On the Presidential Elections in Venezuela
Joint statement led by the Communist Party of Mexico between communist parties in the Americas on the presidential elections in Venezuela. Find the original in Spanish here.
On Sunday, July 28, elections will be held to elect the president of Venezuela. In light of this, we would like to express the following:
- Contrary to what government propaganda spreads, these elections in Venezuela have a profound anti-democratic character, among other things, for deliberately preventing revolutionary parties and forces from registering candidates.
- In recent years, political parties and organizations have been illegalized and intervened in on government instructions, particularly against anti-imperialist organizations that ran independently in the 2020 parliamentary elections as the Popular Revolutionary Alternative. In addition, the electoral register of these parties has been usurped, to be used illegally in favor of the PSUV candidacy.
- State intervention in the parties was a measure to prevent them from presenting candidates that they considered in line with their programme, strategy and tactics, thus vitiating the electoral process from the outset.
- This process has also been directed against our brother Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), the political party of the Venezuelan working class. As the comrades of the PCV have widely documented, there was a series of maneuvers by President Maduro and the Vice President of the PSUV Diosdado Cabello to strip the PCV of its political-electoral rights and replace it with a handful of mercenaries, agents of other parties and outsiders to the PCV membership.
- We do not accept the lie that the government and its media are trying to spread about a “split” in the PCV. Any honest and serious look shows that this is an unacceptable anti-communist government attack.
- The National Electoral Council, under the control of the PSUV, denied the registration of a new organization for electoral purposes that would allow political forces not aligned with the two bourgeois poles to present an alternative candidacy, but also prevented the PCV and other forces from registering the candidacy of Manuel Isidro Molina, denying access to the nomination system to the organization authorized to register.
- While workers' organizations and anti-imperialist forces were denied their democratic rights to participate in elections, at the same time reactionary forces that in the past openly supported the policy of foreign sanctions and even called for military intervention against the country were allowed to register organizations for electoral purposes.
- The so-called international community and progressive governments have remained shamefully silent in the face of this violation of the democratic and political rights of the working class and its parties by the Electoral Council and the government of Venezuela.
The attacks against the Communist Party of Venezuela are part of a general context of aggression against the working class and the labor movement: attacks on the living conditions of workers and their families, attacks on union struggles, and imprisonment of union cadres. As in other countries, the “progressive” management in Venezuela is the preservation of capitalist exploitation against workers, with a rhetorical make-up that shamelessly simulates anti-imperialist, socialist and even revolutionary positions.
We express our solidarity with the workers of Venezuela, and with the Communist Party of Venezuela, its Central Committee headed by its General Secretary, Comrade Oscar Figuera, and all its militants, as well as with the Communist Youth of Venezuela.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party
Communist Party of El Salvador
Communist Workers' Platform of the United States
Communist Party of Mexico
Paraguayan Communist Party