Colombia – April 26th, 2021

This April 28 anticipates the May 1 international day of struggle of the world working class…

Let's transform this day into a day of struggle against the imperialist capitalist system…

Everyone to the streets to impose an indefinite national strike until Duque and the US-military-bases-protected regime fall!

While the Duque government and the bourgeois parliamentarians try to impose behind closed doors the package of anti-worker measures such as the Tax Reform dictated by the bankers and the IMF, the desperate masses are struggling to enter the combat again despite and against their leaderships that had momentarily managed to get us off the streets. As in all Latin America and the US, the workers and the Colombian people starred in a huge revolutionary wave at the continental level during 2019 and 2020, putting the Revolutionary General Strike all across the continent on the order of the day; if today these regimes remain standing, it has been because of the actions of the bureaucratic and treacherous leaderships who diverted the action of the masses and handed them over.
Since the end of 2019, together with the Latin American working class, there has been revolutionary attacks that have, as in Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, put governments and regimes in check, as in our case, the anti-worker government of Duque-Uribe and his regime of thieves and murderous vassals of the US imperialists' military bases. The great struggles of November 21 and September 9 and 10, 2020 once again demonstrated that the ambitions of the enemies of the broad fringes of the proletariat, the youth masses, women, poor peasants, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, employees of small and medium-sized businesses can only be defeated through a determined and consistent fight, taking to the streets, with unemployment affecting production.
The mining workers of the El Cerrejón coal complex did not miss the appointment either, taking over the second largest coal mine in the world in the hands of the multinational mining companies, which loot the mineral resources of the five continents: BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Glencore International; they led the way by stopping production by attacking the property of the capitalists. Once again, these leaderships, after totally demobilizing the workers' struggles of the previous period, kept the struggle of 10,000 mining workers on strike isolated, resisting in complete solitude for three months, what led them to a dead end waiting for the negotiation of the list of demands such as the workers of Sintraincapla of Good Year-Cali and together with thousands of temporary teachers kicked off into the streets by the regime.

Today when the crisis of the world imperialist capitalist system, deepened by the pandemic, plunges the masses  worldwide into a health catastrophe, it is the workers and our families who die like flies or survive in the worst conditions of misery and chronic unemployment. But this happens because these revolutionary processes have been dismantled, disagregated and betrayed by their bureaucratic and reformist petty-bourgeois leaderships.

In Colombia, for decades, Stalinism has played a counterrevolutionary role, betraying the workers 'and peasants' movement, leading our struggle to defeat. The Stalinist reformists of the CCP, together with movements such as Patriotic March, MOIR, Polo Democrático, Colombia Humana, and today the COMUNES party (formerly FARC), ride on the just demands of the peasant base to bring them to the feet of the Duque government, asking him to comply with the counterrevolutionary pacts of the "PEACE of the sepulchres", an infamous pact of non-compliance with the indigenous peoples and poor peasants of the country. These pacts meant the surrender of the Colombian peasant resistance, leaving them at the mercy of displacement, the usurpation of their lands and subjected to massacres and selective assassinations, which have increased during the present murderous regime. In 2020, 54 massacres were carried out with 209 victims, and, in addition, 286 social leaders, human rights defenders and demobilized people were murdered. By February 17, 2021, there have been 13 massacres with 44 victims and 29 social leaders, human rights defenders and ex-combatants of the COMUNES party have been murdered.
That death pact among Obama, Castro, the FARC and Santos, in fact, the handing out of the resistance, is what allows imperialism, not only in Colombia but in US entire backyard, to maintain a fierce attack after having finally restored capitalism in Cuba with the Obama-Castro pact, today propagandized by the renegades of Trotskyism, with meetings in Havana coordinated by García Hernández, representing a wing of the former Castro bureaucracy. From there, the support of all the Stalinist parties and the renegades of Trotskyism was organized for Sanders and the social-imperialist fractions of the Democratic Party, which all ended up supporting Biden to get the American masses out of the revolutionary struggle in the streets that had faced the the entire domination regime in the United States. That is why now Biden comes, with a "good-natured face" to impose a brutal counteroffensive of US imperialism on his "backyard", worse than Trump, as the new commander on behalf of the Wall Street pirates and the IMF.

