Latin America and the Caribbean countries are being re-colonized. This time it is not by Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Portugal, but by the United States.

At a period of time the United States had an anti-colonial position and had advocated for the ending of colonialism. That was one of the features of the Monroe Doctrine that has become somewhat obscured since the US became so bellicose.

Today, in a de facto way it has become a super colonial power. It is imposing its will on regions and countries. Those that stand up for their rights are sanctioned, destabilized and sometimes physically removed.

The fact that it used its military might to kidnap a sitting president, President Maduro of Venezuela, is a clear indication that the United States has decided to ignore international law and to get its own way.

Strikingly, only the President of Brazil protested vigorously. Our Caribbean leaders have generally been tight lipped.

The United States has gone even further. They have, using the guise of fighting drugs, established a strong military presence in the region. They have been murdering hundreds of persons traveling in small boats in the Caribbean. Without producing a scintilla of evidence, without attempting to board the boats and get evidence, the US just killed the occupants. We may never know if any were really involved in drug trafficking.

There has been a deafening silence from Latin America and the Caribbean leaders to those atrocities. As if these events were not enough, many of the governments in the region are, on the request/orders from the United States, acting against their countries’ best interests. The ending of the cooperation in health with Cuba which was in place for more than fifty years and which benefited millions of the region’s citizens, is a case in point.

That has left a massive gap in the health sector of the region. The US has not provided any assistance to help with the dislocation and shortage of technical personnel created by their insistence to remove Cubans.

The US is now also pressing regional governments to stop doing business with China. Many governments are beginning to comply with those orders as we see more big contracts going to US companies, despite some of those companies having poor performance records.

If some newspaper stories are to be believed, (and they have not been countered) in some cases Chinese contractors won bids for certain projects, but they were not given the jobs, they went to US firms instead.

The US and other Western countries have ignored us and kept us in a state of underdevelopment since independence. Now that we are getting assistance from China to build important and much needed infrastructure to facilitate socio-economic progress we are getting push back from the US.

It appears that they want to keep us in a state of perpetual underdevelopment and in poverty.

We see the open intention to super exploit our natural resources and labor for the benefit of big business in the US. They are mainly interested in our natural resources. They do not add value in the region nor establish any type of manufacturing. Those are reserved for the rich, developed countries.

The recent “deal” with Venezuela is worse than highway robbery. Venezuela has to provide oil and gas to US companies at cost for one hundred years. This is barefaced robbery and has demonstrated that Venezuela is now a de facto colony of the US. This will not benefit the poor in the US. It is designed to enrich the huge corporations.

Venezuela was forced to abandon its long and well-known principle of standing in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine. It is now forced to recognise the Fascist, Apartheid Israeli regime that continues to bomb defenseless civilians in makeshift camps in Gaza, the West Bank (where ethnic cleansing is taking place) and in East Jerusalem.

Today the sovereignty of our countries is already severely compromised. If we don’t stand up now it would be completely lost.

Donald Ramotar is a former President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (2011-2015).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

At the end of August, at the Silverbird Cinema in the Accra Mall in Ghana, two Israeli feature films were screened alongside Ghanaian student productions. 

For the second year running, the seats for this Israeli film festival were empty. Ordinary Ghanaians declined the Israeli Embassy’s films, and a peaceful demonstration outside held placards for Palestine and against the continued killing of civilians in Gaza.

There is another screen Ghanaians must refuse to look away from, protestors asserted. The screens on which we have watched Gaza reduced to rubble, families displaced again and again, hospitals and schools destroyed, and children carried from the wreckage of a war that, despite the ceasefire announced in October 2025, has not stopped killing them.

However, something else walked through the doors of the film festival: schoolchildren. In uniform. On a Sunday.

Students from Achimota School and Accra Girls Senior High School, two of Ghana’s most prominent public secondary schools, were brought into an embassy-sponsored event at the center of a serious political controversy. Those of us who were there saw them. We have photographs and videos. The question Ghana must now answer is not about cinema. It is about who sent our children, and why.

