This so-called movement has various links to the conservative PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party), the PAN (National Action Party), and multiple parapolitical and civil organizations that have ties to other right-wing operations in Latin America. It is nothing more than a power play by a coalition of political actors fighting the ruling MORENA (National Regeneration Movement) party for control of Mexico.

Background

Around the world, the so-called Generation Z protests primarily target corruption, nepotism, and the disdain ruling classes have for the concerns of new generations. The movements define themselves as decentralized and spontaneous, and organizers of the movements are largely unknown. While the movements present the shallow appearance of revolution, protestors are not seeking a fundamental restructuring of economico-political systems. Rather, they demand the reformation of existing liberal economic and governmental structures to better integrate younger generations.

In Morocco, the construction of World Cup stadiums alongside poverty and lack of opportunity is a key flash point. In Nepal, massive protests forced the government out of office and voted for a new president on social media application Discord. In Madagascar, the armed forces joined young protesters in a coup d’etat against President Andry Rajoelina, who fled the country in a French military airplane. Widely unpopular President Dina Boluarte of Peru was also impeached following pressure from protest groups.

By bringing a “better” liberal democracy, “Generation Z” protestors believe they can successfully reckon with at least some of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Little to no mention is made of the exploitation inherent to capitalism, the role of the West in underdeveloping the Global South, nor the hierarchical ideologies that justify oppression and keep wealth and power flowing to the top.

Mexico

Circumstances in Mexico differ from those in other other countries. The ruling MORENA regime enjoys consistent popularity, while the political opposition (in the form of an alliance between the PRI and the PAN) is disjointed and hopelessly out of touch with the material reality of Mexico. 

The enormous failures of previous Mexican federal administrations have allowed MORENA to position itself as a muscular, active political “movement”. MORENA sells itself as a corrective to the towering excesses of those before, a party in tune with the masses, and a trustworthy guide for the future. Through “common sense” reforms, infrastructure projects, and a “tough but fair” approach to dealing with its mercurial counterparts north of the border — MORENA has (much like the Zohran Mamdani mayoral administration) wrapped its liberalism in a modern packaging appropriate for the 21st century. 

While many of the projects undertaken by MORENA make for good headlines and better talking points, their ultimate goal is to allow MORENA not only to continue the neoliberal robbery and murder of their predecessors, but also to expand it. Community leaders and citizen organizers are dying, casualties of the relentless advance of the big bourgeois and their extracting armies.  

The relations of production have not changed at all. They have remained firmly capitalist, and firmly exploitative. Indigenous communities throughout the country continue to suffer violence at the hands of paramilitary groups acting at the behest of government officials. Even the “regenerative” nature of MORENA is a lie; many MORENA politicians used to be part of other parties, switching affiliation to take advantage of the political opportunity provided by MORENA, rather than out of any desire to “transform” Mexico into something better.

The difference between MORENA and its opposition is that MORENA has a political awareness and aptitude the PRI and PAN never will. So the PRI and the PAN have begun looking for alternatives outside the liberal political establishment. Most support for the opposition comes from extremely online members of the upper-class who view the MORENA political project as simple populism, instead of the repackaged neoliberalism it really is. Many in anti-MORENA circles view the strength of imperial United States hegemony (political and cultural) extremely favorably – both the yardstick by which the failures of MORENA are measured and the ideal to which Mexico should aspire.

The online “Generation Z movement” in Mexico started in earnest in late October. Following the assassination of Uruapán mayor Carlos Manzo, anti-MORENA protest content inundated Mexican social media, demanding a recall of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and, in some cases, a coup d’etat against the entire government. A Discord server was created and photos of the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger (from the Japanese anime One Piece) flooded social media. Protests convened, and opposition politicians rushed to declare their support for the “mass movement,” hoping to regain some of the political relevancy they had squandered through rampant nepotism and endless corruption.

The Right-Wing Connection

The MORENA government has claimed the protests are funded by both domestic and foreign political actors attempting to destabilize the MORENA political project. President Sheinbaum has linked foreign interest groups like the Atlas Network, as well as local organizations like Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción to the protests. Government-affiliated news outlet Infodemia published a report estimating that MXN $90 million (USD $5 million) has been spent on online disinformation campaigns.

News outlet Milenio has reported that 8 million profiles, or over half of the online presence of the “Generation Z” protests, are automated accounts. The magazine traced many accounts to bot farms located in Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. Some of the accounts were previously used to promote Venezuelan far-right politician Maria Corina Machado.

Independent journalist AYAX has documented how some of the first accounts to spread information about the protests were previously linked to other right-wing political initiatives, like opposition to reform of the Mexican federal election reform agency. Metadata from a supposed manifesto made in Canva revealed the name “monetiq Agencia”, a PR firm registered in Zapopán, Jalisco to an address linked to former PRI politician José Alfredo Femat Flores.

Despite the massive effort put into the social media campaign, the results have been chaotic, disjointed, and sometimes downright bizarre. One TikTok account posted an AI-generated interview of a young woman accusing the liberal MORENA government of being a dictatorship because they raised the tax on soft drinks. Other accounts sought to position Mexican business magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego in a favorable light, contradicting the supposed apolitical nature of the protests.

AYAX reported how Discord server members attempted to influence opinion in favor of Salinas Pliego. One user urged their supposed comrades “not to put Salinas [Pliego] on our list of enemies”, claiming Salinas was not interested in money or political power due to his substantial business holdings. Another Instagram account, generacion_z_25, posted a supportive comment on a post decrying the recent attempts to collect back taxes from Salinas Pliego as a politically-motivated MORENA attack. 

Opposition politicians in Mexico were also remarkably quick to express their solidarity with the so-called “movement”. News outlets published a photo of PRI politicians holding the Jolly Roger in the federal legislative chamber.

Mayor of the Cuauhtemoc borough of Mexico City, (and former campaign staffer for former PRI president Enrique Peña Nieto) Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, has also proclaimed her support for the movement, saying that “no one can silence a generation awakened.” Even former PAN president Vicente Fox posted a video urging people to join the November 15 march.

Result

On November 8, a protest was scheduled in Mexico City. Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main avenues of Mexico City, was partially closed to vehicular traffic. Despite the enormous social media campaign, only a handful of protesters arrived. Mexico City police officially announced a total of 300 participants, while another news outlet reported attendance of only 150 protesters — even fewer than the 200 Mexico City municipal police deployed to prevent any civic unrest.

November 15 saw an estimated 17,000 protestors arrive to the Zocalo in the center of Mexico City. Although the march started peacefully, hooded and masked protestors soon attacked police directly. Police responded with tear gas and beatings. A small number of protestors broke through iron barriers and the police line, spraying judeophobic and breaking windows in the Palacio Nacional, where President Sheinbaum has an apartment. 

Despite the massive social media campaign, various puff pieces in Mexican mainstream media and the push from the PRI, the PAN, and interests close to Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the protest was a failure. By 5 o’clock most of the protestors had left the Zocalo. The decidedly older makeup of a protest calling itself “Generation Z” was met with ridicule and derision. 

Broader Context

The attempt to spark a protest comes against a backdrop of changing geopolitical realities. As United States global hegemony declines, the U.S. government has employed sanctions, unilateral airstrikes, and proxy wars (justified with either “anti-terror” or “anti-narcotics” vocabulary) against other countries in an attempt to maintain its grip on a world that is rapidly slipping out of its control.

While many governments are looking forward to a post-U.S. reality, other political factions see an opportunity. Venezuelan opposition has expressed support for U.S. intervention, and President of Ecuador Daniel Noboa hasannounced his support for the U.S. military reopening bases on Ecuadoran soil. The Milei administration accepted USD $20 billion of relief from the United States government to offset economic disaster resulting from the implementation of neoliberal economic policies.

At a time when unified anti-capitalist resistance is more important than ever, the “Generation Z” movement in Mexico has markedly avoided integration with other traditions of struggle. No civil society organizations or militant anticapitalist groups have said anything about the planned protests, while “Generation Z” movement-associated social media accounts explicitly deny any cooperation or solidarity with other causes. Some posts even went as far as saying Palestinian flags are unwelcome at the protests. The teachers’ union (CNTE) — currently in the midst of its own national protests against proposed MORENA reforms — announced its intention to temporarily vacate protest positions – an express refusal to participate in the “Generation Z” protests. 

Conclusion

A movement without solid political ideology and solidarity among a broad sector of society is predestined to fail. From this vantage point of futility, the might of the United States seems welcome – law and order, opportunity and prosperity for the “ungovernable” Third World.

While the slogan of “no political parties” appeals to anti-hegemonic tendencies that have always been present in Mexico (predating even the Spanish colonial presence), the movement lacks anything approaching a political platform. Disguised as a vague, petty bourgeois “anarchism”, the “Generation Z” movement is only a movement of nihilism. It is not hope, it is the death of hope, and in this way, the protests do serve a purpose for MORENA itself. By taking swift action against the protests, MORENA is able to hold up the silliness of the opposition for all to see. This has allowed MORENA to shore up its own political position, both by discouraging potential revolutionary energy and by distracting from the war it is waging throughout Mexico.

For Mexico is a country at war — a war between the capitalists and everyone else. Both the imperial and national big bourgeoisie extract enormous superprofits,  rivers of blood and the tears of those mourning the loss of loved ones continue to soak the land. The MORENA political project is an attempt to institute  Lazaro Cardenas-esque political hegemony through centralization of power at the federal level within existing liberal governmental structures (and a reformation of those same structures on an as-needed basis). Despite the self-applied moniker of the “Fourth Transformation”, MORENA is just a new hat for the same old liberalism that has always ruled Mexico. 

The voices of the dead cry out for justice, and the living bear the responsibility to see clearly.  Neither the MORENA reformist project nor the inorganic, capitalist-funded right wing “social movement” will provide justice. The “Fourth Transformation” is nothing more than an attempt to paste a liberal veneer over the horrors of capitalism, while the “Generation Z” protests are a simple power play by politicians incapable of even playing the reformist role. We must not be fooled by superficial rhetoric, misleading statistics, or the performative rage of politicians in the opposition. It is imperative that quantitative capitalist political adjustment is not confused for qualitative, fundamental change. Neither reform nor right-wing anger is revolution.

In the weeks leading up to the confrontation, Venezuela armed its entire working class, distributing guns and calling up its militias to repel a threatened US invasion. On January 3, US war planes bombed the capital of Caracas. Shortly thereafter, clown-president Trump announced on his personal social media app that President Maduro and his wife were kidnapped and removed from the country.

This flagrant violation of international law comes just days after US vassal-state, israel, announced its diplomatic recognition of a breakaway region of the Republic of Somalia as “Somaliland,” the only country to do so since its split from Somalia in 1991. This has been trumpeted in imperial mouthpieces like The Telegraph, applauding genocidaire Netanyahu for a “tactical masterstroke” and likening this breach of international law to a “powerful riposte to the West’s recognition of Palestine.”

This is, of course, the way the US empire and its crony-states have always  handled themselves on the world stage: the bullies of the international community, using bombs and terror to impose their will on the peripheral countries and ensure their continued compliance with the “international order” — or, in other words, with the interests of American capital.

In the days following the US invasion of Caracas, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was sworn into office by Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice as acting-president. Trump and his cronies have already begun to lick their chops and demand the re-entry of American capital into Venezuela to seize the country’s oil-wealth, but the Bolivarian Revolution is not beaten yet. The colectivos and workers’ militias continue to patrol the streets and seize pro-American agents on the ground. Colombia’s ELN has pledged to resist Yankee imperialism in Venezuela with armed force, and Cuba has promised to do the same.

Trump’s meeting with Yankee oil executives in Washington this week wasn’t promising for the aging imperialist mouthpiece. The big oil firms expressed their disinterest in investing in Venezuelan production because of its “commercial frameworks, legal system, and hydrocarbon laws” in the words of Exxon CEO Darren Woods. However, the oil ghouls did hold out a path for Trump to win their investment in his geopolitical play: breaking the Bolivarian Revolution.

He won’t find it easy. We must make it even harder by organizing real friction here in the imperialist center and physically opposing government policy with material opposition. As always, the predicate to that opposition must be the establishment of real organizations capable of formulating strategy and tactics and analyzing the results. We have half a century of examples of mindless “action” to warn us of the danger of unorganized opposition. Indeed, the Red Clarion just published “A Structureless Movement,” in which solidarity actions taken in an unorganized fashion in the Pacific Northwest were analyzed and the same conclusion drawn. We urge all readers who do not have a robust, Marxist local organization to use this as an opportunity to establish one. Agitate around the Bolivarian Revolution and the possibility of increasing imperialist friction through action; draw in potential members, educate them, and then act.

