Saturday, April 19, 2008

Statement by the FLT on the murder of Reyes and militants of the FARC

1 . The attack by the Colombian army on Ecuadorian territory against the leadership of the FARC, that was negotiating with Chavez, Correa and representatives of French imperialism to release Betancourt and other prisoners, must be condemned by the entire class workers of Latin America and the world. Under orders from Bush, his cowardly servant Uribe entered Ecuadorian territory to kill an unarmed negotiating committee while they slept.

Thus Uribe, Yankee imperialism's gendarme in the region, fulfills the same plan of the US American empire in Colombia, as does the counterrevolutionary Zionist state of Israel that killed not only Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, but in Gaza today is massacring the Palestinian people imprisoned in real ghettos and concentration camps, where they are blockaded and killed in punishment for their resistance to the usurping state of Israel backed by all the imperialist powers.

The Colombian armed forces have almost half a million personnel, armed and equipped with the best and most sophisticated weaponry provided by Yankee imperialism. These armed forces are commanded directly and are trained by Yankee and Zionist "advisers". Their officers are trained at West Point as mercenaries that spill the blood of the working class and poor peasants in that country.

The Colombian armed forces are acting as the occupying forces of Yankee imperialism in this oppressed country. They are under the political and military leadership of the CIA, the US Pentagon and the Colombian oligarchy. Every working class or peasant organization becomes the target of these occupation troops and their hired assassins. For example, the Patriotic Union, the legalized political form that an insurgent group took at the end of the '90s to stand for elections, had all its deputies and political representatives killed. Thus the national, municipal, and provincial governments are no more than the painted cardboard facades of the Colombian semi-fascist regime.

Therefore, it is the duty of the Latin American and international working class to rise up and fight for the defeat of the occupation troops of the Colombian bourgeois semi-colonial regime, the agent of Yankee imperialism, and to unconditionally defend the Colombian resistance against this army of occupation. This is our duty, even though we do not agree with the FARC’s impotent guerrilla tactics and it politics of class collaboration.

2. Bush, Obama, Clinton, McCain and all the political representatives of the Yankee imperialist butchers, not only welcomed this action of the bloody criminal Uribe and his semi-fascist regime. They accord to him the same freedom to cross borders as the Yankees in 1989 when the Marines invaded Panama killing thousands to kidnap President Noriega and take him to the US to put him on trial, and as they have done in recent years in invading, massacring and suppressing the Afghan and Iraqi nations in wars for oil, creating puppet Governments in Yankee protectorates.

Uribe, servant of the Yankees, acted on the orders of his master in the bloody repression of his own people. This founder of the paramilitaries, along with the Colombian armed forces, has a record of killing over 35,000 workers a year for the past 25 years to ensure that Colombia remains subjected to US imperialism.

In Argentina, under the Peronist government of Isabel Peron, more than 3000 of the leaders of the proletarian vanguard were killed. In Colombia, many militant workers and union leaders were forced to flee for their lives from the paramilitary thugs, and ended up becoming militants of the FARC and the Colombian resistance, subordinated to its petty bourgeois leaderships policies of class collaboration and guerrilla methods of struggle.
Today, in Colombia, a semi-fascist terror regime has been built in the cities and now attempts to regain political and military control of the one third of the country that (as the result of a 50 year civil war) is in the hands of a peasant guerrilla insurgency.

3. The international bourgeois press echoed the regional bourgeoisies who spoke out against the "outrage to the sovereignty of Ecuador" committed by the Colombian army when it attacked a delegation of the FARC that was on a mission to negotiate a peaceful exchange of prisoners. But everyone –from the "Boli-bourgeoisies” [Bolivarian Bourgeoisies] to the landowning and mine-owning bourgeoisies in the region –has been silent for years on another attack on Ecuadorian sovereignty. This is the U.S. military base on the island of Manta which provides finance, weapons and counter-intelligence to Uribe with the permission of the “Bolivarian" government of Correa!

This fact is not new to the working class in Latin America, because in 1997, 2000 and 2005 the Ecuadorian masses erupted in several revolutionary uprisings, overthrowing three presidents by mobilizing in the streets. Their main demands were: "Out with the oil imperialists! ", "Out with the Yankee military base at Manta!", "No to FTA!" and "We do not want to be a Yankee colony, we want to be Latin American, socialist and independent!” This revolutionary struggle of the working class and the exploited Ecuadorians was the only one to provide support for the revolutionary struggle of the workers and peasants of Colombia.

But the "Bolivarian" Correa arrived in power to put an end to the revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle of the Ecuadorian workers and peasants –a struggle that had opened the way to the socialist revolution that later broke out in Argentina 2001 and Bolivia in 2003 –to keep the bourgeoisie in power and Ecuador under the imperialist yoke. Thus, under the "Bolivarian" government of Correa, the Yankee military base in Manta remains and the economy continues to have its currency pegged to the dollar (as introduced by Noboa, the vice president who succeeded in toppling Mahuad for the presidency in 2000).

  • The attack by the Colombian semi-fascist state as the servant of Bush, does not come as a surprise to the working class in Latin America and the world. Today, therefore, our first task is to take to the streets in solidarity with the oppressed workers and peasants of Colombia, to condemn the savage aggression and to fight for the defeat of the Uribe government and its murderous military.
  • Second, the international working class must defend the sovereignty of Ecuador by demanding that the Yankees get out of Manta, and the oil imperialists get out of Ecuador!
  • Third, against the suppression of the Latin American revolution by the national bourgeoisies and their servants organized in the World Social Forum: we endorse the slogan: "No to US colonies, Yes to an independent, socialist Latin America!”

These are the demands of the workers of Latin American and world! This task can only be carried out if the Ecuadorian working class rises up and breaks with the bourgeois Bolivarian government of Correa, the partner of multinationals and the various imperialist powers who plunder our region, and returns to the road of the heroic uprisings of 1997, 2000 and 2005. The Ecuadorian workers and peasants must make common cause with those of Colombia to prepare the resistance and organise a counter-offensive against the genocidal Uribe government! That is the true solidarity that the class brothers and sisters of Ecuador can give to the exploited classes of Colombia today facing the terror of this semi-fascist regime!

No forgiveness for the blood of the leadership of the FARC shed in Ecuador!

How quickly the brave bragging of the "Bolivarians" about sovereignty turned into "Business as business" and “we are all partners”, sealed by the cynical embrace of Chavez, Correa and Uribe, under the auspices of the OAS of the Yankees, French imperialism and Totalfina oil, and the Rio Group meeting

4. Chavez, the leader of the "Bolivarian revolution" condemned the incident, broke relations with Uribe and sent 10 armed battalions to the Venezuelan border with Colombia... while still happily selling oil to the Yankees so they can kill the Iraqi people. The working class and anti-imperialist movement of Latin America have to pull back, once and for all, the veil of the "Bolivarian revolution" to lay bare the real politics of the petrodollar Venezuelan bourgeoisie. Its policy is "peace" in Colombia.

What does this mean?: nothing less than the unconditional disarmament of the FARC, as has already been forced on the ELN. They are trying once again to implement the same plan they used in the 1980s, with the Esquipulas and Contadora agreements between the national bourgeoisies and imperialism, to dismantle the heroic revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador. This is the alternative bourgeois policy –to that of Yankee imperialism and its servant Uribe –being promoted by the bourgeois governments in Latin America, supported by Fidel and Raul Castro and the whole restorationist bureaucracy of Cuba, and backed, behind the scenes, by French imperialism.

Chavez, Correa and all the "Bolivarians" came out to denounce the "Plan Colombia" of Bush and Uribe. But the truth is that there is not one, but two, "Plans Colombia" to stabilize the region and to extend business ties between the oil transnationals and the national bourgeoisies: one, the aggressive plan of Yankee imperialism and the murderer Uribe, and the other, the scheme of "peaceful disarmament" stage-managed by French imperialism and its new bourgeois junior partners in Latin America.

The imperialists are only divided on what is the best plan to defeat the resistance of the masses against the bloodthirsty regime of Uribe and to end the last outbreak of civil war left on the continent and to impose the social peace and the "legitimacy" they need to continue their profiteering and plundering in Latin America. But business is business. When business is at stake, they all hug and swear allegiance on the blood shed by the workers and peasants.
Needless to say, the "peaceful surrender" plan of the bourgeoisie "Bolivarian" does not care for the fate of the FARC and the workers and peasants of Colombia. Nor could the bloody French imperialists, whose only interest is to take over control of the sources of raw materials from Yankee imperialism in its own backyard, care less. The suffering of the working class and the exploited and the blood of the militants of the FARC are only small change in their business negotiations.

Thus, Sarkozy immediately told Marulanda of the FARC to surrender Betancourt alive, or else be declared a murderer. The cynicism of the French imperialist butchers has no limit, it was they who committed a real genocide in Algeria in the 50s, who sent troops to Chad, and under the guise of the UN, sent troops to Lebanon and protect and finance, like Bush, the genocidal Zionist state of Israel.

5. At the meeting of the Rio Group, Uribe claimed that the armed forces of Brazil, Peru, Panama, Chile etc had been cooperating with Colombia in the "struggle against terrorism," that is, against the FARC. The Defense Minister of Ecuador noted that “in 2007, 21 operations of between 10 and 30 days each, searched for FARC bases [in Ecuador, Ed]. We destroyed 47 camps, some well equipped, like the one bombed by Colombia, and others less well equipped as rest camps (...) In April 9 we captured guerrillas and in November we came across Raul Reyes (...) and we narrowly escaped. We knew that he was out there, and our soldiers arrived at the scene. The food was still hot, and letters and books with their names. Reyes had just left. We engaged the rearguard. And we had two soldiers wounded by bullets and grenades, and on the guerrilla side, they left three dead "(Clarin of Argentina, 7/03/08).

These are the "Bolivarians", the alleged "anti-imperialists"! Pigs, it is more than clear that all were in a race to see who captured, killed or took Reyes hostage, to make the FARC disarm and surrender!

At the same meeting of the Rio Group, Cristina Kirchner advised Uribe that the best way to defeat the FARC and the Colombian insurgents was not to make raids into the territory of Ecuador but to observe the "legality" of its armed forces to defeat the FARC inside Colombia.

6. Chavez himself has reported his meetings with the leadership of the FARC when he was unable to convince them that they could not succeed, that they could not repeat a Cuba ’59, or even a Nicaragua'79, in Colombia. Moreover, most of his speech at the Rio Group was to prove to Yankee imperialism that he is a man to be trusted to carry out the task of disarming the FARC, as he praised Banzer –that sinister murderer of the Bolivian masses – as a "great man" of the Latin American bourgeoisie; and said how Samper, former president of Colombia, acknowledged that Chavez had never supported the FARC.