The 2025 Israeli Film Festival

Last year, the Embassy staged a week-long Israeli Film Festival at the same venue and called it an exercise in “dialogue and mutual understanding.” Nearly 400 Ghanaian organizations, student movements, trade unions, faith communities, civil-society groups, signed one statement calling for a boycott. Protesters gathered outside. Sponsors pulled out. The Embassy still declared the event a success.

The veteran editor Kwesi Pratt Jnr., who joined the picket, recalled what that “success” looked like a year ago for the “Alhaji and Alhaji” program:

“This is the first time in my life that I’ve seen 400 organizations come together to sign one statement calling for a boycott of the film festival. I joined the picket at the Silverbird Cinema, and a few, very, very few, prominent Ghanaians, including Afenyo-Markin, attended in spite of the protest. But it was a fiasco. The room was empty. Ghanaians rejected the film festival completely.”

So the Embassy returned smaller: two Israeli films on a single Sunday, free entry, free popcorn, raffle prizes, and an invitation aimed squarely at young people. When adults again refused to fill the room, uniformed students appeared. If Ghanaian adults will not lend legitimacy to this event, should Ghanaian children be made to supply it?

The timing makes it harder to dismiss as a routine outing.

President John Dramani Mahama has publicly described what is happening in Gaza as genocide. The Israeli Ambassador to Ghana has publicly rejected that position and defended his government’s conduct. He is entitled to make his case, but he is a guest of a sovereign state, not the author of its policy.

Against that backdrop, the presence of uniformed students inside an embassy program, days after this very public disagreement, demands an accounting. Pratt put the question bluntly:

“At the time that the ambassador was attacking our president, some authorities in our secondary schools decided to side with [the embassy]. What judgment was exercised by the school authorities when they agreed to bus their students to this film festival? What were they expecting? What checks did they do on the quality of the films?”

Those are the right questions, and they are not rhetorical. They have not yet been answered and there has been no investigation.

What the students deserve

None of this is an accusation against the children. They may have had little understanding of the political purpose around the event. The responsibility belongs to the adults who placed them there.

Ghana rejected the Israeli film festival not because cinema or cultural exchange is evil. Not because Israeli artists have no right to make films. The rejection is not an attack on Jewish people. Antisemitism is hatred and must also be rejected. 

The problem is that this festival is not an example of artists meeting freely across borders. It is an Israeli Embassy-backed initiative staged while the Palestinian people continue to pay with their lives. Amid the killing of civilians and the destruction of Palestinian life, the use of state diplomacy to manufacture an appearance of normality while those questions remain unresolved is nothing less than political soft power.

Ghanaian children are not diplomatic props, and Ghanaian schools must never become extensions of a foreign embassy. Teach them, yes. Teach them the Holocaust, the Nakba, occupation and international law, and give them the evidence to think critically. That is education. Busing uniformed children into a controversial embassy function, and letting their presence become evidence of Ghanaian acceptance, is the opposite.

That is why the demand is simple, and now directed at the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service: did you know? If yes, explain. If not, investigate. And if any official bypassed procedure or abused authority to place schoolchildren inside a foreign government’s public-relations exercise, hold them accountable.

Ghana’s revolutionary legacy

There is a longer tradition at stake. Ghana is the country from which Kwame Nkrumah declared that our independence was meaningless unless linked with the total liberation of Africa. Africa understands what cultural normalization is for: domination has rarely arrived only with rifles. It seeks respectability, the reception, the festival, the partnership, until oppression becomes a disagreement to be discussed politely while business continues.

Palestine poses that old question to the African conscience once more. And a small part of the answer is being written by who walks into a cinema in Accra Mall, and who is made to walk in.

For the second year, the empty seats have spoken. Now Ghana’s own institutions must speak. Our children deserve education, not enlistment. And a sovereign state deserves to decide, in the light of its own conscience, what its schools lend themselves to.

Stay away. Let the empty seats speak, for the Palestinian child who will never again enter a classroom, and for the proposition that human life is worth more than diplomatic image-building.