It falls to us. No one is coming to do the hard work of organizing for us, and we cannot rely on any of the organizations we have inherited. We have an obligation, not only to act, but to organize!

Mexico registered the 7th most cases of diabetes in the world in 2021, per the International Diabetes Foundation. According to the World Health Organization, more than 110,000 people died as a cause of diabetes mellitus in 2021, making it the third-most-common cause of death in the country, behind only COVID-19 and ischaemic heart disease. According to statistics from the World Bank and the WHO, the homicide rate per 100,000 people in Mexico is 28, while 71 out of every 100,000 people die from diabetes mellitus. 

The Beginning

The sun is setting in the town of San Juan Chamula, in the soaring mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. The streets hum with tourists during the day, but now the sidewalks are empty, and stillness hangs in the air. Souvenir sellers are packing up their wares, and a local man wearing a polo shirt and a battered baseball cap steps around them to enter a local store. A few minutes later he exits with a soft drink in his hand, and a gentle hiss and clink echo softly in the avenue. He takes a long drink and lights a cigarette. The point of light at the end of the Pall Mall reflects in the glass bottle, mirroring the fiery orange of the sky overhead. The swooping white script of the bottle’s logo is barely visible in the dying evening light. 

Coca-Cola is ubiquitous in Mexico. Tables, chairs, store signs, billboards, upscale restaurants and street stalls — the red-and-white logo is seemingly everywhere. In a country awash in soft drinks, the state of Chiapas reigns supreme. According to a study by the Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur (CIMSUR), the average per capita consumption of soft drinks in Mexico is 160 liters per year, while the average resident of Chiapas drinks 821 liters per year, or an average of 2.5 liters consumed per person per day, making the southern state the global leader in soft drink consumption.

The iconic soft drink first arrived in Mexico in 1929, but didn’t spread to Chiapas until the mid 1950s. The lush southern state has always been among the poorest in Mexico, and in the middle of the 20th century most of Chiapas’ rural population lived in isolated towns, connected only by dirt tracks or beaten pathways through forests and across ridges and hollows. Before the spread of soft drinks, fruit-infused waters, pozol, and pox were the most popular refreshments in Chiapas. Pozol is a fermented drink made from corn mash, and pox (pronounced “posh”) is a distilled alcohol made from sugarcane and corn. The former is typically taken as a refreshment at meals or while working outside, while the latter is featured in parties, religious ceremonies and other special events.

The Spread

The small church is hazy with smoke. A carpet of herbs is neatly arranged on the floor. Flickering candles ring the small nave. Before the candles stand bottles of Coca-Cola, opened. The faithful pray, take a sip from a bottle, and pass it to their friend. The Coke is chased with a small glass of pox thrown back quickly. 

As The Coca-Cola Company transformed itself from purveyor of a bottled curiosity into a global symbol of United States imperial culture and extractivist power, the government of Mexico saw in it an opportunity to advance its political interests while turning a hefty profit. The ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) had consolidated political power within governmental structures, but attempts to expand into rural zones were hampered by the difficulty of travel and the insular nature of rural towns themselves. Often members of a single family ruled in remote towns, positioning themselves in the role of cacique — the only intermediary between the people and the local landowning class, or the bourgeois government in the state capital. 

The PRI granted Coca-Cola concessions to cacique families, in exchange for political loyalty to the federal Mexican regime. Many cacique families had held power for generations — often long before the solidification of the Mexican federal state under Benito Juárez and its subsequent expansion under Porfirio Díaz and Álvaro Obregón — and were long-accustomed to ruling impoverished populations with domineering cruelty. In addition to owning the local general store and controlling the routes in and out of remote towns, caciques also ran the local pox and pozol trade. These already-existing business concerns provided a ready-made structure for the spread of Coca-Cola throughout the Chiapas countryside. 

Coca-Cola entered Chiapas with a bang. Upon receiving access to a new zone of consumers, Coca-Cola’s marketing and distribution experts went to work expanding the company to every corner of the area. From the most exclusive restaurants in San Cristobal de las Casas and Tuxtla Gutiérrez to the most humble abode, nowhere was safe from the ravages of the soft-drink behemoth. Even religious ceremonies famously incorporate Coca-Cola into their rituals — impulsed largely by Christian missionaries preaching the evils of alcohol consumption to Indigenous communities. The missionaries — displaying the classic mix of arrogance and ignorance typical of moralizing U.S. social adventurism in underdeveloped countries — demonized pox and pozol and encouraged local religious officiants to replace alcohol with Coca-Cola. A local pest replaced by a massive and invasive parasite. 

The company employed outward-facing inclusivity to enter already-existing structures and relationships, monetize them, and reap enormous profit — a strategy more frequently associated with the 2020s than the 1950s. Coca-Cola tailored its trademark blitzkrieg marketing strategy specifically to the local Indigenous population of Chiapas. Billboards featured Indigenous models, stores carried advertisement posters with copy written in Tzotzil, and publicity campaigns featured Coca-Cola being used to celebrate a family gathering, to pay a debt, to say thank you, or to be a good host. Coca-Cola was pasted into existing social situations, creating a social dependency on the brand throughout the state.

As the century progressed, Coca-Cola concessions grew ever more numerous. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the federal government encouraged local power leaders to supplant the white landowning ladino class. Literacy programs and ever more Coca-Cola sponsorships fostered the creation of a local bourgeois class. In addition to peddling soft-drinks, these local bourgeois centralized agricultural production into local monopolies. Capitalist exploitation changed form; while imperious white elites speaking Spanish (castellano, as the language is called by many Chiapanecans) were phased out in favor of familiar faces that spoke the local language, the structure of theft and destruction remained the same. 

The strategy of political alignment was also employed by Coca-Cola’s biggest rival, Pepsi-Cola. The two brands separated along political lines. While the former allied itself with the PRI, the latter integrated with the rival Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) party. In a mafia-esque fashion, both brands pressured concession-holders to distribute their products exclusively, and threatened to withhold shipments to sellers who refused.  

Concession holders distributed the new soft drinks at town parties they sponsored, local sporting events, and schools. They created demand which could then be sated at the local store, also owned by the concession holder or one of their family members. Soft drink prices in remote villages were set much lower in urban locales. Pathways were hacked through the forests by machete to make way for the product. Trucks from the bottling plant often left crates of Coca-Cola by the side of the highway, where they were picked up by distributors on horseback and taken to their destination along trails and unpaved cart paths. 

The new drink proved a hit with consumers and caciques alike, filling the coffers of the latter and allowing the PRI, through the addictive properties of the sugary poison of Coca-Cola, to infiltrate the previously-impenetrable Chiapas countryside. 

Endemic

“Detrás de cada botella con el sello de Hecho en México, hay una comunidad entera que hace que todo suceda” (Behind every bottle bearing the Made in Mexico seal, there is an entire community that makes everything happen.)

Coca-Cola FEMSA

The inroads made by Coca-Cola and its concession holders in Chiapas have led to a flood of cheap junk food. Using networks established to distribute Coca-Cola (those aforementioned trails cut through the forest by machete), potato chips, candy, and a host of drinks high in sugars and salts have inundated rural Chiapanecan communities, with mortal consequences. 

The soft drink’s presence in Chiapas has also restricted local agriculture. In mid-1994, Coca-Cola FEMSA, a Mexican Coca-Cola subsidiary that owns and operates a bottling plant in Chiapas (and also the entire OXXO convenience store chain), inaugurated a new plant outside San Cristobal de las Casas. Soon after, nearby wells began to run dry, as the massive water requirements of the bottling plant began to deplete aquifers. Small farmers cannot access sufficient water to irrigate their crops, forced instead to rely on seasonal rains that grow more unpredictable with every passing year. 

Coca-Cola FEMSA has robbed previously self-sufficient agricultural communities of the means for their own survival, forcing many to travel to the state or federal capital, or the United States, in search of work. The little water that remains is not potable, so many residents buy drinking water from Coca-Cola. As usual, the Mexican government’s response to this crisis has been arrogantly detached from reality. In his term as president at the beginning of the 21st century, Vicente Fox placed the former director general of Coca-Cola in Mexico at the head of the Comisión Nacional del Agua. From 2000-2006, a former Coca-Cola executive directly controlled every drop of water in Mexico. 

The vast majority of the violence Coca-Cola wreaks upon Chiapas is not dispatched at supersonic speeds from the barrel of an automatic rifle (although the company is no stranger to such tactics). Neither does it manifest as kidnapping or torture (unless the company or one of its numerous global subsidiaries fears union pressure). Coca-Cola is a plague upon the state of Chiapas. Coca-Cola sells a little bit of death in every can of its insidiously addictive beverages. 

Even government statistics confirm the extent of the crisis. According to a study undertaken by El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, one-quarter of the state’s population suffers from obesity. In 2022 the Instituto Nacionál de Estatística y Geografía (INEGI) reported 7,617 deaths as a result of heart failure. In 2023 INEGI registered 4,531 direct deaths caused by diabetes mellitus, compared with 631 homicides registered in the same period. In a country that once elected a former Coca-Cola executive as president, the effects of Coca-Cola on Chiapas are too severe to be ignored. 

How does diabetes so easily lead to death in Chiapas? The Mexican government has refused to provide adequate healthcare facilities and sufficient supplies of medicine to rural communities. The Zapatista militant left movement, which has controlled much of rural Chiapas since their 1994 offensive, has prioritized the construction of clinics, dentists’ offices and other healthcare facilities since the beginning of their movement, filling in some of the gaps left by the Mexican state. While the popular success of Zapatista healthcare initiatives has in turn has led to grudging healthcare investment from the state and federal governments, many communities in government-controlled territory are still miles away from the healthcare they need. Once the people have fulfilled their role as consumers by handing over their hard-earned money to Coca-Cola, the bourgeois Mexican government leaves them to die. 

Conclusion

Fighting and bickering within the narcotics trade is a longtime favorite target of bourgeois media. Loud, brash characters brandish firearms carelessly, creating mountains of dead in a never-ending pursuit of riches and glory,  according to countless TV shows, movies, investigative articles, and documentaries. But what of the death toll accumulated by the vicious drive of capital to infest every corner of the earth — a death toll that exponentially supersedes the deaths caused by criminal activity in one of the most violent countries in the world?

Coca-Cola requires death. The company’s drinks are a contagion, a blight upon the land and the people living on it. Diabetes and heart failure are an acceptable cost to the company and its subsidiaries. Let them die, that we might be rich — the unspoken sentiment hanging in the air in every board meeting. Suffer, that we may profit — the terrible truth between the connections in every corporate Zoom meeting. The Coca-Cola Company and all its minions and facilitators around the world murder tens of thousands by selling a poison product. They have reduced millions more to a beaten, rageful capitulation, kicked into submission by the patent-leather boots of Coca-Cola corporate leaders. The victims must not dare to question the great whims and fancies of multinational capital. They must kneel, obediently, while their blood turns sweet, and the sugar kills them from the inside out. 

The Coca-Cola advertising machine — still one of the best marketing departments in the world — churns out a daily batch of lies and excuses. The website for Coca-Cola FEMSA proudly touts the company’s “sustainable management of water” and the “benefits of recycling” while making no mention of the negative health consequences resulting from consumption of their product. The website of The Coca-Cola Company provides a blurb that states that consumption of sugary beverages does not lead to diabetes, citing a 2005 study from the National Institute of Health. In a 2018 article in the New York Times, Coca-Cola FEMSA spokesperson José Ramón Martínez suggested that Mexican people are genetically predisposed to develop diabetes, a theory that has long been disproved, following a long tradition of racist so-called justifications for exploitation and violence.

Just as settler colonists plied Indigenous populations with alcohol in an attempt to subjugate them, so too does the settler colonial company ply death in a bottle to Indigenous communities in Chiapas.  Diabetes, heart problems, obesity, and tooth decay have all become as much a part of the landscape as the 355 mL glass Coca-Cola bottle. Despite marches, numerous expository articles in local media, false promises by The Coca-Cola Company and its subsidiaries to reduce waste, and a flood of corporate buzzword-based propaganda highlighting the company’s dedication to the planet and the community, the wave of deaths continue. Coca-Cola’s invasion of Chiapas is yet another episode in a long tradition of addictive substances foisted onto local populations by imperial capitalists desperate for a profit. Chiapas and the rest of the world suffering from junk food addiction will never know freedom until The Coca-Cola Company, all its subsidiaries and local partners, and every other junk food producer and seller are cleared from the land, and the people wrest control of their own health and nutrition from the iron grip of invading imperial merchants of death.

