Por Red en Defensa de la Humanidad

Nuestra América, 20 de enero de 2020

Compañera Patricia Villegas
Presidenta de teleSUR
Venezuela

Estimada Patricia:

Es difícil reunir tantos elementos y de tan débil credibilidad, como aquellos utilizados hoy por los lacayos del imperio en las amenazas e intentos por acallar a teleSUR. Estos empeños no hacen más que reafirmar la certeza del valor de esta plataforma multimedia en la batalla de los pueblos por el derecho a la verdad.

Cuántas veces, como espectadores, nos hemos sentido reconfortados al ver que un equipo de teleSUR se encuentra en el lugar donde suceden acontecimientos trascendentales para los silenciados, para los excluidos de siempre, y nos reporta, desde dentro, lo que acontece. No podríamos enumerar esas tantísimas ocasiones, pero sí transmitir nuestro profundo agradecimiento y respeto por una labor tan valiente y profesional como la que realiza la emisora. Solo a través de teleSUR hemos podido conocer la acción despiadada y letal del capitalismo, la fuerza de la resistencia de líderes y movimientos populares y de hechos que han abierto verdaderas brechas a la dominación imperial y que han marcado la historia de nuestros pueblos.

La soberbia de los poderosos no soporta la pluralidad de visiones, de culturas, la transparencia informativa, el respeto por el espectador. No soporta el análisis a fondo de los hechos y sus causas, no soporta la denuncia a las transnacionales y sus sucios manejos, la crítica a la manipulación obscena de los medios y redes afines al sistema. Es para ellos imprescindible silenciar esta plataforma, uno de los grandes logros por la descolonización de nuestra América que impulsara el Comandante Hugo Chávez.

Hace ya 16 años de aquella reunión en Venezuela, en diciembre de 2004, donde se dieron cita unos 400 intelectuales provenientes de 52 países. Es en este encuentro en el que se formaliza el nacimiento de la Red de Intelectuales, Artistas y Movimientos Sociales en Defensa de la Humanidad (REDH) y en su documento final, conocido como “Llamamiento de Caracas”, reza: “Apoyar la constitución de una televisora del sur y de medios televisivos y radiofónicos independientes al servicio de los intereses de nuestros pueblos”.

Inmediatamente, el presidente Chávez, con su visión estratégica, asumió el compromiso de crear un medio de comunicación audiovisual asociado a la emancipación.  De esta forma, las historias de la Red y de teleSUR están entrelazadas de una manera profunda y germinal; por lo que salvaguardar Telesur, su filosofía, sus ideales, y su obra, es también nuestra obligación.

Hoy estamos frente a un imperio decadente, cada vez más desesperado al ver cómo se debilita su hegemonía en la que José Martí llamara con razón Nuestra América, algo que necesita para garantizar su subsistencia. No subestimemos sus amenazas. Redoblemos esfuerzos y mantengámonos alertas para impedir que despojen a los pueblos del derecho a una información veraz, plural y oportuna, que junto al derecho al trabajo, a la salud, la educación y la cultura, siguen siendo las aspiraciones más caras de la humanidad hoy, cuando ya han transcurrido veinte años de este nuevo siglo.

Querida Patricia, en realidad te honran de modo singular al colocar entre sus principales blancos el exitoso trabajo del canal y tu propia labor como su presidenta. TeleSUR es hijo de la batalla de las ideas y de los padres de esta nueva era continental: los Comandantes Fidel Castro Ruz y Hugo Chávez Frías. Venceremos, sin duda. Asumimos su defensa sin titubeos ni medias tintas, como un compromiso irreversible de todos los compañeros y compañeras que conformamos la Red en Defensa de la Humanidad y muchos otros movimientos afines.

Como dijera el poeta venezolano Víctor Valera Mora: “Sol del mundo que haremos/ los que van a vivir te saludan”.

Que teleSUR nos diga qué más necesita de nosotros ¡y ahí estaremos!

Un abrazo fraterno y solidario,

En nombre de la REDH, los integrantes de su Secretaría:

Atilio A. Borón, Argentina
Paula Klachko, Argentina
Stella Calloni, Argentina
Marcos Teruggi, Argentina/Venezuela
Tim Anderson, Australia
Hugo Móldiz, Bolivia
María Nela Prada, Bolivia
Carlos Alberto (Beto) Almeida, Brasil
Marilia Guimaraes, Brasil
Nadia Bambirra, Brasil
Arnold August, Canadá
Florencia Lagos, Chile
Javiera Olivares, Chile
Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, Chile/Venezuela
Dario Salinas Figueredo, Chile/México
Ángel Guerra, Cuba/México
Ariana López, Cuba
Fernando León Jacomino, Cuba
Omar González, Cuba
Irene León, Ecuador
Orlando Pérez, Ecuador
Arantxa Tirado, España
Javier Couso, España
Alicia Jrapko, EE.UU.
Hernando Calvo Ospina, Francia
Camille Chalmers, Haití
Anarella Vélez, Honduras
Gilberto Ríos, Honduras
Luis Hernández Navarro, México
Nayar López, México
Fernando Buen Abad, México/Argentina
Katu Arkonada, País Vasco/México
Ricardo Flecha, Paraguay
Hildebrando Pérez Grande, Perú
Antonio Elías, Uruguay
Gabriela Cultelli, Uruguay
Carmen Bohórquez, Venezuela
Pasqualina Curcio, Venezuela
Pedro Calzadilla, Venezuela
Sergio Arria, Venezuela/Argentina

Fuente: Con La Verdad, Por La Paz y La Justicia Social

About 35 Bolivians and other activists demonstrated in front of the Bolivian Consulate in Los Angeles on Jan. 22, demanding that the U.S.-backed coup government of Jeanine Áñez step down.