The 18th BRICS summit concluded in New Delhi on Sunday, September 13, with the unanimous adoption of the New Delhi declaration condemning wars in West Asia and reiterating calls for a more democratic and multilateral world order. 

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of the grouping with the core objective of democratizing global governance and promoting multilateralism and cooperation among the countries of the Global South.

This years’ summit was held around the theme of “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.”

The summit, hosted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was also attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto among others.

Several heads of international organizations, including the secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres also attended the summit.

In the context of ongoing US attempts to outright control the region in complete disregard to the independence of the countries and the international law, the BRICS joint declaration underlined that “the character of Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace, built on mutual respect, peaceful settlement of disputes, and non-intervention” must be respected.

It particularly expressed “deep concern on the situation relating to Cuba due to the tightening of unilateral [US] blockade measures against the country, their adverse effects on the Cuban economy, energy supplies and the worrying humanitarian impact on the Cuban people,” and demanded the immediate end of all such political and economic measures in accordance with UN General Assembly resolutions.

The 11 members of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Iran, Indonesia, China, Ethiopia, Egypt, UAE, and South Africa with Saudi Arabia yet to formally join) represent over 30% of the global economy and nearly half of the world’s total population. 

Israel and US must respect international law  

Though the joint declaration did not explicitly name the US and mentioned Israel once, it expressed great concern over the wars in Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon, demanding the aggressors respect international law and resolve all standing conflicts through the multilateral forums and diplomacy.

It also expressed serious concerns over “deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)” in Iran, calling them a violation of international law. 

The joint US-Israeli aggression, both in June 2025 and since February this year, targeted several civilian infrastructure, assassinated political figures and bombed civilian nuclear facilities in Iran in complete violations of existing laws and norms endangering massive human destruction.

The joint declaration also underlined the need to ensure the smooth flow of “global trade, supply chain and energy” in accordance with international law.

Both Iran and the UAE, which hosts US bases used for attacks on Iran, are full members of BRICS. The UAE has condemned the Iranian retaliation to US bases in the country and recently announced the suspension of all trade and economic relations with Iran. 

The Abu Dhabi crown prince Sheikh Khalid Bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, representing his country at the summit in New Delhi, had a brief conversation with Pezeshkian on the sidelines.

Read more: Iran reverses the asymmetry

The BRICS nations also criticized the continued violations of the ceasefire in Gaza, declared in October last year, by the Israeli forces. It demanded a halt of the plan for “forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza” and asked Israel to fully respect the human rights of Palestinians. 

It reiterated its support for a two-state solution within the 1967 borders and full membership for the Palestinian state in the UN.

BRICS nations also condemned the continued violations of the ceasefire and sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon by Israel, demanding the withdrawal of all its forces from occupied Lebanese territories.

Against unilateralism and attempts to undermine multilateral institutions

BRICS nations reiterated their joint commitment to “reforming and improving global governance” including the UN and global financial and trade institutions by promoting a more just and equitable, representative and accountable international and “multilateral system in the spirit of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits.”

BRICS also condemned the attempts to “unilaterally undermine the work of global multilateral institutions and impair the implementation of their respective mandates” in a likely indication to the recent US attacks on the UN and International Criminal Court (ICC). 

In the context of US attempts to “economically isolate” Iran and threats of secondary sanctions on countries who do not comply with its measures, its sanctions on Cuba and various other countries, the BRICS joint declaration condemned the repeated invocations of all forms of “unilateral coercive measures,” calling them contradictory to international law.

Such measures “have far reaching negative implications for human rights, including the rights to development, health and food security” with disproportionate effects on poor and vulnerable sections of the society, the declaration noted. 

Several leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, called for greater unity and cooperation among the BRICS members and the countries of the Global South to pave the way for the democratization of the international order and greater mutual economic development. 

Xi called the Global South the key driver of world multipolarity, asking them to jointly defend the rule of law in international politics.

The BRICS joint declaration also called for a greater collective push for the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and named the global eradication of poverty as one of its central objectives.