Background section of proposal for affiliation with the Federation of Green Parties of the Americas and the Global Greens
Background:
In 1998, U.S. Greens co-founded the Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas (FPVA in Spanish) together with Greens throughout the Americas. Previous to that, in 1991 U.S. Greens co-founded the FPVA predecessor organization CANAMEX (Greens from Canada, Mexico and the U.S.).
In 1992, U.S. Greens helped organize the first Planetary Meeting of Green Parties in Brazil held in conjunction with the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development. In 2001, U.S. Greens were co-founders of the Global Greens, the first global organization of Green Parties (https://www.gp.org/greenpages-blog/pdf/Vol5-No2-Summer-2001.pdf).
In ensuing years, U.S. Greens participated actively within the FPVA and Global Greens. However in 2022 — with what the sponsors of this proposal argue was insufficient and inaccurate information presented to the National Committee (NC) — the NC voted to disaffiliate from the FPVA. By extension, this disaffiliated the GPUS from the Global Greens as well because only Green Parties who are members of one of the four regional Green Federations (Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Americas and Europe) can be members of the Global Greens.
Despite voting to disaffiliate from the FPVA, the NC did not repeal nor modify the Mission of the GPUS International Committee (IC), last updated in 2011 https://secure.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=502, which states:
“The mission of the Committee shall be to foster collaboration and exchange with Green parties around the world; to facilitate official GPUS representation on the international and global level; to facilitate GPUS issue and policy development on the international and global level; and to network with green organizations and movements working on the international and global level.”
With the rise of the global authoritarian right, it is critical that Green Parties collaborate around the world to provide a viable counterforce and alternative. With the prominent U.S. role in international affairs, GPUS collaboration with Green parties across the Americas and the world is especially important. International Green organization and action is also required to advance Green solutions to global problems such as war, poverty, anti-immigrant nativism, and ecological destruction – and to replace the systems that bring them about.
Into this context, the 2022 decision to disaffiliate should be reconsidered.
The background continues below with the following sections:
– Global Greens
– Federation of Green Parties of the Americas (FPVA)
– São Paulo Forum and the FPVA Rule Against Dual International Affiliation
– Problems in the 2022 Proposal to Disaffiliate from the FPVA – Part I
– Problems in the 2022 Proposal to Disaffiliate from the FPVA – Part II
– Limited, false, and misleading information in the 2022 Proposal to Disaffiliate from the FPVA
– Conclusion: Time to re-affiliate with FPVA and Global Greens
Global Greens
U.S. Greens co-founded the Global Greens at the first Global Greens Congress in Canberra, Australia in 2001. The Canberra Congress adopted the Global Greens Charter with six principles as the basis of political unity: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Participatory Democracy, Nonviolence, Sustainability, and Respect for Diversity.
The Global Greens Congress meets approximately every five years. Each national Green party that is a member of their relevant regional Green federation is considered a member party of the Global Greens, and is entitled to three delegates at Global Green Congresses. Full Global Greens member parties have voting and speaking rights for their three delegates. Associate member parties have speaking, but not voting rights for their three delegates. U.S. Greens have attended as voting delegates to Global Greens Congresses in Canberra (2001), São Paulo (2008), Dakar (2012) and Liverpool (2017), and as observers in Incheon (2023).
Between meetings of the Global Greens Congress, the Global Green Coordination (GCC) is the decision-making body of the Global Greens. The GGC is composed of three representatives from each of the four regional federations: Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas. U.S. Greens have had two representatives on the Global Greens Coordination: Annie Goeke (April 2001-September 2004) and Julia Willebrand (September 2004-October 2009).
U.S. Greens have also been involved in the Global Young Greens (GYG). U.S. young Greens participated in the GYG’s first conference in 2001, and its founding as a formal organization in 2007. The GYG are recognized by the Global Greens as a partner organization.
Even after the GPUS disaffiliated with the FPVA in 2022, the GPUS Youth Caucus — Young EcoSocialists (YES) — maintained its affiliation with the GYG. In June 2023, Matthew Skolar (NJ), Austin Bashore (OH), and Jay Walker (PA) formally represented YES as voting delegates at the GYG Congress, held concurrently with the Global Greens Congress in Incheon, South Korea.
