The following is an edited transcript of remarks by Donald Ramotar to Panel 2 of the Sept. 4, 2026 EIR-IPC Roundtable, “An Alternative to War and Looting in the Americas.” Ramotar is the former President of Guyana (2011-2015). Subheads have been added. The video is available here.
I must say from the very beginning that, with all the developments that have been taking place in the world today, I will just ask your indulgence for me to divert a little bit from the assigned topic so I can deal generally with some other issues that have taken place.
First of all, let me say that we are meeting at a time when our world is facing some very, very serious global issues. We are witnessing many of what we call natural disasters. The most recent is the terrible landslide in Nepal. Thousands have lost their lives and thousands more are missing, most likely dead. But Nepal is not the only tragic event. The wildfires and the heat waves in Europe and North America and the devastating floods in Asia tell us that what scientists have been warning about since the late 1960s is now upon us. And we can only expect things to get even worse from now.
I have just said that we call these natural disasters. However, the truth is that they are really not. Almost all of these tragic events could have been avoided because they are due to our human abuse of nature. Why is it that we were and are unable to avoid many of these unfortunate devastations? Why, since we were forewarned of what will happen if we don’t make changes in our ways, do we continue on the same course? The answer lies in the outmoded international system that dominates our world. The most powerful forces that influence the direction of international relations are outdated, have outlived their usefulness, and are clearly incapable of solving global problems.
Worse than that, my friends, is the fact that the same forces that seem incapable of tackling the existential threat which we face, are creating even more dangerous problems for us. Wars, threats of wars are dominating the world news. A dangerous situation exists in Europe, which, with the proxy war that is imposed on Russia, instead of de-escalating and accepting Russia’s stated position on negotiations, many leaders in the European Union are actually making the situation even more difficult. Germany, France, Britain, and other countries continue to arm Ukraine in a futile effort to destroy Russia. Many are ignoring the root causes of the issue, mainly the security issue. The legitimate security concerns of the Russian administration have to be taken into consideration. After all, we know that the United States was ready to go to war in 1962 when Soviet missiles were placed in Cuba to counter the U.S. missiles that were in Turkey.
It is those same forces that are collaborating with Israel in the genocide against the Palestinian people. The United States continues to arm Israel to the teeth as they continue their inhuman attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Not only the United States, but Germany, too, has only recently supplied almost $1 billion worth of weapons to Israel. We know, too, that the British are supporting the apartheid regime in that country. And we also see the present war in Iran that is killing civilians, where even weddings are attacked.
How Has Humanity Come to This?
I ask: How has humanity come to this? The only answer that comes to mind is that the old, outmoded international system that I referred to at the beginning, that dominates our world, seems incapable of producing leaders able to deal with the complexities of the times. The old system, which is based on the theory of profit motive as the main driver of production, and holding national self-interests above global interests, seems incapable of getting humanity out of the very complex problems that confront the world. What has appeared in fairly open relief is that the leaders of the West are really just instruments of other more powerful, but no less decadent forces in their countries.
Here I am speaking of those who profit from most of the wars—the military-industrial complex, and the huge oil giants, among others. The system drives them to disregard the security of our planet for the maximization of profits, to ignore the consequences of climate change. It is the logic of imperialism: The more money that is to be made, the more considerations of human rights are ignored. For that reason, they continue to attack the forces that are genuinely interested in peace and development. Those forces represented by China and Russia are constantly attacked in the corporate media in the West. Many of the proposals for global cooperation made by China and Russia are routinely spurned.
This is seen very clearly in the relations between the Global North and the Global South. Since the independence of most of the countries of the Global South, we have had to contend with an unequal relationship. Very few of the former colonies have succeeded in transforming their economies. We have generally remained as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured, finished products. That is why the Global South is a net exporter of wealth to the North. Figures from the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) clearly show this. In 2008, the net transfer of wealth from the South to the North was more than $800 billion. That increased in 2012 to $977 billion—almost a trillion dollars in 2012. And the trend continues unabated. The UNCTAD report points out that if illicit financial flows were included in this figure, it would clearly surpass a trillion dollars per annum moving from the South to the North.
Yet, we seem constantly to have a debt problem. This is so because the imperialist system is totally rigged against the developing countries. The more we pay, the more we owe. I can also confidently predict that if these conditions remain, we will never be able to get out of debt, because it is one of the many tools at the disposal of imperialism to continue to extract wealth from our countries.
China Shows a Different Path
However, things have started to change over the last three decades or so. The change has come about due to the great achievements of the People’s Republic of China. China, from the beginning of its revolution in 1949, has always worked to assist the Global South. We recall that long before it achieved the prosperity that it has been having since the late 1970s, it showed considerable attention to helping the Global South. For instance, the TAZARA railway, which allowed Zambia, a landlocked country, to be able to export its copper through Tanzanian ports, and greatly lessened its dependence on Apartheid South Africa. That made it possible for Zambia to give great assistance to Southern African freedom fighters and hasten the demise of the Apartheid regime. Projects like those by China helped to liberate Southern Africa as a whole.
