Please take this resolution to your Labour Party, trade union branch or trades council:
This meeting notes that:
- On 23 January, the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, appointed himself “president in charge” of the country;
- Nicolás Maduro remains the democratically elected president of Venezuela, having won the 2018 presidential election by a large margin;
- The National Assembly remains in contempt of court after a 2016 ruling declared that the election of 3 MPs from Amazonas was void due to election fraud;
- Article 233 of the constitution, which is being invoked by the opposition in the National Assembly who support Guaidó’s claim to the presidency, relies on a “permanent absence of the president”, which is clearly not the present situation. Even if this were the case, the vice president ought to take on the office of the presidency;
- Guaidó’s anti-democratic and unconstitutional manoeuvre is being backed by major powers across the Western hemisphere, including Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government in Brazil, and Theresa May.
This meeting further notes that:
- Following the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998, the workers and poor of Venezuela achieved significant advances in healthcare, housing, education and workers’ rights;
- The Bolivarian Revolution has been opposed every step of the way by the forces of international imperialism and a right-wing opposition in Venezuela who seek to defend the power and wealth of the oligarchs. These opposition forces have at times aligned themselves with fascist gangs, and have employed a range of violent means – including political assassinations, intimidation, and a US-backed military coup in 2002 – to undermine Venezuelan democracy;
- Should the right-wing opposition come to power it will immediately embark on a savage campaign of cuts and attacks on the working class, using violent repression wherever necessary, as evidenced by the conduct of opposition figures in the bloody ‘Caracazo’ massacre in 1989;
- The current crisis of the Venezuelan economy, which began with the steep fall in oil prices in 2014, has been greatly exacerbated by deliberate sabotage on the part of the oligarchy, and economic sanctions by the US, combined with the Maduro government’s inability to put the ownership and control of the Venezuelan economy in the hands of the working class;
- Notwithstanding this fact, for much of the past twenty years, the working class and poor of Venezuela have mobilised repeatedly – at the ballot box and in the street – to defend the gains of the revolution.
This meeting resolves that:
- We are in total opposition to the imperialist coup being carried out in Venezuela;
- We condemn the attempt by the UK government to legitimate the coup in Venezuela by recognising Guaidó as president;
- We demand that the Bank of England immediately hands over the Venezuelan gold it is withholding worth $550 million;
- We call on the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn to reject the ongoing coup attempt in Venezuela;
- We extend our solidarity and friendship to those Venezuelans involved in opposing Guaidó’s coup attempt, and who are seeking to bring the revolutionary process to a successful and satisfactory conclusion and we call on the British Labour and trade union movement to do the same;
- We believe that such a resolution can only be achieved by the energetic expropriation of the oligarchy, who continue to control most of the Venezuelan economy, by the Venezuelan working people;
- We further believe that the future of the struggle of the Venezuelan people for liberation can only be secured by the victory of socialist forces elsewhere, most especially in the US itself, which is the strongest bastion of capitalist reaction in the world.