They all –Yankee imperialism, Uribe, French imperialism, Chavez, Correa, Kirchner and the other "Bolivarians" –seek to end the resistance of the FARC because it controls a region of Colombian territory which is of strategic importance for plundering oil and gas. Chavez spoke openly at the Rio Group of his negotiations with Uribe to build a gas pipeline between Colombia and Venezuela. Moreover, the proposed Southern pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina is planned to go through that part of Colombia controlled by the FARC. In SucumbĂ­os, the Ecuadorian province bordering Colombia, where the Ecuadorian and Colombian armies are both engaged in pursuing and killing the militants of the FARC, are located large oil resources.


"Oil is now at 105 dollars a barrel. There is business for all, what should we fight about?" said Chavez at the meeting of the Rio Group. Then Correa demanded an “International Peace Force" to secure the disarmament of the FARC on its northern border. "I sent 10 battalions to the border with Colombia" said "brave" Chavez to his defense minister. All these troop movements are to make sure that the Colombian resistance against the semi-fascist regime of Uribe is not organized or supplied by Ecuador or Venezuela, let alone Brazil.

The "Boliviarian" bourgeoisie of Chavez and Correa, with the support of the Castro bureaucracy, are responsible for the policy of “peaceful exchange” of prisoners, exposing the entire leadership of the FARC in Ecuador to the watchful eyes of the CIA based in Manta, and the Colombian army which crossing the Colombian border did not hesitate to exploit the situation to kill them. And later, before the blood of the dead FARC leaders had dried, celebrated with hugs and hand shakes, the "peace pact" between their businesses was sealed. His cynicism knows no bounds. Crooks and scoundrels!

7. The "Bolivarians" complain that the fierce repression against the masses and the FARC by 400,000 mercenaries armed and trained by Yankee imperialism in Colombia, threatens to extend the conflict to their own countries. These bourgeois governments, as they said themselves, are "proud" of having "pacified" Latin America and “saved” it from the ravages of the revolutionary masses, but fear that the crisis in Colombia will spread and re-awaken the revolutionary "demons" in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Venezuela, renewing the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses in the first half of the twenty-first century.

Thus, the bourgeoisie of the continent seeking to impose a final "peace" by disarming the masses throughout Latin America at a time when, associated with this or that imperialist power, their profits increase with the rising price of oil, commodities and minerals, while the workers of the continent suffer from the high cost of living, overexploitation, repression and national plundering.

That is why the Rio Group meeting ended with hugs between Correa, Chavez and Uribe, with the latter pledging not to attack any neighboring country, and with all the "Bolivarians" swearing allegiance to the rule of the OAS on "non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries."
Cynics! The United States has military bases throughout Latin America and has ambassadors to ‘advise’ the Presidents; the imperialist powers have the UN, IMF, World Bank, Paris Club, NATO, and even colonial ministries such as the Rio Group , the OAS and the Rio Treaty, "to intervene" every day in the control and suppression of the people. The United States has the Manta base in Ecuador and more than 15,000 military advisers in Colombia that oversee the Colombian armed forces and the paramilitaries to kill 35,000 workers and peasants every year in that country.

Against this, we workers and peasants of the continent have an obligation to support our Colombian class brothers and sisters brutally murdered by the semi-fascist government of Uribe. But to do so we must break our subordination to the bourgeoisie and our treacherous leaders.

We of the FLT denounce the Ecuadorian and Venezuelan troops sent to the border with Colombia. They are not there to confront imperialism, or to remove the US base at Manta, or to "protect" Venezuela from an alleged attack from Colombia. They are there to imprison the FARC and force it to disarm and surrender, and to prevent the spread of Colombia's civil war to the rest of the continent. In this way, it will ensure “business as usual” and the collaboration of the national bourgeoisies with their imperialist partners, to loot the resources and extract their super-profits from Latin America.


  • Out with the "Plan Colombia" of Uribe and the Yankees! Out with the new Contadora Esquipulas to disarm the FARC by the "Bolivarians" and their French imperialist partner!
  • Out with the OAS, the Rio Treaty, the Rio Group and other institutions of imperialism from Latin America!

It is an urgent task of the UNT in Venezuela and the trade union centrals of Ecuador to fight for the immediate withdrawal of the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian troops and to defend the Colombian resistance. It is the duty of the Brazilian workers to oppose the government of Lula and Totalfina-Petrobras, which has already sent 25,000 Federal police to the border with Colombia, and locates the guerrillas with its "spy planes" so they can be killed by Uribe and his murderous troops.

Immediate withdrawal of the Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Brazilian troops, stationed on the border with Colombia to encircle the FARC and force their surrender, while the genocidal murderer Uribe destroys all workers or peasants organizations that stand up to him, his government and its occupation troops commanded by the CIA, the Pentagon and Yankee imperialists!

8. At the OAS, Correa and Uribe signed a pact in which Colombia "apologised" for its "violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity" of Ecuador. The OAS passed a resolution “repudiating” this violation. At the Rio Group, all the bourgeois governments agreed to this pact and agreed to respect each others interests and not to interfere in the "internal affairs" of other countries.
Thus finishes the "brave Bolivarians"! They refused to break with that den of thieves headed by Bush in the OAS, which unanimously created a "Verification Commission", and then ended up together at the Rio Group to discuss their differences, but agreed that there was sufficient business for all.


Thus, between the OAS, which carries out the monitoring and verification mechanisms, and the Rio Group – a parliament where they discuss their differences without "acrimony" – there is much bragging and grandiose speeches. And once again, those who pay the price are the exploited masses sold out a thousand times over in Latin America.

These were the same Rio Group and the same OAS that always "condemned" Cuba and never allowed it to become a member! And Chavez and Correa, with Morales and the other "Bolivarians", the so-called "friends of Cuba"! They all ended up as servants of the OAS and the Rio Treaty. This means that if the US is militarily attacked by another country, all Latin American countries are obliged to defend it. But if a Latin American country is attacked by an imperialist power, the Yankees are aligned with the latter, as happened in the Falklands War, with the United States supporting Thatcher and her imperialist troops. They are all tied to the apron strings of the OAS, which allowed NATO to put a military base in the Malvinas, and which agreed to US bases like Manta in Latin America. More recently, the OAS sponsored the invasion and occupation of Haiti by various Latin American state forces under US command. So that is the end of the "courageous" bourgeois Bolivarians: unable to break even with the OAS and the Rio Treaty, remaining servants of them.

The "left-wing" of the World Social Forum Celia Hart and the renegades of Trotskyism are under the discipline of the bourgeois armies of Correa and Chavez

9.
The ‘left wing’ of the World Social Forum finished up under the skirts of the Yankee masters, the OAS, the Rio Treaty and the Rio Group, tied to the new pact for the surrender of the masses. All the leaders of the fake reformist Trotskyists, led by Celia Hart Santamaria, are using their soothing "Bolivarian" rhetoric to openly support Chavez, Correa etc on the recent crisis. Celia Hart, that impostor and falsifier of Leon Trotsky, the representative of restorationist Cuban bureaucracy said: "Our revolutionary government (of Cuba, ed) calls on the people of Ecuador to support the Army of the Republic of Ecuador and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (...) We call on all Trotskyist, Guevarist, Mariateguist, Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, Bolivarian and anti-imperialist organizations in the world to unite at this moment of maximum proletarian internationalism and ask that all of these organizations speak out and provide practical support to our current leaders Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez. "


THEY HAVE NO SHAME! These new usurpers of the flag of Trotskyism and the Fourth International have been unmasked. Indeed, even without Celia Hart, the restorationist bureaucracy of Castro was already acting under the orders of Chavez, Correa and other national bourgeoisies of the continent. But this time, the agent of the Castro bureaucracy, has put the Mandelists, Morenists and all fake Trotksyists, under the orders of Chavez and Correa.

It has become clear that these traitors have all become complicit with the Ecuadorian military officers who collaborate with the Colombian army to chase down the FARC guerrillas on either side of the border. They want the working class of the continent to follow Chavez orders NOT to support or assist the FARC, nor the mass resistance, against the semi-fascist government of Uribe. Rather they are echoing the demands on the FARC to surrender and disarm, thus exposing the militants of the FARC and the left to the mercy of Uribe, his armed forces and the paramilitaries.

The betrayers of Trotskyism have turned into agents of the restorationist bureaucracy in Havana and claim that they do this on behalf of the Fourth International: IMPOSTORS!
"Everybody with Chavez and Correa"!: This was, in summary, the position of the turn-coat Trotskyists, subordinating in this way the Latin American working class to the bourgeoisie. Not a word of complaint about the U.S. military base in Manta, Ecuador! Not a word of complaint about the colonial ministry of Yankee imperialism, the OAS! What about breaking with the OAS and the Rio Treaty? What about kicking the Yankees out of Manta? Not a word!

For its part, the P-SOL of Brazil –the sister party of Celia Hart and the other fake Trotskyists in Latin America –sent their deputies to show solidarity with Correa. Rogues! Correa, his government and the Ecuadorian bourgeoisie, touched not a hair of Uribe! If they had the most minimal anti-imperialist impulse, they would have gone to the Colombian jungle to solidarise with the fighters from the FARC, using the parliamentary immunity provided by the Brazilian parliament.

Thus, "with Chavez and Correa" and the hand of Celia Hart, all of Trotskyist renegades finshed up at the feet of the OAS, the Rio Treaty and the Rio Group. They are exposed as followers of the "road map" of the "Bolivarian Peace" supported by the French imperialist butchers for the surrender and disarmament of the FARC, when it is obvious that the Yankees and their servant Uribe plan to wipe out the FARC. The servility of the fake Trotskyists to the "Boliviarian" bourgeoisie and the Castro restorationist bureaucracy is total. Its bankruptcy is complete.

The Latin American proletariat must respond to this deception and the caricature of revolutionary Marxism of the traitors of the proletariat with one demand: get out on the streets to confront Chavez, Correa and all the "Bolivarians" that have renounced arms, supplies or money to the FARC and who call for their surrender: complete demilitarization of the border between Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil! All the trade unions in these countries put all their forces into organizing and aiding the resistance of the workers and poor peasants of Colombia against the semi-fascist regime of Uribe!