Federation of Green Parties of the Americas (FPVA)
The founding FPVA meeting took place in São Paulo, Brazil on March 9, 1998, with the participation of U.S. Greens as co-founders. The FPVA’s stated purpose is to promote “international cooperation and solidarity” among the Green Parties of the Americas (Preamble to the Statutes of the Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas).
The General Assembly is the FPVA’s highest decision-making body. Each FPVA member party may have up to three delegates with speaking rights who cast one vote as a party. An elected FPVA Executive Committee makes decisions in between General Assemblies within the framework of organization and policy decided by the General Assembly (Article 13 of the Statutes of the FPVA).
Over the years, U.S. Greens have sent delegates to FPVA annual General Assemblies in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. Two U.S. Greens have sat on the FPVA Executive Committee as Co-Presidents: Annie Goeke (PA/CA) and Julia Willebrand (NY).
São Paulo Forum and the FPVA Rule Against Dual International Affiliation – Part I
The 2022 decision by the NC to disaffiliate from FPVA was precipitated in large part by a FPVA rule against dual international affiliations.
The GPUS NC voted to affiliate with the São Paulo Forum (SPF) in October 2019. In November 2019, the FPVA General Assembly unanimously adopted a regulation against dual affiliations with international political organizations other than the Global Greens. The GPUS delegates present — Ahmed Eltouney (NJ), and Bahram Zandi (MD) — voted for the regulation. The resolution also included language notifying the GPUS and the Green Alliance (Alianza Verde) of Colombia which was already an SPF member, that they could not remain in the FPVA if they did not leave the SPF within a “reasonable timeframe.” The Colombian Green Alliance decided to leave the SPF in order to remain in the FPVA. By contrast, the GPUS did not rescind its decision to seek SPF affiliation. As a result, two years later in January 2022, the FPVA General Assembly voted to downgrade the GPUS from FPVA member to nonvoting observer status because it was still seeking SPF affiliation. In May 2022, the GPUS NC voted to disaffiliate completely from the FPVA.
The São Paulo Forum (SPF) was founded in 1990 as an annual conference of progressive political parties and organizations in South and Central America and the Caribbean. Launched by Brazilian president Lula da Silva and his Workers’ Party, the SPF met in most years between 1990 and 2019. Then the COVID pandemic prevented SPF from meeting in 2020, 2021, and 2022. In 2023 Lula da Silva, having returned to the Brazilian presidency after a 12-year absence, convened a meeting in Brasilia at the end of June to revive the SPF. The SPF met again in June 2024 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in a joint conference with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). But the SPF has not met since and its website (https://forodesaopaulo.org/) seems to be blocked to the public.
In July 2018, IC members Eltouney and Zandi went as observers to the SPF meeting in Cuba and initiated a proposal to the GPUS NC to affiliate with the SPF, which was adopted on October 27, 2019. They would also be among primary advocates for the proposal in May 2022 for GPUS to disaffiliate from FPVA. Eltouney and Zandi are no longer active on the IC or in GPUS.
The IC can find no record of correspondence between GPUS representatives and the São Paulo Forum, nor has any follow-up on seeking SPF affiliation been reported to the IC or NC. No GPUS members have attended SPF conferences since the decision to seek affiliation. In April 2024, without having been notified by SPF about its upcoming June meeting in Honduras, the NC elected two SPF delegates (John Krause, Diane Moxley) and two alternates (Dylan Parsons, AJ Reed). Only Moxley was available to attend an in-person SPF meeting in 2024. She made email inquiries to the SPF secretary about a 2024 meeting, but received no response.
São Paulo Forum and the FPVA Rule Against Dual International Affiliation – Part II
The FPVA regulation barring dual affiliations to international political organizations by member parties was adopted at the FPVA General Assembly in the Dominican Republic held November 29-December 1, 2019. In the minutes, FPVA parties expressed concern that affiliation with the SPF raised questions regarding ideological alignment and electoral positioning.
Many FPVA parties not only have ideological differences with the parties of the authoritarian right and the neoliberal center, but the traditional old left as well — concerning democratic backsliding and extractivist, anti-ecological development policies. The minutes summarized the delegates’ interventions concerning ideology by saying member parties believed “Green Parties have a specific ideology and that is why there is a Green International.”
