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.”

#CaracasVZ #Venezuela #Caracas #Venezuela #Maduro #NicolasMaduro #Elections #VZElection #HugoChavez #PSUV #Chavista #EdmundoGonzalez #Mali #DiakaridiaDiakita #GreenParty #Kenya #IMF #WorldBank #Kenya #BookerOmole #HastaLaVictoriaSiempre

The island country has had a woeful bout with liberalization in its policies. Liberalization entails reduced governmental economic regulation and a higher influence of private companies and foreign entities on the economy of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka was the first country in South Asia to have universal suffrage and it was also the first country to attempt economic liberalization. Liberalization was seen as the pathway towards nation building as attempts were made to replicate the successes of countries like Singapore, an open economy removed from state intervention.

In this process of liberalization, the country opened its doors to the International Monetary Fund first in 1965; the enacting of the IMF intervention would come into effect in 1988 as a structural adjustment. Liberalization of this country took place during the Civil War which started in 1983, initiated by violent pogroms of the minority Tamil population inhabiting the northern Provinces of Jaffna, Killinochchi, Mannar, etc. by the larger Sinhalese majority. The Civil War would come to an end in 2009 and by this time Sri Lanka had accepted 15 IMF loans.

In 2008, with the global financial crisis, there was an impetus to invest in emerging markets like Sri Lanka, which brought foreign finance capital into the country. After an initial boom in the economy, with the country’s GDP rising to 8%, the bubble of growth burst and led to economic slowdown. By 2016, Sri Lanka went for another IMF loan, its 16th and final one to date. This got the snowball rolling and ultimately culminated into the situation we see today of perpetual debt-entrapment and economic collapse.

The COVID-19 pandemic which took hold of the entire globe had a terrible effect, particularly in the countries like Sri Lanka. Major disruptions came to the informal sector. The tourism industry, which is the center of the main foreign earnings, came to a standstill; exports of cash crops like tea, rubber and coconut came to a halt, and a bulk of remittances from migrant workers slowed down as well. This was compounded with the poor planning of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government, which initiated tax cuts for the tourism industry and other corporations at the beginning of the pandemic, benefitting a small segment of the population while the large portions of the working people in the country suffered heavily.

The neoliberal policies affected the agrarian sector as well, since state investment into agriculture decreased, leading to foreign dependency on imports and reducing self-sufficiency. During the pandemic and the emerging food crisis, people left the urban areas and moved back to the villages to cultivate fallow land and subsist. The economic failure in this sector came when the Rajapaksa government announced the banning chemical fertilizer subsidies, leading to crop failure. This, along with reduced foreign exchange, led to lower imports and ultimately food shortages.

In the midst of this crisis, the JVP (Janata Vimukthi Perumana) the largest communist party of Sri Lanka, has emerged as the face of these massive protests across the country, the largest in the country’s history, demanding that the Rajapaksa government listen to the people’s demands.

On April 17 the JVP announced a three-day protest and people’s march. People from all walks of life participated in these protests. These massive protests have also seen repression from the side of the government: military personnel and police have jailed, arrested and injured many. A curfew and shoot-on-sight order has been established by the government as well. Despite the unrest, the people’s demands will not be quelled by the violence from the Rajapaksa government.

#SriLanka #Asia #IMF

The International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS) – Asia Pacific strongly condemns the ongoing repression of the people’s legitimate right to assemble and protest by the Indonesian government and police against people’s organizations who are now in Bali, Indonesia for the People’s Global Conference against the IMF-WB meeting.

The cancellation of the permit to hold the PGC – for the second time – that is, for sure, due to pressure by the authorities is a blatant repressive action. Moreover, the overkill presence of police and civilian agents in hotels where international activists are staying, text blasts warning people of the PGC, and harassments against activists are clear intimidation moves to stop any show of resistance to the ongoing meeting of the IMF-WB.

The people have a right to protest.

As an instrument of imperialists, chiefly the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have, for decades, imposed policies to many underdeveloped countries that kept their economies poor and tied to imperialist interests. The IMF-WB have been twin international finance institutions that championed neoliberalism to enable imperialists to plunder countries, corner resources, and feed superprofits to multinational and transnational companies.

The current meeting of the IMF-WB in Bali will not depart from such path and instead, will intensify profit-making of imperialists and giant businesses in the name of their brand of development that tramples on rights and even cost people’s lives.

The repressive moves by the Indonesian authorities to stifle protest and exposition of the IMF-WB’s true agenda shows its allegiance to imperialists and neoliberal economics. It is not the interest of the Indonesian people or the poor people of the world that they are upholding.

ILPS – Asia Pacific joins the clamor of hundreds of people’s organizations to let the People’s Global Conference be held, allow for the legitimate protests to be conducted, and let the people speak of the tragedies that IMF-WB policies have heaped upon them.

Defend people’s rights! Shut down IMF-WB! Down with imperialism! Long live international solidarity!

#Indonesia #Bali #PeoplesStruggles #IMF #WorldBank #ILPS

The US government has again launched a massive bombing campaign against a sovereign country. Today as we gather here, hundreds of bombs and missiles are raining down on the people of Yugoslavia.

The US government portrays this as a humanitarian gesture on behalf of the Albanian population of Kosovo. This is a lie that is used to justify this bombing campaign and which serves to conceal the real issues behind US intervention.

Yugoslavia, like Iraq, is in a region of strategic interest to the Pentagon and large corporations that want to dominate it. The US attack on Yugoslavia is motivated by the same lust for super profits that has driven Washington to war in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq and to carry out more than 200 other military interventions around the world.

Is it really possible that the Pentagon is motivated by humanitarian concerns? Wasn't it just three weeks ago that Clinton, when in Guatemala, had to admit that the US government was involved in the war against the Guatemalan people that killed over 200,000 people?

Now, just what interests are in Yugoslavia? First, it is rich in minerals and ore deposits, major oil companies are looking for oil. The big oil companies see it as a possible gateway for pipelines to transport oil from newly-discovered Caspian Sea oil fields into Europe for export. This is really what is being fought out today in Yugoslavia.

The big economic powers represented by NATO are competing with each other over who can control and dominate not just the resources of Yugoslavia and its key trade routes, but this is also a competition for influence through Eastern Europe and the other states once in the USSR.

Washington today is working hand in hand with the other powers in NATO, but at the same time these gove