Five Urgent Notes on Attacks to the Anti-Imperialist Encounter in Venezuela

By Iñaki Gil de San Vicente on January 23, 2020

The hostile reaction devised and addressed from abroad against the Anti-imperialist Encounter For Life, Sovereignty and Peace, being held in Caracas on January 22-25, 2020, demands reflections from all of us but especially from those who were not allowed to attend the event.

First: The boycott carried out by several airlines to prevent delegates from attending the event confirms the necessity for celebrating that it happened, as well as the good move of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela for organizing it. Nowadays, we are facing several decisive battlefronts in the war between imperialism and the exploited humanity.  Venezuela is one of them; the most decisive front together with Cuba in the double task of restoring Our America’s emancipating forces and taking the process to the offensive.

But Venezuela, and Cuba, are also important worldwide because besides strengthening the alliance among other powers that are somehow facing imperialism given their own diverse interests above all, these two countries also confirm the unquestionable historical lesson about that people’s sovereignty depends on its capacity to defend itself. Bolivia’s catastrophe confirms history once again; Imperialism will never give up. It is always updating its counter-attacks, it never ceases its destabilizing attempts, in bribing and co-opting despicable people, getting mercenaries appointed to fulfill the orders given by the bourgeoisie and imperialism itself.

Second: For a while, good people, revolutionary people, have been enduring airport restrictions and attacks on their freedom of communication, of movement, of attending events, debates, and solidarity encounters. We are facing a repressive strengthening against these rights, reminding us the desperate measures taken by many States that go back generations.

Let’s start with the prevention of expression of solidarity in the Roman–Greek and Medieval wars; the suffocating vigilance over slaves; peasant wars; Andean and continental revolts; the first bourgeois revolutions; the beginning of the working and popular movement, which faced all sort of obstacles. There was the 1848 repressive controls on the meetings on the organization of First International; the siege of the 1871 Paris Commune; to anti-socialist laws in the late 19th century; and the siege laid against the Second International and Third Internationals and today there is the always failed obsession of limiting and silencing Cuba and Our America. We also recall the Spanish King’s ridiculous aspiration of silencing Hugo Chavez, whose voice is still heard in this crucial anti-imperialist event, as well as the voice of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Colombian leader Manuel Marulanda, Basque leader Argala, Chile’s Salvador Allende, Colombia’s Camilo Torres, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara, Guinean politician Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Spanish’ Buenaventura Durruti, Andreu Nin Pérez, Julio Antonio Mella, Peru’s Mariátegui, Vladimir Lenin, Emiliano Zapata, Rosa Luxemburg, Cuba’s Jose Marti, Mikhail Bakunin, Haiti’s Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Pétion, Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar, Inca leader Tupac Amaru, Puerto Rico’s Negro Miguel… And so many working women who are made invisible but are in fact the intellect and heart of the dignity we have today.

Third: Everything indicates that the clear repressive trend is speeding up. This time, imperialism has coordinated sabotage against this anti-imperialist event taking place now in Caracas through civil airlines from a third country by not processing airline tickets to Venezuela. This is to say, political-military commands have torpedoed foreign civil companies, extending this attack to basic human rights to travel and free speech. We are witnessing another forward leap in the recent process of repressive unification between secret services and international politics, confirming that imperialism’s nature is irreconcilable with the slightest democracy. This complexity is right now explaining this obsessive attack to the anti-imperialist event in Caracas.

Fourth: The capitalist economy nowadays and the power of the United States and the European Union are facing more and more serious obstacles. For instance, the giant global debt won’t stop growing given the suicidal policy kept by the large banking system during the last years amidst what’s known as “cheap money.” This debt represents about 320 percent of the world gross domestic product and there are only two ways to reduce it to a manageable amount according to imperialism’s perspective: Transferring it to workers as well as to competitive powers that refuse to be pawns of imperialism. But this is not the only existing threat. There is more. The most serious of them is the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall and the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. When the different levels of this crisis merge in a single collapse, imperialism has no other resource than mass destruction of accrued value, dead work, infrastructure and productive forces trying to start another expansive phase; if it can. This is why they can’t stand for people to even gather to discuss a minimal step towards people’s emancipation.

Fifth: Regardless of the repression and harassment we must multiply these encounters, these debates. We must coordinate them, advance in the anti-imperialist practice because every second we lose is a vital second we give to the imperialists to regroup and to counter-attack.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation North America bureau