The electoral positioning question is more nuanced. In systems with proportional representation, FPVA member parties in Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and other countries have at times formed parliamentary or presidential coalitions with SPF-affiliated parties and in other instances have competed electorally with them. The FPVA Statutes give freedom to affiliates on the question of political alliances, stating that member parties “may freely form programmatic alliances with political parties of other ideologies” (FPVA Statutes, Alliance Policy, Article 9; Minutes of the FPVA General Assembly, Juan Dolio, Dominican Republic, November 29–December 1, 2019).
It is clear that GPUS was not selectively targeted because the regulation also affected the Colombian Green Alliance. For two years after the regulation was adopted, FPVA noted in a May 2022 letter to the GPUS Steering Committee, “both in General Assemblies and through communiqués at various times, delegates and other authorities of the GPUS have been asked to remain in the FPVA where their presence is valued and their status as founding members is recognized” (GPUS/FPVA Correspondence – July 2020 to May 2022).
At the same time, the inactivity of the SPF may be due to political differences within it. Prior to the 2023 meeting in Brasilia, Lula proposed a resolution condemning Nicaragua for its anti-democratic banning of candidates and parties and the imprisonment of political opponents in the 2021 Nicaragua elections. Ultimately the resolution was not brought forward. But sharp contradictions over questions of democracy were heightened the next year when governments headed by leaders of SPF parties, including Lula da Silva of Brazil, Gustavo Petro of Colombia, and Gabriel Boric of Chile, refused the recognize the legitimacy of the election of Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela, after the Maduro government failed to follow Venezuelan election law and publish the auditable results printed by each voting machine.
The democracy question concerning SPF extends to its internal structure and operations. The structure of SPF is opaque and informal. Its funding comes mainly from parties in state power, notably the Workers Party of Brazil and the Communist Party of Cuba. While SPF conferences issue statements, SPF does not organize popular campaigns to advance its goals. In an organization focused on Latin American and the Caribbean, if GPUS were to actually pursue affiliation, it would at best become a second-class “associate member” as the Democratic Socialists of America became. GPUS would not be participating in a deliberative democratic process like meetings of the FPVA General Assembly. Presumably, GPUS members could still observe SPF conferences like Eltouney and Zandi did in 2018 without GPUS being affiliated.
SPF members’ party policies and silence on ecological and migration issues are of concern for many FPVA Greens. On ecology, SPF member parties — particularly in Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela — have pursued ecologically-destructive extractivist development based on oil, gas, and minerals mining and large-scale agribusiness. And they have done this over the opposition of Indigenous and environmental movements and Green parties in their countries.
On migration and citizenship policies, the SPF has never addressed the racist border wall construction and mass deportations of the U.S. and Dominican Republic. Nine Dominican political parties affiliated with the SPF support the border wall construction and Haitian deportation policies of President Luis Abinader of the SPF-affiliated Modern Revolutionary Party. Unfortunately, so does the Dominican Green Party. This should rightly be criticized by U.S. Greens. But the GPUS can and should raise the issue of migration and citizenship policy in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic — and across the Americas — within the democratic structure of the FPVA.
In a compare and contrast, the GPUS can participate as a full member in the democratic processes of FPVA, still cannot within the SPF. On issues of democracy and ecology within their own countries, FPVA member parties are consistently stronger than many in the SPF. With this in mind, the IC recommends that GPUS rescind its 2019 decision to affiliate SPF in order to reaffiliate with FPVA.
Limited, false, and misleading information in the 2022 Proposal to Disaffiliate from the FPVA
When in May 2022 the NC voted to disaffiliate from the FPVA, the proposal consisted of only of ten sentences and 175 words in total of background, mostly presenting limited and often false information about the record of other Green Parties in the hemisphere and the organizational implications for the GPUS leaving the FPVA. For example, the disaffiliation proposal did not even mention that if the GPUS left the FPVA, it would automatically no longer be a member of the Global Greens. This consequence only came up in discussion on the NC Votes email list.
The disaffiliation proposal also made assertions about the political orientation and policy positions of FPVA member parties without documentation to substantiate these claims.
Each of these assertions merit discussion.
The 2022 disaffiliation proposal characterized “the most powerful parties in FPVA [as] having a right wing orientation”
In general, FPVA parties are committed to the same basic values as GPUS. The FPVA Statutes commit the FPVA to the aims of the Global Greens Charter, which is an explication of six principles – Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Participatory Democracy, Nonviolence, Sustainability, Respect for Diversity. These principles are consistent with the Four Pillars and Ten Key Values of GPUS.
