Grand Rapids, MI – The Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World begins on June 21 in Caracas, Venezuela. To prepare for the Bicentennial Congress a series of Zoom meetings began in February 2021, with hundreds of people from more than 80 countries of the world participating in solidarity each month.

President Maduro of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela welcomed and spoke to the participants who attended from every part of the globe. These included countries where the working class holds power, like Cuba and China, with officials from their ruling parties, trade union movements, and international relations departments.

“It is necessary to point out that we have proposed as the objective of this meeting, to contribute to a greater understanding of our national reality, providing elements that contribute to the analysis that from each of the political, popular, social and worker organizations of which we are a part: The Bicentennial Congress is carried out around the challenges that Venezuela faces today,” said Adan Chavez, the coordinator of the Organizing Committee of the Bicentennial Congress.

Chavez continued, “Dear colleagues, it is important and necessary to point out that in recent years the Bolivarian Revolution has been facing a brutal multiform aggression, led by the United States government and expressed in a systematic anti-Bolivarian campaign and a criminal blockade, economic, financial and commercial, that considerably impacts the daily life of our people; as well as, in repeated threats of military intervention, mercenary incursions and terrorist actions against it, including the assassination attempt against comrade President Nicolás Maduro.”

Adan Chavez finished by sharing, “It is well known, notorious and meant to send a message, that these actions, directed fundamentally from Washington with the complicity of other governments of the world, are aimed at trying to end the project of broad transformations initiated by Commander Hugo Chávez in 1999; imperial initiatives that have met and will continue to meet head-on with the iron will of the Venezuelan people to ensure respect for their dignity, sovereignty and independence; in defense of the legacy of the Bolivarian leader.”

The Congress is occurring within the framework of the Bicentennial Year of the Battle of Carabobo in June 1821. This was an important battle under the leadership of Simon Bolivar, when a patriotic army of Venezuelans defeated the Spanish empire. This victory for the Venezuelan people led to Simon Bolivar, known forever after as The Liberator, then marching to free the neighboring peoples today living in Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Bolivia. This historic sense of solidarity will inform the internationalism expressed this week at the Bicentennial Congress in Caracas.

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