Dear companions,
I want, first, to thank the Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela for the warm welcome and for the important support, essential for the successful organization of this event.
We anti-imperialist fighters feel honored to be in heroic Caracas, land of the liberator Simón Bolívar and the unforgettable commander Hugo Chávez.
Chávez, with intelligence and courage, was a great pioneer of the paths of the anti-imperialist struggle in the 21st century. The Communist Party of Brazil salutes the memory of this hero of the Latin American peoples in the year that marks the decade of his death.
I also place on record our gratitude to the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, which kindly invited us to be here with you. Thank you very much, comrades.
Dear companions,
With the end of the Cold War, in the early 1990s, the world began to live with a power that brooked no challenge. This power, exercised by the government of the United States of America and its allies, acts as the ruthless sheriff of the world.
Imperialism only allows countries to adopt an economic model: the neoliberal one, which condemns nations to eternal underdevelopment and endemic poverty. At the international level, complete political subordination is required. Internally, the existence of one model of democracy is allowed at most: the bourgeois liberal, even so chained, corrupted and limited.
The peoples that dare to confront these dogmas, sooner or later see a storm of threats and aggressions fall on their heads.
Imperialism, which today, to attack Russia, hypocritically raises the fundamental banner of territorial integrity, was the same one that destroyed the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and that of many other sovereign countries.
It is this same imperialism that sustains Israel’s machine of oppression against the Palestinian people, which controls and expands, towards peaceful peoples, its armies of destruction and death, feeding the insatiable hunger for money of the magnates of the war industry.
The solidarity that the imperialists preach is also devoid of real content, as was demonstrated during the covid-19 pandemic, when the imperialist countries revealed all their selfishness and the total inability to see things from a simply human point of view.
But the wheel of history keeps turning.
Until recently, with the end of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp in Eastern Europe, when imperialism began to mobilize its war machine, there was little hope and our activity was almost limited to denouncing.
Fortunately, dear companions, we have the privilege of witnessing the end of this era.
We live in a stage of accelerated transition in the world. This transition did not come out of nowhere. It was created by the brave struggle of the peoples. New global actors are emerging that challenge the hegemonic power.
Actors, such as China and Russia, who claim that the time for unilateral impositions has ended and demand respect for the sovereign options of each country, both in terms of economic development and in relation to the construction of democratic models in accordance with the options, culture and tradition of each people.
Imperialism is not satisfied, it puts into play the immense political, cultural, diplomatic and military power that it still holds, using an arsenal that starts from the threat and goes through the promotion of hybrid warfare, incentives for neo-fascist ideas, unilateral sanctions, and even direct aggression, but the results are no longer the same, as demonstrated by the victorious resistance in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Popular Korea, Nicaragua, Bolivia, etc.
However, the tragic conflict in Ukraine, provoked in the first place by this criminal organization called NATO, points to the fact that the US and its allies are betting everything on increasing tensions and war as a way to avoid the death of the unipolar order.
Contrary to what China and Brazil did, who presented balanced and mutually acceptable proposals for an immediate ceasefire, the so-called “West” does not want to hear about peace and, in addition to supplying the corrupt and neo-fascist Kiev regime with billions of dollars in arms, sabotages any serious attempt at dialogue and promotes a horror show, with media censorship and typical Nazi Russophobia.
The increasing danger of a world war grows hand in hand with the increase in environmental devastation, misery, famine and the growing influence of neo-fascism, phenomena with a clear interconnection.
However, a new and essential actor is beginning to mobilize for peace on the European continent itself: the peoples. Every day we hear reports of mass rallies in different countries demanding an end to the conflict and denouncing NATO.
If this movement continues to rise, and reaches other parts of the globe, everything can change, for the better.
With his amazing ability to see beyond the horizon, Commander Fidel Castro, in his last article, predicted that the main flag of the peoples in the 21st century would be the fight for world peace.
Indeed, the fight for world peace with anti-imperialism as its axis is the fight of our time.
In order to fight effectively, we must take into account that anti-imperialism is a broad banner, which brings together movements, organizations and even countries with different ideological orientations, however, which no longer admit the strong oppression of the alleged owners of the world.
In order to pave the way for the new socialist society that we want and will build, it is necessary to place the national question and the anti-imperialist struggle as a determining factor. This obliges us to be the most ardent defenders of the unity of the progressive forces.
Dear companions,
In Brazil we also recently faced a coup of a new type. Thanks to a hybrid warfare campaign that saw the active participation of the US State Department, an honest and popularly elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was ousted in 2016.
In the 2018 presidential election, Brazil’s greatest popular leader, Lula da Silva, whose name appeared first in every poll for president, was arrested in a judicial farce.
With Lula arrested and prevented from participating in the election, the result was the election of a completely disqualified element. A crude, racist, and misogynistic neo-fascist, advocate of military dictatorship, torture of political prisoners, and sickeningly anti-communist, Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro has attacked Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua since the beginning of his term and promoted an unconditional alignment with Trump’s Washington.
Delving into the neoliberal agenda, the Bolsonaro administration discarded public goods, attacked the environment, human and labor rights, and put Brazil back on the hunger map. Unemployment and poverty assumed unprecedented proportions. During the pandemic, Bolsonaro boycotted vaccines and protective measures and Brazil, with about 2.5% of the world’s population, registered 13% of all deaths from Covid-19. The unions were persecuted and suffocated, as well as the entire social movement. Bolsonaro’s son, who is a senator, proposed, in 2018, shortly after his father’s election, a bill to ban the Communist Party. In justifying the project, Bolsonaro’s son cited neo-Nazi Ukraine as a good example.
However, the Brazilian people never stopped fighting and resisting. Lula was released in 2019, thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Communist Party of Brazil and after that all the lying accusations were dropped. In 2022, a Broad Front elected Lula president. Lula was a candidate for the “Frente Brasil da Esperança”, a political instrument that brings together the PT, the PCdoB and the Green Party. The candidacy of the “Frente Brasil da Esperança” had the support of seven other parties and, waging a tough battle against the extreme right, we won the elections.
I want to thank the Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro, the revolutionary currents and all Venezuelans for the constant encouragement and affection with which they have offered the Brazilian people during this period.
I extend my gratitude to the comrades from other countries present here, whose solidarity was essential for our victory.
With the victory of President Lula, the promising perspective of resuming the solidarity integration project of Latin America and the Caribbean opens, with the strengthening of Celac.
The fight in Brazil against the neo-fascist extreme right has not ended and we are fully aware of the role of US imperialism, which can sometimes change its tactics, but never its objectives.
The Communist Party of Brazil acts, together with its allies, to promote the mass struggle in defense of social justice, the strengthening of democracy, national sovereignty and world peace.
We have no doubts about the final victory and that the future will be socialist.
Long live the memory of Commander Hugo Chávez!
Long live the anti-imperialist struggle!