Latin America and its raw materials resources are prized by rival imperialist powers under the pressure of the global economic crisis

10. Acting behind the scenes, French imperialism is using its demand for the release of Ingrid Betancourt to further its political agenda in the entire region. Behind this policy of "peace" in Colombia driven by Chavez and other "Bolivarians", the French imperialists and Totalfina seek to gain “merit points” for disarming the FARC in its competition with Yankee imperialism for the control of oil and other raw materials in Latin America.


The United States has devalued the dollar in response to the crisis that is developing in its domestic economy and the world economy. This will stimulate its exports to resolve its trade deficit. But it will not reduce the prices of raw materials and commodities, such as oil, sold for dollars, whose prices will go up with the demand for non-renewable resources, and generate an inflationary spiral in the world economy at the expense of the oppressed peoples of the world.
Amid the global economic crisis that has begun the struggle for control of the sources of raw materials and spheres of influence between the imperialist powers, will intensify imperialist rivalry.

The European powers and France in particular, have launched an offensive to challenge the zones of influence of Yankee imperialism in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America for new opportunities for their monopolies. With this policy it is pressuring the United States to abandon the Bush policy of "unilateralism" or US hegemony, and to replace it with an agreement to share areas of influence, raw materials and cheap labour. The European powers want to impose what they call a "multi-polar world", i.e. this means pressuring Yankee imperialism to “share” their business in their areas of influence, such as Latin America.

11. It goes without saying that, in contrast, American imperialism, as the dominant power, has not remained idle. Having succeeded in subordinating the working class struggle against the Iraq war to the Democratic Party, the rights of immigrants and in defense of their conquests attacked –thanks to Chavismo, the Castro regime and all the forces of World Social Forum, including the renegade Trotskyists –Yankee imperialism prepares to restore the legitimacy of its government, following the crisis of the Bush administration, through the Democratic and Republican primaries in the presidential election towards the end of the year.

At the same time, to clearly mark its territories, it uses bombs to remove its rivals: in the Balkans, it creates the "independence" of its protectorate in Kosovo against the will of Serbia and Russia, the allies and partners of France. In the Middle East, its gendarme the state of Israel kills the Palestinian masses of Gaza, while its ally Turkey uses its military to control the North of Iraq to do the dirty work of the US Marines, including killing the Kurdish bourgeoisie who supported the Anglo-Yankee invasion.

In Africa, it resumes its offensive in Somalia with 15,000 Marines. It is backing Sudan against the insurgency in neighboring Chad, a French semi-colony, whose common border, is the territory of Darfur where there is a huge reservoir of oil. The US seeks to exploit that oil at the expense of French imperialism, at a time when many Yankee oil-imperialists have been forced to withdraw by the heroic struggles of the revolutionary Nigerian proletariat that refuses to live in poverty when under its feet lies a enormous wealth of black gold.

In Latin America, Yankee imperialism, while it reorganizes its regime at home with a “Republicrat" election, intervenes by ordering its servant Uribe to kill the leaders of the FARC in Ecuador. This is its first response to the new business between French imperialism and other European powers with sectors of the national bourgeoisies of Latin America.

As a warning to the national bourgeoisies doing deals with rival imperialist powers in the US backyard, Yankee imperialism uses the threat of the secession in Bolivia of the Media Luna oligarchy, the partner of ExxonMobil and British Petroleum.

Thus, with military invasions, bombings and threats of secession, Yankee imperialism clearly decides who is permitted to do business in its own backyard and the world economy at large. To give it more freedom to do this the US is preparing to stabilize its protectorate in Iraq so that it can relocate its troops for new counter-offensives around the globe.

12. In the United States, the working class has suffered many defeats. These include the loss of past gains in wages, pension and health benefits, and the many thousands who are being evicted from their homes with enormous suffering that reminds us of the '30s. The workers fights against the war and for the rights of immigrants have been diverted into the Democratic Party. The democrats have formed a bloc with the Republicans as “Rebublicrats” so they can go on the offensive, as they did through their servant Uribe.

In Latin America, after the abortion and diversion of the revolutionary struggles, the working class and the masses have lost their place at the center of the political scene. Subordinated to the class collaborationist leaders, the working class has been contained momentarily on the American continent. This situation where the masses are out of the scene is one that allows the various imperialist powers and bourgeois fractions to openly dispute –including military interventions – the control of oil, commodities and minerals from Latin America whose rapidly rising prices are a rich source of super profits for the trans-nationals, and their plans for further pillage and plunder of our peoples.

The national bourgeoisies exploit these disputes as junior partners of the multinationals to get their share of the business. And this is what explains why the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie of Chavez or Correa, as well as the bourgeoisies of Brazil and Argentina (two Yankee semi-colonies) as well as those of Chile, Peru and Mexico who –despite having signed FTAs with the US –are all trying to do deals with the EU imperialists to lessen the dominance of the US with its repressive FTAs and devalued dollar. Only the Uribe government, which has been turned into a gendarme for Yankee imperialism, remains a loyal servant and agent of the US.

So while Chavez has rescinded contracts with the Yankee oil companies Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips for the exploitation of crude oil from the Orinoco Basin, he transferred that right to the French Totalfina. The Castro brothers and the Cuban restorationist bureaucracy have already created joint ventures with French imperialist monopolies to exploit nickel, with Repsol oil, and with Spanish corporations in the tourism business.

At the same time the "Bolivarian" Lula in Brazil gave the Yankees their entire crop of sugarcane and soybeans in the country until 2025 for the production of bio-fuel and has signed an agreement with France to buy aerospace technology and weapons for military purposes, with the agreement of the Argentine bourgeoisie. Morales has already agreed to supply cheap Bolivian gas for the energy needs of the transnationals and the national bourgeoisies of the countries of the Southern Cone.

This is precisely the role of the national "Boliviarian" bourgeoisies. Its aim is to negotiate with the various imperialist powers and their multinationals to allow them to loot our nations and exploit the working class in Latin America, and in exchange get their slice of the superprofits.
At the meeting of the Rio Group, they were clearly trying to impose a "multipolar world" on Yankee imperialism. But it was equally clear that Yankee imperialism is not going to allow others to intrude in its backyard. That is why Uribe, the US agent, exercised his veto power, so that none of the measures promoted by the “Bolivarians”, such as the creation of an international commission to "release of the hostages", was approved.

But despite this, everyone accepted that Yankee imperialism had to talk about sharing production with French imperialism and the national bourgeoisies of Latin America. That is why the meeting ended with handshakes and hugs, with Chavez flanked by the mother of Ingrid Betancour; why Sarkozy met Correa and Uribe together; and the sighs of relief and smiles of Cristina Kirchner, Lula and Bachelet who were reassured that they would get the supply of oil and gas to satisfy the multinationals and national bosses of Argentina, Brazil and Chile. This indicates that both US and French imperialism agree that they need the "Bolibourgeoisie” to finish strangling the struggle of the masses.

Therefore, the working class in Latin America, in its anti-imperialist struggle, must endorse the demands:
  • Out with Yankee imperialism and its puppet governments and gendarmes like Uribe!
  • Out with Totalfina and the French Imperialist butchers from Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and all Latin America!
  • Break with NAFTA, CAFTA, Mercosur and all the FTAs of multinationals and the national bourgeoisies! Break with the ALBA of the national bourgeoisie and Cuban restorationist bureaucracy and the businesses of Franco-German imperialism! For the Socialist United States of South and Central America!

The subordination of the working class to their respective bourgeoisie in Latin America, imposed by the World Social Forum, is responsible for the tragedy of the slaughter and persecution of fighters from the FARC and the working class and poor peasants in Colombia

13. The real tragedy of the killing of the leaders of the FARC in Ecuador is none other than the tragedy of a class collaborationist politics driven by the World Social Forum, which has tied the working class and exploited in Latin America to exploitation of business in their respective bourgeoisie, and has forced them to submit to the supposedly "democratic" French and German imperialists, and now, to submit to Obama and Clinton, who quickly gave their unconditional support to the "exemplary action" of the genocidal Uribe.

The leadership of the FARC, under the discipline of Chavez and Castro, has raised the policy of peace, disarmament and "national unity" in this manner, and is preparing to sacrifice the peasants’ struggle. The leadership of the FARC will not fight for a workers’ and peasants’ uprising to defeat the genocidal Uribe and his armed forces, or for the land, nor to liberate Colombia from imperialism. They limit themselves to the futile strategy of negotiating for a demilitarized zone to exchange prisoners and for "peace" or disarmament.

Thus, the same leadership of the FARC, even after the murder of Reyes and 15 or more fighters, issued a communiquĂ© claiming that Reyes died fighting for the “cause of peace based on social justice" and reaffirmed that its goal is that of the "humanitarian exchange" of prisoners and to establish a demilitarized zone in Florida and Pradera. Not a word about FARC defeating the genocidal government of Uribe and his murderous army! The only way to win "peace with social justice" is to break with imperialism, demand land for the peasants, and to end the suffering of the working class and Colombian people subjected to the semi-fascist regime of Uribe, Bush’s gendarme. The struggle for the self-styled "socialism of the twenty-first century" proves to be no more than a salute to the flag, while hoping that the “Bolivarian” revolution will prevail by the year 2099! The FARC is now under the leadership of Castro and Chavez!

It is this policy of class collaboration which isolated the FARC from all the exploited masses in the cities. First, because as a petit-bourgeois peasant party, it has not expropriated, in the territory it controls, the bourgeoisie or the landowners, nor has it given land to the rural poor. It only taxes employers and the landowner, as would any bourgeois government. In fact as a proto-bourgeoisie in the territories it controls, it does nothing to combat the slaughter and terror that the working class is subjected to in the cities.

Thus, the policy of the FARC has aborted the agrarian revolution which can only be consummated fully and effectively with the victory of the workers socialist revolution; i.e. the working class leading the poor farmers and taking power.

Its policy of class collaboration has prevented the FARC from extending civil war and insurgency to the entire Colombian peasantry, dividing the army at its base and preventing the revolutionary peasants over the past decades, from uniting with the proletariat in the cities. It is for this reason that the FARC has lost much of the power and prestige that it won outside the cities, turning its back and looking after its interests only.

which has become a What was lacking in Colombia was a revolutionary leadership of the heroic Colombian working class, which can offer leadership to the poor peasantry against the sector of the petty-bourgeoisproto-bourgeoisie, raising the demands for the immediate expropriation of all landowners and the distribution of land across Colombia, beginning with the territories controlled by the FARC, for the expropriation of all multinationals and banks in Colombia, and creating committees of armed workers and peasants and in the rank and file of the army, to prepare a victorious revolution to create a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ government to break with imperialism and end the sacrifice of the Colombian people.

