This weekend, the historic Palacio de San Carlos — the neoclassical palace in Bogotá’s Candelaria that once housed Simon Bolívar himself — becomes the stage for a hemispheric reckoning.
Chosen by the Liberator as the seat of Gran Colombia, the republic that once united today’s Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, San Carlos stands as a living archive of resistance and the unfinished struggle for emancipation. Within its walls in 1828, Bolívar narrowly escaped assassination, leaping from a window with the help of Manuela Sáenz, the Liberator of the Liberator — a reminder that self-determination in the Americas has always demanded courage, solidarity, and defiance.
Two centuries later, the region confronts a renewed assault on that legacy. Under the revived banner of the Monroe Doctrine, Washington is asserting the right to decide which governments may stand and which must fall. From Caracas to Havana, from Bogotá to Mexico City, sovereignty is being challenged by force and fiat: bombs in Venezuela, siege in Cuba, threats against governments that refuse subordination, demands for Greenland, and the weaponisation of trade and finance against those who resist. Coercion, intervention, and destabilisation have once again become the organising principles of hemispheric order.
This threat extends beyond the Americas and spans the globe. In Davos this week, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his so-called Board of Peace — an initiative underpinned by the raw power of the United States and the whims of Donald J. Trump, unconstrained by enforceable rules or international law. Its ambitions stretch far beyond Gaza. With opaque governance and Trump’s suggestion that it might replace institutions such as the United Nations, the project signals an effort to remake world politics in the image of unilateral dominance.
Even defenders and beneficiaries of the old order now concede that something has broken. At the same forum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that the “rules-based international order” is not returning — that the world has entered a “rupture”. He acknowledged what much of the Global South has long known: that the system was “partially false,” speaking of rules while privileging power, and of law while practising coercion. Trump’s project does not depart from that reality. It strips away the fiction and hardens it into doctrine.
As the old order collapses and a harsher one is forged in its place — ruled by decree, leverage, and threat — [Nuestra América](https://act.progressive.international/nuestraamerica/) advances a different proposition: that peace and stability cannot be imposed from above or outside, but must be grounded in the collective agency of the peoples of the hemisphere.
From 24 to 25 January, the Progressive International convenes an emergency hemispheric summit in Bogotá, bringing together ministers, parliamentarians, trade unionists, and movement leaders from across the Americas and beyond. They assemble in direct response to the escalating threats to sovereignty — from military aggression and political destabilisation to sanctions and economic coercion that undermine democratic choice and social rights.
Inside San Carlos, seventy delegates will undertake three tasks: a shared diagnosis of the present crisis; the construction of a strategy for hemispheric cooperation; and the development of concrete pathways for collective action. The process will culminate in a Declaration that inaugurates an ongoing political project — a living framework for coordination, solidarity, and collective self-defence across the hemisphere.
Opening the convening alongside PI Co-General Coordinator David Adler is Colombia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio, who will present the government’s agenda on agrarian transformation and the fight against drug trafficking. Delegates include ministers from across Latin America, parliamentarians from Europe and the Americas, and movement leaders from struggles for peace, land and bread: Daniel Rojas, Martha Carvajalino, Christian Duarte, Andrés Arauz, María José Pizarro, Bettiana Díaz, Jorge Taiana, Andrea Navarro, Thiago Ávila, Clémence Guetté, Gerardo Pisarello, Walter Baier, Bill de Blasio, and many others.
Beyond internal deliberations, the summit opens outward. On Saturday evening, an assembly at Bogotá’s Teatro Colón will invite the public into a shared horizon for the hemisphere — one grounded in dignity, solidarity, and the right of peoples to determine their own futures. You can watch the event live [here](https://www.youtube.com/live/B01iBwhrHl4).
Nuestra América is not a one-off event. It is a process: a space to rebuild bonds across borders and to forge a collective response to threats no country can confront alone. As the United States rehearses new doctrines of domination, the peoples of the Americas are assembling an answer of their own — not in Davos, and not in Washington, but in Bogotá, in the house of the Liberator. The hemisphere will not be governed by decree. It will be built together.
From the story of the British women who stopped the supply of Hawker fighter jets to East Timor to the establishment of the East India Company, the 2026 Internationalism Calendar features 12 chapters of struggle, victory and defeat. [Order your](https://workshop.progressive.international/products/internationalism-calendar-2027) stunning 2026 wall calendar today.
PI member Bangladesh’s National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF) secured six new Collective Bargaining Agreements covering more than 11,500 workers in 2025 — the first in the sector to win rights beyond national law, including paternity leave, higher allowances, safer complaint mechanisms, and protections against job loss from climate change or automation. NGWF also registered eight new factory unions, bringing together 7,432 additional workers and strengthening collective power on the shop floor.
Popular movements, parties, and progressive organisations from more than 20 countries have issued [The Caracas Resolution](https://progressive.international/wire/2026-01-20-the-caracas-resolution/en/) — a global statement of solidarity with Venezuela and all nations resisting imperial aggression. The declaration condemns the United States’ attack on Venezuelan sovereignty and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, denounces the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine as a dangerous phase of hemispheric belligerence, and situates this assault within a long-running hybrid war of sanctions, blockades, and interference in Venezuela and around the world.
A new report from the Progressive International, Energy Embargo for Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement and the People’s Embargo for Palestine reveals how Türkiye’s publicly announced trade embargo against Israel has been systematically breached with 57 shipments of oil leaving Ceyhan port and arriving in Israel between May 2024 and December 2025. The report, which you can read online here, has prompted activists to call a day of action on Tuesday 27 January to pressure the government of Türkiye to stop the trade.
At its 30th AGM in Morogoro, PI member Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania
(MVIWATA), the national network of smallholder farmers, brought together hundreds of delegates to deepen democratic organising and resist corporate control of agriculture.
*Sonia Bazanta Vides,* better known as *Totó La Momposina,* is a fourth-generation Colombian musician and artist of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous descent. *Totó* is known as the *Queen of Cumbia* and is celebrated throughout the Americas and around the world.
In 1982, Totó performed at the award ceremony honouring Gabriel García Márquez's Nobel Prize in Literature, and she won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Latin Grammys in 2013. Her singing reminds us that intergenerational cultural importance transcends visual and material forms and that “A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.” – Alan Moore
