Latin American Progressives to Gather at Puebla Group Meeting

Argentina's President-elect Alberto Fernandez will host the second meeting of the Puebla Group, a Latin American forum of progressive leaders who began their discussions in Buenos Aires on Friday.

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Among the 25 attendees are former Chilean presidential candidate Marco Enriquez-Ominami and former presidents Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), Ernesto Samper (Colombia) and Fernando Lugo (Paraguay).

Former secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS) Jose Miguel Insulza, Mexico's vice-chancellor Maximiliano Reyes and former foreign ministers Celso Amorim (Brazil) and Guillaume Long (Ecuador) are also attending.

Fernandez's opening statement at this top-level meeting will be a delicate test for his ability as a politician. He aspires to rebuild a progressive pole in the region and, at the same time, have cordial relations with the U.S. President Donald Trump.

"An America free from neoliberalism is approaching." The meme reads, “I never thought that putting a plate of food on a poor man's table would generate so much hatred within an elite who gets fed up of throwing food in the trash every day,” Lula Sa Silva, the Great Lula.

As the Argentinean politician said previously, the Puebla Group is an attempt to regroup progressive forces in order to foster regional integration in the way in which the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) intended to do.​​​​​

Created at Puebla (Mexico) in July, this forum also seeks to promote alternatives to the actions prompted by the Lima Group, which brings together the Latin American most conservative rulers.

This second meeting is expected to generate collective pronouncements on the situations which Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Haiti are currently going through. The conclusions emanating from the event, however, will be known at a press conference on Sunday.

"We postulate peace, dialogue and self-determination, which are principles recognized by the United Nations. No government can be offended by that," Enriquez-Ominami said.

"We are going to show the progressives' cohesion as it had not been seen for a long time. It is becoming clear that neoliberalism did not work."