Under the leadership of the counter-revolutionary Stalinism yesterday, and today under the leadership of the Castro regime and the World Social Forum, this rural civil war led by the FARC, ELN, the M19 and other groups of petty bourgeois parties-armies, was limited to the objective of fighting for a "patriotic", "national unity" government with the bourgeoisie and "progressive" military, with which the leadership of the FARC dreams of making a common government. It is merely a strategy of armed Stalinist reformism, which has to limit the insurgency by smothering the peasantry and isolating all the exploited masses of Colombia.

Under the leadership of Fidel Castro, the ELN has already been sacrificed by entering into the "pacification" plan of Uribe. The FARC’s program reflects the impotence of the petty bourgeois leadership whose ultimate dream is to follow the path of "commander" Ortega of Nicaragua and the FMLN of El Salvador, in order to change their fatigues into the suit and tie of the Wall Street yuppies. But Colombia is not today a Nicaragua or El Salvador in the late'80s. In those countries, imperialism and the bourgeoisie had to allow the Sandinistas and the FMLN to recycle themselves as the national bourgeoisie in order to strangle the revolutions that were still alive. By contrast, in 2008, that danger has already been contained in Latin America, and therefore, the Yankees and Uribe are unwilling to grant those privileges to the FARC: they will accept only their unconditional disarmament. If they do not agree to this, and try to negotiate with Chavez and French imperialism, there awaits the brutal army of the Yankee stooge Uribe to destroy them.

Colombia proves in the heat of red hot events the truth of Trotskyism, that only the working class, leading the poor peasants, expropriating the property of the bourgeoisie in the city and the countryside, self-organized, armed and lead by a genuine revolutionary leadership, and with the struggle methods of the working class –strikes and pickets, factory committees, and mass political insurgencies –can complete the national struggle, overthrowing the bourgeoisie, taking power, breaking with imperialism, abolishing the large estates and giving land to peasants, and expropriating the expropriators.

14. We are witnessing then a brutal offensive to end the FARC and the peasant insurgency in Colombia. In this offensive, while Uribe serves the Yankees, using the army and the paramilitary to kill the FARC, the role of the Castro bureaucracy, Chavez and other "Bolivarians" is to demoralize the militants of the FARC, convince them that "cannot succeed", talking them into disarming and dividing them so that they betray their comrades, as appears to have happened with the reported murder of the leader of the FARC Ivan Rios by his own ranks. Those who do not agree to this, are isolated and at the mercy of being killed in Colombia or Ecuador, and also Brazil, which has announced the reinforcing of a military base on the border with Colombia, and of course in Venezuela also.

This policy of Castro and Chavez towards the Colombian resistance is not new. They simply follow in the footsteps of the Stalinist counter-revolutionary policy implemented by the bureaucracy in the USSR for decades.

Thus, not only are they pressuring the leadership of the Colombian resistance to disarm, they are acting as guarantors that the petty bourgeois leadership will not expropriate the bourgeoisie or landowners in the territories it controls militarily.

In Colombia today then we see the application of the same treacherous policy that was used to defeat the heroic Spanish revolution in the 1930s. There, Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy said to the workers that they had first to win the war against Franco in a popular front with the bourgeoisie Republicans, and not fight for the socialist revolution, while at the same time its fifth column was killing the militants of the POUM and anarchists of Durruti who refused to agree to this policy, and instead fought to expropriate the landowners and the bourgeoisie in the territories under the control of the republican army.

The Stalinist bureaucracy also did this at the end of the Second World War. Stalin signed the Yalta and Potsdam agreements with the United States and Britain, and undertook to suppress the revolution in the imperialist countries of Europe, and contain it in the East European countries that were occupied by Germany. So while the Red Army stopped its advance into East Berlin –refusing to seize power throughout Germany –communist parties were engaged in disarming the French and Italian workers who had led the resistance against the occupation. When the Communist Yugoslav partisans and the Greeks refused to disarm, Stalin called their leaders to "talks" in Moscow. In Moscow the whole leadership of the Greek resistance was murdered by the Stalinists. Tito and the Yugoslav Stalinist leadership survived only because they suspected this would happen and refused to travel to the USSR.

Something similar took place with Che Guevara in Bolivia. While we disagree with the policy of Che to promote a guerrilla struggle in Bolivia – at time when the Bolivian revolution that started in 1952 was being crushed by Barrientos and his military-peasant pact – it is clear that Che´s position of "One, two, three Vietnams" in Latin America was opposed to the Stalinist policy of peaceful coexistence. That is why the Communist Party of Bolivia, led by Monje acting under the orders of Khrushchev, collaborated with the Bolivian dictatorship to assassinate him.

In the 1970s, Stalinism led by Fidel Castro, preached the "peaceful path to socialism" in Chile which allowed Pinochet to join the Allende government as commander of the army, where he along with the ITT [US telecoms giant], prepared the bloody military coup that crushed the Chilean proletariat and its heroic revolution in the industrial cordones.

After 1989, the Stalinist bureaucracy handed over the workers states to imperialism, restoring capitalism and transforming itself into a national bourgeoisie. The same path is following today by the Castroist bureaucracy: to finish capitalist restoration on the island – a process that began some time ago, with the bureaucracy visibly enriched while Cuban workers earn a wage of 13 dollars – it must finish the strangling of the revolution in Latin America, and as part of it, put an end to any vestige of mass insurgency and civil war in Colombia.

15. For that reason, the Castro bureaucracy, Chavez, the "Bolivarians" and all currents of the World Social Forum – including the fake Trotskyists – are now supporting the policy of destroying the leadership of the FARC in Ecuador, and today playing the same role that the old Stalinist bureaucracy played for decades. All the "Bolivarians" want today is "peaceful coexistence" with the various imperialist powers and their transnational business partners. For this reason they are offering to bribe all the fighters of the FARC and workers and peasant groups that fight to defend themselves against the occupying forces of the semi-fascist government of Uribe, to disarm. If they refuse to do so, they will be left at the mercy of Uribe and the Colombian army, or pursued into Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela.

Faced with this treacherous plan, the FLT calls upon all labour organizations and class struggle groups on the continent to launch a campaign for the immediate and unconditional release of the thousands of political prisoners, fighters of the FARC and other worker and peasant organisations in Colombia, who are rotting in the jails of Uribe and the semi-fascist regime.
We call on workers' organisations especially in Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador, to break all subordination to their bourgeois governments, and to place all their forces at the service of the resistance of the masses of workers and peasants in Colombia.

The FLT doos not agree with the class collaborationist politics of armed reformism of the leadership of the FARC, or the petty bourgeois guerrilla strategy. The only way to organise a victorious insurrection that brings the working class to power is that of the self-organization and arming of the worker and peasant masses, with a revolutionary leadership at the head.

We recognize the right of the FARC – as an organization fighting to negotiate, make agreements, exchange prisoners etc – to make pacts when the balance of power is not in their favor. But we do not agree with or endorse the policy of the leaders of the FARC of misrepresenting these agreements as "victories" to the masses of Colombia and Latin America.

Such agreements present imperialist butchers like Sarkozy and national bourgeois leaders like Chavez, Correa, Cristina Kirchner, Lula and others – who want to enforce surrender and disarmament, and use the blood of the militants of the FARC as a bargaining chip in its business deals – as "friends" and "allies" of the Colombian resistance. Any state that makes peace with the Colombian bourgeoisie, responsible for systematic murder of the exploited masses of Columbia, has no right to attack, detain or try any militant or worker or peasant organization fighting imperialist subjugation, oppression and exploitation.

It's time to lift the veil of international politics for the advanced workers of Latin America and the world. What we are witnessing is the threat of destruction of a petty bourgeois peasant organization openly entangled in a political partnership with different kinds of national bourgeoisie and various imperialist powers.

Having expropriated the worker and peasant revolution in Bolivia, the policy of enforcing a surrender on the mass Colombian resistance is necessary so that the Castro bureaucracy can finish the process of capitalist restoration in Cuba

16.
The attack and killing of leaders of the FARC and the regional crisis it provoked, demonstrates to the masses of Latin America, the consequences of the suppression of the heroic workers and peasants revolution in Bolivia.

First, the Castro bureaucracy and the bourgeois regimes led by Chavez, Lula, Kirchner and Bachelet, used the class collaboration of the Morales government to contain the Bolivian revolution that was becoming a threat to the property and business of imperialism and the national bourgeoisies in Bolivia and in the entire Southern Cone, where production relies heavily on the provision of Bolivian gas.

And no doubt that if today there were burning barricades in La Paz and El Alto was on a war footing, we would see a real anti-imperialist struggle of the entire working class in Latin America against Bush's gendarme Uribe. In the same way, a worker and peasant revolutionary Ecuador could organize and supply the resistance of the working class and poor peasants in Colombia against the the Uribe regime.

In this treacherous betrayal of the worker and peasant revolution in Bolivia, Castro, Chavez and other bourgeois "Boliviarians" benefited from the open collaboration from all types of reformists in the World Social Forum, including the fake Trotskyists of all kinds. They either directly called for a vote for the bourgeois government of Morales and his fraudulent Constituent Assembly alongside PODERMOS supported by the vast majority of the bourgeoisie Mercosur and the transnationals, or they supported the collaborationist leadership of the COB that tied the proletariat to the helm of the bourgeoisie popular front. The result: the breakdown of the worker and peasant alliance and subordination to the government of Morales of the proletariat and the poor peasants who today support the new constitution like they supported yesterday the bourgeois farce of the "nationalization of the hydrocarbons" still in the hands of the transnationals. The new Constitution establishes that "land reform" means to discuss whether landowners can retain a maximum of 10 thousand or 5 thousand hectares, that is, to decide how many absentee landlords will divide up their properties between them. The reactionary Constitution of Morales and Co says absolutely nothing about "gas to the Bolivians", "land for the peasants", or "bread for the workers".


After the suppression of the worker and peasant revolution in Bolivia, and the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle of the masses of Ecuador and Colombia, after the Argentine revolution was aborted in 2001, after stabilising the popular front in Brazil and the civil-military regime Chile, the representatives of the "Bolivarian revolution" want to impose "peace" in Colombia only in order to finish off the last vestiges of civil war left in Latin America, to end the "revolutionary dress rehearsal" that the exploited masses staged in the first years of the twenty-first century, so as to be in a better position to bargain for their slice of the business with the various imperialist powers.