Speakers denounced the vicious repression against supporters of President Evo Morales, who was forced into exile in November. Protesters chanted support for the candidates of Morales’ party, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), in the May 2020 national election: Luis Arce for president and David Choquehuanca for vice president.

Immediately after the coup took place, the U.S. government announced its support for the illegitimate regime that took over. Supporters of the MAS are still being arrested, physically attacked and jailed on a daily basis. 

In spite of the repression, many tens of thousands–mostly Indigenous people–marched in Cochabamba on Jan. 22 to show their determination to continue the struggle. The same day in Argentina, President Morales spoke to a massive solidarity rally in a sports stadium. The new Argentine government has granted Morales sanctuary.

Jan. 22 is a national holiday in Bolivia that commemorates the inauguration of Evo Morales in 2006. On the same date in 2009, Bolivia’s “re-foundation” was carried out with a new constitution, and the name of the country was officially changed to the Plurinational State of Bolivia, in recognition of the country’s Indigenous cultures. 

President Morales said at the time that the new constitution “protects all Bolivians equally” and enshrines “the deepest aspirations of the most abandoned sectors,” referring to Indigenous peoples and the working class. It’s advances like these that Washington and its Bolivian allies seek to roll back.

Vice President Mike Pence penned a poisonous piece on impeachment in the Jan. 17 Wall Street Journal. His article revives white supremacist myths about the Reconstruction period following the U.S. Civil War.

The pseudo-historical op-ed seeks to defend Trump by whitewashing the super racist president, Andrew Johnson, who was impeached in 1868. It uses “Profiles in Courage,” written by Democrat John F. Kennedy, to do so.

Republican Sen. Edmund Ross is eulogized in Kennedy’s book for casting the deciding vote that kept Johnson in the White House. Pence quotes from it to urge Democratic senators not to convict Trump.

Trump’s sidekick describes Johnson, who succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, as having “quickly run afoul of the Republicans in Congress who wished to impose a far harsher penalty on the former Confederacy.”   

What’s the real story? Andrew Johnson wanted to keep African Americans from voting. He did nothing as thousands of Black people were killed by Ku Klux Klan terror. 

Johnson declared that “this is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” What a role model for Trump! 

Frederick Douglass knew what Johnson was about. Douglass said to a friend at Lincoln’s second inauguration, “Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race.”    

Pence is retelling the Klan version of history that vilified both Black and white fighters for human rights. These lies were taught in U.S. classrooms for a century until the Black liberation struggle flushed them out of most public schools. 

The truth can be found in the monumental classic by W.E.B. DuBois, “Black Reconstruction in America.”

A big step backwards

Andrew Johnson was nominated as Lincoln’s running mate in June 1864. At the time, the largest Union army was besieging Petersburg, Va., while another Union army was trying to reach Atlanta.

This was the bloodiest period of the Civil War, with hundreds of Union soldiers being killed every day. Some Northern capitalists wanted to throw in the towel. Lincoln himself thought that he would be defeated for re-election.

The Republican Party’s answer was to capitulate to racism. It rebranded itself as the “National Union Party” and put Andrew Johnson—a Tennessee Democrat and slave owner—on the ticket. 

Lincoln was no abolitionist and had to be pushed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. During the Civil War, Lincoln hanged 38 members of the Dakota Sioux Nation in Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 26, 1862. But Johnson was to the right of Lincoln.

What turned things around at the ballot box were the victories of the Union Army, particularly Atlanta’s capture on Sept. 2, 1864. The most revolutionary part of the army were Black soldiers, who were determined to defeat slavery.

Yet, Lincoln got just 55 percent of the vote and won New York state by less than 9,000 votes.

Six weeks after Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term, he was assassinated on Good Friday 1865. 

Reprieve for traitors

The Confederacy had been smashed and the slave masters were in disarray. Now was the time to seize the land like the people of Zimbabwe did 135 years later under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe!

That’s what Pennsylvania Congressperson Thaddeus Stevens wanted to do, backed by a few colleagues in Congress. Big Capital wasn’t interested. Southern aristocrats were given a reprieve.

Yankee moneybags didn’t want formerly enslaved Africans to take over the plantations that they worked on and made rich. Northern capitalists wanted to exploit them instead. They certainly weren’t going to give any of the land back to Indigenous people from whom it was stolen. 

The only land the Yankee one percent wanted to seize was for their railroad companies. Abandoned plantations along the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia that had been granted to Black people by General Sherman were taken away.

Meanwhile, President Johnson was busy pardoning thousands of Confederate traitors. In 1866, he vetoed a civil rights bill and appropriations for the Freedmen’s Bureau that helped Black people in the South.

Hundreds of Black people were massacred by white mobs in Memphis, Charleston and New Orleans in 1866. A thousand African Americans were murdered by whites in Texas from 1865 to 1866. Black Codes were enacted in Southern states that denied any rights to African Americans.

Black people in the South and a few white allies fought back. So did the Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Thad Stevens. Andrew Johnson became detested and his opponents won large majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1866 elections. 

