The following joint statement issued by participants in the World Anti-imperialist Platform’s international conference was delivered by CPGB-ML vice-chair Joti Brar to a demonstration in Caracas on Sunday 5 March.
The Platform conference was held in cooperation with Venezuela’s ruling PSUV, and both events formed a part of the commemorations of the tenth anniversary of the death of Comandante Hugo Chávez.
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Standing here in Caracas, at the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution and of the struggle to unify and liberate Our America, we feel the weight of two centuries of the Monroe Doctrine, through which the USA appointed itself the sole colonial master of this continent, gradually pushing to the margins first Spanish and Portuguese colonists and later British financiers.
Whether oppressed via direct rule, as in Panama, via proxy, as in Pinochet’s Chile, or via economic stranglehold, as in debt-laden Argentina, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean have known none of the peace or prosperity their anticolonial forefathers fought for.
People here can well understand the desperate humiliation of the workers who once lived in the proud and independent Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, but who lost their last shred of sovereignty in 2014 after a second US-backed coup removed their elected government and placed a fascist junta in power.
The story of a US-controlled puppet government whose role is to oil the wheels for corporate looting of the economy, close down all opposition parties and media, and oversee the training of a fascistic proxy army (to be aimed at independent-minded locals and neighbours alike) is not a new one to all those on this continent, who have everywhere struggled to throw off Uncle Sam’s suffocating embrace, from Guatemala and Colombia to Chile and Peru.
But this story of oppression is also a story of resistance. Through two long centuries, the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have fought back and continue to do so.
Sometimes they have resisted through armed struggle, as in the Haitian independence war, the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, or the people’s wars in Guatemala and Colombia. Sometimes, they have carried out mass uprisings in the streets, as we saw only recently in Bolivia. And at other times, in different conditions, they have brought their revolutionary leaders into office via the ballot box, as when they elected Comandante Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or Comandante Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
A thousand times over, the people here have proved the truth of the words of the great US freedom fighter Paul Robeson, when he said that “the people’s will for liberation is stronger than atom bombs”.
Or as the Cuban people, coming together in 1960 after the victory of their revolution, wrote in the Havana declaration: “This assembly condemns the imperialist monopolies and enterprises which continually plunder our wealth, exploit our workers and peasants, bleed our economies to keep them in a backward state, and subordinate Latin-American politics to their designs and interests.”
Assassinations and coups, from Ukraine to Colombia and all across the western hemisphere prove decisively the words of Comrade Lenin, when he proved that imperialism seeks domination not democracy.
Everywhere we look in the world we are presented with proofs that the anti-imperialist governments of Russia, China, the DPRK and Iran are right to brand the US imperialists as ‘agreement incapable’. From their broken promises to the indigenous peoples of their own territory or the broken treaty of New Granada, from the nineteenth century til today, the USA has never kept the terms of a treaty it felt powerful enough to ignore.
Since imperialism cares nothing for human suffering and has no interest in the logic or reasoning of human beings, since the only language it understands is the language of force, there is only one route open to the masses of the world who seek relief and liberation: to stand together and create a force too strong to be ignored or overthrown.
As many revolutionary fighters have found out: the imperialists are not as strong as they seem, if only we know how to stand up against them.
That is why the revolutionary and progressive governments of this region have worked so hard to create a network of regional institutions such as Alba and Celac, which can bring together the oppressed nations of Latin America and enable them to cooperate respectfully with one another, to stand together against US economic and military coercion, to stand up for the rights and dignity of their peoples.
Not for nothing did Comrade Fidel Castro greet the founding of Alba with these words: “Who should be the proponents of this idea? Venezuelans, because Venezuelans launched it on the American continent, because Bolívar is Venezuela’s son and Bolívar is the father of the idea, of the union of America’s peoples.”
Understanding the need for the maximum possible unity against imperialism was what motivated Brazil to join in the formation of the Brics alliance, which now stands at the centre of a new world order that is struggling to be born, and which the Yankee gangsters are so desperate to strangle in its crib.
That is also why some progressive governments of this region have begun to engage in military cooperation with independent Russia. And it is why so many have welcomed the infrastructural, technological and development cooperation offered by people’s China, especially via the western section of the Belt and Road network.
Understanding the truth of the words spoken by another American freedom fighter, Malcolm X, who pointed out that, if we let them, “the newspapers will have us hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”, progressive governments across the region have funded anti-imperialist media like Venezuela’s Telesur and Cuba’s Granma, which work to expose the propaganda lies of the US monopoly-controlled media and their local stooges – propaganda that aims to keep our people confused, distracted, divided and weak.
In the words of Comrade Fidel: “What is the fate of the balkanised countries of our America if they don’t join together, if they don’t integrate?”
Let us also remember the words of another great son of the Americas, Comrade Che Guevara, who looked at the US defeat in Vietnam and saw what it meant for the whole of the oppressed world, saying: “What a luminous future would be visible to us if two, three, or many Vietnams flourished throughout the world with their repeated blows against imperialism obliging it to disperse its forces under the attack!”
Comrades, the outbreak of war in Ukraine has drawn a line across the globe and clarified the question of who stands with whom for all who care to see it. It is time for all those who seek freedom to let the people know that we have a side in this war, which the imperialists are waging to save their position as the masters of our suffering world and to keep the rest of us as slaves.
Just as the imperialists are huddling together in the face of their economic crisis, trying to save their position and their system, so the oppressed and exploited masses of the world must join together and find strength in unity, and victory through resistance.
Let the imperialists tremble at the prospect of the world’s peoples, united and risen. Let us do everything in our power to defeat this enemy of humanity once and for all. And let us remember, as we come together, the bright future that awaits us on the other side of victory, and the words of Karl Marx that we indeed have “nothing to lose but our chains” and “a world to win”.
No cooperation with imperialist war!
Defeat to the Nato-led imperialist alliance!
Victory to the resistance!
Yankees go home!
