Joint statement from communist and workers’ parties: Stop US military threats against Venezuela!

Several communist parties, in an initiative led by the Communist Party of Mexico (PCM) have jointly issued a statement condemning the US military threat against Venezuela . The Communist Workers’ Platform has signed and New Worker republishes the text below.

We, the undersigned Communist and Workers’ Parties, express our condemnation of the current deployment of U.S. military forces in the Caribbean, on the orders of the Trump Administration, threatening Venezuela under the pretext of the fight against drug trafficking.

U.S. imperialism and its European allies have historically used as a political façade the supposed “fight against terrorism, drug trafficking, the presence of weapons of mass destruction, the defense of human rights and democracy,” among others, to attack and intervene in various countries of the world.

The threat of U.S. military aggression against Venezuela once again shows the interventionist character of the U.S. imperialist power, which has historically considered Latin America as its backyard, as it has demonstrated over the last 200 years, carrying out invasions, interventions, and direct and indirect military aggressions (as in the cases of Guatemala,  Cuba, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador); it has forged conspiracies to impose anti-democratic and pro-U.S dictatorships (as in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay); it has deployed criminal plans against the struggles of the peoples (such as Operation Condor and Operation Colombia); and has imposed illegal economic embargoes and blockades on a series of nations, the most emblematic case being the criminal blockade against Cuba.

The United States, in its eagerness to exercise full economic, political, and military dominance in the region, has also installed nearly 80 military bases and enclaves in Latin America and the Caribbean; in addition to reactivating, in 2008, the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet to increase its maritime military dominance over Central America, the Caribbean and South America.

This new warmongering escalation of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean area has the clear purpose of making the interests of U.S. monopolies prevail in their competition with the capital and interests of competing powers, exerting greater pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro so that it continues to grant greater privileges and concessions to U.S. monopoly capital or even achieve the total fracture of the regime and the rise to power of the right-wing opposition factionas a faithful interpreter of its interests.  In addition, it would generate an enormous destabilizing and violent repercussion for the entire Latin American and Caribbean region.

In this sense, we express our energetic condemnation of this dangerous interventionist escalation of imperialism, which aims to further worsen the difficult conditions at the level of democratic freedoms, human rights, and deterioration in the quality of life of the Venezuelan people. Imperialist intervention, expressed in the current military deployment or in the continuity of criminal economic sanctions, aggravates the Venezuelan capitalist crisis, increasing the suffering of the Venezuelan working people.

We support the struggle of the Venezuelan working class and working peoples for the restoration of democratic freedoms in the country, the political, social, and economic rights of the people, the cessation of repression and the full release of workers, political, and social activists unjustly detained for fighting for their rights or demanding the Constitution be respected,  that the political rights of the organizations that have been intervened in by the institutions of the Venezuelan State be restored, as in the case of the legitimate Communist Party of Venezuela, its militancy and its Central Committee elected at the XVI Congress, always in the front ranks of the struggle against imperialism, to whom we express our full solidarity. We also urge the Venezuelan government to respect and restore these aforementioned rights.

We express our solidarity with the working class and the Venezuelan people, and we reaffirm that the way out of the social, economic, and political crisis in Venezuela is in the hands of the Venezuelan working class and working peoples, and not in any bloc of the national bourgeoisie or pole of the world capitalist system.

We oppose the new imperialist redivision and the sacrifice of the peoples for the benefit of the interests of capital.

Proletarians of all countries, unite!