The Mal Gobierno (as Mexican federal, state and local governments and governmental authorities are called by resistance groups, including the EZLN and the Zapatista movement to mean “bad government”) has promised a full federal investigation — a promise that has been made (and broken) before regarding crimes allegedly perpetrated by the state. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side is dying. 

Job offers abound for those innocent enough to believe it. USD $400 a week, in Jalisco, buy a bus ticket here and we’ll take care of the rest. The shoes and backpacks piled haphazardly in a corner, the cremation ovens out back — they finish the story. The state police visited in September of last year, arrested a few people, and left. More shoes and more backpacks piled in the corner, and acrid smoke filled the sky again. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side feels pain.

When the suffering beg for justice, the government meets them with scorn. “What do you want, woman?” an exasperated official yells at a grieving mother. “You think I lost your daughter? Just go away!” Mothers organize to search for their disappeared children, shaming so-called law enforcement into doing their job. The state police come and take everything the people find, leaving buildings literally swept clean. We’re categorizing the evidence, says the federal attorney. The mothers know better, and their wails echo throughout the empty rooms. First the government disappeared their children, then it disappeared the remains the mothers dug out of the ground with their own hands.  

Arrests have been made, arrests are always made. This time, it’s a few municipal cops, an alleged “cartel leader” living on the outskirts of Mexico City. The National Guard has taken over from the municipal police, and the federal attorney’s office has fired the state attorney. Is this justice? No, but it’ll lead to the resignation of the governor. Political infighting is drowning out the cries of mothers demanding justice for their murdered children.

Mexico is at war, and those with power profit. 

Local toughs shake down a municipal market for protection money. Everyone knows who they are, where they live. But the police don’t do a thing about it, because they are in on this little enterprise, too. News filters out about a little ranch on the outskirts of town. Turn a blind eye, take the envelope, don’t ask too many questions. When a police officer’s time is up, they cross the line and join their friends in the mafia.

Mexico is at war, but only one side is fighting. 

Trucks full of soldiers in army green, or Marines in blue, patrol ominously, always at the corner of one’s vision. For the narco? No, for the people. A warning. Stay out of our way, say the automatic rifles. The military ousts the police, and takes over their racket. A captain-capo picks up the envelopes full of cash, and kicks a share up to their colonel-consigliere. The military arranges for planes to land and send transport trucks to pick up the bales of drugs they carry. They sell guns to paramilitary forces, hitmen and the so-called cartels. The military enforces the will of the government, and the will of the government is to get rich, the rest be damned. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side uses bullets.

Paramilitary gangsters force families off land for which their ancestors fought in the Revolution over 100 years ago. Then come the businessmen— the alchemists who turn screams into profit and monetize the blood of the dying. Wells run dry, soil is poisoned, pollution chokes the air, agricultural workers make an average of less than USD $150 a month, and imperial capital receives enormous profits. Encomenderos of the Spanish colonial age would recognize this oppression well. The people resist, they fight tooth and nail, they file suits in court, they march in the streets. The people pursue every outlet available to them within the confines of the law, but these confines form no limit for the government. It doesn’t matter what the courts decide — hitmen resolve any inconvenient judicial or political outcome. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side knows it. 

The government has always studiously pursued a pacifist foreign policy devoid of antagonism or confrontation. Why, then, does it so violently deny this same respect to the people it claims to represent? The government wipes the blood off its chin and flashes a ghastly smile to the camera; it stretches out its arms to embrace whichever capitalist ghoul seeks its blessing; it sacrifices its people’s dignity, destiny, present and future to feed the slavering, ravenous maw of capitalist empire. And for anyone who stands in the way, the ovens roar with flames, ready to consume, to devour, ready to reduce a human life to a pitifully small collection of bones, teeth and personal effects, the essence of a life, buried in the dirt to clear the way for the great and terrible march of imperial capitalism. 

Mexico is at war with its own people! El Mal Gobierno must go! 

Aquila is a small town of roughly 2,000 Nahuatl-speaking inhabitants, nestled in the mountains of southeastern Mexico. Ternium is by far the biggest commercial interest in the area, and according to Aquila locals the company processes between 12,000 and 15,000 tons of ore per day from the Aquila Mine. Local farmers also claim Ternium disposes of hazardous waste without taking proper precautions and that the company’s water demands have lowered the water table, making it difficult for them to grow crops. 

Mexican law states that all commercial interests that wish to operate on communal land must reach an agreement with the ejidatarios resident to the land. In 2012 the Aquila ejidatarios and Ternium signed a contract stating that in exchange for permission to operate a mine on ejido land, Ternium would pay the ejidatarios a fee of USD 3.80 per ton of iron ore extracted. In 2017 the contract was renegotiated: the fee remained the same, but added to the deal were a reforestation campaign, a designated site for disposal of hazardous materials, and the construction of two pedestrian bridges and a hospital (the town’s sole clinic was exclusively for the use of Ternium employees and their families — all medical care beyond the ability of a general practitioner had to be seen to out of town), all to be funded by Ternium. 

Ternium simply did not keep up their end of the bargain. According to members of the community, the USD 3.80 Ternium agreed to pay became MXN 3.80 — only USD 0.19 at the time of writing. No hospital was constructed, and neither were the promised pedestrian bridges.The land appointed for waste disposal was instead mined for iron ore. From 2012–2023, the Aquila Mine expanded from 73 hectares (180 acres) to 380 hectares (939 acres) and the company began to extract gold, silver and copper, all without community approval or a renegotiation of the standing contract. Fighting back proved a deadly business: in 14 years 38 community leaders have been killed in Aquila and the surrounding countryside. 

Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca helped the ejidatarios petition the courts to allow the community to elect their own leader, as the ejidatarios considered the then-current community leaders to be in the pocket of Ternium. The community also sought the payment of millions of pesos in back rent that had been placed in escrow, but not given to the community. Ternium fought the community every step of the way, but in 2022 it seemed that the legal process would favor the community over the mine. At this time, the threats began. The two men were stalked by local gangsters. More than once Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca were chased by masked men on motorcycles, but managed to outrun their pursuers in their Honda pickup truck. 

On December 13, 2022, Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca attended a community assembly meeting in Aquila, where they, along with hundreds of the town’s residents, threatened to block the mine’s operations if Ternium did not respect the agreements signed in 2012 and 2017. Also present were three members of the directorate for the Aquila Mine: Mining Development Director Diego Ferrari, HR manager Rogelio Omaña Romero and Community Relations Director José Ulises González. Also present was the town mayor, José María Valencia Guillén. 

When the two lawyers told the Ternium representatives that the community was ready to shut down the mine in protest, the directors responded with a threat of their own. According to three eyewitnesses present at the assembly, Omaña Romero told Díaz and Lagunes to “let go” of their fight with the mine, and if they didn’t, “they would be killed at any moment.” Díaz Valencia replied that Omaña Romero had given him a death threat, and made sure the government official present to mediate the assembly registered it as such. Said one of the eyewitnesses: “The engineer Ferrari threw the microphone, they [the three men representing the mine] got up, and they left.” One month later Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca had disappeared. 

In the subsequent trial investigating the disappearances, Javier Puntos testified to being present at and participating in the kidnapping of Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca. He said under oath that he, along with other local criminals, had received pictures of the two men and strict instructions not to let them escape. “Afterwords we found out they were killed because they were fucking things up for the mining company [Ternium].” Soon after testifying, Puntos was also murdered, after being released from police custody without explanation. 

When asked for comment, Ternium reiterated their willingness to pursue “a good working relationship” with the ejidatarios of Aquila, and stated that all communities surrounding their operation should “submit their concerns in a constructive and transparent manner.” They also condemned “any type of violence against the community.” No employee of Ternium has been investigated or indicted in connection with the case. 

In September of 2023, the community of Aquila finally won their court case, which allowed them to elect their own leader to represent them in negotiations with the mine. An ex-employee of Ternium won the vote, and the rapacious extraction of fuel for the capitalist death machine continues — generating Ternium towering profits that cast a bloodsoaked shadow upon the town of Aquila, the people who live there, and the world. 

“El orgullo más grande que siento estar siempre al lado de mis compañeros, hermanos de raza, los indígenas…ofrendaré todo mi esfuerzo, mi trabajo y mi vida por defender nuestra raza.

The greatest pride I feel is to be forever by the side of my friends, my brothers, the indigenous…I will give all my strength, my work and my life to defend our people.”

— Antonio Díaz Valencia

“Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa,
Quieren el barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya,
No, no suelte’ la bandera ni olvide’ el leolai,
Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái.”

They want to take the river from me and the bеach too,
They want my neighborhood and they want grandma to leave,
No, don’t drop the flag or forget the leolai,
I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii.

Puerto Rico entered 2025 in the dark. The colony’s outdated power grid faced a massive blackout on New Year’s Eve, causing 90% of the island to lose electricity. Outages are a part of day-to-day life under the Yankee occupation that has impoverished and displaced Puerto Ricans since 1898. Colonialism attacks Puerto Rican unity. Young Boricuas — forced to leave in search of jobs — are exploited as cheap labor here in the states, all while millionaires move to Puerto Rico in droves. Outages, poverty, and migration are symptoms; colonialism is the illness. The independence movement, historically suppressed but rapidly growing, is the cure. A nation without self determination is a nation denied freedom, and Puerto Ricans have been enslaved for too long.  

Why does Puerto Rico experience so many blackouts in the first place?

The “Commonwealth of Puerto Rico” has no sovereignty. Unlike the mainland, which pretends to be a democracy, Puerto Rico is controlled by Congress’ “plenary” powers. As a territory, they receive less federal funding than the states. Congress has never used its total control over Puerto Rico to meaningfully invest in the island’s economy. They have always treated Puerto Rico like an imperial colony, temporarily installing American companies and paying Puerto Rican workers lower wages than anywhere on the mainland.  

The official excuse for why Puerto Rico cannot fix its power grid is that the island is in tremendous debt. This debt crisis can be traced back to a series of U.S. Congressional incursions on behalf of U.S. capital. Since the early 20th century, they have made Puerto Rico into a tax haven for U.S. investors and corporations. They transformed the agrarian economy into an industrial one, displacing hundreds of thousands of people in the process.

Operation Bootstrap, which began after World War 2, paints a brutal picture of colonialism on the island. Corporate taxes were eliminated to entice Yankee business. Meanwhile, wages were kept lower than anywhere on the mainland and unionism was suppressed. The colonial capitalists were making  themselves a heaven on Earth, while the situation for Puerto Ricans only became more hellish. The farming economy was destroyed faster than advanced industry could be built, and the island became plagued by unemployment. Those who could find a job in the new factories enjoyed improved living standards, but there weren’t nearly enough for everyone. Almost 500,000 Puerto Ricans had to migrate to the U.S. in the 1950s in search of a wage. Whether they were kept on the island or sent to a foreign land, Operation Bootstrap was a corporate scheme to trap nationally oppressed Puerto Ricans into more advanced forms of wage slavery. 

In a testament to the compromised insular government, their first governor Luis Muñoz Marín supported the federal government in blaming mass unemployment on Puerto Rican overpopulation. According to these traitors, Puerto Ricans had too many children, and needed to have less. By 1969, 35% of all child-bearing women had been sterilized. La Operación, they called it.

“The so-called insular government is only a corporation organized by the Congress of the United States.” Pedro Albizu Campos, President, National Party of Puerto Rico, 1950.

More recently in 2016, President Barack Obama completely took over Puerto Rico’s financial policy and placed it in the control of an unelected, seven member council of finance goons known as La Junta. Eight years later, they are still gutting Puerto Rico’s social safety net, cutting social programs, and leaving the power grid to rust. La Junta represents the interests of Congress, the White House, and USian business. There is not even the illusion of equality in the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico; between an empire and its colony. It is one nation exploiting another at every turn. 

Nearly 3,000 people died in the man-made catastrophe that followed Hurricane Maria in 2017. Only a few dozen perished in the storm itself. Thousands were killed over the following months as power was knocked out and clean water disappeared. The destroyed health care system was unable to prevent the spread of infectious disease, especially among the poor and the elderly. The people sacrificed on the altar of colonialism died in agony while imperial masters blocked relief from coming in.