The most powerful and enduring parties in the FPVA are the parties in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela, all of which have elected members of their countries’ national legislature and the legislatures of their various states or provinces. None can be accurately characterized as right-wing.
The Green Party of Brazil (Partido Verde do Brasil, or PV) was founded in 1986 after a democratically elected government replaced the military dictatorship of 1965-1985. Its founders were left-wing radicals like Fernando Gabeira and Alfredo Syrkis who had participated in the armed struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship. At their founding, the Brazilian Greens committed to peaceful and democratic political methods and adopted the Four Pillars of Green Politics: ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice, and nonviolence. Syrkis spoke at the National Green Gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts in July 1987. Gabeira (1989) and Syrkis (1998) became Green candidates for President of Brazil. Gabeira has been outspoken in his support for marriage equality and the legalization of abortion. In 2022, when the GPUS disaffiliation proposal was being considered, the Brazilian Green Party was in a leftwing electoral coalition including Lula da Silva’s Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Party for Socialism and Liberty in the election that returned Lula to the Brazilian presidency after a 12-year hiatus. In that election, the Brazilian Greens won six seats in the lower house of the Brazilian National Congress.
The Brazilian Green Party currently has four members in the Federal House of Deputies (https://pv.org.br/parlamentares/na-camara-dos-deputados/) and 20 members in nine state legislatures (https://pv.org.br/parlamentares/nos-legislativos-estaduais/). The PV platform (https://pv.org.br/opartido/programa/ and https://pv.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/programa_web.pdf) states, “The PV identifies with the left-wing ideology in its commitment to the aspirations of the vast majority of the working population and in solidarity with all excluded, oppressed and discriminated sectors. It defends income redistribution, social justice, the regulatory and protective role of public power in relation to the disadvantaged and the interests of the majority of citizens, not only in the face of economic power, but also of corporatist privileges.”
The origins of the Green Ecologist Party of Bolivia also go back to extra-parliamentary struggles against a military dictatorship. The party’s founder, Maria Soria, was a militant in the Revolutionary Left Movement against the military dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in the 1970s. She lost two children carrying pregnancies under the hardships of the clandestine underground. As a Green, she defines herself “as a leftist politician—democratic, pluralistic, and deeply respectful of human rights.” In 2014, she was the Greens’ vice-presidential candidate as the running mate to Fernando Vargas, an Indigenous leader. The Greens formed a presidential and parliamentary alliance with the confederation of traditional governing bodies of the Quechua-, Aymara- and Uru-speaking highland indigenous communities. The Bolivian Greens continue to campaign for stronger democracy, Indigenous rights, and an ecologically sustainable alternative to the extractivist model of development that has been pursued by the ruling rightwing and traditional leftwing governments of Bolivia.
The Green Party of Canada currently has one member of the House of Commons and nine in provincial assemblies. In the 2019 elections, it elected three members to the House of Commons under a single-member-district, winner-take-all system similar to what we face in U.S. House elections. Its 2025 national program (https://cdn.greenparty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/GP_Platform_English_FINAL-1.pdf) focused on affordable housing, health care, progressive taxation, a guaranteed livable income, free tuition, food security, and abundant clean energy.
The Green Ecologist Party of Chile (Partido Ecologista Verde, or PEV) as of February 2022 had elected 40 municipal councilors, six state legislators, and one state governor. The party supported the successful election of socialist Gabriel Boric as president of Chile in 2021. The Greens were active in the surge of massive protests in 2019 aimed at writing a new democratic constitution to replace the authoritarian one imposed by Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator installed by a U.S.-backed coup on September 11, 1973 who ruled until 1990. Pablo Riveros told the Global Greens online conference in February 2022 that “the center-left and those forces seeking to challenge the neoliberal capitalist model performed very well” and the Greens were optimistic about the prospects for a new constitution. Unfortunately, proposed more democratic constitutions failed in referendums in 2022 and 2023.
The Green Ecologist Party dissolved in 2022 because it failed to meet voting thresholds for party status. The Social Green Regionalist Federation (FREVS) then became the FPVA affiliate in Chile. In the 2025 election, FREVS elected two members to the Chamber of Deputies and three members to the Senate. In the presidential election, the FREVS was part of the Unity for Chile coalition founded by the outgoing socialist president Gabriel Boric that supported Jeannette Jara, a Communist who won the Unity for Chile primary but lost the general election to a Trump-emulating right-winger, José Antonio Kast.
