What ALBA is and how it works

The document it was written against

The joint declaration signed at Havana on 14 December 2004 names its opponent in its opening lines. The Free Trade Area of the Americas, then still under negotiation, is set out there as an arrangement its two signatories would not accept, and what they put in its place is a list of principles rather than a schedule of tariffs. Trade and investment were to be instruments rather than ends. Treatment was to be special and differential, taking account of each country's level of development and the size of its economy. Complementarity between producers was to stand in for competition between them.

The declaration is a statement of shared views rather than a treaty. Nothing in it is deposited, nothing is ratified, and nothing in the two decades since has replaced it with an instrument that is. A country joins by being welcomed at a summit, and the record of its joining is the declaration that summit issued. The idea is older than the document that carries it: the text credits a proposal made at the third summit of the Association of Caribbean States, held on Margarita Island in December 2001.

The name moved and the letters did not

The declaration of 2004 calls the project the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas. When Bolivia came in, at Havana on 28 and 29 April 2006, the agreement three presidents signed calls it the Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América and sets a second instrument beside it, the Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos, which is where the second half of ALBA-TCP comes from.

By 2009 the first word had changed as well. The preamble of the treaty signed at Cochabamba on 16 October 2009 describes its parties as member countries of the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, and in the same preamble still calls the summits held that April and that June summits of the Alternativa. Alternative became alliance, the Americas became the peoples of Our America, and the acronym stayed where it was.

A unit of account, and where it lives

A framework agreement for a regional payments system was signed at Cumaná on 16 April 2009. The treaty that established the system followed at Cochabamba on 16 October 2009, in a single original drawn up in Spanish, and it names six states party: Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The preamble states the object without decoration, a progressive uncoupling from the United States dollar.

What the treaty creates is not money anyone carries. The sucre is a common unit of account, issued exclusively by the Regional Monetary Council the same text sets up, and used to register, value, clear and settle the operations passed through a central payments clearing house. The Council allocates sucres to each state party, fixes and publishes the rate of each national currency against the unit, and determines its convertibility against other currencies. A reserve and trade convergence fund sits beside it, and an agent bank runs the clearing house.

The instrument is a treaty in the ordinary way and reads like one. It enters into force five days after the second instrument of ratification is deposited with the Venezuelan foreign ministry, it runs for twenty years and renews itself automatically for equal periods, and it may not be signed or ratified with reservations. A party leaves by written notice given at the same moment to that ministry and to the Council. The unit also has a code: ISO 4217 carries the sucre as XSU, number 994, with no minor unit, and the entity the standard files it against is not a country but the payment system itself.

The archipelago, and a rate fixed in 1976

Dominica joined on 20 January 2008. Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines were welcomed at Maracay on 24 June 2009, Saint Lucia at Guayaquil in 2013, and Grenada and Saint Kitts and Nevis on 14 December 2014. Six of the countries on this page are Eastern Caribbean island states, every one of them a protocol member of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, whose remaining protocol member, Montserrat, is a United Kingdom territory. English is official in those six and Spanish in the other four, and Bolivia is the only member with no coast.

The six also share a currency, and its terms are the ones the sucre treaty was written against. The governments of the Eastern Caribbean fixed the East Caribbean dollar to the United States dollar at 2.70 to 1 on 7 July 1976, after consultation with the British government and the International Monetary Fund, and the rate has not moved since. None of the six is named among the parties to the treaty of 2009.

Members that left

Honduras was welcomed at Tegucigalpa on 25 August 2008, and its Congress approved a withdrawal in January 2010, after the coup of 28 June 2009. Ecuador was welcomed at Maracay on 24 June 2009 and withdrew in August 2018. Both are named among the parties to the Cochabamba treaty, so the one instrument the alliance produced records a membership it no longer has.

Bolivia has been out and back. Its foreign ministry announced a departure in November 2019, and the country's participation resumed in November 2020.

Where the membership is argued

A communiqué issued on 24 October 2025 stated that the alliance had suspended the incoming government of Bolivia. That communiqué also set out the membership, and the countries it names are the 10 filed here, with that one marked as suspended. The roster this catalogue applies was read from the alliance's own site on 2 September 2026, where the country is listed without qualification.

The catalogue records both readings and settles neither, which is the same treatment a disputed border gets on a country page. The figures below count the roster as it stands, Bolivia included.