SOCIALISTS gathering this weekend for the annual Adelante! conference can look to Latin America as inspiration and example.

It is true that the continent is beset by threats. The parliamentary coup against Peru’s socialist president Pedro Castillo, and the ongoing brutal crackdown on democratic resistance which has killed scores, is the latest in a long line of right-wing outrages.

These include the Bolivian coup of 2019, the repeated attempts at violent insurrection by the Venezuelan opposition, the constitutional coup against Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the “lawfare” that stopped Lula from standing in 2018.

The manoeuvres continue. But they are not generally succeeding.

Recent years in Latin America have seen the people triumph over anti-democratic stitch-ups again and again. 

A year of heroic resistance toppled Bolivia’s coup regime. A left government in Mexico is standing by Castillo just as it saved the life of Evo Morales back in 2019. 

Venezuela is returning to political stability and economic growth, the weird Juan Guaido farce fading into irrelevance. 2022 saw historic wins for socialism. 

The election of Gabriel Boric in Chile saw him vow that neoliberal ideology would die in the country of its birth. As striking was the victory of Gustavo Petro as first socialist president of Colombia, traditionally the US’s closest Latin American lieutenant. And the year wound to its triumphant close with the re-election of Lula in Brazil.

These are developments of huge significance for a world on the edge of ruin. 

US determination to maintain its global pre-eminence is expressed in a worsening trade war with China and an expanding network of military alliances in the Pacific to threaten its rival. 

Nato’s reckless eastward expansion in Europe has, as US strategists such as Henry Kissinger long predicted, provoked a violent Russian response in the invasion of Ukraine. The US has sought to enrol the entire world in this war: imposing unilateral sanctions and browbeating countries into sending weaponry. 

These efforts are not confined to Europe: US Southern Command chief General Laura Richardson revealed last week that the Pentagon was pressing unnamed Latin American countries to “donate” weapons to Ukraine.

Richardson is a cold warrior, one who rails at Chinese trade with South America as “the tentacles of the People’s Republic in our neighbourhood” and stresses the US need to control the “lithium triangle” of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. 

But the US’s word is no longer law in its hemisphere. Nato plans to expand there have been thrown into disarray by Petro’s election in Colombia, the alliance’s “strategic partner” in the region. 

Latin American countries have signed up eagerly to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and are keen to trade with whom they please.

They have resisted participation in the drive to war, with Lula stressing the need for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

They are pioneering concepts of ecological civilisation — Bolivia’s revolution being the first to accord rights to nature itself — and Lula’s return offers hope for responsible leadership being shown on climate change in a country whose resources, notably the Amazon rainforest, can make it a game changer. 

And they are co-operating more than ever in the teeth of US hostility, confronting the Washington-dominated Organisation of American States and telling the White House to keep its hands off socialist Cuba, which six decades into its revolution continues to demonstrate daily that another world is possible.

So Latin America is an example. It shows that popular resistance can overcome tyranny. That countries can decide their own fate rather than knuckle under the diktats of the United States — a lesson we would do well to heed.

That we can build a world of peace, co-operation and environmental sustainability to replace a current order of imperialism, war and degradation. 

Those are themes that should inspire this weekend, and which can inform our fight for a stronger socialist movement in Britain.