As is often the case under capitalism, where the colonized and working classes face complete devastation, the owning class found fresh opportunities for new business. La Junta, on behalf of the U.S. capitalists, used Hurricane Maria to privatize the power grid. Without consulting the people, the Board created an energy contract for private companies Luma and Genera, companies based in the U.S. and its junior imperialist partner Canada. The move transfers money from Puerto Rico’s tax base off of the island directly into the hands of Yankee capitalists. Privatization was marketed as a way to stop blackouts and eventually modernize the power grid. Seven years later, all that has changed are the monthly bills, which are nearly 50% more expensive than in 2017. 

According to Luma, the massive New Year’s blackout was caused by a single underground electric cable. The cable was so old and outdated that the company which manufactured it closed 28 years ago. A perfect microcosm of the overall power grid! Lights turned off around dawn on Tuesday, December 31 and stayed out all day and night, the only power available coming from diesel generators for the minority who could afford them. Most Puerto Ricans celebrated the New Year by candlelight. Power was eventually restored to 98% of customers by Wednesday afternoon, January 1, the blackout lasting a little over a day. Each blackout triggers more and more anger against Luma. The new Trump-supporting governor has already threatened to replace them. The company is performing so poorly that everyone, including the people who first supported privatization, are being forced to acknowledge its failure. 

These corporate planners had Puerto Rico in an artificial economic bubble. Local Puerto Rican businesses had no way to compete with these tax incentives. The island’s economy would face destruction if the U.S. businesses left or if there was an economic downturn. This is what happened when the economy went into recession in 2006. Puerto Rico was in a debt snowball at this point; they were borrowing money just to pay the bills. Wall Street investors continued to push these loans even after it became obvious the government was going bankrupt. Puerto Ricans themselves were targeted by these predatory bonds. When the bond market finally crashed, hundreds of millions of dollars in Puerto Rican wealth disappeared overnight. The banks got away not just scot free, but rich. Puerto Ricans are footing the bill to this day. They are at the mercy of La Junta. Targeted by Wall Street hedge funds, they are paying off their government’s debt with the dilapidation of their power grid and hospitals. Mass displacement is the other half of this crime against the Puerto Rican people. As the island is gutted from the inside, the occupier lures Puerto Ricans with  the chance of employment on the mainland. Between 2010 and 2020 alone, over 10% of Puerto Ricans have moved to the states. They survive on the farms, in the cities, but their heart stays in Puerto Rico. 

The strength of the Puerto Rican nation lies in the unity of its people. In both the mainland and the colony, Puerto Ricans share the same oppressor.  But Puerto Ricans will not defeat the Yankee Empire on their own. Full unity with the other oppressed nations — Black, Hawaiian, and other Native nations — is also required. 

Puerto Rico will never be free in the subservient role of territory or state. Puerto Rico will only prosper, will only know freedom, as an economically and politically sovereign nation. Full support to a self-determined Puerto Rico, on both the mainland and the island! Unity with the nationally oppressed! Remember the Cry of Lares: ¡Libertad o muerte! ¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!

Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and National Liberation

Colonialism in the modern era first developed in the latter years of the 15th century, but reached maturity in the late 19th and early 20th century with the comprehensive colonization of the African continent. In their infancy, colonialism and capitalism developed hand-in-hand, with the resources and profits extracted from the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade spurring rapid growth in the European economies. In turn, products manufactured in the European metropoles were utilized to further develop the grip of the European economy over the world at large. In essence, capitalism was born with the profits of colonial extraction, and the insatiable capitalist mode of production drove the expansion of the colonialist system.

In its “traditional” form, the colonial economy is primarily an extractive economy, maintained through economic, political, and military domination. The colonial power takes raw materials and other resources from the colonized territory to be shipped back to the “home” country to fuel their burgeoning economies. During the dawn of the era of imperialism (from the 1880s onwards), colonial holdings also served as a sink for the exportation of capital from the European countries, financing international corporations in their advancement of the extraction of resources from the colonial territories. For “traditional” colonialism, the Indigenous population constitutes the labor force for the international corporations. The rapid development of the urban centers in the colonial territories drove the “proletarianization” of the colonized workforce; that is, driving populations from the countryside to the urban centers to engage in the newly imposed capitalist-colonialist economy. The Indigenous people themselves in this context serve as a resource; labor to be exploited for profit, most acute under the slave system in which colonized peoples were literally exchanged as commodities themselves.

Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonialism. Whereas in the “traditional” colonial economy, extraction of resources is the primary focus of the occupying power and indigenous labor utilized in that extraction is a central component, settler colonialism is concerned with complete control and assimilation of the land as the foundation of a new settler nation. Under settler colonialism, the Indigenous populations are eradicated, in whole or in part, by a series of deliberate policies enacted by the settlers to drive them off the land and claim it for themselves.

In its initial stages, the development of settler colonies on the American continents was driven by rivalries between the last remnants of the European monarchies, which involved religious and military expansionism. The so-called “New World” presented a crisis for the European kingdoms, essentially constituting a new battleground for existing tensions on the continent. At the time, the nascent capitalist system in the form of mercantilism was subordinate to the interests of the monarchs, driven by the need to expand control in the religious sphere, through which the kings justified their “divine right to rule”, and the need to grow the coffers through which they funded their respective armies. An as yet “undiscovered” continent made up of billions of acres of “unclaimed” land presented both an opportunity and a threat to the kingdoms. They could not afford to be left behind while their rivals expanded their power overseas.

What resulted was a mad dash for the direct control of the land, leading to a period of primitive accumulation which increased the wealth and power of the European kingdoms, but also increased the wealth and power of the nascent bourgeoisie which would go on to supplant them in the following centuries. Some of the European powers attempted to engage in “traditional” colonization schemes, but the most successful and the earliest — that of Spain — was settler colonial from its inception and would provide the model for England.

The problem for the Europeans was that this land was not “unclaimed” as they pretended, but was inhabited by millions of Indigenous people organized in thousands of complex societies across both continents. Instead of halting the ambitions of the European economies, a solution was developed, and the Europeans, especially the English, having honed their skills at warfare through centuries of struggle both inside and outside the continent, utilized those skills towards the complete supplanting of the indigenous populations for their own.

Today, the first phase of the settler colonial project in North America is complete. What once was a land of dizzying cultural wealth and complex civilization has been completely supplanted by the US settler colonial empire and its Canadian counterpart. The millions of Indigenous people that once inhabited the continent have been subjected to outright slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and otherwise removed from the land to be corralled into reservations, making way for the fascist global hegemon to thrive. 

Some believe that because the “settlement” of the U.S. is complete, the colonial relation in the country has ceased. On the contrary, through the reservation system and the indigenous reserve labor force kept in perpetual poverty, through the continued subjugation of the Black interior semi-colony by the survival of slavery in the prison industrial complex and the continued denial of land rights in the Black Belt, and through the exploitation of immigrant labor largely consisting of indigenous South and Central Americans, the colonial relation is thriving. This relation is most clear through the antagonization of these colonized populations by the armed wing of the state — the DHS, the BIA, and the federal, state, and municipal police — which takes up its legacy as an occupying colonial military.

The imperial outpost of “israel” is the most readily apparent example of settler colonialism due to the intensity, and thus visibility, of the conflict. Through widespread media coverage of the issue, this genocidal relation is undeniable. Despite billions of dollars being funneled every year into maybe the most advanced propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, the age of social media has allowed the Palestinians to demonstrate their plight for all to see.

The colonization of Palestine is well-documented by scholars and by the zionists themselves. Following the British acquisition of Mandatory Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the “holy land” provided a golden opportunity for the zionist conference in Britain to begin their colonial project. Between 1917 and 1948, zionists began in earnest to claim land in Palestine through both purchase and conquest. This process culminated in the infamous Nakba of 1948, in which zionist paramilitaries excised large swaths of the land through genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing, killing thousands and driving many hundreds of thousands more from their homes. What resulted was almost 80% of the land of Palestine falling under control of the zionists, driving the displaced Palestinians into refugee centers that became the Gaza Strip and the West Bank territories, an act that was legitimized by the international community’s recognition of the “State of israel”.

Zionist ideology closely resembles the religious settler ideology of Manifest Destiny that drove the lion’s share of the colonization of what would become the western United States. Believing the land to be promised to them by God, settlers push the boundaries of the existing colonial borders, encroaching into land that is still controlled by the indigenous inhabitants, often in violation of the various treaties and agreements previously negotiated between the colonialists and the colonized. When the colonized naturally resist this unlawful expansion, the military forces of the colonial entity intervene on the basis that the settlers constitute civilians and they must be defended from the “violent, uncivilized natives”. Thus, the colonial borders expand and the indigenous are further removed from the land. This practice is utilized to this day in the zionist settlements in the West Bank.

We should not be surprised at the similarity; we should not be surprised that the zionists appear to be brothers in arms to the U.S. ruling class. After all, the same economic exploitation of Indigenous people is the basis for both.

So what is the resolution to the colonial contradiction? Despite settler colonialism constituting a distinct form of colonialism, the solution remains the same: national liberation. The anatomy of the colonial system consists of the economic, social, and political domination of the colonized by the colonizers. To abolish this relation, the political, economic, and social spheres must be taken hold of by the subject nation. In a “traditional” colony, this is easy to envision due to the fact that the majority of the population is Indigenous. The anti-colonial liberation movement in this context must seize control of the state from the colonizers and the bought-off compradors, nationalize the colonial enterprises, and begin the process of developing national self-determination. In the settler colonial context, control of the land is the axis upon which the Indigenous peoples are oppressed and self-determination takes the form of the reclamation of the land from the settlers.

South Africa is a particularly interesting case study on this point. Prior to the takeover of the South African apartheid government by the ANC in the 1990s, South Africa could similarly be described as a settler colonial project. After the apartheid system was overthrown and Mandela elected in 1994 as the first president of the country, a process of land reform was undertaken, but was not taken to completion as it had been in Algeria in the 1960s and in Zimbabwe and other territories that made up the former Rhodesian state in the 1980s. As a result, racial disparity and racial tensions continue to wreak havoc on the South African social and political sphere, with white settlers still owning a disproportionate amount of land relative to their population, leaving millions of indigenous South Africans in poverty. What this tells us is that the land and who controls it is the most important aspect of the settler colonial context.

CPUSA Convention Controversy

This past weekend, June 7–9, the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) held its 2024 national convention in Chicago. Two particularly important results of this conference made a significant stir among communist circles on social media regarding the Party’s position on settler colonialism.

As part of the party’s membership in the International Meeting of Communist Workers’ Parties (IMCWP), the CPUSA invited delegates from several other participant parties to speak at the convention. Included in this group was the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), whose speech, delivered by israeli Knesset Member, Ofer Kassif, was streamed on YouTube and subsequently posted by the Party’s official account on Twitter. In this speech, Kassif began by “providing context” to the situation in the zionist entity, in which he vocally condemned the Palestinian Resistance for its acts on October 7, repeating the rigorously debunked lie that thousands of Israeli citizens were massacred by the Palestinians. Later in his speech, he rightly describes the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide, but ultimately delivers a message that is indistinguishable from the messaging of, say, US Senator Bernie Sanders. In essence, it espouses a political position which can be described as “labor zionism”; the genocide of Palestinians is to be condemned but so are those struggling against it. It is bad to kill Palestinians, but those who are waging a national liberation struggle to overthrow the settler colonial relation are terrorists. Essentially, their position is that the state of “israel” has a right to exist and that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1917 and 1948 is legitimate, but with a left-wing facade. The position of the CPI is further revealed in an article posted on their website in November of 2023, calling for an investigation of war crimes against the Palestinians for sexual crimes committed on October 7, which has since been thoroughly debunked as a conspiracy, a lie spread by the IOF to justify the genocide in Gaza.

The Twitter post of Kassif’s speech received vitriolic backlash from people criticizing the party for inviting the CPI to speak at the convention, especially during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many CPUSA members took to social media in an effort to do damage control, justifying the invitation of the party with such excuses as CPI being a “fraternal party of the IMCWP”, as if that isn’t an indictment of the IMCWP in its own right!

During the CPUSA’s discussion of the resolutions being adopted at the convention, the question of settler colonialism in the United States was presented. Following this discussion, a CPUSA delegate who was present at the convention tweeted “After an investigation the Communist Party USA has rejected settler colonialism as the primary contradiction in the United States”. Again, backlash from communist circles on social media was responded to by hand-waving and justification by party members, calling any who criticized this decision “ultras” and “wreckers.”