It was preparing to do so when the American imperialism and his servant Uribe gave the signal.
This is how imperialism today uses the national bourgeoisie: it makes them dowse the fire of revolution to earn their share of the business. Or, they are used as the front behind which rival imperialists contest Yankee domination of the region. But once the imperialist powers have guaranteed their business interests, especially oil, gas and commodities, they don’t hesitate to throw those national bourgeois stooges into the trash if they do not except their role as minor shareholders of the transnationals. Of course, the national bourgeoisies always capitulate to imperialism because, as we have seen, "business is business” and they fear much more the revolutionary struggle of the workers and peasants who threaten to take their property and their interests, than the discipline imposed by the transnationals.

What happened in the Balkans is a clear example of this. During the '90s, imperialism used Milosevic and the new Serbian bourgeoisie to attack Bosnia and Kosovo. Once this "dirty work" was done, imperialism then bombed Serbia to put an end to its dreams of a "Greater Serbia". This was also done with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He was used to attack the Iranian revolution and crush the masses, and then he was turned into a "devil" so that Ango-US imperialism could invade and occupy Iraq. Today we see this again in the case of the Kurdish bourgeoisie in northern Iraq who collaborate with the Yankees in the occupation, only to be paid for their services by Turkey sending 10,000 soldiers to kill Kurd nationalists.

The truth is that only two classes play a decisive and fundamental role in production in the oppressed nations, and that will define in the coming period, the fate of Latin America. They are the working class on the one hand, and imperialism of another. The outcome of this confrontation depends on the role of the oppressed middle classes of the city and countryside of the oppressed Latin American nations. The treacherous leaders subject the working class to the bourgeoisie, tie its hands to prevent it from leading all the exploited classes in the oppressed nations. The crisis of our continent and the whole of humanity is reduced then to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the world proletariat.

17. The architect and driving force of this policy to force the Colombian resistance to surrender and disarm has been the Cuban restorationist bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has already handed over a huge part of the Cuban economy to the multinationals, and has launched – like the Chinese bureaucracy did with its "red entrepreneurs" –the restoration of capitalism. In preparation for this the majority of the Cuban working class works for wages of 13 dollars, while the bureaucracy with its joint venture hotels, tourism, nickel or oil businesses, lives in that sector of the economy where 1 peso is convertible to US$1. Thus is the bureaucracy preparing to defeat the only degenerate workers state in Latin American revolution, complete the restoration of capitalism, and transform itself into a new national bourgeoisie.

This situation became inevitable since the beginning of '90s when the fall of the USSR forced Cuba to enter a so-called "special period" in which the degenerate workers state opened up to imperialist investment under the pretext of ensuring the survival of "socialism in one island-nation". The already degenerate foundations of the workers state began to decompose, the gap grew between rich and poor, the bureaucracy became more isolated from the impoverished masses, and entered more and more joint ventures with imperialist companies.

This process of extreme degeneration and decomposition could not be avoided in an isolated degenerate workers state led by a bureaucracy that is the enemy of the world revolution and whose only way of surving is to transform itself into a new bourgeoisie. As the Cuban bureaucracy became restorationist, it benefitted from the increased wealth generated by the joint ventures with the transnational corporations at the expense of the Cuban working class.
The results are obvious: the longstanding command of Fidel Castro passing to his brother Raul, is not only a change in continuity of the bureaucracy, but also means that the contradiction between the conquests of the revolution on the one hand, and the bureaucracy tied to the global economy, imperialism and its business interests in Cuba, on the other, is reaching the point where it is irreconcilable with the existence of a degenerate workers' state.

When students and state functionaries, or friends of the regime like Julio Rodriguez say "we want to go to the hotels," what they are saying is that they want to enter the $US sector as consumers, since the hotel chains installed in Cuba have shops which sell all the brands of clothing, electronics, jewelry, etc.. on the world market, but are only accessible to the bureaucracy and the new middle classes linked to the rich imperialist investments on the island.

The betrayal by the bureaucracy as agent of capitalist restoration, and as the counter-revolutionary agent that has strangled the socialist revolution in Latin America and the world, is living proof of the prediction Trotsky made at the founding of the Fourth International, either the political revolution would succeed, or the bureaucracy associated with global capitalism, would eventually becoming a new possessing class, imposing a treacherous restorationist regime. The bureaucracy, direct agent of restoration, is destroying the achievements of the Cuban revolution and the consciousness of the Cuban masses, because for the vast majority of the working class, "socialism" is a wage of the 13 pesos a month underdeveloped economy, rationing, lack of housing, transportation and enormous hardship everyday, while capitalism is the luxury and consumption of the hotels. So, following in the footsteps of Deng Xiao Ping, Gorbachev and the East German Honnecker, the Castro bureaucracy prepares the conditions for a counterrevolutionary coup, and if it succeeds in this objective it will be one of the biggest defeats for our class.

The bureaucracy has tied its future to its joint ventures with the transnationals which is why it must strangle the revolution in Latin America and globally. The Castro brothers, behind their allies Ortega and Chavez, insist that the leaders of the FARC cannot create a new Cuba or Nicaragua in Latin America. Thus it is the restorationist bureaucracy of Castro that is behind the leadership of the "Boliviarian" bourgeoisie in suppressing the revolution on the continent. Its has sealed its fate by doing business with the national bourgeoisies and French and Spanish imperialism, and is eagerly awaiting Obama, Clinton or McCain to lift the embargo and allow them to become the business partners of Yankee imperialist investors.

18. It is the same method of Gorbachev and the Stalinist bureaucracy, which in the former USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe in the '80s became the associates of Citibank, and were transformed from a parasitic caste into a new bourgeoisie by handing over the degenerate workers states to global capitalism.Thus Jaruzelsky repressed the Polish working class and its revolutionary struggle in the '80s, allowing Thatcher to defeat the 84-85 general strike of the British miners. Like its defeat of the revolution in Central America yesterday, today the Castro bureaucracy desperately needs to prevent another Cuba in Latin America. It must suppress any victorious workers and socialist revolution on the continent as a "certificate of good conduct" that Obama and Clinton require to lift the embargo, so that they, and not the bourgeois expatriates in Miami, will get the franchise to control capitalist restoration on the island. Capitalist restoration cannot be peaceful and this will mean the crushing of the resistance of the working class and Cuban masses Cuban by means of civil war.

This policy of "peace" is the Bolivarian policy of the "peace" of cemeteries where they bury forever the anti-imperialist struggle of the workers' and the socialist revolution.
This is the truth. These are the irrefutable facts. But it remains to be seen whether they can continue to expropriate, contain and divert the Latin American revolution, and continue to deceive and subordinate the US working class to the Democratic Party, because the proletariat on the continent has not been historically defeated, and their forces remain intact.
Therefore, it is a task of the working class in Latin America, all oppressed people, and all internationalist currents in America and the world, to fight the treacherous class collaborationist politics of the "Bolivarian revolution" that tries to enforce the peace for the bourgeoisie, by hunger, looting, and ferocious atttacks against workers and oppressed people.

But we cannot fight for the socialist revolution on the American continent, if we do not settle accounts with the counterrevolutionary Castroist bureaucracy. This struggle is inseparable from the struggle for the defense of the Cuban revolution.

  • Stand with the Cuban workers and peasants!
  • Out with the corrupt newly rich Castro bureaucracy Castro!
  • Down with social inequality and low wages, medals, decorations and privileges!
  • Down with joint ventures!
  • A single currency, a single economy: immediate renationalization of oil, nickel, tourism and other joint ventures, under workers control!
  • For the formation of committees of workers and Cuban soldiers to put their heroic revolution in the service of socialist revolution in Latin America!

In the victorious Latin American revolution, the Cuban workers and peasants will find the solution to the hardships imposed by the Castro bureaucracy and its politics of "socialism in one country". What they need to eat and live in dignity is not the luxury hotels of the bureaucracy and transnationals in Havana. Rather, it is and will be in the victory of the socialist revolution on the continent: in Argentina –where Fidel Castro sold out the revolution that began in 2001, pledging support for Kirchner –that the Cuban masses will get meat, wheat and cheap bread; from the industries of Mexico and Brazil, they will get the consumer goods in short supply on the island, and when the Central American and Mexican revolution leaps over the infamous Rio Grande wall, to reach the millions of superexploited Latin American workers in the United States, a real bond of flesh and blood will be forged with the largest battalion of the proletariat in the region: the US working class, which can strike at the heart of the imperialist beast.

However, if the imperialist plan for "peace" wins with the suppression of the struggle of the masses by the "Bolivarian revolution", these regimes will be replaced by ones such as that of Uribe in Colombia, the Media Luna fascists in Bolivia, a Mexico militarized by Calderon, and Venezuela open to new coups by Yankee imperialism, no doubt by the "courageous" bourgeoisie who hid in the churches after the masses came down from the hills to rescue Chavez in 2002 and defeat the coup attempt. And in Cuba, the Castro restorationist bureaucracy will be recycled as new millionaires like Yeltsin and the “red entrepreneurs” of the USSR and China, in partnership with Citibank and the transnationals, and the Miami gusano expatriots.

Breaking with the bourgeoisie is the only way to untie the hands of the working class in Latin America and return to the anti-imperialist struggle and the workers' and socialist revolution

19.
The International Trotskyists of the FLT call on all organizations who speak in the name of the working class and the struggle against imperialism in the Americas, to break with the bourgeoisie. Enough of the subordination of the workers' organizations of the continent to the national bourgeoisie, "Boliviarian" or not, all partners under the Yankee, French, Spanish and others imperialists who destroy Latin America!


There can be no stopping a murderer like Uribe, gendarme of the Yankees, if the working class and the exploited do not defeat the treacherous "peace" plan for Colombia of Chavez, Correa and other "Bolivarians" which disarms the fighting workers and poor peasants of Colombia before Yankee imperialism and their colonial client regimes in the OAS, the Rio Treaty and the Rio Group.

There is no time to lose: if their evil plan succeeds – either by demoralising and bribing the Colombian resistance, or by military massacres –it will not only be a huge defeat for the working class and poor peasants of Colombia who will see their already terrible suffering multiplied a thousand fold, but for the entire proletariat and exploited people of the continent. A defeat of the masses will not only strengthen the Colombian regime of Uribe, but all the bourgeois regimes and governments throughout the region, and without a doubt, will give a huge boost to completing the capitalist restoration in Cuba.

20. Far from calling the working class of the continent to break with the bourgeoisie, the fake Trotskyists of every brand, following the orders of the Castro bureaucracy and Celia Hart Santamaria, have fallen at the feet of Chavez, Correa and other "Bolivarians", and are now in the trench against the worker and peasant resistance to Uribe and the Colombian armed forces.

