“The peoples think that the only thing incompatible with the destiny of Latin America is misery, feudal exploitation, illiteracy, starvation wages, unemployment, the policy of repression against the masses of workers, peasants and students, discrimination against women, blacks, indigenous people and mestizos, the oppression of the oligarchies, the plundering of their wealth by the US monopolies, the moral suffocation of their intellectuals and artists, the ruin of their small producers by foreign competition, the economic underdevelopment, the peoples without roads, without hospitals, without housing, without schools, without industries, the submission to imperialism, the renunciation of national sovereignty and the betrayal of the homeland”.
Quotes
“The peoples of the Americas freed themselves from Spanish colonialism at the beginning of the last century, but they did not free themselves from exploitation. The feudal landowners assumed the authority of the Spanish rulers, the Indians continued in painful servitude, the Latin American man in one form or another remained a slave and the minimal hopes of the peoples succumbed under the power of the oligarchies and the strap of foreign capital”.
"Let’s put an end to the transfer of lifestyles and consumer habits to the Third World that ruin the environment. Let human life be more rational. Let a just international economic order be implemented. Let science work toward a sustainable development without contamination".
"(...) that everything that today contributes to underdevelopment and poverty is tantamount to a flagrant attack on the ecology. As a result, tens of millions of men, women and children perish every year in the Third World, far more than in each of the two world wars. The unequal terms of trade, protectionism and the foreign debt are also an assault on the ecology and facilitate the destruction of the environment".
"(...) today to be economists of the people—I repeat—they must be political economists; and politicians must be politicians with a minimum of economic knowledge and if it is possible with a maximum of knowledge in that field, that today is really the basis on which the fate of humanity depends, the basis on which our struggles are being carried out. And the politicians who do not understand, or do not want to understand, or who do not strive to know economics, are not worthy of exercising the duty they exercise as such politicians".
“An attempt is made at imposing an economic order in which our small and poor countries would have no choice but to become an immense free zone where the capital and industries of the powerful would find cheap labor force, destroy our environment, deplete our resources and multiply their profits without even paying taxes, when these countries no longer receive the modest custom benefits they used to obtain.”
“There is the intention to accord equal treatment to countries which differ greatly in their capabilities and development stages; that is terribly unfair. Our particularly backward and vulnerable economies - a logical consequence of centuries of colonialism, slavery and pillage - would never be able to successfully take part in the world economy in the absence of preferential schemes and of a great contribution in non-repayable foreign resources.”