The formulation of this CPUSA resolution is malformed and belies the lack of understanding on the part of the CPUSA delegates and those who rejected it. It is clear that the resolution was raised as a sop, and always designed to be defeated. There is no primary contradiction; this is a mish-mash of Marxist terms. There is, of course, in any situation, a principal contradiction, but this is a question of strategy. The principal contradiction conditions the other, secondary, contradictions, which cannot be resolved without first addressing it.

Party members on Twitter immediately began denying the need for any national liberation struggle in the US. It is clear that, where CPUSA once suffered from extreme white (imperialist) chauvinism, that chauvinism is alive and well.

Social Class and Class Struggle

Defenders of the party’s resolution on Twitter made a point of railing against Anything But Class (ABC) Marxists. While ABC as an ideological trend does constitute a liberal distortion of Marxism, the Nothing But Class (NBC) position lacks any basis in reality. Proponents of NBC argue that all oppression and oppressive institutions arise from capitalism, and thus through waging class struggle, all oppressive contradictions will be resolved. What this deviation ignores is the reality of social classes, and the particularity of the nature of class in the colonial context.

The Wretched of the Earth, written by Martiniquais revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who developed his analysis from his participation in the national liberation struggle against the French settler colonial project in Algeria, argues that in the colonial context a person’s race in part dictates a person’s class. An analysis of the colonial relation reveals this fact to be true. In colonial Africa, all of the enterprises were owned by Europeans, whereas all of the industrial and agricultural workers were African. They were workers and not owners because they were members of an oppressed nation; because of their indigeneity. As a result, class was stratified along national lines, meaning that a national liberation struggle also constitutes a class struggle.

“Identity politics” is a contentious topic among Marxists, with many taking the view that the concept of identity is a liberal distortion that only serves to obfuscate the class struggle. What this leaves out is a robust understanding of what exactly goes into determining someone’s social class. In our white-supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchal settler colony, a person’s identity plays a part in determining a person’s class. If you are a trans person, a Black person, a gay person, or any intersection of the various avenues of oppression, odds are that you are not a member of the bourgeois class. As a result, gender relations, race relations, disability relations; these things all constitute social relations with an objectively identifiable economic base. They are class relations and thus are essential to address when engaging in class struggle.

These are fundamentally not questions of identity. Identity is a social question; the relations that produce these social identities are economic questions.

In the US settler colonial system, Black and Indigenous people are corralled into reservations and ghettos, flushed into the prison system to work as money-printing slaves, and are oppressed along national lines. As a result, a national liberation struggle must be waged as PART of the class struggle. National liberation IS class struggle, and must be taken up and supported by Communists.

When CPUSA and its membership reject an in-depth analysis and discussion of settler colonialism, reject the principles of national liberation, and embrace only a simplified analysis of class, they are, in effect, abandoning the class struggle. 

Do not mistake their behavior. The CPUSA has abandoned the class struggle. At best, they represent a dam holding back a reservoir of committed Communists, straining to fight in the class war. At worst, they represent an active barrier to the advancement of the very movement they claim to lead, and thus serve as an objective pillar of U.S. capitalist-imperialism.

A source within the party shared a section of one of the resolutions to be adopted at the convention with regards to the national sovereignty for Indigenous peoples of the Americas which read:

Therefore be it resolved that the CPUSA fully supports the struggles of the Native American people for full social, economic, and political equality and national sovereignty over Native lands. We demand expansion of federal and state funds and services for all the reservations. We oppose schemes to nullify tribal treaty rights.

While paying lip service to national sovereignty for indigenous nations, this resolution reveals deep issues within the party’s understanding of settler colonialism. In their message of support for the struggles of the Indigenous people of the Americas, CPUSA takes care to specify that this only extends to the borders of so-called “Native land”, a distinction that legitimizes the settler control of land not specified as “Native”. The resolution also calls for the expansion of federal and state funds with regards to the existing reservation system. Instead of calling to abolish this violent colonial institution, the CPUSA takes the position that the system should be expanded! Funneling funds into the existing genocidal reservation system can do nothing but strengthen it in its purpose: exercising control over the indigenous populations held captive inside of them. Additionally, this resolution calls for the upholding of existing treaties between indigenous nations and the US government, with no mention at all as to the nature of those treaties as documents forged through coercion that legitimize the settler control over already-stolen Native lands.

This position is indistinguishable from the “labor zionist” position of the Communist Party of “Israel,” which pays lip service to the plight of the Indigenous Palestinians while at the same time upholding the existing colonial borders taken through wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing in 1948 and today. By refusing to acknowledge the nature through which this land was claimed and the illegitimacy of the settler control over it, the CPI and its brethren in the CPUSA effectively condone the genocidal actions taken by the settler system.

Settler colonialism and national liberation are not buzzwords. They are not empty platitudes to be tossed out and then ignored, nor are they secondary issues to be subordinated to an ill-defined “class struggle”. They are class struggle, and any party which seeks to overthrow the settler colonial relation must engage with this from the outset. Settler colonialism is a material relation concerned with control of the land. A communist party in a settler-colony must contend with the question of the land and who controls it. They must take the stance that the reclamation of the land through a national liberation struggle is the issue at hand. Otherwise, they are giving in to settler chauvinism as willful idiots of empire.

What is to be Done?

A problem of this magnitude requires extensive education of general party membership, but the capacity to carry out that education would require a party leadership which has this understanding and is capable of imparting it to others. Many members of the CPUSA, especially the younger ones, have a better understanding of these issues than the old party bureaucrats, but the undemocratic nature of the party —  through measures such as the slate system — prevents that leadership from being replaced. Instead, membership at large is forced to table any attempts at eliciting structural change until the party convention, which is only held every four years, and even then resolutions are laundered through the National Committee before being put to a vote.

With the CPUSA’s rejection of settler colonialism as the principal contradiction, they willingly reveal the settler chauvinism that is eating away at the party’s structure, nullifies its revolutionary capability, and condemns it to serve the forces of reaction. 

We have no Communist party in the United States. Once we accept this, we can then begin the process of building one. National liberation and gender liberation are essential aspects of the class struggle, and we must begin to organize a resolute political structure that understands this fact. In order to engage in class struggle, in order to destroy all existing oppressive relations, we must come together to build a political formation capable of taking on this challenge and building a better world for all people.

We can illustrate that convenience by examining the hypothetical production and preparation of a cup of coffee in a Starbucks. Unlike McDonald’s and other large-scale franchises, Starbucks is a single corporation; we won’t have to worry about franchising fees or the way that McDonald’s makes money by owning the ground the restaurants are built on and renting it back to the franchisee.

For ease of illustration, we’re going to remove their entire menu and say they serve only a single item: a grande drip coffee. This will cost you $3 at the register. How much does it cost Starbucks to make that cup of coffee? To know that, we have to tally every cost they have, figure out how many cups of coffee they sell every hour, and then divide the costs into the cups of coffee produced.

The Storefront

Before labor costs, paying for just the storefront, the Starbucks corporation must pay, on average and for the average storefront, $414 each day.¹ In busy locations, Starbucks stores are open from 6:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. This is, of course, different in cities like New York or small towns, but we are looking for a typically average amount. That leaves fourteen hours of productive time when our typical Starbucks can make money. In order to pay that $414 per day bill, Starbucks must make at least $29.57 every hour it is open.

The average Starbucks uses up $50 of raw materials, packaging, and shipping for each hour it is open.²

Labor Costs

The average salary of a barista is $11/hour, and the average pay of a manager is $19/hour. We can estimate that at any given time there are four baristas on shift, supervised by a single manager, meaning the labor costs for a given location are about $63 per hour.³

Covering Costs

Between rent, machinery, furniture, raw materials, and worker pay, each hour the Starbucks corporation must spend $142.57 in total or the storefront would be unable to operate.⁴ Remember, our coffee costs $3 a cup, so the Starbucks storefront must sell forty-seven cups of coffee each hour to cover its costs.⁵

But how many cups of coffee do they actually sell? Recall, first, that we’ve flattened the entire menu; for the purposes of this exercise, we will assume they only sell coffee, so the profit margin on different items doesn’t matter. It won’t give us a precise answer, but it will illustrate the point. The average Starbucks store sells sixty-six coffees an hour at $3/coffee.⁶

Each of the corporation’s expenses is embodied in a fragment of the price of a single one of the sixty-six cups of coffee. $29.57 for rent and machines and $50 in raw materials each hour gives us $79.57 an hour in fixed costs — that is, before Starbucks pays the workers. We can divide this by the number of coffees we calculated are sold in each hour, sixty-six, which leaves us with $1.20. That means $1.20 of each cup of coffee goes to keeping the lights on, the machines working, and the raw materials coming in.⁷ The other $1.80 value of the cup of coffee comes from the labor of the workers in the store.⁸ Without this labor, not a cup would be sold.

Remember that our employees are costing us $63 per hour. That means they are being paid $0.95 for every cup, even though they are adding $1.80 to that cup.⁹

The Cost of Convenience?

Most modern economists will tell you that the difference between these listed costs per cup ($3) and the cost inputs ($2.15) comes from a markup. That is to say, in our example, these economists believe that the Starbucks corporation is cheating the consumer of roughly 85 cents every time you buy a grande drip. This extra 85 cents is therefore the price, they say, that customers are willing to pay for the convenience of not having to brew their own coffee.

This is simply not true. No one buys something for more than its value. We can more clearly see this trickery at work if we investigate what exactly the economist means when they say that the “customer is willing to pay” the price. Why is the customer willing to pay that? Well, they’ll dither and tell you about household expenses and average income, savings, and all that. But the fact of the matter is that the customer — the market  supports a price because it is more or less the value of the thing being sold. Something sold above its value is not sold for long; something sold below its value causes the seller to lose money and eventually stop selling anything. In other words, people do not tell the market how much things are worth, the market tells us.

What is Value?

Use-value is the thing, the commodity; the use-value of a coffee is that it is coffee. You drink it, it’s hot, it caffeinates you. But the exchange value, the value for which you will pay for that coffee, is the cost of producing the coffee. The cost of producing any commodity is simply the total cost of each individual input used to create the commodity. The value of each cup of coffee is therefore the value of the physical store used to prepare it (during the amount of time it takes to prepare and sell the coffee), plus the value of the raw materials that go into the coffee (the beans), plus the value of the labor.

We could represent this as an equation: constant capital (rent, raw material, etc.) + labor cost = value. Notice that this leaves no room for profit! We will return to this question.

Those underlying costs fluctuate. The price of water and power, for instance, changes from day to day.  Some labor is more efficient and some labor is less efficient, depending on the worker. None of this matters; what matters is the socially average cost, that is, the amount of work it takes for the society, on average, not any individual, to produce, of each expense. Value isn’t set at each transaction, but rather overall and on average, as commodities tend to gravitate around the value of their cost. A corporation that pays more than socially average for labor or raw materials loses out on the value. For instance, if Starbucks bought coffee beans that were ten times as expensive but otherwise the same, they would not then be able to charge ten times the price.

We saw above that the workers add $1.80 in value to each cup of coffee. How do we determine that amount? That is, why does the coffee cost $3 rather than $2? Why do the workers not add 80 cents to the $1.20 of constant capital costs? This amount is not arbitrary. The $1.80 figure is determined by the cost of the labor-power, its value. What is the value of labor-power? It is the same as any other value: a total of all the costs in reproducing it. When the value is embodied in labor-power, those costs are the aggregate total of the quality of life of the laboring class in any given society. The cost of housing, of clothing, of food, of existence for the laborer. 

This value — the aggregate total of the quality of life, the value of all the individual objects required by the members of the laboring class: housing, clothes, etc. — is the cost of reproducing the worker’s labor-power. If the laborer were to be paid less than the cost of reproducing their labor-power, they would die or their quality of life would begin to sharply decrease. If the laboring class as a whole were paid less than the minimum cost of reproducing their labor-power, its members would die or become infirm at an unsustainable rate, and the whole economy would fail.

There’s only one input that the employer can pay for at less than cost. Because the employer purchases all the non-living inputs from other merchants, they generally trade on an equivalent level. That is, the employer pays the merchant of raw materials the value of the raw materials. The employer, however, has a great benefit over the laborer for two main reasons. The first is that the laborer cannot live without money earned from the employer. The second is that when we enter the labor market, we confront the entire class of employers — the capitalists — while the entire class of the capitalists confronts only a single laborer at a time. So, although the laborer produces a certain value (which is based on the socially average commodities that members of the laboring class consume), they are paid a value less than this. If a we were allowed to work for only so long as necessary to pay our expenses and buy what we want the employer would never make any money.

