By: President Nicolás Maduro on June 3, 2020
On behalf of the Venezuelan people, I express our solidarity with the family of George Floyd, the African American community and the American people who are fighting for equality and justice. A cry goes out from U.S. cities: No more racism! No more police violence!
We express our strong support for the people of the United States, for those millions who are protesting the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the state police force.
We deplore this atrocious crime, which has spilled over the glass of tolerance. The people are tired of racist repression.
The recent acts of protest in the United States have exposed the profoundly racist character of the American state. The supremacist government of Donald Trump has further deepened this evil historically present in American society, and in the presence of the assassination of George Floyd it has only fanned the flames of violence against protesters.
However, we cannot forget that racism in the United States is structural, historical and systemic, which means that Republicans, Democrats, corporations and the mass media have fed a society where the plundering, appropriation of labor and the stripping of all rights from African American, Latino, Indigenous and migrant communities has been the basis of capitalist accumulation in that country.
COVID-19 highlighted this model, which left most of society, especially the vulnerable sectors, without any guarantee of health care. The statistics reveal that there are more deaths in poor areas with a strong Latino and Black presence, and even in areas that are not poor, the greatest number of infected and dead people come from these social sectors.
We denounce that the response of Donald Trump’s government, in the face of the millions of inhabitants who are outraged by this situation, is a demonstration of the will of the elites who are imposing a racist and fascist agenda: deploying police and military forces in the streets, declaring curfews, disqualifying the people who protest, wanting to criminalize the organizations and collectives that have pushed this struggle — such as the Black Lives Matter campaign — or even civil groups such as the antifascist movement, Antifa, declaring them terrorists by decree.
We condemn what the Organization of American States, the United Nations, the European Union and the central capitalist countries in general are keeping quiet as a way of complicity: the murder of George Floyd is a hate crime perpetrated from the U.S. state, the police and military repression against hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, the massive violation of human rights and even the murder of some citizens during the protests; not to mention the violation of the democratic right to protest, in the name of protecting private property.
We declare our solidarity and our commitment to these people who are fighting in the streets today. They must know that their struggle is also ours, against racism, against fascism, against capitalism. But, in addition, today we are united in our struggle against the same government and the same state, that of the United States, which represses and murders Black and Latino communities if they do not allow themselves to be plundered and stripped of all that capital needs to reproduce itself in an expanded way. It is the same state that declared war on the Venezuelan and Cuban peoples, that threatens to invade us or starve us if we do not allow ourselves to be plundered in order to maintain its position as an imperialist power.
Finally, we recognize the courage of these people who are fighting for their rights in the streets, who are raising their voices against this unfair system to say that enough is enough, that the police state is trying to choke them like George Floyd — but that they will not succeed.
You play a main role in the struggle against the common enemies of the people of the world, and it fills us with hope to look at millions of young people in the streets, in the struggle that gives us identity, makes us equals in a project for liberation and the construction of a society that is just and puts life above capital.
Homeland is humanity!
For us the homeland is the Americas!
Source: ALBA Movimientos Venezuela