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbade slavery, was written in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Black, white, Indigenous, Latinx, Muslim and Jewish soldiers. It has a rotten exception that permits slave labor in prisons.

This amendment now meant formerly enslaved Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths of a person. Southern states, if they were admitted to the union, would have even more seats in Congress. But African Americans could still be prevented from voting.

Combined with racist congressmen in the North, such a reactionary coalition with the former slavocracy could repudiate the U.S. national debt that had ballooned because of the Civil War. A large section of the wealthy and powerful in the North would have lost billions.

Suddenly there was support among capitalists for Black voting rights. Black people fought back against the Ku Klux Klan with rifles donated by Northern allies. Impeaching President Andrew Johnson was part of this righteous struggle.

Reconstruction was a brief springtime for African Americans. Black elected officials opened public schools for all students.   

In South Carolina, a Black majority state legislature, called the Black Parliament, became the most democratic in U.S. history. It was the best government poor white people ever had.

False profiles

Pence demagogically uses “Profiles in Courage” to defend Trump. Seven years after it was published, President John F. Kennedy was murdered in a Pentagon coup d’etat. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas was supported by the same elements in the ruling class that are backing Trump today.

In his book, JFK praised eight U.S. senators for their alleged courage. Three of them were slave masters. Neither Hiram Revels or Blanche Bruce —the first two Black senators, who were elected by the Mississippi legislature during Reconstruction—were mentioned.

Sen. Charles Sumner, an ally of Thaddeus Stevens who fought for land and freedom for Black people, wasn’t included either. Sumner was nearly beaten to death while pinned under his Senate desk by the rabidly pro-slavery Rep. Preston Brooks. 

Kennedy paid tribute to Sen. Robert Taft—co-author of the viciously anti-union Taft-Hartley Act—for denouncing the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

Pence’s hero, Kansas Sen. Edmund Ross, was no “profile in courage.” Historian Brenda Wineapple, author of “The Impeachers,” described how Ross sold his vote to Andrew Johnson: 

“He wanted Johnson to support a treaty that would sell 8 million acres that belonged to Native Americans to a railroad for a fraction of what it was worth. He wanted his brother to get a government position in Florida. Then he wanted two friends to be appointed as Indian agents, and another friend to be Southern superintendent of Indian affairs, and another friend to be a surveyor in Kansas.”

While Ross was demanding favors from Johnson, Kansas Republican Gov. Crawford was sending troops to fight Indigenous people on behalf of the railroads. It was railroad interests that helped broker the rotten deal in 1877 that led to Reconstruction’s bloody overthrow.

Impeach Trump for racism!

Trump and Pence need to be thrown out now. But the Democratic Party leadership has limited the impeachment struggle to Trump’s delay of $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. Texas Rep. Al Green’s appeal to impeach Trump for racism has been ignored.

No money should be sent to the regime in Ukraine that persecutes leftists. Its fascist supporters murdered at least 42 people at Odessa’s House of Trade Unions in 2014.

Backed by the U.S. and the European Union, the Kiev government has killed thousands of workers in its war against the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Every cent of aid sent to Ukraine’s fascist militias is money taken away from poor people.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to divert the struggle against Trump. But it’s the burning hatred against the Klansman in the White House that forced the Democratic Party leadership to back impeachment.

To millions of Black people and their allies, Trump is a clear and present danger. It’s as if arch-segregationist George Wallace had become president.

Trump and Pence are both neo-Confederates. The power of the people will sweep them away.

To the social and popular organizations, to the workers and intellectuals of Our America:

It’s been three months since the great popular uprising that Chile is experiencing began. Since those days in mid-October 2019, when a noisy group of students decided to evade the fare in the Santiago Metro to protest the very high cost of the ticket and thus awaken Chilean society from a long sleep, the country has experienced a shake-up that without a doubt gave birth to a new Chile.

The bravery of those youth who circumvented the surveillance of the Metro and were then violently repressed by the carabineros generated a chain of solidarity with the beaten and injured students. All together, the people of Chile took to the streets and did not abandon them until today. Successive assaults by the police on thousands and thousands of youth very soon led to a qualitative leap in the protests. The demand that is being heard today throughout Chile is synthesized in two slogans: “Piñera resign” and “Pacos culiaos” [“Fucking pigs”], referring with irony and rage to that Nazi-like institution that tortured and murdered during the Pinochet dictatorship and now continues to repeat that script against those who protest peacefully.

From those first hard lessons in October, many imagined that this revolt was going to be a summer rain and that the young people, fed up with wild capitalism and feeling excluded in every way, were going to let up. That they would “get over it,” as one minister suggested. None of this happened; quite the contrary. The youth rebellion turned into days and into a massive interclass mobilization that encompassed all ages. 

Gatherings of hundreds of thousands or even a million people in the renamed Plaza de la Dignidad became a common scene. All this in spite of the increasing repression, the powerful jets of water with caustic soda that burns the body, the gases and the bullets targeting the face and eyes, following the Israeli manual on the subject. Nothing has turned back this hurricane that knows what it does not want and what moves it to rebellion. “We have woken up and are fighting for our dignity.” Nothing more, nothing less.

Nothing has lessened the healthy anger of those who “have nothing to lose because we have lost everything,” not even the mobilization of the military, the curfew, the clandestine executions, the torture and murder by the “pacos culiaos.” Nothing helped the dictatorship, whose officials today cannot step into the streets, except in disguise, if they do not want to be spat on, slapped, or as happens in the stadiums and in every square in the country, made to hear the hit phrase of the Chilean summer: “Piñera, murderer, just like Pinochet.”