The Green Alliance of Colombia (Alianza Verde) has members in the cabinet of the left-wing administration Gustavo Petro who was elected President in 2022. Many founders of the Green Party such as Antonio Navarro Wolff, a Green Senator (2014-2018), and Carlos Ramón González, a co-president of the Green Alliance (2005-2009, 2019-2023) and General Director of National Intelligence (2024) under Petro, share political roots with Petro in M-19, or the 19th of April Movement. M-19 was an urban guerrilla movement that took up arms against the National Front, the power-sharing coalition of the two establishment parties, after the coalition stole the presidential election of April 19, 1970 from the third-party left-wing candidate. M-19 transitioned to electoral politics in the late 1980s. M-19 members joined various left-wing parties, including the Green Alliance and Gustavo Petro’s Humane Colombia. A Colombian Green, Antonio Sanguino (https://x.com/AntonioSanguino), is currently the Minister of Labor in Petro’s cabinet.
Colombian Greens currently have 13 representatives and 8 senators in the Congress, 2 governors, and 86 mayors. In 2022, they had over 1,000 municipal councilors, over 40 state legislators, and the mayoralities and council majorities in the six most important cities. A major issue for the Green Alliance is protecting environmental activists who resist mining, logging, and agribusiness expansion. Nearly 400 environmental defenders have been murdered since 2018, the majority of whom are rural Indigenous and Afro-descendant people. The key values of the Green Alliance are similar to the GPUS Ten Key Values: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Nonviolence, Participatory Democracy, Sustainability, Political and Electoral Ethics, Trust in People, and Equality (https://alianzaverde.org.co/nosotros).
In Venezuela, the Ecological Movement of Venezuela (Movimiento Ecológico de Venezuela, or MOVEV) had to renew itself in the 2020s with new younger leadership because many of its older leaders were compelled to become part of the Venezuelan diaspora that emigrated to nearby South American countries due the country’s rapid dive into deep poverty after the collapse in oil prices since 2014 devastated Venezuela’s oil export dependent economy. Alejandro Aguilar, a recent FPVA co-president, was re-elected to the National Assembly in May 2025 in a parliamentary election that most of the opposition boycotted. In 2022, the party had 40 city councilors and two mayors. Many of these local officials are in the predominantly Indigenous states of Monagas and Bolivar where many Indigenous people participate in the party.
A central cause for MOVEV is resisting the exploitation of nature and labor by predatory extractivism, particularly in the Orinoco Mining Arc in the state of Bolivar. They have built a natural alliance with Indigenous people who are most impacted. The Venezuela government has created a neoliberal economic and military zone to promote open-pit mining for gold, bauxite, coltan, industrial diamonds, and rare earth minerals by both official mixed private-state corporations and in larger scale by transnational criminal organizations, which the military protects and profits from. This open-pit mining is destroying the climate with mass deforestation, the environment with water pollution, and the labor, water, and land rights of the Indigenous communities who live there. It is displacing the Indigenous farmers and small-scale artisanal miners. Alejandro Aguilera spoke about this at the online Global Greens conference in February 2022 and Lois Maldonado, a former city councilor in Caracas and then a legislator in the state of Miranda, spoke about MOVEV’s opposition to this mining and its extractivist model of development at a plenary session of the Global Greens Congress in Incheon, South Korea, in June 2023.
Among the leaders of this resistance to open-pit mining in the state of Bolivar have been Américo de Grazia, a former member of the National Assembly (2011-2021) and the MOVEV candidate for governor of Bolívar province in 2021, and Carlos Chancellor, a former mayor of Sifontes in Bolívar province (1995-2016) and the MOVEV candidate for mayor of Caroní in Bolívar state in 2021. For their resistance, they have been beaten and injured by mining mafias and imprisoned by the government. Their most recent incarceration as political prisoners was for a year after the disputed 2024 presidential election. Their health deteriorated without adequate medical care. De Grazia was held incommunicado. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the Human Rights Council of the UN General Assembly found that the imprisonment of de Grazia and Chancellor was in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Venezuela is a signatory. The political roots of de Grazia and Chancellor are in the New Left movement-based party, La Causa Radical (The Radical Cause), formed in the 1970s to advance a participatory “radical democracy” as an alternative to both authoritarian “socialism” and “democratic” capitalism.
