EDITORIAL
AFL-CIO, immigrants & Venezuela
"There are no borders in the workers'
struggle." That truth, based on the granite foundation of unity
among working and oppressed peoples around the world against
their bosses at home and abroad, is the only basis on which a
strong labor movement can be built.
That's the kind of solidarity that the AFL-CIO is
strengthening with its support of the current Freedom Ride by
immigrant workers and their supporters across the United
States. Union members of all nationalities have turned out at
rallies to extend their own solidarity with immigrant
workers--documented and undocumented.
And by modeling the Freedom Ride after a chapter in the
mighty civil rights struggle and stopping to rally at the
Market House in Fayetteville, N.C.--the once-central site for
the auction of enslaved African people--the movement for
immigrant rights is extending its solidarity with a powerful
segment of oppressed people who were forcibly brought to this
country in chains.
But the AFL-CIO leaders are breaching that unity and doing
the bosses' bidding when they fund counter-revolutionary
activities against the government of Hugo Chávez, which
was voted in by the workers and peasants of Venezuela. That's
exactly what the AFL-CIO's American Center for International
Labor Solidarity, which gets most of its money from the
quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy, has been
doing. It passes these unregulated government funds on to the
so-called Venezuelan Federation of Labor, the CTV, a group of
bribed union bureaucrats who have been collaborating with the
Venezuelan oligarchy and U.S. imperialism and opposing
Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution."
Washington and Wall Street fear that the broad social
movements for economic change sweeping Venezuela could lead to
a transfer of power and ownership from the imperialist owners
of industry and banking and the national capitalists to the
laboring and disenfranchised masses. That's how U.S.
imperialism felt about the Salvador Allende government in Chile
after 1970.
And as it did with Salvador Allende in Chile, U.S.
imperialism is using the CIA and all the covert economic and
political weapons at its disposal to try to bring down the
popular Chávez government in Venezuela. In April 2002,
when a CIA-backed coup briefly deposed Chávez, millions
of Venezuelan workers and peasants mobilized to restore his
presidency.
There are no borders in the workers' struggle.
Only the U.S. and Venezuelan bosses profit from overturning
the Chávez government, which is carrying out land reform
and extending workers' rights. A victory for imperialism and
its allied ruling class in Venezuela would be a profound defeat
for laboring and oppressed people throughout the Americas.
The leadership of the AFL-CIO needs to demonstrate its
commitment to the motto that the union movement is built upon:
"An injury to one is an injury to all."
U.S. bosses are attacking Venezuelan workers. It's urgent to
unite, shoulder to shoulder, with the life-and-death struggle
by Venezuelan workers and oppressed people.
Reprinted from the Oct. 9, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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