November 2, 2024

Speech by Milenka López, for the LSTI of Bolivia

Fraternal and revolutionary greetings from the Internationalist Socialist Workers’ League of Bolivia to the comrades of Syria, to the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people and resistance and to all the comrades at the meeting. We want to pay tribute to Abu Al Baraa, our Trotskyist leader, a revolutionary socialist, and to all those who have fought for the victory of the revolution in Syria, who were part of the uprisings for bread in the Maghreb and the Middle East; A revolution beset by betrayals, slander and sieges. There will be neither forgetting nor forgiving!

Organizations like the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) of Bolivia, which claims to be Trotskyist and fight for socialism, were part of the siege in Syria and openly supported the murderer al-Assad. They had the nefarious policy of making a Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Front (FRA) with the murderers of the exploited Syrians. With this policy, in Bolivia they made the national congresses of the Bolivian Miners' Trade Union Federation (FSTMB) vote to support first Kadafy and then al-Assad, dressing up the murderers of the exploited, both in Syria and Libya as "anti-imperialists." This was the policy of this movement, as part of the international siege to the Syrian revolution.

There were also other currents like the PTS/LORCI, from their Izquierda Diario, which said that a Russian helicopter that had fallen over Aleppo was carrying "humanitarian aid" and "medicine" to the Syrian people, when it was actually carrying bombs. We should not be surprised, since in Libya they said that the masses were NATO troops.

Today the POR and many Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism have to explain their disastrous policy in Syria, e.g., the movements that in 2013 said that the enemy was ISIS. They formed an “anti-terrorist front” that would make the people who rose up in arms appear as “terrorists.” This policy allowed them to drown Syria in blood.

That is why we fought in Bolivia to break the siege. Part of the Bolivian vanguard took the struggle in their hands, like a pole of miners from Huanuni, the factory workers from La Paz, the relatives of the martyrs of Senkata in 2019 who in different mobilizations raised the fight for the exploited Syrians.

But we see that these people are repeating this policy of “anti-terrorist front” in Palestine, as a continuation of this Islamophobic policy.

There are organizations like the PTS/FT that condemn the legitimate right of an occupied nation like Palestine to wield military action against the Zionist occupier...

Hamas and the Islamic Jihad are the armies of an oppressed nation and are the armies that have defended an occupied nation for 76 years... To condemn any of the Palestinian resistance organizations, in times of military clashes, is to call for the open banning of these organizations of the Palestinian people and to end up accusing them of being "terrorists." If these armies are disarmed and defeated, Palestine falls and there is nothing left, not a single Palestinian in Gaza.

We are horrified in Latin America! In the face of currents like the PTS/FT of Argentina. The leader of the PTS, Myriam Bregman, sent condolences to the (Zionist) "civilians" on October 7!!! They sent their condolences to the Zionist settlers who were having fun at a rave, after being killing  Palestinian peasants and exploited, stealing their lands and killing their children! They sent their condolences to the counterrevolutionary settlers who are armed to the teeth from their 18 to 45 years of age, who are going to raze Palestine to advance and punish the entire working class in the Middle East.

There will be neither forgetting nor forgiving in the face of so much betrayal!

Abu Al Baraa, until socialism forever! Until the victory of the international socialist revolution! We pay tribute to our comrade Mustafa Abu Jumaa, to the more than 15 fallen comrades who fought while raising the flags of the Fourth International. To the hundreds of thousands of martyrs, like Abd el Basset Sarout, the so-called "goalkeeper of the revolution"; their death and their struggle will not be in vain! We will avenge them in the fighting of the Syrian and Palestinian resistance and in the uprisings of the exploited in Bolivia and the working class of the USA, who are already fighting in the heart of the imperialist beast against genocide in Palestine. One class, one enemy, one struggle at the international level!