alternative vision(s)

this is a neat organization i encountered while researching the european union's economic policies with latin america for an international economic relations course i took in chile last semester. naive as some might argue i choose to be, i wouldn't have taken such a course under normal circumstances--but i thought that maybe i would get the chilean perspective, and i wrongly assumed that it might be somewhat critical of neoliberalism and/or the frequent and grossly oversimplified assumption that all 'growth' is good. all students did class presentations on various countries' relations with chile, and no one challenged chile's vision of strong neoliberalist economic policy (one which, i might add, severely limits participation in their frequently-boasted-about democracy. see the list of campaigns by Mapuche International which describe the ways that chile's relationship with the forresting sector is interfering with the rights of many mapuche communities). when it was my group's turn, i convinced the chilean students in my group to let me present on the "social aspect" of EU-Chile relationships, and proceeded to describe to the class the history of anti-EU-free-trade-agreement- movements in Chile and elsewhere (a lot of mapuche resistance is formally organized in Scandinavia, where there are large communities who relocated in exile during the Pinochet dictatorship).

the organization/network i linked to, Enlazando Alternativas: Red Birregional Europa-América Latina y el Caribe, describes how it was formed:
La creación de la red es el resultado de una creciente concientización de que las políticas neoliberales de la Unión Europea (UE) y su agenda comercial se encuentran lideradas por el poder de las corporaciones transnacionales y que la UE tiene como objetivo asegurar el acceso de sus economías a los mercados latinoamericanos y caribeños de manera irrestringida. Así también, la creación de esta red birregional reflejó la necesidad de incrementar las resistencias por parte de la sociedad civil latinoamericana y europea al “proyecto europeo”, a las empresas transnacionales con base en la Unión Europea y a las políticas internacionales de “libre” comercio."
[The creation of this network is the result of a growing awareness of the neoliberal policies of the European Union and its comercial agenda, driven by the power of transnational corporations, and that the EU has the objective of securing its economies access to latin american and carribean markets in an unrestrained manner. The creation of this biregional network also reflects the necessity of increasing the resistance(s) of latin american and european civil society to the "european project," to the transnational companies based in the European Union and to the politics of "free trade."]

for those of you who don't speak spanish but want to navigate their site, this link is the best i could find, and it will bring you to an english advertisement for their 2006 alternative summit of social movements from latin america, the carribean and europe. "ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE."