Caracas, Venezuela – “A PSUV victory is the most important present for Commander Hugo Chavez. Today, July 28, is the anniversary of his birthday, the same day as the popular triumph of the people,” says international observer Diakaridia Diakita, the president of the youth of the Yelema party in the Republic of Mali. PSUV stands for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Over 800 international observers from around the world are in Venezuela to observe the historic elections between the Chavista PSUV leader Nicolás Maduro and the opposition pro-imperialism parties.

The main opposition candidate is Edmundo Gonzalez, who supports the privatization of the oil companies, schools, healthcare, and the removal of social programs that former President Chavez started.

These international observers come from unions, left parties, newspapers, and organizations from around the world. The grandson of Nelson Mandela, Nkosi Zwelivelile, is also observing this important election. Observers talk about the importance of this election for Venezuela, Latin America and the world.

Observers from Africa, Latin America, Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and all over the world will be monitoring today’s election.

“Venezuela has been strangled by sanctions for over a decade. This election will show us if Maduro has been able to lead his country to persevere, or if smear campaigns and national betrayal of the opposition will bring the country back down into vassal status. The fate of Venezuela rests on July 28,” says Ahmed Eltouny, the former cochair of the Green Party in the U.S.

Booker Omole, the vice president of the Communist Party of Kenya, says, “I am here in Caracas to attend this very important event of the revolutionary history of Venezuela. Particularly, the Communist Party of Kenya is an internationalist organization, and we support the Bolivarian Revolution. Also, there are certain commonalities between the Venezuelan revolution and the ongoing processes in Kenya, which is still a neocolonial entity.”

Omole continued, “In 1989, in Caracas and major cities in Venezuela, there was a social explosion in the streets, where the IMF and World Bank had imposed austerity measures, the anti-people policies. In Kenya today, the masses and the working class are also resisting. We have seen millions of people pouring into the streets to resist the puppet regime that is sponsored by the USA imperialism. This reminds of similarities where the IMF has designed policies, particularly here in Venezuela, that took ten years after the social explosion for the Bolivarian revolution to materialize. Hugo Chavez still lives among us, not only here in Caracas, but also in Kenya.”

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Caracas, Venezuela – “Hasta la victoria! El pueblo unido jamás se ha vencido!” tens of thousands chanted, filling the streets, in the rally for President Nicolás Maduro on July 26.

The presidential elections of Venezuela are July 28. These historic elections are crucial in continuing the PSUV-led Bolivarian revolution of former President Chavez and the current President Maduro.

Under Chavez and now Maduro’s leadership, widespread social programs such as free schools, literacy centers, free universal healthcare and free universities have been established. Due to these widespread literacy centers and free education, UNESCO declared Venezuela free of illiteracy. The PSUV also launched a program called, “La Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela” (Great Mission Housing Venezuela) and built over 5 million units of free housing for Venezuelans. You can see these buildings all over Venezuela, with Chavez’ signature in big letters on the outside of the buildings.

Under Maduro’s leadership, the government launched the People’s Assembly, made up of leaders from Las Comunas, the neighborhood organizations. The democratic People’s Assembly has real power and can pass laws and establish new programs that serve the Venezuelan people.

They have also nationalized the oil companies to bring more profit into Venezuela, instead of having the profits go to other imperialist countries like the USA. Before Chavez, five-sixths of the profit from petroleum went out of the country. Now, most of the profits stay in the country to support social programs. 

In Venezuela, the pro-imperialist opposition parties want to take control away from the people and remove social programs. The main opposition candidate is Edmundo Gonzalez. His neoliberal program, called the “Land of the Grace,” states that his first measure will be to privatize the oil and gas industry. The opposition wants to privatize schools, so they will no longer be free; privatize companies; amend the Organic Law on Labor to remove the restrictions on labor rights; remove pensions so workers will pay their own retirement in private banks.

The opposition party has close relations with the United States government. The U.S. government has major interest in these elections due to the profit they would make from the opposition’s right-wing program and to crush the Chavista national democratic movement. 

Venezuela is an inspiration to workers all around the world that another world is possible, a world where the power is in the hands of the “pueblo” (the people).

#CaracasVZ #Venezuela #Caracas #Venezuela #Maduro #NicolasMaduro #Elections #VZElection #HugoChavez #PSUV #Chavista #EdmundoGonzalez #HastaLaVictoriaSiempre

Caracas, Venezuela – It has now been more than 1000 days since Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab was first kidnapped by the U.S. government on the island of Cabo Verde, off the west coast of Africa. Since then, he’s been subjected to physical, psychological and chemical torture and moved to a federal detention center in Miami, Florida.

Two members of Minnesota's Anti-War Committee met with Saab’s wife, Camilla Fabri Saab, on Tuesday, March 7, alongside a delegation from the Alliance for Global Justice and progressive lawyers with the Free Alex Saab Movement. Camilla, Fabri Saab, mother to their two young daughters, provided updates on his case, emphasizing that his health has taken a severe turn for the worse.

Saab is missing several teeth due to beatings and has been denied access to all medical treatment beyond aspirin. Camilla’s account of the weaponization of psychiatric treatment in the Miami Detention Center was particularly shocking. First U.S. officials tortured Saab, then they diagnosed him with PTSD resulting from the torture that they themselves inflicted. Using that diagnosis as a pretext, Saab was forced to take pills which made him feel exhausted, dizzy and nauseous to such a degree that he was sometimes unable to even speak on the phone. Prison staff refused to tell him what was in these pills, and it was only after Alex Saab's lawyers intervened that this chemical torture ended.

Saab is a diabetic cancer survivor, making the Miami FDC’s decision to deny him medical attention especially cruel and life-threatening. Four weeks ago, he began to vomit blood. Despite this, he is still being denied the right to see a doctor. Saab’s rapidly deteriorating health means that the urgency of his fight for freedom intensifies day by day.

Everything indicates that this medical mistreatment is intentional U.S. policy, an extension of efforts to immiserate the Venezuelan people as a whole. The dark irony of Saab being deprived of healthcare is that he is being targeted for his efforts to bring exactly that – healthcare – to the people of Venezuela. Under a U.S.-led blockade that prevented Venezuela from importing basic goods like food, medicine, fuel and agricultural supplies, many Venezuelans suffered tremendously. Saab traveled the world as a diplomat for the Venezuelan government in order to secure the basic, critical supplies needed to save Venezuelans from starvation and death by preventable illnesses.

Camilla also provided the Anti-War Committee with an internal U.S. government email from Elliot Abrams, a neoconservative and former U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela. She described this email as a “smoking gun.” District Judge Robert Scola’s ruling against Alex Saab in December of last year relied on the assertion that he is not a diplomat and thus doesn’t have any diplomatic immunity. In the email Camilla presented, however, Abrams admits that Saab was in possession of a diplomatic passport and suggests that the U.S. will have to find a way to discredit the passport, such as claiming that it is a fake, in order to successfully prosecute him. The case against Alex Saab has been clearly politically motivated and illegal from the beginning, but this new evidence is concrete proof.

Since the visit, Camilla and the Free Alex Saab Movement have continued the fight, holding the U.S. government squarely responsible for Saab’s life. Their current demands are:

For the International Committee of the Red Cross to send a representative to the Miami Detention Center; for the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights to denounce Saab’s imprisonment as an illegal detention and a violation of human rights; for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to denounce the illegal detention of a diplomat by the U.S. as a violation of international law; and, immediate freedom for Alex Saab.

Activists in the U.S. know we cannot rely on the legal system to do its job and free Alex Saab. The U.S. government willingly violated international law. It will take a concerted, popular struggle for Saab to see his family again. The Free Alex Saab Movement is calling for activists to take to the streets for a National Week of Action from May 1-7 to build the movement and show U.S. leaders that we will not stand by while Saab, and Venezuelan people as a whole, are criminally attacked.

Free Alex Saab!

#CaracasVenezuela #Caracas #Venezuela #AlexSaab #BolivarianRepublicOfVenezuela #Americas

Caracas, Venezuela – On March 4 a member of the Minnesota Anti-War Committee visited the Feria Conuquera Agroecológico (Agroecological Small Farmer's Market) in Caracas’ Caobos Park and interviewed activist and biologist Giselle Perdomo. Perdomo, who organizes the farmer’s market, detailed how U.S. sanctions have impacted both the struggle for food sovereignty and her own family.

The market is run by Chavistas but is not itself a government program. It works to bring farmers from in and around Caracas to sell in the city. Under the weight of U.S. sanctions, food is very difficult to import into the country, but in the last couple of years the country has seen vast improvements in food sovereignty: Venezuela now produces 94% of its own food after importing 80% for the last 100 years. The farmer’s market is a small part of that effort.

Perdomo’s group also defends Venezuela’s revolutionary 2015 Seed Law that outlawed the use of transgenic or GMO seeds. Without the laws, Venezuelan farmers would be pressured to adopt seeds supplied by transnational GMO corporations in order to sell their crops on the international market. Under that system farmers must buy specially designed seeds, fertilizer and herbicide from the agricultural monopolies year after year, becoming fully dependent. Although the law was passed after his death, Hugo Chávez led the fight against transgenic foods. In one instance he ended a soybean contract with GMO giant Monsanto in 2005, advocating that the land be used instead for indigenous crops and calling transgenics a threat to the nation’s food sovereignty.

Promoting indigenous foods remains key today, although there are hurdles in getting the people to accept them over the international market foods they are accustomed to. Perdomo explained, “So, for example, I plant something that's called purple yam. And even Venezuelans don't know what it is, right? So I offer it here in the market, and many people just ask, you know, what's that? Because it looks like the color of beets. So people just look at it, it's weird. And they go on. So we need to try and change people's attitudes towards things that are local.” To this end the fair bakes the yams into bread to get people used to the taste and works on educating about local foods, how to make organic pesticides, and farming techniques.

Perdomo lost her six-year-old son in part because of the horrors of a medical system under attack by the U.S. Many doctors fled the country, live-saving medicines and equipment were impossible to import, and at times the electricity was spotty in hospitals. “My son, he had difficulties with his muscles. They were all very hard, so he couldn't breathe very well. He couldn't cough. So if he got a cold that was a life threatening thing for him. And taking him to a public hospital was just heartbreaking, because you saw kids queuing up to breathe, to get to the one piece of equipment that’s working. You know, the lighting sometimes didn't work. And then it was just chaos. It was chaos. You should be able to, you know, have a hospital that doesn't give you nightmares.”

It’s different now. Medicines like those that Perdomo’s son needed are more easily available, but it’s cold comfort to her and others who have lost loved ones to the U.S.’s cruel unilateral coercive measures.

The Caobos Park is full of farmers with stands selling fresh produce – plantains, vegetables, honey and much more. One man sells homemade rice wine, and a woman makes infused tea bags. Next to the market a government health program has tents set up to fight obesity. They give people free check-ups and vaccinations, and there is a dance party, soccer and games to promote wellness. Thanks to their enormous strength of will and a people-oriented government, Venezuelans have been able to claw back a sense of normalcy, but still suffer under the economic pressure. Organizations like the Anti-War Committee still call for an end to the U.S. sanctions regime.

But the very nature of the U.S. hybrid war campaign makes it harder to organize around than a traditional invasion. Nevertheless, Perdomo says the anti-imperialist movement must persist: “It has impacts on human health, just like wars with bombs do. And it has impacts on emotional health, just like wars with bombs do. The most insidious thing is that people don't consider it to be war. Therefore there's not a whole lot of newspapers talking about the war on Venezuela because if there aren't explosions, then there isn’t outrage. And there should be outrage because we are suffering, we have suffered. But the flip side of that is we have made resistance a lifestyle and we have made happiness in the face of struggle a lifestyle.”

#CaracasVenezuela #Caracas #Venezuela #BolivarianRepublicOfVenezuela #Americas

Caracas, Venezuela – Friday, March 3 was the first day of an international anti-imperialist conference in Venezuela held to commemorate the legacy and continuing struggle of the late Venezuelan President and leader of the Bolivarian Revolution Hugo Chavez. A delegation of Chicano and Latino members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), led by long time Chicano activist Carlos Montes, were invited to attend by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

Chavez is not dead

The theme of the conference was carrying on the legacy of Hugo Chavez. The mood in the room was lively, with every seat in the large auditorium filled and two rows of standing room only in the back. In between speeches, local delegates from Venezuela led the room in popular Chavista chants. One common chant was “Chavez no murio, se multiplio,” meaning “Chavez is not dead, he multiplies.”

Local delegates representing different sections of Venezuelan society – such as the youth, fishermen, cafeteria workers and more – were in attendance at the conference as well as international delegates. One member of the PSUV told the FRSO delegation, “In every province, in every community, in every street in Venezuela – the PSUV is there organizing the people.”

Popular democracy

Though the U.S. media portrays Venezuela as a dictatorship, the reality is much different. Hector Rodriguez of the PSUV stated, “In the U.S. they have democracy, but it’s only democracy for capital. In Venezuela we have a true, representative, popular democracy.” He invited international delegates to talk with the Venezuelan people about their participatory government and to question the narrative put forth by the U.S. media.

Anacaona Marin, an indigenous leader of the commune movement and councils, spoke about building revolutionary communes and local people taking their own action to solve problems. She said that for the government to meet the people's needs, the people have to “hacer gobierno” or “make government” themselves, by studying, learning and debating.

Multicolor revolution

One aspect that the PSUV emphasized was the diversity of the Bolivarian Revolution and the participation of indigenous and Afro-Venezuelans in the people’s movement. “I was inspired to see the leadership of women in the conference and the government,” said FRSO member Enya Silva, “the people cheering and chanting the loudest were always women.”

This was also evident in the international delegations, as the conference placed special emphasis on elevating Caribbean, African, and other Latin American countries.

Free Alex Saab

A highlight of the first day was a panel discussing the U.S.’s unjust detention of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, who has been held for over 1000 days by the U.S. government for negotiating food and medical aid for Venezuela. Camila Fabri Saab, his wife, spoke about his case. “What the U.S. media doesn’t talk about is how his detention affects our family,” said Fabri Saab. “His oldest child misses him dearly and his youngest child is growing up without him.”

