“We socialists in the United States celebrate with Venezuela’s working and poor people the re-election of Hugo Chávez”
Socialists throughout the Americas, and indeed throughout the world, join with the Venezuelan working people in celebrating the re-election of Hugo Chávez as Venezuela’s president.
As the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in the United States, we recognize that Chávez’s victory is a step forward for working and poor people everywhere.
Wall Street and the CIA are disappointed today for the same reason that millions of people in Venezuela and throughout Latin America are celebrating.
Chávez and the Bolivarian revolutionary process seek to overturn the wretched capitalist status quo that has allowed the elites to get ever richer while the masses of people suffer in deep poverty.
Massive support for the Bolivarian revolution could be seen in a huge rally two days before the election, on Friday, Oct. 5, with 3 million people dressed in bright red packing seven main avenues of the capital.
With 54.42 percent of a record-turnout vote, Chávez has won a fourth term as president of Venezuela in a race widely recognized as a crucial struggle between the progressive forces of the “Bolivarian Revolution” and the right-wing opposition of U.S.-backed Henrique Capriles. His Democratic Unity coalition (MUD) had hoped to return the wealthy classes — national and foreign — to their former unchallenged status by reversing the social and economic gains of the vast majority of Venezuelans.
Before Chávez’s presidency, at least 66 percent of the population of Venezuela — a country with one of the highest oil and natural gas reserves in the world — suffered from deep poverty. Despite enormous natural and industrial wealth, the two dominant capitalist parties, Copei and Acción Democrática, ran the government to benefit both the Venezuelan elite and U.S. and British oil companies.
That old social order is coming undone in Latin America. It needs an equally radical transformation in North America, where capitalism has allowed the 400 richest billionaires to increase their wealth by 13 percent in the last year while millions lost their jobs, homes and health insurance while the government handed their tax dollars over to the biggest banks and the criminal cliques who run them.
Today, socialist and progressive pro-worker movements are struggling throughout the Americas for a new world. The governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and, of course, Cuba, are representative of a hemispheric trend to overturn the old, oppressive order.
This is not the Latin America of yesterday, when U.S. imperialism was able to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States, invade Dominican Republic in 1965, overthrow Salvador Allende in 1973, invade Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.
Now there is a powerful anti-imperialist alliance of countries that have supported each other’s social development, sharing resources and building solidarity.
We, in the United States, will continue to demonstrate our solidarity with the people of Venezuela as they struggle for workers rights, for justice and for socialism. We oppose the policies of the U.S. government that continue to treat Latin America as its colonial “backyard.”