The workers are paid collectively ninety-five cents  per cup of coffee, even though they add $1.80 to it. That leaves Starbucks with 85 cents in pure profit that accrues to the corporation. If the Starbucks workers themselves were paid the full value they added to the raw materials and machinery by finishing the coffee and distributing it, they would be paid at a rate of $118.80 each hour, collectively;¹⁰ individually they would make $23.76 an hour. This assumes that the manager is actually providing valuable labor that’s over and above their labor as a barista, and distributing that extra $8 back to the four other employees.

Let’s talk about that extra $8/hour. This $8 is primarily paid to managers to ensure that the person making the schedule, counting the money, doing the deposits, enacting discipline, etc. is loyal to the company. The manager’s salary makes them a labor aristocrat — a bribed worker who has been corrupted to act against their fellows. The extra $8 is actually part of the amount stolen from the other four employees and given to the manager by the manager’s bosses. Let us instead pay the manager at the rate of the other employees, ignoring the fact that their salary is actually $19/hour and we will find that 5 x $11/hr = $55/hr. $55/66 cups of coffee is 83 cents.

Accounting for the current pay scales of the five employees, the rate of exploitation is slightly under 100% — that is, the employees are cheated out of $1 for every $1 they are paid.

But wait! This doesn’t happen only in the Starbucks store, it happens at every stage of production, with every single input that goes into the coffee!

The Raw Materials: Imperialism in Action

We have noticed a curious thing when it comes to the costs associated with making a cup of coffee: the largest cost in raw material comes not from coffee beans, which are what many would consider to be the indispensable element of coffee, but from rent, machinery, and utilities. Why is that? Are coffee beans really worth so little? Do they take so much less labor to produce?

Not at all.

In fact, the roasted coffee bean is actually the pit of a fruit that requires a long, intensive labor process to extract from its plant once it’s actually grown. How can it be that for each cup of coffee sold in a Starbucks, the labor of the five employees there serving it is worth $1.62, but the labor of the coffee bean farmhand is a mere 7.5 cents?¹¹ 

As Brazilian coffee plantations account for most of the coffee production worldwide, we will use the Brazilian growing region of Minas Gerais as our source of data.

Coffee plantation workers in the Minas Gerais region are paid for each sack of coffee-cherries they harvest, and on average earn $6 per day by harvesting 100 to 200 pounds of coffee-cherries. Working roughly fourteen hours a day, the coffee harvester thus earns forty-three cents per hour.

According to the National Coffee Association USA,  these 100 to 200 pounds of coffee-cherries result in roughly twenty  pounds of coffee beans once they are roasted. Making $6 a day for the equivalent of twenty pounds of roasted coffee beans, harvesters receive 30 cents for each pound of final product.

Remember that Starbucks pays the plantation owner $1.20 per pound of coffee, but the plantation owner pays the harvester a mere thirty cents per pound. If we assume the plantation owner has no other costs, this is a rate of exploitation of 4:1 or 400 percent. That means for every $5 worth of value the harvester creates, $4 of it is stolen by the plantation owner. Even if we are generous and say the plantation owner has to pay 15 more cents per pound to bring the coffee beans to market and roast them, that’s still a rate of exploitation of 2.5:1.

Why is this?

The answer is simple: U.S. imperialism.

U.S. foreign policy encourages — nay, demands — reduction in the standard of living of the working class all over the world. The peripheral countries are transformed into places where raw materials are produced. This system permits the capitalist class in the U.S. to shunt the greatest misery onto workers in the third world, while providing goods that would otherwise be much more expensive to the workers in the imperial core.

What if the coffee harvesters had the same standard of living as the Starbucks barista? If the hourly pay of that worker were $11/hour, a pound of coffee would embody $7.80 a pound of harvester labor, not 30 cents  a pound. Now, Starbucks would pay five  times that amount. The value of the coffee beans embodied in each cup would increase from 7.5 cents to 48 cents per cup. Thus, our raw material costs will be $1.78, an overall increase of 40 cents per cup. The grande drip would cost $3.40, not $3. But this still doesn’t show us how much value the imperial core is extracting in even this simple process.

Remember, without the greedy hand of the capitalist, the Starbucks barista is comfortably making $21.38 an hour. If we let our coffee harvester produce the same value — without the interference of the U.S. war machine, puppets like the fascist Bolsonaro, or the plantation owner — then the coffee embodied in the cup would be not forty-eight  cents, but rather:

The harvester, making $23.76 an hour, like our barista, now harvests one pound of coffee at the rate of $16.97 per pound or $1.06 per cup. Our coffee, when we remove imperialist exploitation and equalize our labor markets across the core and periphery, costs not $3, but $4.

The benefit — $3:$4, or 1:2 again — is the rate of imperialist exploitation of the peripheral Brazilian coffee economy. Thus the peripheral worker is doubly exploited, first by his own capitalist employer and then by the capitalists of the United States.

We can estimate the overall rate of exploitation in the Brazilian peripheral coffee economy by comparing the price-per-pound of coffee currently made by the harvesters (30 cents) to the price-per-pound if their economic position were equalized with that of the workers in the imperial core ($16.97). That is 47:1. The imperial worker is exploited at a rate of 100%; the peripheral worker is exploited at a rate of 4700%. For every $4,700 distributed to the comprador plantation owner, imperial workers, and the U.S. capitalist, one dollar is distributed to the harvester.

The difference between the thirty  cents and the $16.97 is realized as surplus value for, first, the plantation owner; then, Starbucks corporation; and finally, the American consumer. We pay $3 per grande drip instead of essentially $4 at the expense of the Starbucks barista and the coffee harvesters. This isn’t limited to coffee, and the more laborious the final product, generally the more hidden value is shifted onto the peripheral workers. This one dollar may seem like nothing in a cup of coffee — but now consider the amount hidden in the blood-soaked coltan in our phones, in the agony-filled rosewood of a desk, in the gunpowder-scented gasoline of our cars…

Without the Capitalists, Everyone Benefits

The wages of every other non-productive or semi-productive position in the Starbucks corporation, from advertisement positions to H.R. to hired lawyers to the CEO, is paid for by the unrealized wages of the baristas and the coffee harvesters. It is true that managers may help increase efficiency of laborers, and that the petit-bourgeois ranks of the Starbucks corporation might maximize those same efficiencies and create extra sales; to the extent that they do this, they do add value. The vast strata of labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeois “knowledge workers” supported by the stolen superprofits of the peripheral economy can only be employed in such marginally productive labor so long as the U.S. continues to dominate and destroy the economies of peripheral countries.

Although there are clearly tiers of exploitation, with the imperialized periphery suffering the most, there is one truth that is emblazoned above all others: without the interference of the parasitic capitalists, the workers of both the core and the periphery will live markedly better lives.

We must march together with our imperialized siblings, stand in solidarity with international labor, and oppose the entire system — we must inoculate ourselves against the blandishments and bribes of the capitalists, reject their crumbs, and unite together. The barista and the coffee harvester are linked by common interest and common need. All that remains is a common creed to bind them together and coordinate them against their common foes; capitalism and imperialism!

1. According to the Starbucks 2022 10-K report, Starbucks spent $2.7 billion on machinery and furniture and a further $2.7 billion dollars on rent for their stores. There are presently 35,711 Starbucks stores worldwide. That means each location costs, on average, $75,606 each year in rent, or $207 each day. Starbucks spends almost the same amount on furniture, machinery, and utilities each year — this includes replacing old, worn-out machines that get used up. That all means it costs $414 per day to keep the Starbucks storefront open, before any raw material costs or labor. ︎
2. That same 10-K report gives us the figures of $1.2 billion for coffee beans and $9.1 billion for all other raw materials (milk, syrups, packaging, shipping). We will set aside those other raw materials, because we are assuming they make only coffee. Divide this total of $10.3 billion by the number of stores (35,711) and we have a per-store per-year expense of $254,823. That’s $698/day and $50 an hour. ︎
3. $11/hour x 4 baristas + $19/hour x 1 manager. ︎
4. $29.57 (store costs) + $63 (labor costs) + $50 (raw material cost). ︎
5. ($142.57/hour)/($3/cup). ︎
6. According to their latest financial reports, the gross revenue of Starbucks is currently $35.97 billion per year. That’s $1,007,253 a year from each store — $2,759.60 each day, or $197.11 for each working hour. Divide $197.11 by $3 and you get 66 cups. ︎
7. Divide the $79.57 in fixed costs by the number of coffees sold each hour, 66, and you arrive at $1.20. ︎
8. Coffee price of $3 – $1.20 for maintenance. ︎
9. $63/66. ︎
10. 66 x ($3-$1.20). ︎
11. How do we arrive at 7.5 cents as the cost of the roasted coffee beans used in each cup? Starbucks reportedly pays $1.20 per pound of coffee, and one pound of beans can make 16 cups. ︎

The U.S. Empire has always treated the Latin American countries this way. From the creation of the so-called Monroe Doctrine in 1823 all the way up through the Cold War and into the new millennium, the United States has pushed the Latin American countries around, violated their sovereignty, murdered their citizens, and encouraged U.S. corporations to do the same. The term “banana republic” was coined to describe the domination of the United Fruit Company (Chiquita Banana) over Guatemala. As late as 2007, U.S. courts found that companies like United Fruit were providing millions of dollars to far-right paramilitary organizations in Colombia and other Latin American countries for the express purpose of terrorizing their people and clearcutting the ground for exploitative U.S. corporate practices. Coca-Cola funds anti-union Colombian death squads. God bless America!

In 1999, the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly created a new constitution and inaugurated the Bolivarian Revolution, which promised resistance to the International Monetary Fund’s meddling in the Venezuelan economy and the establishment of social welfare programs. Perhaps most critically from the point of view of the United States vultures, it nationalized a number of economic sectors. The natural reaction of the U.S. Empire was to impose an ever-tightening regime of sanctions designed to “make the economy scream.” This was the response of the Nixon administration to the socialist government headed by Allende in Chile; it was the response of the Bush administration to the socialist government of Venezuela. Since 2008, the U.S. Empire has continuously put restrictions on one or another part of the Venezuelan economy, with the intention of destroying the socialist government there, as they did in Chile. As a result, Venezuela has been isolated from the U.S. portion of the world-economy. It cannot access the U.S. financial system, its accounts have been frozen, it cannot sell oil to U.S. allies, and many companies inside Venezuela are prevented from accessing the international market.

This is not enough for the ghouls who run the U.S. Empire, but despite the fact that these sanctions led directly to more than 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018, the Bolivarian Revolution remains standing, resisting the onrush of empire. The seizure of foreign-owned oil fields and the transfer of ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Exxon Mobile property to the control of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state-owned oil company, drove the Washington ghouls and their puppeteers into apoplectic convulsions.

The Trump regime tried to launch a takeover of the country in early 2019, naming one of their many puppets, a vacant-eyed politician named Juan Guaido, interim president. Guaido, a graduate of CIA-hotbed, Andres Bello Catholic University — which has been the alma mater of several CIA agents, hosts a CIA-funded partner program with George Washington University and the National Security Archive, and which has been implicated in papers from the U.S. embassy obtained by the Venezuelan intelligence service — attempted, with considerable U.S. backing, to force President Nicolas Maduro out of office and take control of the country. This laughable coup, a repeat of the much more serious U.S.-backed attempt to remove Hugo Chavez in 2002, was easily repulsed.

This brings us to today and the U.S. state’s newest attack on the Bolivarian Revolution through PDVSA, the state oil company.

In 1990, before the Bolivarian Revolution began, PDVSA acquired control over the oil conglomerate Citgo. Perhaps as retaliation for the defeat of the Guaido coup, the U.S. Treasury Department under Trump issued further sanctions against Venezuela. These specifically targeted PDVSA. These sanctions allowed Citgo’s executives to block payments to PDVSA and operate independently, essentially severing the Venezuelan government from Citgo entirely. The Bolivarian Republic’s assets have been placed in a “blocked account” which both Citgo and the U.S. government have conspired to prevent the people of Venezuela from getting the benefit of their ownership of the company.

At the end of this last July, the necromancers in charge of President Biden began a final assault against the Bolivarian Republic’s ownership of Citgo. PDVSA’s shares are being stripped from the company — and thus, the Republic and all its people — by Obama-appointed and Biden-promoted federal judge Leonard Stark. The shares will be auctioned off to satisfy “creditors” of the Venezuelan government, and will almost certainly be sold at a hugely discounted rate. This same neoliberal tactic was wielded against Allende’s Chile, the U.S.S.R. and many other places struggling for socialism. Pedro Tellechea, Venezuelan Oil Minister, said “It’s not a PDVSA asset. It’s an asset of all Venezuelans.”

