At. His Excellency Dr. Ralph Gonsalves
Prime Minister
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Dear Prime Minister, please accept our cordial greetings from the Puebla Group. The purpose of this letter is to congratulate your Excellency on his appointment as President of the Caribbean Community (Caricom).
In times like these, it is necessary to have fair leaderships to face the health, economic, social, environmental, and political crisis. Your role will be decisive in assuming integration, solidarity, and resilience efforts in the region.
Along with our feelings of celebration to the work that you will develop starting off July 1, we want to present our group to you. The Puebla Group brings together 45 progressive leaders from 14 Latin American countries. It is integrated with nine former heads of government and a President currently in office (see attached full list – Annex I), all with extensive international experience. It was created in July last year and had its first meeting in the city of Puebla, Mexico, followed by another meeting in Buenos Aires, in November 2019, and a couple of virtual meetings in 2020.
What unites us is, above all, the common objective of articulating progressive leaders with a vocation for change and political action, within strictly democratic parameters. We are committed to integration, development, social progress, and ecological transition in each of our countries and the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole.
We also seek to strengthen the voice of Latin America and the Caribbean on global issues, to ensure that each country can exercise its sovereignty in solidarity with other nations.
The current and urgent drama of the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that global problems require global solutions. In the case of this new pandemic, it is clear that an effective approach will only be possible through a comprehensive global effort, involving multilateral institutions and all governments. We want to support your future work, we hope that your leadership will bear fruit for the peoples of Caricom.
Assurances of our highest consideration and esteem,
Aloizio Mercadante Oliva
Ernesto Samper Pizano
Esperanza Martínez
Celso Amorim
Marco Enríquez-Ominami