The fake Trotskyists, as in the case of PSTU of Brazil, organize conferences such as the "Latin American and Caribbean Congress of Workers" next July convened by CONLUTAS together with the bureaucracy of the COB class collaborators in Bolivia, to support the government of Morales. This congress says nothing about the burning issue of Cuba because the convenors take the "Bolivarian" side against the FARC. They will not be calling the working class to break with the Bolivian government and Morales and return to the path of October 2003 and May-June 2005. Nor will they call the working class to confront the Brazilian Totalfina and Petrobras that plunder gas from Bolivia.

No, they seek to strangle the Left wing of the proletariat in Brazil and Bolivia, as well as in all Latin America. With the Bolivian revolution strangled by the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie, Totalfina, Petrobras and Repsol, with the new Constitution of Morales under their arm, they are preparing to legitimize their plunder with the Chilean and Argentine working class under Bachelet and Kirchner respectively. With their plans "Colombia" and their share of business, the purpose of the "Latin American Conference" in July will be to dig the last shovel of earth from the grave of the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle of the masses of Latin America.

Take back the theory and program of the Fourth International and its founder Leon Trotsky 1938, from the hands of the fakes Trotskyists who usurped the clean flag and legacy of the IV International to serve Stalinism and with the conniving political manipulations of the reformist class collaborators!

We of the FLT oppose this policy by calling upon all labor organizations of the continent to break with the bourgeoisie and to place all their forces, firstly, in support of the mass workers and peasants resistance in Colombia. We must raise the demand for a unite workers struggle throughout the continent:

  • Down with the OAS, the Rio Treaty and the Rio Group!
  • Down with the "peace" plan of unilateral disarmament and surrender of the Colombian resistance!
  • Out with Yankee imperialism from Latin America, killer of our brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan, jailer and torturer of the anti-imperialist fighters in Guantanamo, and supporter of the Zionist state of Israel which is massacring the Palestinian people!
  • Out with Totalfina and butchers of French imperialism, Repsol, British Petroleum and other imperialist powers and transnational plunderers from Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and all Latin America!
  • Out with the British pirates of the Malvinas!
  • Out with the occupation troops of Bachelet, Lula, Kirchner and Morales, "gurkas" in the service of Yankee imperialism in Haiti!
  • Down with the FTAA, NAFTA, CAFTA, Mercosur and all the other FTAs of the multinationals and the native bourgeoisies, plunderers of our nations and exploiters of our workers!
  • In defense of Cuba, for the defeat of Castro restorationist bureaucracy, allies of the imperialist transnationals which prepares to complete the restoration and their recycling as a new bourgeoisie!
  • For a government of the councils of workers, peasants and soldiers to put the Cuban revolution in the service of the world revolution!
  • All support of the trade unions in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and throughout Latin America to the Colombian resistance of the masses!
  • Out with the Uribe and his semi-fascist regime!
  • Dissolution and disarmament of the officer caste in the terrorist Colombian army, and its parallel fascist army of mercenaries and paramilitary!
  • For the military crushing of the paramilitaries!
  • For the legitimate right to self-defense of the masses!
  • No plan to force the "surrender" of the Colombian resistance!

We must call on the militants of the FARC and the resistance to reject the “surrender” plan and break with the reformist politics of its leaders who collaborate with the allegedly "democratic" imperialists such as Sarkozy and the "Boliviarian" bourgeoisie which use them as cannon fodder in their business disputes.

We must break all ties to the bourgeoisie and build workers and peasants committees with their own self-defense organizations, which are coordinated and centralised with the organisations of resistance fighters against Uribe´s semi-fascist regime. The unity of the working class of the cities with poor peasants, through these workers and peasants committees, must be based on a program which demands the immediate break with imperialism and expropriation of all landowners and redistribution of land across Colombia in the first place, in the territories controlled by the FARC; the expropriation of monopolies, bankers and major employers, and renationalization under workers control all the privatized companies, work and living wages for the entire working class, etc.

Only then will the Colombian masses centralize their struggle and prepare a counter-offensive against Uribe’s government and semi-fascist regime, and pave the way for the revolutionary government of workers and peasants masses, armed and self-organised, that breaks with imperialism, expropriates the landowners and distributes land the peasants.

21. We of the FLT, also call on the poor workers and peasants of Bolivia, the heroic proletariat of El Alto, the miners and manufacturing workers, to defeat the collaborationist leadership of the COB, to break the unions of the workers and poor peasants with the class collaborationist government of Morales, and convene a congress of delegates from the COB and other trade unions base. The time has come to prevent the adoption of the "Bolivarian" constitution Morales has put in the hands of the multinational superexploiters of hydrocarbons, mines and the other resources of Bolivia, and that leaves the productive land in the hands of landowners, agricultural bourgeoisie and farmers rich.

This is the only way to resume the struggle for land for poor farmers, against the high cost of living and for the sliding scale of wages and hours of work, drive out the transnationals with a true nationalization of hydrocarbons and mines through expropriation without payment under workers' control, and to set up working-class and peasant militias to defeat the forces of fascism that are rallying. Recover the revolution that has been expropriated, by returning to the streets and barricades resonating with the sound of dynamite, and the slogans “ "Rifle, shrapnel, Bolivia is not silent!", "Out with the transnationals!", "Neither 30 or 50%, nationalization!". This would be the best support that the Bolivian expoited workers and peasants could give to their class brothers and sisters of Colombia, and to the workers and peasants of Cuba who oppose the Castro bureaucracy plan of captalist restoration.

We call upon the organisations of the working class and poor peasants of Ecuador to break with the Correa government that submits to the OAS, allowing the Yankee base to stay in Manta, which starves the people with dollarization and, as he said openly what his defense minister, has been acting in common with the murderer Uribe to prosecute and massacre fighters of the FARC in Ecuadorian territory. Only in this way can they return to the revolutionary road 1997, 2000, and 2005 This is the road to throw out the Yankee base at Manta, and for the and the expropriation without payment under workers' control of all oil imperialists who plunder Ecuador and financing and arming Uribe and his genocidal army! This is the road of the heroic days when the battle cry was "We do not like and do not want to be a colony of North America, we like and want a sovereign, socialist Latin America"!

We call on the working class and the Venezuelan UNT to end all political support for Chavez, his government and the PSUV; immediately to launch a campaign for the withdrawal of troops sent to the border with Colombia; to give full support to the resistance of the Colombian masses; and to convene a national congress of delegates from the bases of UNT and all trade unions, to stop the sale of Venezuelan crude oil to the Yankees that massacre in Iraq. We call on them to organize the struggle for the complete renationalisation PdeVSA, expropriating without pay, and under workers control worker all wells, fields and pipelines, all the concessions of Totalfina, Repsol and other imperialist monopolies; for the expropriation of all landowners, the 31 families and capitalists that control the imperialist banks through the which the "boliburgueses" with its petrodollars are large investors on Wall Street; expropriation of control of Telefonica from King Juan Carlos of Spain; and fight inflation with the sliding scale of hours and wages of work, to end anti-strike laws etc.

Breaking with the bourgeoisie is the only way for the Argentine working class can return to road of 2001 and the cry of “All of them out, every last one”, for the proletariat of Chile to the road to the general strike against the civilian-military regime of NAFTA and the US client regime of Bachelet, shut down by the bureaucracy of the CUT, and the "Red pacos" of the PC and populists; in Mexico to re-open the road to the heroic workers and peasant Commune of Oaxaca; to break the social compact of the bureaucracy of the CUT which underpins Lula in Brazil and break the corset of the reformist policy of P-SOL and the PSTU as the new “left” union bureaucracy in CONLUTAS. Against the scam of the “Bolivarian revolution” that has stolen the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle of the exploited of the continent for the working class and socialist revolution, the only way to end the imperialist yoke on Latin America!

For the Socialist United States of South and Central America!

22
. Break with the "Bolivarians" and all other regimes of the bourgeoisie, whose false promises of "unity of Latin America" means taking sides with one or other imperialist powers and transnationals, and driving the nations of Latin America into catastrophic fratricidal wars.


The liberation of the Latin American nations from imperialism, and the unity of the working class and poor peasants of the continent will never come from the national bourgeoisies, tied by thousands of strings to the business interests of imperialism and their monopolies. The most they can do is to negotiate for their slice of the business with the imperialist masters. As an exploiting class they are terrified of the revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle of the masses, because when they attack the property and interests of imperialism they also attack the property of the national bourgeoisies who are the junior partners of imperialism. Sooner or later the national bourgeoisie will always side with imperialism to crush the masses.

The working class is the only class that has no borders, and has nothing to lose but its chains. It has no interest in common with imperialism. It is therefore the only class capable of uniting and coordinating the exploited and oppressed nations of the continent to make a workers socialist revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie, destroy the bourgeois state, expropriate and the expropriators, ending submission to imperialism. It is the only class that can make a political revolution, defeat the restorationist bureaucracy in Cuba and make it a bastion of the American and world revolution.

Only then can the road to the United Socialist States of South and Central America be opened, and the only true unity of Latin America take place with the working class in power organizing a rational economic plan for the use of technology, natural resources, industry and wealth of all our national to serve the needs of the working class and poor peasants of the subcontinent.

With more force than ever, the words of the Fourth International in 1934 clearly ring out: "South and Central America can only clear its backwardness and slavery by uniting all of its states into a single and powerful federation. But it will not be the backward South American bourgeoisie, a class totally subservient to foreign imperialism,, who perform this task, rather the youthful South American proletariat at the head of the oppressed masses. Therefore, the slogan that should guide the fight against the aggression and of world imperialism and against the bloody domination of the national bourgeoisies is: For the United Soviet States of South and Central America " (Leon Trotsky," War and the Fourth International, 10/07/1934).

It is necessary for the working class of America, France and all the imperialist powers, to stand in the first line of defense of the Colombian masses’ resistance against imperialism, the mass murderer Uribe, and the sham of the "Bolivarian revolution".

23.
There is no doubt that the American and French proletariat are the ones that have the greatest responsibility in stopping the plans for the disarmament, surrender and slaughter of the FARC and the Colombian resistance of the masses because it can strike directly inside the United States and France against the imperialist bourgeoisies who are the respective architects of these sinister plans.


Faced with the blows of the crisis of the capitalist world economy now begun, the imperialist bourgeoisies of the United States, France, Germany and other European powers, have intensified their inter-imperialist rivalries and have launched brutal offensives against the living standards of their own workers through the inflation of the prices of bread, milk and other necessities, greatly increasing the numbers of workers in poverty.