This unstoppable movement is horizontal from every point of view, without leaders in the style of other times, but with the vote of confidence from those who fight on the front lines by putting their bodies in front of the bullets, the gas or the ambush. This movement has left the bourgeois politicians on the sidelines, all of them without distinction, including those of a certain “left” who made a pact with Piñera for a constituent assembly that is not what those at the bottom are demanding. “Ours will be inclusive, popular, activist, feminist and with the Indigenous peoples,” they say. 

This mass movement, which includes the grandchildren of those thousands who risked their lives to make the revolution in the 1970s, many being killed in the attempt, is the most complete expression of a unique cultural and political revolution of the 21st century. It unites, from the strength that comes from standing back to back in the street, the historical legacy of the Chilean rebellions, from Manuel Rodríguez to Víctor Jara, Salvador Allende and Miguel Enríquez. It does not need to be displayed on posters or flags, but rather incorporates the singing, poetry and anger of the new insurgencies. For these young people, other names weigh closer to home, such as Mauricio Fredes, from the front line, who was killed in the scuffle with the “pacos,” meters away from the Plaza de la Dignidad. Or Gustavo Gatica, who was blinded by the bullets aimed at his eyes.

These fighters write their documents and statements on the walls, with creative texts, just like the handmade banners with which they mobilize. They are an overwhelming force when they face the warlike brutality of the uniformed, who will never understand why these “youth,” who carry a Chilean or Mapuche flag in their hands, laugh and dance, run as if they were playing, ride bicycles, and sing to the sound of the music broadcast by Radio Plaza de la Dignidad. They kiss passionately or hug to remember while a pandemonium of gases, explosions and screams explodes around them. They are living in the face of death, because “we have lost our fear.”

The revolt is national, it is either erupting in Santiago, or in Valparaíso, in Pudahuel Sur, in Antofagasta, Temuco, Concepción or Iquique. The whole country “has said enough is enough and is marching,” banging the pots, to which the combative rapper Ana Tijoux pays homage, or confronts the rifles with stones or even with fists.

In the face of this broad, gigantic movement, the dictatorship has managed to make its submissive hegemonic media shamefully silent, censoring the obvious, trying to cover up reality, but this one is coming over and over again like waves. And this doesn’t only happen in Chilean media, but the unique discourse prevails in all the genuflecting press of the continent. But what they have not been able to tame is the hundreds of communication guerrillas who, through video on social media, are denouncing the horrors of repression and the small but gratifying victories of those mobilized.

Hence the fundamental reason for this urgent note, written from the heart and with the passion that such a popular rebellion provokes in us. It is necessary that in the place where we find ourselves we make the cause of the Chilean people our own, that we do not leave them alone in their attempt to restore a society in which there is room for everyone. That we break down the wall of disinformation and in any way we can, in each city, in each country, we demonstrate, embracing those who fight in Gabriela Mistral’s homeland.

It is time for us to awaken that indispensable stimulus of internationalism in solidarity. Chile, its people, its courageous youth, are calling us by example. Let’s not fail them, let’s bring them a fraternal greeting that does not only mean that, but that commits us to the streets of our countries to also see those two flags (the Chilean and the Mapuche) fly, which have been forever entwined. Let our neighbors know that what is happening there is not by chance but rather because imperialism and capitalism suffocate the people in such a way that one day the explosion will come, and it will be unstoppable.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau

Bolivians will return to the polls on May 3, almost six months after former President Evo Morales was ousted in a coup. Having been declared the winner of the October 20 election, the leader of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) was forced to resign three weeks later after opposition protests denouncing fraud culminated in the police and military calling on Morales to step down.

With a right-wing senator, Jeanine Áñez, sworn in as “interim president,” the post-coup government has set about ensuring that after 14 years of MAS government, the leftist party will not return to power. Backed by the military, media and judiciary, the government has been persecuting MAS activists and repressing protests.

Almost 30 protesters have been killed since the coup and, in a show of strength, the government ordered the military onto the streets of the capital, La Paz, on January 16 ahead of anti-coup protests planned for January 22 — the day Morales’ term constitutionally ends.

Despite this, the MAS continues to lead in the polls, writes Fernando Molina from La Paz.

***

For two months, the media have bombarded Bolivians with daily reports on an investigation into the charging or arrest of one or another ex-collaborator of exiled ex-President Evo Morales. Morales is the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by Jeanine Áñez’s transitional government.

The latest story was of the arrest of ex-minister of government Carlos Romero on January 15, whom prosecutors have accused of corruption. Romero was taken to jail after being informally arrested — first in his home and then at a medical clinic — by civilian groups that refer to themselves as the “resistance,” and have the backing of the police to impose their law on the street.

Morales calls them “fascist paramilitary groups.”

Fascist paramilitaries

These groups also maintain a daily presence around the Mexican Embassy in La Paz, where various ex-ministers and Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) leaders have sought refuge but have not been—and will not be—granted safe passage to leave the country.

Members of these groups take turns inspecting vehicles entering and leaving the exclusive neighborhood of La Rinconada, where the ambassador’s residence is located.

