Towards the VIII CLOC-LVC Congress | San Salvador, El Salvador, July 3-7, 2025
The youth of rural communities and indigenous peoples, organized in the Latin American Coordinator of Rural Organizations – CLOC La Vía Campesina Central America, gathered at our Regional Youth Camp, to raise our voices with strength, dignity, rebellion, and hope, from every corner of our territories and from this space of analysis. We have come together to recognize, educate, listen to, and organize ourselves, reaffirming that we are youth in struggle, in movement, and in the construction of popular peasant power.
We live in a context of profound civilizing crisis. Each dawn brings with it new news of the advance of environmental devastation in our territories, a product of a capitalist system that privileges the accumulation of a few at the expense of the lives of the vast majority. While the economic elites enrich themselves from the crises they themselves have created.
Peasant youth face abandonment, dispossession, and the structural violence of public policies that deny essential rights such as health, education, food, housing, decent jobs, and access to land. The consequence is clear: inequality is growing, our lands and common goods are being monopolized, and our dignity as peoples is being violated.
WE DENOUNCE:
The systematic and violent dispossession and displacement of our lands and territories, driven by transnational corporations, local oligarchies, and extractive projects, in complicity with neoliberal governments that act as administrators of capital’s interests, deepening inequalities and particularly violating the rights of children and youth.
The criminalization, persecution, and repression against our youth organizations and leaders, as is occurring in Guatemala and El Salvador, where the suspension of constitutional guarantees has rendered citizens, and especially organized youth, defenseless.
The role of private enterprise and opposition forces in Honduras, with the support of the US government, in promoting violence and the continued violent dispossession of rural areas, causing, in addition to deaths, the migration of thousands of young people in search of other opportunities.
The fierce offensive against the popular movement in Panama, where legitimate struggles against the extractive model are violently repressed, criminalizing those who defend their territories and rights.
The imposition of a capitalist model that expels youth from the countryside, shatters the fabric of community, turns life into a commodity, and destroys Mother Earth.
WE STAND IN SOLIDARITY with the heroic Palestinian people; we are pained by their suffering and demand an immediate end to the genocide in Gaza, where entire families have been condemned to pain and destruction. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine is also our struggle, because it is the struggle against imperialism and for the self-determination of the peoples.
WE firmly EXALT that Comprehensive and Popular Agrarian Reform is not a utopia, but a historical and political necessity; it is the path to social justice, food sovereignty, territorial roots, and peace for our peoples. We support youth-led organizational processes that strengthen us as political actors capable of transforming the present and building the future.
WE REAFFIRM that today more than ever, peasant youth are standing up and resisting; we are protagonists of regional and continental struggles. We sow rebellion, we cultivate awareness, we harvest sovereignty and hope!
WE DEMAND:
Clear, coherent, and transformative public policies that respond to the realities of peasant youth and Indigenous Peoples, free from interference by power groups that subject us to greater conditions of exclusion and vulnerability.
Concrete mechanisms for monitoring and effective enforcement of legal and institutional frameworks that guarantee human rights and counteract the insecurity, unemployment, criminalization, and forced migration that affect the youth of our territories.
From Central America, as youth articulated in CLOC-LVC and as part of the global peasant movement, we will continue to intertwine our struggles toward the 8th Continental Congress, with the firm conviction that another world is possible with justice and equity.
Without the rural countryside, there is no city. Without youth, there is no future!
