Peru, Arequipa - May 12 2023

A fire in the Yanaquihua mine leaves 27 miners dead from asphyxiation. There is nothing to investigate: It was not an "accident", it was a massacre!

The state, the coup-born government, the Fujimori regime and the businessmen are responsible!

On Saturday, May 6, in the early hours of the morning, a fire broke out in the pit called "Esperanza 1" of the Minera Yanaquihua SAC company, which exploits mainly gold, located in the province of Condesuyos in the region of Arequipa. Tragically, this event has left 27 miners dead, who could not escape and got suffocated. Not even a week had passed since May 1st and the workers' families were once again filled with mourning and rage for the loss of their loved ones.
In the face of these facts, the murderous bosses are calling for an "investigation" into these events, when according to the Ministry of Labor, this company "reported 430 work accidents between 2011 and 2022. Of these, 230 were "minor accidents" and another 196 caused serious injury or disability to workers, in addition to the four fatal events" (Convoca. 5-8-2023).

The capitalist parasites, because of their incessant thirst for profits, don't give a damn about the life and safety of the workers. They only do enormous business at the expense of the brutal conditions of slavery of the mining proletariat, who are forced to work without any kind of industrial safety, without health insurance, etc. And the vast majority are outsourced, as was the case of the 27 deceased comrades, one of the most super-exploited sectors of the working class.
These are the miserable conditions of labor exploitation in Peru, suffered by millions of workers throughout the country.

On top of that, the government of Boluarte traveled with his Minister of Mining and his technical team to "investigate" the conditions that caused the fire in that mine in Arequipa, when they are all there to guarantee these conditions of slavery of the miners and all the workers.
There is nothing to investigate! The murderous bosses, the government and the state, are responsible for this massacre!

Faced with this terrible fact, the Stalinist leadership of the CGTP, which has just betrayed the revolutionary struggle against the coup of Boluarte and sat at a negotiating table with representatives of the coup-born government, has cynically come out to say: "We hope that the government authorities, and especially those who today rule the destinies of the country by force, such as the Congress and the Executive, change the repression of the protests of the workers and the peoples of the interior of the country for their just demands with real actions for the national development of our country". Traitors, a thousand times traitors! Furthermore, and along with the bureaucrats of the Mining Federation, these leaders demand "exemplary punishment from the authorities of the Ministry of Labor and the Public Prosecutor's Office for those responsible for this culpable homicide".

But it was this coup-born government of Boluarte which has been put in place by the US and its IV fleet of its Navy to renew all the mining law contracts in favor of the voracity of the mining transnationals and to let them continue plundering gold, lithium, copper and all the natural resources over the workers' blood and the contamination and usurpation of the lands of the poor peasants. This is the height of the cynicism of these leaders of the Communist Party and Red Fatherland, who never tire of surrendering and dividing every struggle of the workers. Out with the bureaucracy of the CGTP and the Mining Federation!

We workers cannot continue to die for the thirst for profits of the slaver bosses: For health and safety committees under the control of the workers and their general assembly! Enough of outsourced workers! Everyone to the permanent payroll with a wage equal to the family basket! Equal pay for equal work! Reduction of the working day and one more shift in all the mines so that all the available hands go to work!
All mining companies must be expropriated without compensation and under workers' control!

To fight against imperialism, the FTA, and the whole plundering plan that this coup-born government has come to deepen, it is necessary to unify all the ranks of the workers to take up the fight against this coup-born government, together with the deep Peru and the masses in the capital Lima at the cry of: Out with the murderous Dina! Out with the corrupt Congress!
For this, we must defeat these traitorous leaders, calling right now for a National Congress with delegates from the rank and file of the entire workers' movement, the poor peasants and the combative youth, as well as calling also on the rank and file soldiers to disobey the officers of the Armed Forces and to set up their committees to be part of that Congress. Thus it could be prepared a second wave of our revolutionary combat to overthrow the murderous Dina and the entire Fujimorista regime, servants of imperialism.

The super-exploitation of the mining workers is common currency not only in Peru but in the whole region. That's  because in Latin America imperialism has the same plan, which it is deepening together with its servant governments, regimes and in complicity with the trade union workers bureaucracies. Thus we can see in Colombia that in only two months they have already added the death of almost 30 miners as a result of the explosions in the coal mines in the department of Cundinamarca, in Sutatausa (with the death of 21 miners in March) and Cucunubá (7 miners dead in April). This is also happening in the mines of Bolivia, as in the state-owned Huanuni, where weeks ago, as a result of toxic gas, a miner lost his life, as well as the unemployed workers who also lose their lives when entering the mine, either because of the bullets of the Armed Forces or risking their lives entering the mine, and who are called "jucus" or "mineral thieves", when the real mineral thieves are the imperialist transnationals. Enough is enough!
It is necessary to set up a Continental Mining Congress gathering together the miners of Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, etc., in order to stop, in the same common anti-imperialist struggle, the super-exploitation, and put an end to the plundering of the transnationals and their servant governments, who are coming for lithium and all our natural resources. Thus we could prepare and coordinate a day of rage in all the mines, which are the same companies that plunder us in all our countries with the complicity of the union bureaucracies. We must call on our best allies such as the US workers who are at the heart of the imperialist beast: Out with US imperialism and its military bases of Latin America!

The names of the 27 miners killed by the bosses