Comité pour l’abolition des dettes illégitimes (CADTM) – Réseau international

ABC of CADTM and Illegitimate Debt
Founded in 1990, the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (formerly the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, hence its acronym CADTM, which it has retained) works tirelessly to demonstrate the link between debt and the inability of the global capitalist and patriarchal system to satisfy the most basic rights of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

CADTM International is a network of some thirty organizations active in more than 30 countries across 4 continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe). Its main work, focused on the issue of debt, consists of implementing actions and developing radical popular alternatives aimed at the emergence of a world based on sovereignty, solidarity and cooperation between peoples, respect for nature and living beings, equality, social justice, and peace.

In the 1990s, the CADTM drew attention to the need to build a just relationship between the countries of the North and the South, starting with debt cancellation. It particularly emphasized the harmful impact that debt mechanisms used by multilateral financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), Northern governments through the Paris Club, and large international private financial groups have on the development of Southern countries, to which must be added new creditors such as China. Although the CADTM's priority, as its original name

indicates, was debt cancellation in the countries formerly known as

the Third World, its broader aim is to highlight, through

its analyses and activism, just how harmful the "debt system"
is for the people of the Global South and those of the most

industrialized countries. As the Political Charter of the CADTM's international network

establishes: "In both the Global North and the Global South, debt constitutes a mechanism for transferring wealth created by workers and small producers

to capitalists. Public debt is used by

lenders as an instrument of political and economic domination that

establishes a new form of colonization, with the local

dominant classes taking their cut along the way." Excessive private debts demanded from the working classes constitute a tool of dispossession and oppression.