Carlos Montes spoke from the floor of the wide support and work of FRSO in the campaign to demand freedom for Alex Saab. Camila Fabri Saab smiled and expressed gratitude, telling the FRSO delegation that the work we do is important not just for Saab’s family, but to fight U.S. sanctions against Venezuela.

Fighting imperialism

The day ended with a speech from Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez. She spoke on the importance of uniting with other nations to combat U.S. imperialism. “The world will be multipolar, but do we multiply capitalist poles? Poles that will put us in the same position as they have in the past? The world needs diverse poles, a pluripolar world.” Rodriguez used the example of China to show how a country can surpass the economy of the U.S. without resorting to the exploitative methods of imperialism.

#CaracasVenezuela #Caracas #AntiwarMovement #Venezuela #HugoChavez #antiimperialism #Americas

Caracas, Venezuela – The Freedom Road Socialist Organization delegation to Venezuela visited downtown Caracas, March 2, and spoke with working-class Venezuelan people. Delegation members include Chicano activist Carlos Montes, student organizer Enya Silva and anti-police crimes activist Omar Flores.

The group visited the home of Simon Bolivar (the Liberator), Bolivar Plaza, and several historic sites. Carlos Montes said, “I enjoyed the popular theater performance in the outside plaza with the public of all ages watching, and the displays of Simon Bolivar.”

FRSO delegate Omar Flores stated, “The city is exceptionally clean, I did not see any homeless people, which is in stark contrast to what I’ve seen in large U.S. cities. Living in the most segregated city in the U.S., Milwaukee, it is also stunning how integrated Caracas is.”

The delegation is participating in an anti-imperialist conference hosted by the PSUV, United Socialist Party of Venezuela, to honor and promote the work and legacy of Hugo Chavez, who passed away ten years ago on March 5.

The group viewed many murals dedicated to Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution throughout the city, as well as murals calling for an end to the blockade on Cuba; celebrating the victory over fascism at Stalingrad; and calling for the liberation of Palestine. Organizers for the conference are working to promote unity in Latin America and against U.S. imperialism. The demand to stop U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and freedom for diplomat Alex Saab will also be raised.

#CaracasVenezuela #Caracas #Venezuela #Americas #PeoplesStruggles #FreedomRoadSocialistOrganization #Socialism #BolivarianRepublicOfVenezuela

Caracas. Venezuela – On March 1, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) delegation landed in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. Members of FRSO report being shown great hospitality from the Venezuelan people. These members of FRSO were invited to attend an anti-imperialist conference being hosted in Caracas.

FRSO member Enya Silva stated, “I’m excited to learn about how the Venezuelan people continue to grow their economy despite U.S. sanctions, which are specifically used to undermine the Bolivarian government.” The conference will also cover the subject of Alex Saab’s unjust detention in the United States. Enya Silva had been present in the courtroom when Alex Saab was on trial in the U.S. and will be reporting on her experience.

While the United States has reported Caracas as being a desolate wasteland, members of FRSO have reported that the city is thriving. FRSO member Omar Flores stated, “There is an abundance of food, public transit and commuters heading out to their jobs.”

#CaracasVenezuela #Caracas #Venezuela #BolivarianRepublicOfVenezuela #Americas

Caracas, Venezuela – Day three of the PSUV 5th Congress began on March 8, with thousands filling the large auditorium again as Afro-Venezuelan dancers took to the stage and Caribbean coast music filled the air. The Chavista delegates smiled and swayed to the steady rhythm of folkloric songs about the Bolivarian Revolution. PSUV militants came prepared to listen to speeches and consider the changing conditions and forces in motion, explanations of errors, questions about how to achieve new goals, and implementation of the Three R’s: Resistance, Rebirth, and Revolution.

Luis Brito Garcia, a professor, spoke on ethics, responding to the arrest of a mayor and others in a drug smuggling scandal. He taught theory, using the ideas of ancient and modern philosophers. He gave people the words and ability to discuss and formulate anti-corruption campaigns within the party and society. He warned against relying too much on criminal justice systems and courts to obtain good outcomes.

His entertaining style included teaching hard lessons from the U.S. He warned of the weaknesses and problems of relying on prohibition laws to deal with drugs. He explained how U.S. prohibition of alcohol caused large mafia gangs and criminal families to arise, including the Kennedys, who smuggled whiskey. He also challenged the current casino culture in Caracas and its role in society. At one point he joked that the U.S. failures to undermine Venezuelan society might lead the White House to consider, “using Amazon to make the invasion.”

Later that day, thousands rose to their feet when Venezuela Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was introduced by current Minister of Educat