For now, they operate in two cities, La Paz and Cochabamba, the scenes of most of the fierce clashes between Morales’ supporters and opponents prior to his overthrow. The “resistance” is comprised of organised middle-class residents and students who, during the crisis, armed themselves with sticks, helmets and improvised shields to confront the contingents of workers and peasants that sought to neutralise the opposition protests.

The person most hated by the “resistance” is one of the key MAS leaders seeking asylum in the Mexican ambassador’s residence, Juan Ramón Quintana: An ex-minister of the presidency and key figure in the previous government, he has been charged with sedition and terrorism.

The ex-minister of justice, Héctor Arce; of culture, Vilma Alanoca; of government, Hugo Moldiz; and of defense, Javier Zavaleta, are all trapped in the diplomatic house and facing various criminal charges.

They are accompanied by Nicolás Laguna, ex-director of the Government Agency for Electronics and Information and Communications Technology, who is accused of electoral fraud, as well as other former high-ranking officials who, for now, are not facing criminal proceedings but have been refused safe passage.

Many of the charges have to do with something the person said: Morales is accused of terrorism and sedition for having called a peasant leader and asked him to blockade the cities and make sure “food cannot get in.”

The ex-president was also recently charged for having said in Argentina that, if one day he returns to power, he will have to organise armed militias, like late socialist President Hugo Chávez did in Venezuela, to ensure his mandate.

Quintana is accused of terrorism and sedition for having declared to Russian news outlet Sputnik that a coup against Morales had to be intensely opposed by converting Bolivia into “a modern-day Vietnam.” The government has jailed an au pair and a courier who worked for him.

These and other controversial arrests—such as that of a doctor who attended to a left activist who had been wounded by a bullet in a clinic, or the young public employees who made memes against the government using workplace computers—have provoked some individual complaints in the media, which, in institutional terms, have applauded Áñez’s government and celebrated the existence of the “resistance.”

Along with Romero, dozens of people have been charged with corruption. There are also ongoing investigations into the patrimony of 600 former MAS ministers, vice ministers, directors, governors and mayors.

Threats to labor 

When Andrónico Rodríguez, the leader of the Chapare coca growers union, announced that a new stage of “peaceful resistance against fascism” would begin on January 22, and suggested protests be held, minister of government Arturo Murillo tweeted: “Andrónico, be careful, this radicalism is putting at risk your leadership and future.”

Rodríguez had to come out and clarify that he was not planning to commit any crime and denounced the government for trying to suppress union leaders through judicial processes and arrests.

In an attempt to halt the wave of repression, the MAS passed a law regarding human rights in the Legislative Assembly. It demanded the Áñez government compensate the families of the 29 people killed due to repression and opened up the possibility for union and political leaders who feel they are being unjustly persecuted to present their cases to the courts.

The government responded by saying it considered the law “unnecessary” and anti-constitutional.

All of this is occurring with the support of the middle and upper sections of society, who have converted Murillo into a popular figure. The minister, who before coming to power was questioned for the abruptness of his scraps with Morales, today is applauded when he enters any cafe in La Paz.

‘Pacification’ campaign

The “pacification of the country,” as the measures against the MAS are officially referred to, have converted Áñez into the highest polling anti-Morales politician (15 percent, according to a Cies Mori poll done for Unitel).

Ex-president Carlos Mesa, who came second behind Morales in the October elections, is polling at only 13 percent.

However, Áñez has said she will not be a candidate in the May 3 elections. Instead, she is pushing for the different candidates to unite against MAS which, even before having defined its candidate, remains the largest party in the country, with 20 percent voter support.

[Translator’s note: The MAS announced on January 19 that it would run former economy minister Luis Arce and former foreign minister David Choquehuanca as its presidential and vice presidential candidates.]

However, the MAS is also the party with the highest level of disapproval. Ensuring the “tyrants” and “narcotraffickers” do not raise their heads in the new elections has become the main concern for that segment of the population that was committed to the overthrow of Morales and today dominates public opinion.

The pressure to form an anti-MAS united front has not stopped various people expressing their desire to run. Mesa is putting himself forward as the center option, a space he will probably have to fight over with business owner Samuel Doria Medina, Morales’ main opponent in the 2014 elections.

Another ex-president, Jorge Quiroga, is seeking to represent the traditional right. Luis Fernando Camacho, a key figure of the “resistance” in Santa Cruz and principal leader of the cívicos movement that claimed responsibility for deposing Morales, is running together with his Potosí counterpart, Marco Pumari. This list represents an expression of the new right, characterised by its religiosity, its civilian “shock troops” and its strong presence on social media.

Many thought Camacho and Pumari would quickly become the main option for anti-Morales voters, but for now they have not managed to climb in the polls.

This is possibly because the first attempt to bring the two together on a common slate ended in spectacular failure. In early December, Camacho said he would not run with Pumari and later released a taped conversation in which he criticised him for having asked for US$250,000 and control over customs in Potosi in exchange for his support.

Pumari did not deny the conversation, but said he wanted the money to finance his election campaign and that the nomination of a cívicos representative to the board of directors of customs was a “demand of the people of Potosí.”

The Legislative Assembly remains in MAS hands, but its parliamentary bloc has been neutralised by the popularity of the interim government in the cities; the monolithic alignment of the military, police, prosecutors and judges behind the government; and its own division between a “conciliatory” group and those “loyal” to Morales.

The Constitutional Tribunal has extended the parliament’s mandate, which was meant to end on January 22, until the handover to a new president, which is expected to occur mid-year.

