that occupy predominant positions in the world economy.
The cardinal principle that governs the ALBA is widest solidarity between the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, as upheld by Bolivar, Martí, Sucre, O’Higgins, St Martin, Nobleman, Petion, Morazán, Sandino and so many other national heroes, without selfish nationalism or restrictive national policies that reject the objective of constructing a Big Homeland, according to the dreams of the heroes of our emancipating fights.
The countries that currently comprise ALBA-TCP are: Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