In sum, it was incorrect in the 2022 disaffiliation proposal to characterize the Green parties in FPVA as having a rightwing orientation.
The 2022 disaffiliation proposal said “Some of these parties support the death penalty and oppose LGBTQ+ rights such as the Ecologist Green Party in Mexico.”
FPVA is on record supporting LGBTQ+ rights. FPVA Statutes say the federation subscribes to the Global Greens Charter, which calls for “a new vision of citizenship built on equal rights for all individuals regardless of gender, race, age, religion, class, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, disability, wealth or health.” The International Committee can find no documentation that any FPVA party has opposed LGBTQ+ rights.
The Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (Partido Verde Ecologista de México, or PVEM) supports LGBTQ+ rights. As Raúl Guzmán, a Green Deputy in the Mexican Congress, told a session of the Global Greens online conference in February 2022, the Mexican Greens “continue bringing in groups that currently lack significant political participation: women, sexual diversity groups, Indigenous groups—all these groups that exist and which are not minorities, but rather majorities that are currently underrepresented.”
The Mexican Greens did support the death penalty between 2008 and 2015 for kidnappers in criminal gangs linked to drug cartels that were preying upon and demanding ransoms from vulnerable migrants passing through Mexico toward the U.S. In 2009, the National Committee of GPUS passed a resolution condemning the PVEM support for the death penalty (https://secure.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=382). That same year, the European Green Party called for PVEM’s expulsion from the Global Greens over this matter. Since 2015, however, the PVEM’s position has been against the death penalty, which Mexico abolished in 2005. The detailed report from his visit in November 2018 to Mexico and the PVEM by Per Gharton, a former Green MP and MEP from Sweden, addressed questions European Greens had about the PVEM, including support for the death penalty but also questionable electoral alliances, allegations of corruption, and its relationship with environmental movements. Gharton’s report documents that the Mexican Greens no longer support the death penalty and concludes:
“Thus, my over-all evaluation is that the PVEM, whatever has happened during its some times turbulent history, is a genuine Green political party with a Green political agenda, nation-wide presence in Mexico, a functioning electoral organisation and considerable parliamentary representation on all administrative levels. In addition I support the switch of alliance from PRI to MORENA, which seems to make Mexico into a rare hopeful example in our time of right-wing populist advances all over the globe.” (https://gpus.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/PVEM-report-2019-Per-Gahrton.pdf).
Historically, the PVEM has focused on the environment and Indigenous rights. PVEM aligned with U.S. and Canadian Greens in the early 1990s in CANAMEX to oppose NAFTA. The PVEM’s electoral strategy on the national level has been to align itself with the party most likely to win the presidential election in order to gain more Greens elected to the Mexican Congress and thus gain more of the Mexican state’s public funding for political parties. U.S. and European Greens have questioned this strategy, which aligned the PVEM with the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2002 and then the catch-all Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) until 2015.
It is worth understanding the historical context of this electoral strategy. In the presidential election of 2000, the PVEM aligned with the PAN in order to successfully break the 70-year political monopoly of the PRI. After PAN candidates won the 2000 presidential election and large delegations to the Congress, PVEM switched to coalitions that supported the presidential candidates of the PRI from 2003 to 2015 while running its own parliamentary slate. Since 2018, however, the PVEM has aligned in elections with the left coalition of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) of presidents Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Claudia Scheinbaum and the Labor or Workers Party (Partido del Trabajo), which is a socialist party. Currently the PVEM has 14 Senators (https://www.partidoverde.org.mx/representantes/camaras/camaras-representantes?id=16339) and 77 members of the House of Deputies (https://www.partidoverde.org.mx/representantes/camaras/camaras-representantes?id=16338).
The 2022 disaffiliation proposal said “others like the Domincan Green Party are so right wing they support a Trump style wall along the Haitian border.”
All of the major political parties in the Dominican Republic, and almost all of the minor parties, support the border wall with Haiti and the deportation of Haitians. The Greens there have conformed to this near consensus in Dominican politics and public opinion.
The Dominican Greens – officially the Green Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Verde, or PASOVE) – have always been a small party with low votes in national elections. The party has been centered around Antolín Polanco, who has always been the party’s president. Despite the party’s low votes, Polanco himself is an influential political figure in the Dominican Republic — elected to the city council of Santo Domingo Norte, where he served for 14 years, and appointed to positions under the presidential administrations of both Danilo Medina (2012-2020) of the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) and Luis Abinador (2020-present) of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM). Polanco and the Greens allied with both parties’ presidential candidates in their respective campaigns.