To make them pay the costs of the crisis, to recover the hundreds of billions of dollars that the state banks are using to rescue their monopolies and bankrupt banks, the imperialist bourgeoisie now attack their own working classes in the same way as they attack the Palestinian, Iraqis and Afghans masses, or as they treat workers in the super-exploited maquiladoras of Central America, or as they treat workers enslaved by the transnational corporations in China, in short, as if they are no different to their slaves of the colonies and semi-colonies.

The responsibility for this situation is entirely the fault of the treacherous bureaucratic and reformist leaders of the proletariat. Thus in Latin America and the semi-colonial world, the leaders of the World Social Forum subordinate the working class and the exploited to their respective native bourgeoisies. In the USA and the European powers they tell the workers that these imperialists are supposedly "democratic".

Thus, in 2003, the mobilizations of American, British, French, Spanish workers against the war on Iraq, was diverted into support for the supposedly “democratic” French and German imperialists policy of appealing to the UN against the “ fascist” Bush. In 2004, they subordinated the Spanish working class who rebelled against the war shouting "Your war, our dead" to the social-imperialist government of Zapatero, loyal subject of the Spanish Royal family. They put the US working class at the feet of the Democratic Party, and thus prevented the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle of the masses of the semi-colonial world. These betrayals prevented the coordination of the anti-imperialist struggles that began to develop in the working class of the imperialist powers. That, precisely, was the main task of the treacherous reformist leaders: to fragment the struggle of the proletariat and prevent by all means the internationalist unity of the working class.

To reclaim proletarian internationalism and rebuild the international unity of the working class is a necessary task of the first importance. It can only happen by the defeat of the treacherous reformist leaders of all kinds.

This will be the task first of all of the proletariat of the imperialist countries. In the case of the US, the elections are being used to “legitimize" Yankee imperialism and in the face of the recession the intensified attacks that will be made on the American working class, sacking more workers, and attacking wages and creating conditions which the US proletariat has not experienced since the 1930s.


Therefore, the most urgent task for US workers is to break their ties with Obama, Clinton and the other imperialist butchers of the Democratic Party and their allies the Chavista, Castroist, the fake Trotskyist “Bolivarians”. This is the only way to free themselves to fight the war and for the rights immigrant workers, and to defeat the brutal attack on their living standards launched by the US ruling class.
These demands must be written on the flags of the US working class.

  • Against the subordination o the US working class to the imperialists Obama and Clinton!
  • Pickets and strikes against the war to again paralyse the Pacific ports; workers boycotts of the war machine; take to the streets to fight for the rights of immigrant workers!
  • End the layoffs; no backroom deals handing down wages and pension cuts signed by signed by the treacherous bureaucracy of the ALF-CIO!
  • Make the transnationals pay for their crisis!
  • Unite the fight of the masses of the world against US imperialism!
  • Down with the "Plan Colombia"!
  • Out with Yankee military, “advisers”, the CIA, the DEA, and Mossad from Colombian territory!
  • Expropriate the US oil businesses in Colombia!
  • Support the struggle capitalist restoration in Cuba!


The French imperialist bourgeoisie, led by Sarkozy, has launched an offensive in its dispute with US imperialism for zones of influence, with its monopolies like Totalfina looting gas and oil in Iran, in Chad –where France has sent troops to support their clients the national bourgeoisie –and in North Africa, as well as Bolivia, Venezuela and Latin America, as revealed by the intervention of French imperialism in the "liberation of Ingrid Betancourt." The more the French imperialists succeed in looting and oppressing the colonial and semi-colonial nations, the stronger their position to attack the French working class, which the bureaucratic unions of the PC and with the PS –in open collaboration with the fake Trotskyists – have subjected to social pacts to prevent the further development and deepening of their struggle against the attacks on their historic gains and living standards.

To prevent this, the French proletariat must break the social pacts with those who subordinate them to their own bourgeoisie, and return to the path of struggle, strikes, the rebellion of youth workers of the Cités that rose up shouting "Every night we will make Paris a Baghdad!" to face the government of Sarkozy and the imperialist regime of the V Republic, and raising as a key demand of their struggle to kicking out of the French imperialist troops and their monopoly looters from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America!

  • Down with the cynical plan of "Peace for Colombia" of Sarkozy and the "Bolivarians", which leaves the militants of the FARC and the Colombian resistance exposed to slaughter!
  • For the expropriation of Totalfina and other French monopolies in Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and throughout Latin America!

The Spanish working class must break the damned Moncloa Pact of the traitors of the PSOE and the PC that tied their fate to the interests of the King and the Spanish imperialist bourgeoisie. In Germany and Italy, the working class can fight the class war against the brutal attack on their gains only by breaking with the social pacts imposed by the union bureaucracies and social imperialist parties and facing their own bourgeoisie, first by raising the demands of their class brother and sisters of the colonial and semi-colonial nations.

The working class of the United States, France and other imperialist countries holds the key to the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the world, but first it must break any subservience and subordination to its own imperialist bourgeoisie: it is necessary to be the first to stand in the defence of the Colombian masses’ resistance to imperialism and the murderer Uribe, in the fight against capitalist restoration in Cuba and against imposters of the "Bolivarian revolution"!

These new events in the class struggle worldwide are acid tests that separate reformism and opportunism from the program of international socialist revolution.

  • For an emergency international conference of the forces of principled Trotskyism who have not joined forces with the World Social Forum and reformism!

In the face of the new and convulsive events of the class struggle in the Americas and around the world, the new acid tests strongly vindicate the conclusion made by the Fourth International in 1938: the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat.

Thus, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century saw the fake Trotskyists join forces with reformism and the World Social Forum, assisting the rotten remnants of social democracy and stalinismo to liquidate all vestiges of internationalism in the ranks of the world proletariat. Three proletarian internationals were stolen and destroyed in less than a century. The Second International was destroyed in 1914 by the Social Democrats who went into the enemy camp and led the proletariat into the imperialist carnage of the First World War. The Third International founded by Lenin and Trotsky, was usurped by the Stalinist bureaucracy that first transformed it into an instrument of its counter-revolutionary foreign policy and then before the Second World War dissolved it as the price they paid for admission to League of Nations, the den of thieves that preceded the UN, giving the proletarian internationalism of the world working class a mortal blow. And lastly, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, was taken over by the centrists, opportunists and revisionists who that liquidated it and moved onto the terrain of reform, following in the footsteps of their predecessors in Social Democracy and Stalinism.

In the global situation the masses face a reactionary situation imposed by the treacherous leaders.

The actions of the treacherous reformist leaders, especially the fake Trotskyists that provide a “left” legitimacy, have prevented, for the moment, a decisive response from the exploited world proletariat to the crisis of the capitalist imperialist world economy, thus allowing the bourgeoisie to take the offensive against the masses to make them pay the costs of the crisis, with inflation, high cost of living, and attacks on their historical gains the living standards.

But above all, in the US and Europe social pacts of bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy have subordinated the workers to the Democratic Party and Social Democracy, and prevented, for now, the mobilization of the workers that have the key to defeating the imperialist ruling classes, and freeing the semicolonial nations and the oppressed peoples of the world.

Thus, while the bourgeoisie faces a global economic crisis and collapse of business confidence, their lackeys –the union bureaucracy of all colors, the WSF and the fake Trotskyists – have exceeded themselves in controlling the masses, demoralizing its forces, dividing their struggles, allowing the bourgeois governments the time to strengthen their institutions, and United States to recompose its ruling class to replace the hated Bush and to give some respite to global capitalism.

It is at this critical reactionary time that the fake Trotskyists have allowed the treacherous leaders of the working class to intervene decisively to give the imperialists the time to prepare for the deepening of the global crisis by stepping up their attacks to make the workers pay for this crisis.

Therefore in the world today, two class trenches are clearly opposed: on the one side, the treacherous social democrats and reformists, the Stalinist bureaucracies, and beside them, the fake Trotskyists with their policy of class collaboration, supporting “democratic” and “progressive” imperialist bosses with the fraudulent "Bolivarian revolution", allied to the restorationist bureaucracy of Castro. Under this leadership the rotten crisis-ridden imperialist capitalist system is allowed to have a new lease of life.

On the other side are the working class and exploited masses of the planet that, as in Pakistan, Burma or Georgia responded to the onset of the crisis with food riots that without their treacherous leaders, could have brought down their regimes and governments; in Palestine in Gaza, against the Zionist rampage and Hamas, the masses broke through the wall to enter Egypt and began to make links with the Arab masses; in the United States and Europe there are the youth and organized labor which have refused to shut up under Sarkozy; the heroic and violent strikes, as in Nigeria, seeking the way to the revolution to end the looting and slavery imposed by the bourgeois imperialist domination in the black continent; in Latin America, under the farce of the "Bolivarian revolution" , the masses are challenging exploitation and pillage without limits of the oppressed nations and testing the limits of the popular front regimes.

In this last trench alongside the proletariat and the exploited, a thousand times betrayed and sold out by their leaders, the international Trotskyists of the FLT take their stand.

The global bourgeoisie use the Castro restorationist bureaucracy and the fake Trotskyists to control and contain the vanguard of the world proletariat

Today, imperialism, allied to the national bourgeoisie, and in turn the Castroist restorationist bureaucracy, use the rogue Trotskyists who have destroyed the Fourth International, to control and contain any process of radicalization of the world proletarian vanguard. They saw how the working class and exploited in Chile rose against the military-civc regime and government of Bachelet supported by the Communist Party, to the cry of "Out with the Red Pacos” ! [armed thugs of the CP]. They know that the next uprisings of the exploited will directly confront the regimes of Chavez, Morales, Kirchner, Lula, Correa and all the reformist and Stalinist leaders who currently contain them. All fear that the cry of "The Red Pacos are dangerous" will be echoed in the mouths of the Cuban workers and peasants in Havana, but this time, opposing the capitalist restoration of the Castroist bureaucracy. That is why they rely on the fake Trotskyists to put in place on the "left" a new barrier against the masses, to prevent the new layers of workers from breaking free of the treacherous leadership.

As international Trotskyists the FLT denounces the Castro bureaucracy, Chavez and the World Social Forum, and in particular the fake Trotskyists, who legitimize the destruction of the degenerate Workers state which while in an extreme state of decomposition is yet to complete the process of capitalist restoration. Thus we see, the imposter Celia Hart, supported and legitimized by the fake Trotskyists, falsifying Trotsky to justify the counter-revolutionary policy of Castroism in Latin America and Cuba which supports the bourgeois government of Chavez, in the same way that the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR falsified Lenin to provide a “left” cover for its policy of betrayal of the world revolution and the October revolution.