Source: A version of this article originally appeared in Brecha. Translated for Green Left Weekly by Federico Fuentes.

Bolivia’s de facto government does not even try to hide its anti-people, racist and repressive character. The coup power headed by President Jeanine Áñez seems to be emulating Augusto Pinochet with the purposes of spreading the same type terror that accompanied the Chilean military junta and the rest of the military-fascist governments in 20th century Latin America.

Dozens of reports from Bolivia, provided by human rights organizations, activists from the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), diplomatic offices, groups and independent individuals, report the terror sown among the population: the massive use of torture; selective assassinations, which include throwing of people alive from helicopters; death threats; lynchings executed by the now infamous “cívicos”; disappearances; and strict censorship of the media, including the burning of television and radio stations.

Bolivian doctors, especially graduates of the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) who worked alongside the Cuban health care workers, activists from MAS and journalists critical of the coup are among the more than one thousand dead or reported missing.

On social media, the Association of ELAM Graduates has denounced the persecution, unjustified dismissals and vicious campaign of discrediting to which they are being subjected.

The police have given orders not to provide medical care to those injured by the government repression, and failure to comply with this order is severely punished. Recently, Mirtha Sanjinez, the administrator of a major hospital, was presented by the police at a press conference as a “collaborator of criminals and terrorists” because, according to the security forces, she failed to comply with the order.

The repressive action against the press has been called, by Áñez’s henchmen, an “operation to dismantle the propaganda apparatus of the dictatorial regime of Evo Morales.”

Telesur, Bolivia TV and RT in Spanish have been shut down, and the journalists who collaborated with them have been arrested. Al-Jazeera correspondent Teresa Bo was shot in the face with tear gas while transmitting a live report.

Disrespect for political asylum

Holding out in the Mexican Embassy in Bolivia is Juan Ramón Quintana, minister of government, and one of President Morales’ closest associates. The Áñez regime issued an arrest warrant against him on charges of sedition and terrorism.

Also there are Javier Zavaleta López, minister of defense for Morales; Héctor Arce Zaconeta, attorney general; Félix César Navarro Miranda, minister of mining; Wilma Alanoca, minister of culture from 2017 to 2019; and Hugo Moldiz, who was minister of government until 2015. Also included are Víctor Hugo Vásquez Mamani, who served as governor of the department of Oruro; Pedro Damián Dorado López, deputy minister of rural development; and Nicolás Laguna, director of the Morales government’s digital agency (Agetic).

Of the nine officials who have been granted asylum, four have arrest warrants against them and five do not, but the de facto authorities have not granted them safe conduct to leave the South American country.

All these ministers of the constitutional government of Morales are accused by the de facto regime of alleged acts of sedition.

The coup regime has exerted unprecedented pressure and harassment on the Mexican Embassy, but if the harassment against the diplomats has been strong, the pressure on asylum seekers and their families has been worse.

Despite what Bolivia is suffering through, MAS is reorganizing and preparing to win again in the next elections.

Source: Granma; translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau

Around the world, people are walking off the job in huge numbers, withholding their labor power to protest government attacks on workers’ rights and other crimes of the profit system. Why isn’t this in the news?

Unless you regularly follow alternative news sources, you might not have heard that the largest strike in history took place on Jan. 8 in India. Between 250 and 300 million — yes, million — workers, urban and rural, joined by students, shut down much of the world’s second most populated country. 

The strike was long planned by unions as a protest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies of austerity, price hikes and privatization. But the strike took on added momentum because of recent anti-Muslim laws that threaten to strip many people of their citizenship and the brutal police violence against protests of the anti-Muslim laws.

Meanwhile, in France, one of the most powerful countries in Europe has been gripped by a historic 40-plus day general strike against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 years. 

Not only would French workers be forced to work longer for their pensions; the measure includes a thinly disguised plan to hand over the country’s pension funds, now administered and guaranteed by the government, to big banks and insurance companies — just like the rotten system that exists in the U.S. That’s why the country’s labor unions, the Yellow Vest movement, the unemployed and the unorganized have all united in an unprecedented strike movement.

Closer to home, few workers outside the Puerto Rican community may be aware of a general strike called by unions and social movements in Puerto Rico on Jan. 20. This call for mass action comes on the heels of the Trump regime’s continued withholding of urgently needed aid in the wake of ongoing earthquakes, symbolic of Washington’s racist conduct and Puerto Rico’s colonial status. 

Further fuel was added by the discovery by local activists in the city of Ponce of a warehouse full of supplies withheld from the people following Hurricane María. Last July, a massive general strike that encompassed much of Puerto Rico’s population forced the resignation of the island’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló.

The year 2019 also saw powerful general strikes of workers, uniting with other sectors of the working class — students, women, Indigneous communities — in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile, to name a few of them. 

So why isn’t the mass media in the U.S. reporting it?

Bosses scared

In the rare event that these strikes are mentioned — say, in a 10-second flash on a news program, or a photo caption in the local paper — no context is given. The workers’ demands are not explained. 

The first thing to remember is that the mass media in the U.S. are completely monopolized by mammoth for-profit corporations. Whether it’s the local newscast, 24-hour cable news or the local paper, what you are allowed to see trickles down from a handful of profit-hungry media giants. U.S. corporate owned social media, which many workers and youth rely on for their news, are rife with censorship.

