Socialist Workers Party: US hands off Venezuela!

Thousands of workers rally in Caracas, Venezuela, May 17 in support of July 30 vote to elect delegates to national constituent assembly called by President Nicolás Maduro.

The following statement was released July 19 by Margaret Trowe, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Albany.

The Socialist Workers Party urges working people across the United States and around the world to stand with their fellow toilers in Venezuela, speaking out against Washington’s threats and attacks on Venezuelan sovereignty.

The U.S. propertied rulers, and the Venezuelan opposition forces they back, see the deep economic crisis battering Venezuela’s workers and farmers as an opportunity to bring down the government of President Nicolás Maduro there and install a regime more subservient to the interests of Washington and Venezuela’s employing class.

President Donald Trump has threatened to “take strong and swift economic actions” against the Venezuelan people if the government doesn’t cancel a scheduled July 30 election for delegates to a Constituent Assembly it says it needs to stabilize the country after three months of increasingly violent anti-government demonstrations organized by opposition forces. These same groups now threaten to set up a parallel government of so-called “national unity.”

The Maduro government, like the Bolivarian government of Hugo Chávez before it, has earned the undying hatred of the U.S. and Venezuelan capitalist rulers because it has sought to manage the capitalist market to use oil profits to fund social programs popular with most Venezuelan workers and farmers. It collaborates with revolutionary Cuba, sending much-needed oil at reduced prices, speaking out against Washington’s interference in Latin America and the Caribbean, and welcoming thousands of Cuban volunteer doctors, health workers and teachers who bring medical care and literacy to working people throughout the country.

The working class of Venezuela is the real target of Washington and the pro-imperialist parties seeking to overthrow the Maduro government. They rightly fear the working class as the force capable of ending their class rule, as the toilers did in Cuba in 1959.

“Foreign intervention in the Bolivarian and Chavista Republic must stop,” Cuban President Raúl Castro told Cuba’s National Assembly July 14. “We reaffirm our solidarity with the Venezuelan people.”

Working people here and worldwide should follow Cuba’s proletarian internationalist example. The Socialist Workers Party says: U.S. hands off Venezuela! End Washington’s economic sanctions and interference in the internal affairs of the people of Venezuela!

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Washington threatens ‘strong economic action’

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