Santiago de Chile, Mar 17 (EFE).- Eleven conservative presidents and former presidents of Latin America founded the Freedom and Democracy Group this Friday in Chile, a new discussion forum that was born at a time when most of the countries in the region are ruled by the left.
“This group was created because we believe that it is absolutely necessary to organize and group together to defend freedom and democracy in our continent. Many of the setbacks that democracy has had are not so much because of those who hate democracy, but rather because of the lack of defense of those of us who are its supporters,” said former Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, host of the event.
Paraguayan Mario Abdo and Ecuadorian Guillermo Lasso are the only active members of the group, which is also made up of Mexicans Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox; Colombians Iván Duque and Andrés Pastrana; the Bolivian Jorque Quiroga; the Argentinian Mauricio Macri and the Spaniards Mariano Rajoy and José María Aznar.
“It is not left and right”
“This is not a debate of left and right. This is a debate between demagogues and educators. It is surprising how in our countries they sold the youth that everything was wrong”, Duque pointed out.
Aznar, for his part, pointed to “populists and false prophets” as the great enemies of democracy, while Rajoy defended the importance of “institutional stability”: “Turn everything around when the government changes is something tremendously negative,” he added.
Quiroga and Pastrana were the only ones who attended the event in person, held at the Andrés Bello University in Santiago and during which the founding declaration of the group was signed. The rest intervened electronically and Lasso and Abdo sent a recorded message.
Lasso, against whom the opposition activated a process of impeachment on Thursday for allegedly protecting those close to him in an alleged network of corruption in public companies, criticized “the dark intentions of destabilizing democracy” in his country and assured that his government “will will stand firm.”
Hello progressive in Iberoamerica
The creation of the Libertad y Democracia Group coincides with an unprecedented event: for the first time in history, the five main Latin American economies are governed by the left.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Alberto Fernández have been in power the longest and have presided over Mexico and Argentina since 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Gabriel Boric and Gustavo Petro assumed the Presidencies of Chile and Colombia, respectively, in 2022, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took charge of Brazil last January.
“The left that is controlling the region and destroying it”
“The left that is controlling the region and destroying it is a group that does plan, that does sit down, that does organize internationally and does not cease in its efforts to destroy the freedoms that we must defend so much,” Calderón pointed out.
“What we are experiencing is very hard and we have finally come together to face it together,” added Macri.
The left of Ibero-America is articulated in the Puebla Group, a discussion forum created in 2019 in which Lula da Silva and Fernández and former presidents such as the Brazilian Dilma Rousseff, the Spanish José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero or the Ecuadorian Rafael Correa participate.
The traditional right did not have an instance of this type, unlike the extreme right, which recently founded the Madrid Forum, promoted by the Spanish party VOX and with the participation of Bolsonarismo or the Argentine Javier Milei.