Today, China is making a very valuable contribution to the developing countries as a whole. The projects it has undertaken are generally transformative, enhancing production and productivity. China sought cooperation with the North to allow more major issues affecting the Global South to be tackled—issues of poverty, wars, and the effects of climate change. Relations with China offer us a chance to overcome our underdevelopment. Needless to say, their efforts of cooperation with the West, mainly the United States, have been rejected out-of-hand. They have not only been rejected, but have made China a target for slander.
Imperialism, by its very nature, does not want to see the Global South emerge from the clutches of socioeconomic backwardness. They mistakenly believe that anything that contributes to the strengthening of our sovereignty will lead to a decline in their own living standards, because they would not be able to exploit the South as easily as they do today. This is now driving the United States to the extreme. This is very visible in our Americas. The United States has decided to ignore international laws and has taken action to destroy international institutions in order to put our region in its stranglehold.
Under the guise of fighting drugs, they have militarized the Caribbean. Their aircraft are shooting and killing fishermen, among others. They, without providing a scintilla of evidence, just say that they are drug smugglers, and they kill people without any consideration. To take full control of our continent, they have now announced their intention to push China out of Latin America and the Caribbean. To do so, they have launched a campaign to remove any government that dares to act independently. We see this in their open interference in elections in the region, Colombia being the most recent example. Here, they are doing everything to ensure that the patriotic forces are defeated and that those who come to power are puppets of the United States.
U.S. Expands Its Reach into Ibero-America
That is why it is so important that we stand in solidarity with Brazil and say “hands off” the Brazilian election. Let the people decide without external interference of the United States, CIA, and other subversive forces. Where electoral interference is insufficient, they use naked force, as we saw earlier this year with the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of dealing with drugs, even though the United Nations and the European Union reports on drugs show clearly that that is a fallacy. We see the inhuman economic blockade against Cuba, a country that put great store on freedom and sovereignty.
The tactics of the United States and its allies are just to put maximum pressure on the civilian population of targeted countries to force them to oppose their own governments. We see this in Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, among others. That is why the Israelis continue to bomb the totally defenseless people in Gaza. That is why they do the same in Lebanon. In Iran, schoolgirls are targeted, and people at weddings also. The same tactics were used in Afghanistan a short while ago. The objective is always the same—to try to turn the populations against their governments.
In our region, they have created such a fear in government circles, that our resources are practically being handed over to the United States. This was seen with the deal that the United States and Venezuela had just made. Venezuela, unfortunately, is nothing more than a colony of the United States. This will extend to other minerals in that country and in other countries of the region as well.
In Guyana, ExxonMobil controls our oil completely, and mining in bauxite, gold, uranium, and other minerals are all in foreign hands. Our Caribbean leaders, instead of uniting and resisting this new imperialist onslaught, have adopted an appeasement stance. They have practically handed over all the resources that the United States demands of them. They have generally complied with the U.S. diktat, as we see in their ending more than 50 years of relations with Cuban medical brigades, even though that acted against the national interests of the Caribbean countries and the Caribbean people. The fear of the United States is greater than the governments’ commitment to the region. Sadly, but truly, the neocolonial chains of the U.S. seem much stronger than those that were used on the oppressed during the time of colonialism.
Moment of Epochal Change
Colleagues, I know I must have painted a grim picture of what is happening here and globally. However, this is no time for despondency. What we are seeing in the United States is not just strength, but desperation. They are afraid of losing their dominance. They want to stop the trend towards a multipolar world and to reinstate a unipolar world where they dominate. The U.S. is deathly afraid of the BRICS countries’ talk about reducing their dependency on the U.S. dollar, or even creating a new currency for international trade. If this effort is successful, it would create great possibilities for real changes in the world.
On the military front, they are under pressure as well. The resistance of the Iranian people has shown that even with the huge resources at U.S. disposal, their power has limits. They seem not to have learned much from Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, which demonstrated the same lesson much earlier. Their sanctions are beginning to boomerang against them. The seizure of the Russian and Iranian reserves has led to the undermining of trust, even within their own camp. Some countries have begun to remove their gold reserves from the United States because of fear that their assets can be seized if they dare to take an independent stance. The Netherlands has just moved tons of gold out of the U.S. reserve, and they have actually followed France in that regard. Clearly, therefore, the actions of the United States, in particular, are driven by their own fears.
These desperate measures reflect a system that has long outlived its usefulness. That is why it is so dangerous. We in this global community must continue to raise the consciousness of the people everywhere to the dangers and the prospects that are ahead. We must organize globally to stop an outdated system from destroying our world, because we don’t know about any other. Even though we might be a speck in the universe, we don’t know about any other as unique as we are.
Let me conclude by recalling the warning of Rosa Luxemburg more than 100 years ago, who warned that if we don’t change the system—since she already thought then that it was outdated—we will end up with barbarism. Take note, my friends, and let us work to prevent this from happening. Thank you for your attention.