Both the PLD and PRM are nominally social democratic center-left affiliates of the SPF, but these parties support socially conservative policies on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration and citizenship. A racist anti-Black, anti-Haitian prejudice is prevalent in Dominican politics that supports a border wall with Haiti and deportation of Haitians who they call a threat to Dominican identity, sovereignty, and economic well-being in domestic politics. To the international community, they say these policies are necessary because the Dominican Republic cannot bear the whole brunt of the Haitian crisis, which needs substantial international economic and security assistance. The Dominican Greens have not campaigned against these anti-Haitian policies and Polanco was appointed Director of the National Border Council by President Abinader in February 2025.
In a July 7, 2024 interview, Polanco emphasized the Greens’ ecological commitments, such as their opposition to open-pit mining for gold and silver, as the Venezuelan Greens have done. He underscored their support for the progressive values of the FPVA and Global Greens and their participation in their meetings and activities. When the interviewer asked, “You know that the Green parties are somewhat left-wing, more so than far-right, right?,” Polanco answered, “Yes, exactly, because they make a series of proposals there regarding the protection of the environment. The far right always has a liberal approach in which the states should not intervene in that.”
The Dominican Green Party’s roots go back to the National Renaissance Party (NRP) founded in 1987 by Polanco. NRP emphasized anti-Haitian Dominican nationalism. In 2009, the party rebranded as the Green Socialist Party and got involved in international Green politics. In 2017, it changed its name again to Green Party (Partido Verde), although it is still registered with the state and appears on national election ballots as the Green Socialist Party. The party has received very low votes under all three party labels in national elections. In the most recent national elections in 2024, it received only 5,910 votes, or 0.14%, coming in 33rd out of 34 parties in single-member-district plurality-winner elections for the Senate, For the proportional representation elections for the Chamber of Deputies, the Greens still only received 9,069 votes, or 0.21%, coming in 30th out of 34 parties. In municipal elections, it received only 16,700 votes for 0.38% as the Green Socialist Party in 2016 and only 4,506 for 0.13%, as the Green Party in 2020.
In the 2024 presidential election, it supported the incumbent president Abinador of the PRM, who has led the building of the border wall with Haiti starting in March 2022. The Greens did nominate their own candidate for president in 2020, a wealthy nationalist businessman, Porfirio López Nieto, who took a hard line against Haitian immigration and also called for building a border wall. López Nieto’s Dominican Nationalist Party had not secured a ballot line. So he asked for the nomination of the Dominican Greens, who apparently thought López Nieto and his money would help the Greens down the ballot. In the end, blaming media bias and the Covid lockdown, López Nieto and all Green candidates dropped out and did not appear on the ballot.
In October 2023, the Green Party joined 28 other parties in signing a national pact to support stronger border controls. The only parties that did not sign were the three main electoral rivals to Abinader’s PRM. Like the PRM, all three of them – Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), People’s Force (FP), Dominican Revolutionary Party (PDR) – have the same catch-all politics of nominally progressive economic policies, nationalist scapegoating of Haitian immigrants, and conservative social policies with respect to abortion and LBGTQ rights. All three of them are also members of the SPF, which speaks to how conservative the politics of the Dominican Republic are.
Anti-Haitian, anti-Black racism goes back to the Dominican war for independence from Haiti (1844-1856) and to the white-supremacist ideology and racial segregation imposed by the U.S. military occupation of the island of Hispaniola (present day Dominican Republic and Haiti) for 19 years (1915–34). It continues today under the reactionary presidency of Abinader, whose policies of denationalizing and deporting Haitians have become models extolled by the Trump administration and the U.S. anti-immigrant far right. No political party with electoral standing in the Dominican Republic has come out against the mass deportations.
The problematic politics of the tiny Dominican Green Party on migration and citizenship should be challenged, but should not be an obstacle to GPUS re-affiliating with the FPVA. GPUS participation in the FPVA can provide a forum where migration and citizenship policies can be addressed, with the policies of the U.S. as well as the Dominican Republic needing critical discussion and action. The GPUS should do so with some tact and humility given decades of U.S. intervention in Latin America and the objectionable immigration policies of Obama, Biden, and Trump. Migration is a growing global crisis driven by growing poverty, repression, wars, and climate change. GPUS should help shape a humane Green response in the Americas and globally by re-affiliating.