Mr. Tellechea is right. This is a crime being committed against the people of Venezuela, another in the long list of crimes the U.S. Empire has committed in Latin America. It’s yet another outrage against the sovereignty of the people of Venezuela, another of many attacks on the right of the Venezuelans to determine their own future. The United Socialist Party of Venezuela, also known as PSUV, is consistently elected to fill most positions throughout their government. The Indigenous people of Venezuela are now, thanks to the 1999 constituent process, guaranteed political representation in all levels of the government, and have reserved parliamentary seats in the national assembly and on municipal councils in districts with Indigenous populations.

Like the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Venezuela has a uniquely representative and responsive form of government. Like Venezuela, Bolivia’s government was recently forced to survive an American backed coup because it had nationalized its mineral resources.  The U.S. Empire, of course, takes every effort to paint both governments as “undemocratic” and “authoritarian.” This is the same empire that was thrown out of Venezuela by the Revolution’s nationalization program, the same empire whose tendrils have been repulsed time and time again, whose interference and influence among the Venezuelan class of exploiters has been defeated and turned back. Of course the capitalists who lost out when Venezuela nationalized its industries and began to spend its resources to take care of its own citizens, rather than ship them abroad to make profits for American businessmen, despise Venezuela.

Having failed, for approaching twenty years, to directly overthrow the socialist Bolivarian Republic, the United States is now employing its grinding legal system. If they can’t recapture the oil, they can at least steal the profits of the Indigenous people of Latin America — so goes the corrupt thinking behind the bench and in the halls of power. The U.S. vampire demands satisfaction, and is now employing its own court systems to get the blood it feels it’s owed.

The Americas are no longer the preserve of United States corporations; despite the empire’s failing efforts to damn the people of Venezuela for daring to control their own destiny, the mighty Yanqui beast is doomed to failure as other Central and South American countries follow suit and shrug off the yoke of their imperial masters.

José Pedro Castillo Terrones, the democratically elected, legitimate president of Peru, has been ousted by the right-reactionary wing of Peru’s ruling class. President Castillo, a former union leader and school teacher who stood as the candidate of Free Peru, a Marxist party, ran on the most progressive platform in the country’s history, and beat Keiko Fujimori, leader of the right-fascist and neoliberal Popular Force party, in the 2021 elections. Since those elections, every reform put forward by President Castillo’s progressive government has been obstructed by a reactionary-right opposition bloc in the country’s Congress. This obstructionism has earned the opposition-dominated Congress a staggering 10% approval rating from an increasingly disgusted public. Initially, Castillo attempted to reach conciliation with the moderate wing of the opposition; he governed as a moderate left-wing social democrat for 18 months, despite his radically progressive election platform and the clear mandate he received from his political base in Peru’s working classes and peasantry. From the start of his presidency, Castillo lacked the necessary revolutionary infrastructure to see through his ambitious plan. The Castillo government was unable to dislodge Peru’s entrenched political establishment, characterized by right-wing neoliberalism and anti-Indigenismo racism. 

Finally, on 7 December, 2022, in an attempt to purge the government of these rightist-reactionary  obstructionists, President Castillo dissolved the Congress, formed a provisional government, instituted a national curfew, and called for the formation of a new, popular Constituent Assembly to draft a new, popular-democratic constitution. 

President Castillo’s last-ditch effort to save Peru from another right-wing dictatorship has seemingly failed. Nevertheless, now is the hour to stand with President Castillo and denounce the right-wing Congress, the treasonous armed forces of Peru, and Peru’s colonial-capitalist oligarchy. Now is the time to stand firmly against the imperialist machinations of “our own” U.S. monopoly capitalists and their minions in “our” U.S. imperialist federal government, who interfere in the internal politics of Peru for the purpose of resubjugating and recolonizing yet another Latin American country.

Class Struggle in Peru

The territory that is now the Republic of Peru was conquered by Spain in the middle of the 16th century. This conquest expanded Spanish rule over the Americas and brought with it a caste hierarchy. This hierarchy, called casta (literally “lineage”), divided the subjects of the Spanish empire in the New World into racial categories: peninsulares, the Spanish administrators born in Spain; the criollo, or Spanish born in the so-called New World; mestizos; mulatos; indios; zambos; and negros. High positions in the government of New Spain were more or less reserved for peninsulares.

At the beginning of the 19th century, wars of independence swept through Central and South America. Peru remained loyal to the crown throughout much of this period. It was Simón Bolívar the Liberator himself who brought republican rule to Lima. In 1821, a congress of Peruvian aristocrats sent a plea to Bolívar for assistance in winning their independence. Although this congress of Spanish aristocrats would not maintain any kind of actual, institutional continuity, it is telling that even at this early stage in Peru’s formation, the decision to fight for independence from Spain was made not by the people, but by a narrow group of unelected, unrepresentative, elite officials.

The early republic was unstable, and it was replaced by a series of criollo strongmen after 1830. The criollo nobility refused to recognize Indigenous people of Peru as citizens until the 1860s. During the 19th century, under the Monroe Doctrine set forth in the 1820s, the U.S. consolidated its imperial hegemony over the Americas, systematically driving out its Western European rivals. By the early 20th century, the Peruvian planters and landowners, supplied and financed by the U.S. Empire, ruled the country in an uneasy truce with the powerful Peruvian military.

In 1895 the Partido Civilista, planter-aristocrats opposed to military rule, established the so-called “aristocratic republic.” Ostensibly liberal — that is, inspired by Enlightenment values — strict property and literacy requirements effectively meant that essentially only criollo landowners could vote. During the late 19th and early 20th century, these powerful criollo families developed plantation agriculture along the country’s coasts and their Partido Civilista dominated the presidency; planters served in the cabinet, the senate, and the chamber of deputies. Almost every sugar and cotton planter occupied some political position. The planters brought 17,000 Japanese workers into the country from 1898-1928 to work their plantations and increase sugar production. Even though the aristocratic republic saw the rise of very powerful pre-capitalist plantation and mine owners, the mining industry, plantation agriculture, and other areas of the Peruvian economy in the early 20th century were heavily financed by foreign, primarily British, capital.

In 1920, a progressive constitution was adopted and the old planter “aristocratic” families fell from their stronghold. Plantation agriculture had declined, the price of sugar on the world market collapsed in 1921, and growing professional, artisan, and capitalist classes displaced the largely unorganized semi-feudal planters of the coast. President Augusto B. Leguía courted these new class-elements which were primarily focused in the country’s cities. He began a program of public works and infrastructure improvement that included new streets, sewers, and public buildings in Lima. Rural infrastructure was expanded through a forced-labor system that drafted indios, Indigenous, labor. In order to finance this development, Leguía borrowed freely from the U.S. and other outside capital.

In 1924, reform leaders in Mexico, who had been forced out by Leguía’s political repression, founded the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), a Pan-Americanist, anti-imperialist, pro-Indigenous political party. In 1928, the Peruvian Communist Party was founded, in part by José Carlos Mariátegui, who was himself a former member of APRA. In 1929, the worldwide economic crisis and the beginning of the Great Depression destabilized the Leguía government and undermined its base among the urban capitalists. 

Leguía’s government could not weather the storm. In 1930, the military, which had been so powerful during the 19th century, again took action. A military junta removed Leguía and the presidency then passed from military figure to military figure until the so-called Primavera Democrática, the Democratic Spring, of 1939. A general election was held on 22 October, 1939 and the victor, Manuel Prado Ugarteche, was elected by a huge margin. 

From 1939-1968, something approaching a liberal-democratic republic governed in Peru, although the occasional interference of the armed forces would continue throughout the 20th century. During the latter half of the 1960s, the Peruvian military intervened yet again, and the long-antagonistic relationship between the military and APRA became more hostile as new revolutionary Communist forces sprang up in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, including the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), which launched an open insurrection in the middle-60s. The military, by and large under continuous leadership (unlike the civilian government) began a long campaign of suppressing the various Communist guerilla movements.

Operation Condor and the Shining Path 

In 1968, the U.S.-friendly capitalist regime was again toppled by the Peruvian Army, which installed itself as a military dictatorship. To forestall a revolution from below, the Peruvian armed forces instituted what they called a “revolution from above.” The military enacted a sweeping agrarian land reform project that redistributed farmlands from the wealthiest families in Peru and helped alleviate the country’s worst land-poverty. The army nationalized whole industries, and placed the economy under the control of the Peruvian working people.

The very next year, 1969, the Peruvian Communist Party – Red Flag (Bandera Rosa), which had itself split from the original Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), split again. The splitting faction, led by Abimael Guzmán, founded the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. Bandera Rosa had split with the PCP over which “camp” — that of the Soviet Union or of the People’s Republic of China — to follow during the Sino-Soviet Split. In turn, Sendero Luminoso split from Bandera Rosa because of a disagreement over tactics. Whereas the majority of Bandera Rosa believed it would be necessary to remain a mostly legal party, and that direct war with the Peruvian state was out of the question, Guzmán and his followers claimed that only an immediate, years-long, low-scale, violent insurrection could free Peru from capitalism; this, despite the fact that it was capitalist provocateurs who most loudly advocated for open war and terrorism, and despite the near-century of evidence proving the ineffectiveness of direct confrontations with the Peruvian state. In the ten years from 1969 to 1979, Sendero Luminoso built a strong base within student organizations and recruited almost exclusively from among radicalized university students; its central leadership included several highly-placed university professors, Guzmán among them. In this it was typical of “Maoist” parties of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the Western imperialist world, perhaps in an attempt to replicate the Maoist Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In 1980, when the party turned away from mass organizing toward open warfare with the Peruvian state, its roots among university students would wither.

In 1975, an official with close ties to Yankee capitalists, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, became the military’s new leader. Just like that, the military dictatorship became yet another puppet-regime for Yankee capital. Because the dictatorship was anti-democratic, it lacked strong roots among the people; even though it was widely popular, it had few defenses against usurpation from within. An official like Bermúdez was thus able to simply step into office and retool the state apparatus built up by his predecessor. The Bermúdez regime brought the Peruvian government into the fold of Yankee imperialism, joining the U.S.-designed and financed Operation Condor, a continent-wide campaign of political repression and anti-Indigenous, anti-labor, anti-Communist state terror that suffocated the oppressed of Latin America during the 1970s and 80s.

In 1980, the military government caved to mass pressure, and relinquished power, permitting elections for the first time in decades. APRA, which had led the campaign for democracy and had earned itself mass support from the common people of Peru, won the 1980 elections and formed the new government. Peru began its slow and still-incomplete transition to a semi-democratic republic under a liberal constitution.

At the same time, in 1980, Sendero Luminoso, having amassed about 500 members, abandoned its base in the university campuses, and launched its doomed insurrection against the Peruvian state, which it called a “protracted people’s war,” after the military strategy of the Communist Party of China during the Chinese revolution. In truth, Sendero Luminoso never earned the widespread support of the people — the key to the Chinese Communists’ success. Instead, Sendero Luminoso fought not only against the Peruvian state, but also against everyone, from other Communists to peasant villages, who did not join their crusade. It attacked the new 1980 elections as illegitimate, and did the same following the APRA’s 1985 electoral victory; it branded the APRA “revisionist” and the APRA-led government its enemy. When Sendero Luminoso militants attempted to establish “base areas” in the Peruvian countryside, the party was met with stiff resistance from the peasantry, who were largely against its insurrection. Sendero Luminoso members resorted to acts of terrorism, massacres, and brutal methods of execution against the peasants in villages that resisted its occupation. Indigenous communities and leaders in the Peruvian countryside were similarly terrorized by Shining Path militants. Although Guzmán and his clique called themselves “Maoists,” there was little in their tactics that Mao would recognize; they did not serve the people, they did not build popular workers’ and peasants’ councils, they did not bring literacy to the countryside, they did not redistribute the land, and they did not listen to criticism from the masses. Rather, they told the people that the time had come for warfare, and rather than attempt to prove themselves as revolutionaries and win over the poor masses of Peru, they butchered individuals and whole communities who objected to their methods. Other Peruvian Communists have characterized the Shining Path’s activities as similar to those of the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Shining Path’s anti-union, anti-campesino and anti-Indigenous terrorism drove the poor masses of Peru not only from their faction, but from Communism as a project; every Communist faction in Peru was now forced to overcome the people’s widespread fear and distrust. This dangerously weakened the left-wing political alliances that had so often triumphed over even the most violent right-wing repression throughout the early 20th century, and strengthened the right-wing political camp representing Peru’s capitalist and landlord oligarchy. The right-wing parties soon clawed back their power.