The same bosses who hold the strings to these media giants, the banks that finance them and the politicians beholden to their money for re-election, are scared by the recent growth of the strike movement in the U.S. In 2018, nearly 500,000 workers went on strike in this country — the most in more than three decades. 

The capitalist government, from the Trumps and Pelosis on down, and the big bosses they answer to, don’t want workers, communities and students here to see the power that they could have if they all get together to shut down business (and profits) as usual.

What makes a general strike different from a more common strike action? It’s not only that more people are involved. Instead of being directed against a particular employer, usually for economic demands, a general strike is directed against the government and the whole profit system.

The recent strike wave in the U.S. has been targeted at specific employers and industries. But some, like last year’s Los Angeles and Chicago teachers’ strikes, show some characteristics of a successful general strike, such as involving the wider community and raising broader demands that would benefit the whole working class, like more affordable housing. 

Also, last autumn’s global climate strike, though not a labor strike per se, took on a mass character that saw many workers withhold their labor and employers forced to close their doors for a protest against the capitalist system’s deadly ravaging of the environment.

The possibility that this could blossom into greater consciousness of workers’ power as a class and desire for unity makes the bosses very nervous.

After all, aren’t there plenty of things that could warrant a general strike here? 

Both the Republicans and Democrats voted in December to hand the Trump administration a massive increase in the war budget, even as Trump prepares to further cut food assistance to low-wage workers. 

Federal, state and city governments continue to give tax breaks to big companies and okay development of luxury housing while the numbers of homeless families increase and oppressed people are driven out of their neighborhoods by gentrification. 

Then there’s the official torture and imprisonment of migrants and refugees, including children.

Help spread the word about the general strikes in India, France and Puerto Rico. Let’s share these vital ideas with our class!

Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin studied the importance of strikes and shared this knowledge with the working class. Following are excerpts from his early article, “On Strikes”:

Strikes, which arise out of the very nature of capitalist society, signify the beginning of the working-class struggle against that system of society. When the rich capitalists are confronted by individual, propertyless workers, this signifies the utter enslavement of the workers. But when those propertyless workers unite, the situation changes. There is no wealth that can be of benefit to the capitalists if they cannot find workers willing to apply their labor-power to the instruments and materials belonging to the capitalists and produce new wealth. … Strikes, therefore, always instill fear into the capitalists, because they begin to undermine their supremacy. 

“All wheels stand still, if your mighty arm wills it,” a German workers’ song says of the working class. And so it is in reality: the factories, the landlords’ land, the machines, the railways, etc., etc., are all like wheels in a giant machine — the machine that extracts various products, processes them, and delivers them to their destination. The whole of this machine is set in motion by the worker who tills the soil, extracts ores, makes commodities in the factories, builds houses, workshops, and railways. When the workers refuse to work, the entire machine threatens to stop. Every strike reminds the capitalists that it is the workers and not they who are the real masters — the workers who are more and more loudly proclaiming their rights. Every strike reminds the workers that their position is not hopeless, that they are not alone. …

Every strike means many privations for the working people, terrible privations that can be compared only to the calamities of war — hungry families, loss of wages, often arrests, banishment from the towns where they have their homes and their employment. Despite all these sufferings, the workers despise those who desert their fellow workers and make deals with the employers. Despite all these sufferings, brought on by strikes, the workers of neighboring factories gain renewed courage when they see that their comrades have engaged themselves in struggle. “People who endure so much to bend one single bourgeois will be able to break the power of the whole bourgeoisie,” said one great teacher of socialism, Engels, speaking of the strikes of the English workers. 

A strike teaches workers to understand what the strength of the employers and what the strength of the workers consists in; it teaches them not to think of their own employer alone and not of their own immediate workmates alone but of all the employers, the whole class of capitalists and the whole class of workers. When a factory owner who has amassed millions from the toil of several generations of workers refuses to grant a modest increase in wages or even tries to reduce wages to a still lower level and, if the workers offer resistance, throws thousands of hungry families out into the street, it becomes quite clear to the workers that the capitalist class as a whole is the enemy of the whole working class and that the workers can depend only on themselves and their united action. …

A strike, moreover, opens the eyes of the workers to the nature, not only of the capitalists, but of the government and the laws as well. … The government itself knows full well that strikes open the eyes of the workers and for this reason it has such a fear of strikes and does everything to stop them as quickly as possible. One German Minister of the Interior, one who was notorious for the persistent persecution of socialists and class-conscious workers, not without reason, stated before the people’s representatives: “Behind every strike lurks the hydra of revolution.” Every strike strengthens and develops in the workers the understanding that the government is their enemy and that the working class must prepare itself to struggle against the government for the people’s rights.

Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war,” a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labor, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital. …

Here we must point out that strikes are, as we said above, “a school of war” and not the war itself, that strikes are only one means of struggle, only one aspect of the working-class movement. From individual strikes the workers can and must go over, as indeed they are actually doing in all countries, to a struggle of the entire working class for the emancipation of all who labor. When all class-conscious workers become socialists, i.e., when they strive for this emancipation, when they unite throughout the whole country in order to spread socialism among the workers, in order to teach the workers all the means of struggle against their enemies, when they build up a socialist workers’ party that struggles for the emancipation of the people as a whole from government oppression and for the emancipation of all working people from the yoke of capital — only then will the working class become an integral part of that great movement of the workers of all countries that unites all workers and raises the red banner inscribed with the words: “Workers of all countries, unite!”