The disaffiliation proposal also briefly alluded to problems with the process and decisions of FPVA General Assemblies:
“Our delegates attempted to organize with other parties to get new leadership and reform the FPVA. FPVA has revoked GPUS’s voting privileges and downgraded our party to observer status. This was done the day before an election for the FPVA executive council. During the vote there was an even split in Brazil’s delegates. Despite Brazil’s deadlock the executive council recorded their vote in favor of revoking our full membership status. Brazil’s vote was the deciding vote against GPUS and fraudulent. At this time our FPVA delegates unanimously favor leaving the FPVA with the support of several former delegates.”
The concerns about the process here refer to the FPVA General Assembly in January 2022 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The GPUS delegates were Diana Brown, John Krause, and AJ Reed, who all recommended GPUS leave the FPVA.
Brown and Reed are no longer active in GPUS. Krause is no longer on the International Committee. Whatever difficulties these delegates had at the 2022 FPVA General Assembly in Argentina, the current IC believes that any problems of democracy in the FPVA General Assembly should be addressed from within it. They should not be a reason for GPUS to be outside and have no influence in the FPVA.
A December 2025 video conference between the FPVA Executive Committee members and several IC members has given current IC leadership confidence that the FPVA is a reasonable and democratic organization worth working within.
Conclusion: Time to re-affiliate with FPVA and Global Greens
Withdrawal from the FPVA has isolated the GPUS from the international Green movement and taken away GPUS’ voice and vote in the FPVA and Global Greens. This absence has diminished GPUS opportunities to learn from and influence the Green political movement in the Americas and around the world.
There are many similarities between the programs of U.S. Greens and those of the 11 national member Green parties in the FPVA – and among the 80+ member parties in the Global Greens overall. But there are also differences in focus and emphasis in each country as a result of the various historical, cultural, and political conditions. Within the FPVA, when competing for power on the state and national level and to advance Green policies, some Green parties in Latin American countries with proportional representation and two-round runoff elections for president have made electoral and legislative alliances that may seem objectionable to Greens in the United States with our winner-take-all elections.
Instead of treating these differences as obstacles and reasons not to work together, they can be seen as opportunities to learn from and influence each other. The GPUS can address whatever differences we may have with other FPVA parties within the democratic processes of the FPVA — and Greens in these countries can benefit from a U.S. Green perspective, coming from a Green Party within the imperialist hegemon of the hemisphere.
Can and should the internal process of the FPVA be improved? Yes, and recent communication between IC and FPVA leadership indicates a commitment to this. Should the GPUS ask the FPVA to commit to employ a variety of means to increase political communication and understanding between member parties, and between wider numbers of Green party members across national boundaries – and can the GPUS play an important role in this? Yes.
In an era of increasing militarism and war, environmental collapse, growing inequality and poverty, and the erosion of human rights and democracy in the face of a growing international far right, a strong international Green movement is needed to advance real solutions to these existential problems. If the GPUS re-affiliates with the FPVA, it can successfully work with other Green parties in the Americas on joint campaigns, statements, and organizing — like the GPUS did together with the PVEM at the 2017 Global Greens Congress in a statement opposing the first Trump Administration’s proposal to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, but missed an opportunity most recently in not co-writing the FPVA statement condemning the U.S. aggression against Venezuela.
Given the lack of any actual GPUS involvement in the SPF, and the SPF’s uncertain future, there is no benefit for the GPUS to continue to seek SPF membership at the expense of its relations with Green parties in the Americas and across the world.
At the same time, after having more time to research Green parties in the Americas and the world, several NC delegates still active on the IC today who voted for disaffiliation now support affiliation, including Jacqui Deveneau (ME) and the current IC co-chairs Diane Moxley (NJ) and Mike Stewart (SC). At the same time, IC members who pushed for affiliation with the SPF and disaffiliation from the FPVA and Global Greens are no longer active in the GPUS or the IC.
For all these reasons, given the IC’s mission “to foster collaboration and exchange with Green parties around the world,” the IC recommends that the National Committee adopt this proposal that rescinds the decision to seek membership in the São Paulo Forum and seeks instead to rejoin the FPVA, which will then also trigger renewed GPUS membership in the Global Greens.