Fujimori

In 1990, APRA was defeated by the far-right presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori, who ran on an extreme right-wing platform of neoliberalism, anti-Indigenous racism, and militarism. These politics, which came to be known as Fujimorismo, were cut from the same cloth as those of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime in Chile.

Pinochet came to power in a 1973 military coup, in which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, relatively moderate Marxist president, was murdered; thousands of Chilean civilians were tortured, murdered, and disappeared by the Pinochet military junta. Chile under Pinochet was used as a testing grounds for the model of economic policy known as neoliberalism — a model developed in the halls of the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, which centered on the sweeping privatization and austerity, which sought to increase the capitalists’ profit rates by gutting the welfare state and depriving workers of basic rights to assembly and organization. As Chile descended into autocracy, its poorest citizens suffered ever deepening inequalities and worsening poverty. The damage done by the Pinochet regime can still be observed in Chilean society, even three decades after the country’s transition back to democracy.

Fujimori was little more than a puppet of Western capital. His government received a $715 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development. The neoliberal economist Hernando de Soto, who received money from the notorious CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, became Fujimori’s chief economic advisor, his “personal representative,” and was often referred to as the “informal president.” De Soto helped institute “Fujishock” — the privatization of 250 industries that had been nationalized by the revolutionary military dictatorship, the devaluation of the country’s currency by 200%, causing nearly half the country to drop below the poverty line, the lifting of price regulations, a 300% tax increase, and the sale of large sections of the country’s economy directly to U.S. corporations. De Soto advocated for the wholesale collapse of Peru’s society to rid it of the “dead weight” of the poor.

To enact this horrific plan, Fujimori used his powers to dissolve the Congress, suspended the constitution and replaced it with one of his design, and ruled as a dictator from 1990 until 2000. The Fujimorists, led by his daughter Keiko, now dominate the Congress.

The character of the Peruvian Congress has not fundamentally changed since the time of the aristocratic republic. The old colonial planter-aristocracy has evolved into the modern-day classes of industrial capitalists and agricultural landlords. The dictatorship that once ruled Peru, a dictatorship of the old aristocracy, has transformed over the last two centuries into a dictatorship of U.S.-backed urban capitalists and rural landlords — but an assembly for the class-dictatorship of the oppressors, the Congress still remains.

Peru in 2020

Peruvian society has sharp class divides which map to the old Spanish racial stratification. Although the poverty rate has fallen since the days of Fujimori (down to a low of 20% in 2019), by 2020 it was on the rise again and has, in 2022, reached 25%. The urban elite, Peru’s comprador bourgeoisie, live almost entirely in Lima, and comprise roughly 3% of the total population. These capitalists are overwhelmingly white in a country where 60% of the population is Mestizo and 26% Indigenous. As opposed to the general poverty rate, the poverty rate of those whose mother’s tongue is Quechua, Aymara, or any other native language is at least 70%. White wage earners in Peru earn nearly 2.5 times the average wages of other national groups.

The cities also host petit-bourgeois professionals and domestic servants. There is a substantial campesino and agricultural worker population in the rural areas, and a large class of proletarian workers employed in extractive and manufacturing industries.

With the caveat that some of this information is now out of date, the agricultural labor force of Peru is 6% of the labor force; 0.5% employed in mining; 12.6% in manufacturing; 5% in construction; 26% in finance; 5% as domestic servants; and 44% in various other “services.” This breakdown is tellingly inexact — we do not know, for instance, anything about the informal economy of unreported work that thrives in the cities, nor can we discover the class-composition of the “services” encompassed by that broad term.

Peru is the world’s second-largest producer of copper, zinc, and silver and Latin America’s second-largest producer of gold. It is among the primary mineral-producing countries in the world. This wealth is siphoned off by the imperialist Euro-American bourgeoisie, who own the largest mining companies in Peru — Dynacor for instance, by far and away the largest mining concern in Peru, is a Canadian company. Its shareholders are Canadian, French, and American.

The Fujimori dictatorship established the so-called “Lima Consensus” to open the country to foreign capital and break the revolutionary national policies of the APRA. The Lima Consensus was cribbed by the Fujimori regime from the same playbook the CIA handed Augustin Pinochet thirty years earlier: extreme market deregulation, privatization of all industries, no or very low social spending, the invasion of Indigenous territories by mining and logging companies, and the slaughter of oil protestors in the Amazon.

In 2020, Peru was in the hands of the neoliberal comprador elite. They administered Peru for the benefit of their class and their Euro-American allies, having crushed the resistance of Indigenous groups, APRA, Communist guerillas, and other left-wing groups. The country’s Congress, which is its legislative body, has been more or less continuously held by right-fascist parties in alliance with Keiko Fujimori (Alberto Fujimori’s daughter), the leader of the fascist Popular Force.

Victory of the Left in the 2021 Elections

The 2021 Peruvian election saw Marxists, Social Democrats, and those fighting for Indigenous rights make gains in the Congress as the social base for Fujimorismo degraded. For two decades, the poorest of Peru have suffered under the Fujishock doctrine; despite Sendero Luminoso’s alienation of the campesinos and workers, the continuous assault on the laboring masses of Peru by the neoliberal comprador elite of Lima has seen a broad resurgence in left alliances across the country.

Pedro Castillo was a campesino who fought against Sendero Luminoso and led a series of teacher’s strikes for wages and improvement of conditions. He entered the presidential election under the Free Peru ticket. He has since met publicly with the Sendero Luminoso representatives from MOVADEF, their United Front organization. As Castillo won the presidential election (facing off against arch-fascist Keiko Fujimori in the second round), left-wing parties gained traction in the Congress for the first time in decades.

Free Peru won 37 seats, up from zero; Together for Peru won 5 seats up from zero. Still, the fascist and right-liberal parties retained the vast majority of Congress seats. Out of 130 seats, Popular Force held 24, Popular Renewal 13, and Popular Action 16. Liberal-reformists like Popular Action have historically aligned with the shifting Fujimorist majorities.

Castillo’s victory over Fujimori was narrow — a mere 44,000 votes. Since his accession to the presidency, certain sects of the U.S. and Western Marxist movement have denounced President Castillo as a social imperialist and called for intensified war in the countryside against the state. Nevertheless, Gustavo Petro of Colombia, AMLO of Mexico, Luis Arce of Bolivia, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Indigenous farmers organization CODECA of Guatemala, and numerous other left anti-capitalists have voiced their support for Pedro Castillo and denounced the Congressional coup regime of 7 December.

“Moral Incapacity” and the Peruvian Fascists

The traditionally aristocratic Congress of Peru has the constitutional power to recall its president — a power it reserves to prevent the kinds of national-left revolutionary dictatorships like that which held the country in the mid-1960s. The clause under which the Congress can recall the Peruvian president is in the case of “physical or moral incapacity” — a clear cipher, a transparent phrase designed to permit the removal of any moderately left-wing president who threatens the U.S.-comprador axis.

President Castillo, immediately upon accession, was battered by international outrage. While the Yankee-imperialist mouthpiece, the New York Times, hailed him as the “clearest repudiation of the country’s establishment,” the election triggered mass capital flight out of Peru. Capitalist credit-rating agency Fitch penalized Peru with a credit rating downgrade in response to the election.

The comprador right and their hardened fascist core immediately began preparations to combat Castillo. For his part, Castillo came out fighting: he appointed former National Liberation Army (ELN) fighter Héctor Béjar as his Foreign Minister. Béjar was immediately set upon by the Peruvian media and attacked for his statements that “the Shining Path was trained by the CIA.” The Congress began the process of launching a show-trial to impeach Béjar for his part in the ELN, casting him as a criminal. Béjar was asked to resign 19 days after the government was inaugurated to prevent him from speaking to the Congress and presenting a strong case for the working class and campesinos in Peru.

Labor Minister Iber Maraví was accused of having ties to the Shining Path and censured by the Congress. Keiko Fujimori attacked the president as the head of a “terrorist government.” Rather than permit Maraví and the rest of his government to be subject to increasing attacks from the ultra-right Congress, Castillo dissolved his cabinet.

On 6 October, 2021, in a misguided attempt to protect the fragile Free Peru presidency, Castillo appointed Mirtha Vásquez Prime Minister and a host of centrists and rightists into his cabinet. Free Peru itself began to support action against President Castillo as he ran to the right to avoid the threat of a confrontation with the Congress. On 20 November, 2021, Popular Force, Go on Country, and Popular Renewal attempted the first of three impeachments, but lacked the 87 votes needed to oust Castillo and reinstate a right-wing terror government. Right-wing violence has been rising as the ultra-rightists struggle to rid themselves of Castillo. The formation of La Resistencia is a direct response to the election; this paramilitary organization has threatened and harassed members of the Castillo administration and attacked both civilians and government officials.

Despite his attempt at avoiding the sword of the ultra-right Congress, Castillo and his supporters still struck at their economic base: On 20 November, for instance, the Castillo government refused to extend the operations of four mines in Ayacucho. On 3 November, the Castillo government began a land reform plan that, although it would not redistribute the land itself, would put an end to the “bosses and the landowners… eat[ing] from the sweat of the poor and the peasants.”

Twice before, the ultra-right compradors and fascists in the Congress have attempted to impeach Pedro Castillo under the “moral incapacity” clause. The Castillo government’s moderation toward the right actually left it more vulnerable to the third and final attempt at impeachment: isolated from its true and natural allies on the left, he was isolated and vulnerable to this last thrust. Rather than permit the fascist-dominated Congress to go forward with its plan, Castillo reversed a year of capitulationist backpedaling and made use of a Fujimori-era presidential power to dissolve the Congress itself. On 7 December, 2022, using legal powers of the president, he enacted a curfew, established an emergency government, and called for a Constituent Assembly to replace the Pinochet-like Fujimorist constitution.

Many of Castillo’s compromise rightist and centrist ministers resigned in protest. His rightist Vice President was sworn in the next day. Perhaps predictably, the Congress refused to be dissolved. The right across Peru has rallied together and, in a blatantly illegal maneuver, has removed President Castillo from office and placed him under arrest.

Power to the Pro-Castillo Forces

Immediately following the Congressional coup to oust Castillo, the country erupted in protest. Each day following the coup, protests of thousands to tens-of-thousands have rocked the country. On 14 December, Dina Boluarte, Castillo’s renegade vice president and current illegitimate coup-president of the country, declared a national state of emergency. The coup government has stripped democratic rights from the people of Peru: the rights to refuse troop quartering, freedom of movement, assembly, and personal freedom and security have all been suspended. On 15 December, the Peruvian Armed Forces opened fire on protestors in Ayacucho, killing 8 and injuring 52.

Even the Yankee-imperialist newswire Reuters reports that “Peru’s ‘forgotten people’ rage against political elite after Castillo arrest.” Despite his vacillating, Castillo represents the hopes of the racialized lower classes, the campesinos, the industrial workers, the seasonal workers, and the Inidgenous peoples fighting the Congress and the blood-soaked U.S., British, and French companies encroaching on their ancestral territories. Peru is now the focus of a continent-wide Pan-American struggle against European exploitation. The protests carry banners and placards that denounce Dina Boluarte, the traitor-minister, as an assassin, her hands dipped in the blood of Castillo and of the people.

From his cell, President Castillo wrote “I was chosen by the forgotten men and women of deep Peru, by the dispossessed who have been neglected for over 200 years.” The people have no faith in their ultra-right Congress, dominated by the heirs of Fujimori and Pinochet. The people have no faith in the courts of Peru, and only recently has their faith in the possibility of the great equalizing revolution been restored after decades of disillusion and abuse at the hands of certain so-called Communists behaving little better than the CIA’s own death squads. Although Castillo has been far from steadfast, he is now standing with his people, against the abuses of the racialized caste system inherited from the Spanish; Castillo stands with the people, against the capitalist exploiters. We, too, stand with the people of Peru!

We call for justice for the people of Peru, and death to her assassins; we call for the restoration of the rightfully-elected president of the country, and the immediate dissolution of the rebel Congress! Only in solidarity with the people can reform of the criminal abuses, those installed by the United States Empire and its puppet regimes, be purged from the government of Peru.