We denounce those that bloc with Celia Hart, the Mandelites, led by the French CSF, and the Lambertistas, which have become social-imperialist parties, serving the interests of French imperialism in the world, a true political auxiliary of the deadly "Foreign Legion". We already saw these currents support Chirac against Le Pen; saw its "MEPs' travel to Palestine to promote the imperialist "Roadmap "; in Algeria they legitimized the fraudulent elections of the brutal dictatorship of pro-French Bouteflika; in Brazil, they have a member, Rossetto, Minister of Agrarian reform in Lula’s pro-imperialist government, who is responsible for the slaughter of landless peasants at the hands of the landowners armed thugs and the police.

Today, it is preparing to centralize its forces on the continent, at the conference to he held in Toronto (Canada) in May, which will involve the Mandelites along with Celia Hart and the grandson of Trotsky as part of the falsification of the Trotskyism in the service of the restoration of capitalism in Cuba and the interests of French imperialists in the Western Hemisphere.
It is necessary to expose before the eyes of the vanguard of the world working class, how the fake Trotskyists are blocking with the Chavistas and Castroists to play a pivotal role in subordinating the working class to the US imperialist Democratic Party of Clinton and Obama. The FLT warns the most advanced layers of youth and workers, especially the black movement, they are facing a huge trap. If Obama is elected as the first black President of the US, he will be the one to lead a new offensive by Yankee imperialism to plunder the wealth of mother Africa and the new enslavement of workers of color, both in the African nations and inside the US.

In imperialist Italy, the fake Trotskyists, led by the Mandelites, supported the Communist Rifondazzione government of Prodi, which together with the French imperialism, lead the UN troops occupying southern Lebanon – with the blessing of Hezbollah -- to control the Palestinian masses that in 2006 defeated the genocidal Zionist army. Having supported Prodi and joined his government, the Mandelites have now left the RC and formed the so-called "Critical Left", to form a new barrier to contain and control any leftward break by elements of the Italian working class under the new attacks of their imperialist bourgeoisie. The Mandelites join with the PC-Rol, Italian section of LIT, which has shamelessly made campaigns for "humanitarian aid" for the Palestinian people, begging the imperialist governments of Europe, all supporters of the Zionist state of Israel, to lift the blockade on Gaza.

The internationalists of the FLT want to fire up the world vanguard of the proletariat against the killings of the FARC in Ecuador, against the the entire treacherous left wing –Celia Hart, Mandelites, P-SOL, the MST of Argentina, Socialist Tide in the PSUV of Chavez, etc –which together have stolen the name of Trotsky and the "Fourth International", using it as a mat when the kneel before Chavez, Correa and Fidel Castro.

We want to fire people up against those like the ITU-CI or LIT-CI, which give "critical" support to bourgeois governments such as Chavez, to influence "the progress of the twenty-first century socialism." Against all of them, we reaffirm the principles of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International, that never, under any circumstances, can we give the slightest political support – even "critical" – to any bourgeois government, because in doing so, in that act alone, we step back from the struggle for its overthrow, i.e. we renounce the struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In the FLT we will not tire in our fight to expose before the eyes of the world vanguard of the proletariat, any fraction of the fake Trotskyists – Morenists, Altamirists, Loristas –that have turned into the servants, each in their own country, of their own bourgeois regimes, diverting the proletariat of these countries into a parliamentary campaign to put pressure on governments and regimes of the employers to pass reforms to make concessions and handouts to the workers.
Thus, in Bolivia, the POR Lora supports the collaborationist leadership of the COB that subordinated the working class subordinated to the class collaborationist government of Morales. While the government has written a new Constitution that protects the oil property of the transnationals, which does not give land to the peasants, nor bread to the workers, while the fascist bourgeoisie of the Media Luna has gained strength and rallied its forces. Thus while the hardship of the masses has got worse with the rising cost of living, the POR tells the working class is that the solution is ... a struggles for higher wages!

Thus, in Argentina, the fake Trotskyists of all colors, falling in behind the Stalinist PCR, are responsible for aborting the masses fights against the social pact of early 2007 between the employers, Kirchner and the union bureaucracy acting for the workers. This union bureaucracy is a new "leftist" servant of the Minister of Labour responsible for selling out the hard fights such as the strike by the fish workers in Mar del Plata, the Casino workers etc.., and to prevent the coordination and regrouping of the vanguard workers, allowing them to be isolated and defeated sector by sector by the concentrated forces of the employers, the government and the thugs and the gunmen of union bureaucracy. Meanwhile, they still maintain a cynical silence and refuse to fight for the freedom of the fighters of Las Heras and the piquetero leader Villalba, political prisoners kept hostage by the social pact between Kirchner, monopolies, the employers and the union bureaucracy.

Thus, they made it possible for Kirchner to become a new Menem, strengthening the social pact regime in which the union bureaucracy imposes new starvation wages for 2008. Today Kirchner prepares to "refound" of PJ to restore the party regime that was swept away by the masses in the revolution of 2001 to the cry of "Everyone out, not one left" which will not require the collaboration of the fake Trotskyists to control the left wing of the working class, and who will be thrown away like so many squeezed lemons.

The Venezuelan fake Trotskyists are also lemons to be squeezed and thrown away by Chavez and the bourgeoisie. For example, take the dismissal by Chavez of Orlando Chirino, leader of the UNT. Chirino and his current refused to enter the PSUV and called for a NO vote in the constitutional referendum, and then Chavez sacks him… Yes but after Chirino, along with the rest of the leadership of the UNT, had fought for years to campaign for "10 million votes for Chavez" to ensure his re-election as president.

In Brazil, by contrast, the fake Trotskyists are lemons which still have some juice left useful to the bourgeois regime. The P-SOL (aligned internationally with Celia Hart and the Mandelites) is standing for elections, and sent its deputies to kneel before Correa, the president of Ecuador bourgeois. The PSTU still plays the role of guaranteeing the subordination of the left wing of the proletariat, both in Brazil and Bolivia, where Petrobras, the partner of the French Totalfina has its main business: this is the sole purpose of the Congress of Latin American workers next July together with the class collaborators of the COB of Bolivia, as we discussed above.

The internationalists of the FLT denounce and reaffirm, then, that the fake Trotskyists of all brands – Mandelites and supporters of the "new left", Morenoites, Altamiristas, Loristas etc –are all Pabloites, destroyers of the Fourth International who became the devoted followers of Mao, Tito, Fidel Castro and various Stalinists, and who liquidated Trotskyism by their "sui generis entrism" in the communist parties. We denounce the fact that all of them have become neo-Pabloites, adopting the class collaborationist program and strategy of the Stalinist "revolution by stages", and crossing over definitively onto the terrain of reformism.

  • For a new Zimmerwald and Kienthal of the twenty-first century, the path to refound the world party of socialist revolution on the basis of the program and the legacy of the Fourth International founded in 1938

The proletariat and the toilers of America and the world must defeat the reformist Left Trotskyists. They have become the "left-wing" of the World Social Forum and are preparing new defeats and setbacks such as joining with the Castroite imposter Celia Hart to legitimate the completion of the capitalist restoration in Cuba, and providing a left cover of the WSF to subordinate the working class to the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie and the "democratic" imperialists. Therefore, we are devoting all the forces of the internationalists of the FLT to the fight to break the world proletarian vanguard from this "left-wing" of the World Social Forum.

With the treacherous leaders at their head, the current world situation is reactionary and unfavorable for the masses. But under the conditions of capitalist crisis and decay in its imperialist era, there is no room for concessions, and the reformists are increasingly unmasked for what they are: agents of the bourgeoisie.

Therefore, the faster the vanguard of the proletariat can regroup its international forces, the faster we can get rid of the current leaders of the masses and build a campaign to launch a counter-offensive of the masses to overturn the balance of class power in favor of the working class worldwide.

We face enormous changes in the current world situation. If the proletarian revolution does not prevent it, in the immediate future we can expect a rapid increase in the trade wars and inter-imperialist disputes breaking out in the heat of the global economic crisis. This will not be as the reformists promise, a golden age of world capitalist development, but one of inter-imperialist war.

Already the imperialist bourgeoisies begin to prepare that scenario: "An alarming report prepared by the Minister ofEuropean Affairs, the Spaniard Javier Solana, warns, among other risks, of mass migration, droughts, famines, cut to energy supplies, and war for control of the territories with resources " (emphasis added). Clarin 14/03/08.

Inter-imperialist wars are not yet here. Whether they come or not will be decided by the struggle of the working class worldwide, and by the struggle to build the international revolutionary leadership that the world proletariat deserves, capable of spearheading the fight to remove the treacherous leaders of the masses who lead the workers struggles to surrender and defeat.

The capitalist imperialist powers have already conquered the world economy, including the former degenerate workers states, and can only now fight among themselves to re-divide its territories. As the world crisis develops, the imperialists take their profits out of the mouths of the workers. The capitalist mode of production based on the contradiction between social production and its appropriation as private profits by a handful of parasites, cannot meet the most basic needs of mankind. For example, today, the big multinationals and finance capital which control raw materials and commodities are making new investments in biotechnology and bio-fuel production. The result is to drive up the price of commodities like corn, increasing the cost of living and poverty of the masses, when there is sufficient resources and technology to feed the entire planet.

The capitalist system survives not because of its inner strength, but only because of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat.

The Transitional Program of the Fourth International says that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat. This means that only the proletariat can save mankind from barbarism by rising up to overthrow the treacherous leaders who must betray and defeat their struggles. But this requires a new revolutionary leadership.

Faced with this, the Trotskyist Internationalists of the FLT call for the convening of an emergency international conference where the acid tests of the Cuban, Colombian and Bolivian situations can decide who are the reformists and who are the revolutionaries, and so identify and regroup the principled Trotskyists that have not passed over to the camp of reformism.

The final bankruptcy of fake Trotskyism; the onset of the crisis of the capitalist imperialist world economy which unleashes convulsive and critical developments in the global class struggle; the imminent danger of capitalist restoration in Cuba etc; proves that the world proletariat needs a new Zimmerwald and Kienthal of the 21st century to unite the revolutionary internationalists to lead the struggle to overthrow the treacherous reformist leaders and take the road to rebuild the World Party of Socialist Revolution based on the program and the legacy of the Fourth International Founding Congress in 1938. There is no time to lose!

March 14, 2008

INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIAT FOR COORDINATION AND ACTION
INTERNATIONAL LENINIST TROTSKYIST FRACTION