Radio Mundo Real

The 6th Congress of CLOC-Via Campesina was launched on Friday, April 10, with a Young People Assembly, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Congress will take place until the International Day of Peasant Struggle, April 17.

Journalist Viviana Catrileo, a member of the communications team working around the congress shares with us the testimonies of two young people from Nicaragua and Brazil who are participating in the event.

One of them is Sayra Ticay, member of the Central American Association of Rural Workers and CLOC Latin America. "Latin American young members of organizations that belong to CLOC (the Latin American Coordination of Countryside Organizations) will meet on April 10-11. This fourth assembly is the result of a process launched at the 3rd Congress and the important advances reached at our 3rd assembly held in Quito, Ecuador, in 2010, where we identified strategies to strengthen our work from the grassroots level. There we aimed at strengthening the articulation of young people in all regions".

At this 4th assembly, the aim is to consolidate a common youth agenda around issues such as agroecology, capacity-building, immigration, with concrete actions to help young people stay in the countryside. And also "to build our alternatives to develop and claim our Mother Earth rights", said Sayra.

Three Challenges

Meanwhile, Raul Amorim, of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), one of the Brazilian organizations that founded CLOC, talked about the three main challenges at this event for the youth of peasant organizations.

The first one is to "identify how capital is acting in the countryside in Latin America, especially with reference to young people. Here it is important to identify how capital moves and address it with proposals and strategies, with the building of agroecology as a more general proposal towards popular agrarian reform, building popular mining practices and a popular energy project".

Secondly, the MST leader made reference to the building of "an international campaign for young people": We need unity among young people from the countryside and the city, because it is important for the movement to be general, not only of young people, but the whole working class”.

He also considered important to identify the violence of the capitalist system towards young people: "violence bythe State, which is directly eliminating young people, among other types of violence, such as communication media policies", said Amorim in the interview for Real World Radio.

Interview and photos: Viviana Catrileo (CLOC-Via Campesina Communications Team)