MOVE member Delbert Africa, held in prison since the confrontation of Aug. 8, 1978, has walked out of a Pennsylvania prison after 42 years. Delbert, in his 73rd year of life, came out to meet other members of the MOVE Organization, who greeted him with a hearty chant of “Long live John Africa!” and a MOVE salute. Del was in a good mood and high spirits, cracking jokes and eating sandwiches.

Aug. 8, 1978, was a date of infamy, for it marked an attack on the MOVE house in West Philadelphia’s Powelton Village, where hundreds of cops shot thousands of shots into the structure where men, women and children were huddled in the basement. Gunfire was followed by water cannons, where MOVE people had to fight to stay alive from being drowned.

When Delbert exited the house, he was beaten by several cops – rifle-butted, stomped and kicked viciously. When several of these cops were charged with assaulting Del, they had nothing to worry about, thanks to Judge Stanley Kubacki. Ignoring video tapes, he acquitted the cops, citing, among other things, Delbert’s muscles as justification for the beating.

Ironically, one of those cops charged might have been luckier if he were sent to prison. Several weeks after the trial, he was shot and paralyzed by his wife, who also happened to be a cop. 

Delbert Africa, MOVE member, walks free after 42 years in the joint.

From Imprisoned Nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Listen to Mumia’s commentary at Prison Radio

[su_column][/su_column]

By Ajamu Baraka and Bahman Azad
Co-Chairs of the Embassy Protectors Defense Committee

As the trial approaches, the lawyers for the Trump administration’s prosecution of the four Venezuelan Embassy Protectors who were arrested last May are asking the court to make sure the jury is kept ignorant about the facts and circumstances surrounding the actions of the protectors.

In a recently filed motion by government lawyers, state prosecutors are seeking to severely restrict what can be discussed during the trial, scheduled for Feb. 11, 2020. Judge Beryl Howell will hear arguments on the motion at the pre-trial hearing on January 29.

What does the prosecution want to repress? Everything that might give the defenders the ability to challenge the state’s case.

The prosecutors do not want jurors to know that Nicolás Maduro is the democratically elected president of Venezuela. They also do not want the illegitimacy of the failed coup leader Juan Guaidó to be known to the jurors, as the eviction and arrest of the four was based on the direction of a fake ambassador, Carlos Vecchio, who is wanted for violent crimes in Venezuela and is allied with Guaidó.

The Trump prosecutors do not want the jury to know that the Embassy Protectors were inside the embassy with the permission of the elected government of Venezuela that is recognized under Venezuelan law and by the United Nations.

And, they do not want the Vienna Convention discussed, so jurors remain unaware that the United States violated international law when police entered the embassy to arrest the four who remained inside.

The parties will also discuss “voir dire,” i.e., the questions that will be used to pick the jury and ensure that they are not biased, as well as jury instructions, which the court will read to the jurors before they deliberate.

The government’s motion “in limine,” if approved by the judge, would leave the jury wearing a blindfold, unaware of the facts, context or why the Embassy Protectors were in the embassy. This will ensure the desired outcome of the state, which is to convict the defenders and make them a model for how the state intends to deal with challenges to its illegal policies.

The jurors will also not be told that the protectors were under siege, surrounded by a pro-coup mob that was working with the police, threatening the protectors and blocking food from going into the embassy. And they will not know that the government had the electricity and water turned off in the embassy.

While there were negotiations between the U.S. and Venezuela for a mutual protecting power agreement during the final days of the embassy protection, the jurors will not be told that the negotiations were occurring and that they would have resulted in Switzerland protecting the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, and Turkey protecting the Venezuelan Embassy in D.C. The Embassy Protectors told the police they would leave voluntarily when that agreement was reached. The day before the four were arrested, Samuel Moncada, the Venezuelan ambassador to the U.N., held a press conference where he discussed the negotiations for a protecting power agreement and said the Embassy Protectors were in the embassy with Venezuela’s permission.

The government is also urging the court not to allow the four to explain that they were exercising their rights under the First Amendment to political expression and criticizing the U.S. government for its continuing efforts to force the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Venezuela.

If Judge Howell grants the Trump government’s motion, it will leave the Embassy Protectors virtually defenseless. The government wants the prosecution to be about three things: (1) the four were in the embassy, (2) they were given a notice of eviction by the police, and (3) they refused to leave.

The judge has thus far shown she leans toward the government’s narrow view of the case and does not want the questionable legality of the state’s order to vacate the embassy and its clearly illegal entry into the embassy and arrest of the defenders as part of the trial. When the motion for discovery was argued, the judge ruled against the Embassy Protectors regarding documents and other materials related to some of the above issues. See this article we wrote at the time, Embassy Protectors Are Being Denied Their Right To A Fair Trial.

For more information on the prosecution, this page provides background on the case: Frequently Asked Questions.

You can also show support for the Embassy Protectors by supporting our demand to drop charges against the defenders on the homepage of the Embassy Protectors Defense Committee‘s website.

• We are still raising money for the defenders’ legal defense (Donate here).
• There will be an international day of action on January 22 (Click here for more information)
• You can also attend one of the events of the defenders’ upcoming January tour on the East Coast if you are in the area.
• We are asking the public to attend the trial in Washington, D.C., which begins on February 11.

In this period of normalized illegality and attempts at intimidation, we shall not allow the state to move against these courageous activists without resistance from our movements. While today it is the defenders, tomorrow it could be any of us.