A legitimate integration means that all countries can articulate their economies to make the most of their natural, human and material resources, as well as a chance to enhance the market for the sake of human development. That’s precisely the contribution of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Caribbean (ALBA is the Spanish acronym): the search of “cooperative or shared advantages” to stave off poverty. “Shared advantages” are construed as the efforts to come up with social conditions for material and spiritual satisfaction of all human beings; the social policy of this kind of integration means that all nations join hands to share the advantages of a given territory, natural environment and common history, with homogeneous economies and similar population volumes. The point is that the advance toward an ALBA-like integration can only be possible through the strengthening of a comprehensive market complemented with the effort and solidarity of all participating national States. There’s no way to ignore the role of the State as a ruling and managing body in this process, planning and laying out economic policies in line with this development endeavor and taking the lead within the community in the protection of the environment and the buttressing of the civil society’s democratic participation. In keeping with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s ALBA proposal, this participating market means, to begin with, the implementation of a giant Latin American oil company: PETROAMERICA, because PETROCARIBE is just a sample of how large this strategy can actually be like. It also includes the creation of an Interregional Bank to guarantee the region’s financial independence. For its part, the foundation of TELESUR is giving our countries a much better chance to know one another and feel respect for those who have always needed to be together in Latin America and the Caribbean, just as our founding fathers –especially Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti- wanted us to be. The economic independence of Latin America and the Caribbean is a hard goal to accomplish in the face of countless loopholes that still persist and rule the uneven development of the region’s economies. International economic relationships have a longstanding history and are full of complexities. The term interdependence usually conceals ties of economic, technological and political dependence that characterize the ongoing imperialist mechanisms in today’s world. As a matter of fact, the development integration proposed by ALBA is by and large the right way to attain that much cherished economic independence. Latin America is a region rich in raw materials, water, oil and biological diversity; no matter how often we hear people say time and again that in the “new economy” the raw materials the Third World has to offer are simply rendered worthless. Some resources are in danger of extinction, not only for the exponential cancer triggered by the spendthrift attitude of the Western countries, but also by the advance of new industrialization in the outskirts. Latin America is not the world’s top oil-producing region, yet it churns out roughly 15 percent of the planet’s crude output and harbors approximately 11 percent of all reserves. Latin America is now home to a whopping 37 percent of all oil imports going to the U.S. The reason is simple: Latin American supplies are safer and geographically closer, unlike those hailing from the Middle East, a region marked by increasing instability and unrest. For the Bush administration, Latin American crude is a key strategic player, given the fact that U.S. oil reserves are running out and they are good enough for just a decade. Latin America is also the world’s richest region as far as biodiversity is concerned, home to 40 percent of the all floral and wildlife species on the face of the earth. This is simply irresistible for the huge pharmaceutical and biotechnology transnational companies eager to lay their hands on those resources and privatize that biodiversity and the traditional knowledge of our peoples. Latin America is home to a third of the planet’s usable water at a time when availability of that precious natural resource is getting slimmer and future prospects are increasingly bleak, chiefly in a world where industrialized elites squander on the liquid while the poor only get a fraction of low-quality water. Therefore, the point here is to try to explain away the lack of economic independence in Latin America, regardless of its being a region teeming with resources so important and decisive for its development. Overall, the national States in our region have been stripped of their basic resources and tools to reach development in each and every country. Those countries have been subjected to an unequal treatment whereby Latin America doles out its richness and, through a mechanism that demands increasingly larger lump sums of money to pay off the foreign debt, powerful States make fabulous earnings that are funneled into efforts to further exploit and ransack the resources of our poor countries. Under the pretext of protecting and enhancing freedom of trade, powerful States ram economic deregulation down our poor countries’ throats. They encourage them not to play a role in environmental or social protection or in putting a cap on the free flow of capital. As a matter of fact, transnational companies are vested with full powers to act freely. In addition, there’s a clear-cut intention to keep a tight grip of the oil monopoly, of biodiversity and water supplies in the region, as well as of all patents on phytogenetic resources and cutting-edge technology. In the same breath, there are ongoing efforts to do in the role of the State in such fields as education, research and development in a bid to keep full control on these sectors and be in a position to subdue the most valuable resource of all: the human beings. There’s increasing need to implement concrete, well-articulated lines of action in order to put our legitimate demands on the front burner. They are the ones that can secure food sovereignty for our peoples by means of sustainable agriculture and a consumption policy in sync with our national identities and rational needs, respect for the most basic human rights, cultural identity, social equality for women, access to development, education, jobs, housing and healthcare for all. In a word, a dignified life for our boys and girls, youngsters, workers and peasants, indigenous populations, intellectuals and the people in general. The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Caribbean could give those demands a big boost because it clusters, in a very dialectical unit, the power of the workers represented in a diverse civil society and in those national States that decide to jump on the bandwagon of Development Integration. The brief experience spearheaded by Venezuela and Cuba with the signing of the ALBA agreements is quite encouraging and lays bare the true meaning of what shared advantages are actually all about. And this is just the beginning.