While this is happening, the so-called Unitary National Command, of which the CGT, UTC, CUT labor unions are part, in which union sectors, teachers -FECODE-, state workers and social leaders are converging, are supposedly getting ready to call a national strike, protesting against the tax reform, which the Duque government announced for 2021. This was stated by Diógenes Orjuela, secretary general of the CUT when in reality what they are planning is how to keep the masses demobilized and keep them entangled in the FARCICAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORAL campaign that is already underway while the bourgeoisie as a whole and all its agents prepare to pass the plan of imperialism such as tax, labor and pension reforms. With the labor reform, labor flexibility is officially established, with hourly work. In practice, minimum wage, job stability are abolished, layoffs are imposed without compensation, no premiums for services will be paid and there will be no severance pay; nor will overtime, Sunday and holiday surcharges be paid. Contributions to health and pensions will be made individually by the workers (with no contribution from the employers, NT) and there will be no compensations for medical disabilities due to work accidents and occupational diseases, nor will maternity leave be recognized. Already employers are using this provision not only to hire new employees but to change the conditions to the old ones. This tax reform tries to cover the need of the State, expanding the tax base on one side and on the other increasing the VAT on the products of the basic food basket. In terms of pensions, the pension age for men and women would be increased, putting an end to COLPENSIONES, the  state retirement entity, and impose the private pensions system.
These positions of the workers' centrals, labor union organizations, are tying the struggle of the Colombian exploited to the current electoral campaign in development, to elect president and congressmen in 2022. On the one hand, the reformists, concentrated in Human Colombia, the Stalinist party -CCP-, the Patriotic Union, together with sectors of the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie, supporting the candidacy of Gustavo Petro, and on the other hand, the Green Party, with dissidents from the reformist parties Polo Democrático Alternativo and MOIR, Together with bourgeois dissidents from the Liberal party, Cambio Radical and the U party, they discuss support for the presidential candidacy, among Jorge Robledo, Sergio Fajardo, Juan Manuel Galán and Humberto de La Calle. Two versions of the Popular Front of Stalinism are constituted, to tie the masses of the exploited to openly pro-bourgeois or bourgeois candidates, abandoning all class independence, as they have always done by betraying the masses of the exploited, oppressed and poor of the world. Meanwhile, the pseudo-left of the PST-LIT covers Stalinism's back as it did in the last elections, when they called for a “critical vote” for Petro. With this, all they do is closing the way to the Indefinite Strike, for which the leaders of the collaborationist union centrals are also responsible, because they are controlled by these parties.
Meanwhile it is clear that none of the  "leaders" of the bourgeoisie, in particular the most fascist sector (URIBE), today with its clumsy and puppet Duque, are presentable; each of them, in addition to being allies of drug trafficking, swindlers and thieves of the public purse, have legal antecedents, and many of their cases are pending today. An Alexander Char Chaljub, a Colombian “businessman”, linked to the bourgeois Radical Change party, led by former President Germán Vargas Lleras, today is a declared Uribista member; Uribismo has not yet officially determined the name of its presidential candidate, none presentable within its deck, much less the current vice president Marta Lucia Ramírez, or Dilian Francisca Toro, Paloma Valencia, former minister Rafael Nieto Loaiza, Paola Holguín, María del Rosario Guerra and as the adage says "may pass the devil and choose."
Now it is clear why the pseudo-left, the reformists delayed and took the struggle off the streets to allow the regime and this government agent of the capitalists and imperialism to have a free rein  and deepen a cruel attack, increasing food taxes and saving the superprofits of those above, by imposing the reforms. This is why the time has come for the grassroots to take the fight into our hands, organizing ourselves so that we stop the surrender of our fight and the theft of our wages; it is necessary that we put in place a fight organization recognized by all workers and the poor people and the peasants, to stop this attack, the theft of the land and riches of Colombia, and that they be elected from the bottom up with the recallability of their leaders. Let's learn to govern ourselves.
Although the working class was diverted from the political struggle against the regime, today a fight is opening up to recover and regroup the workers' vanguard to end the murderous Duque government and the US imperialists' military bases ... WE CALL TO PUT A CLASSIST AND ANTI-IMPERIALIST COMBAT BLOCK ON FOOT, TO CONQUER THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MASSES FROM THE STATE AND THE EMPLOYERS' POLITICIANS AND OF THE PSEUDO-LEFT, with a workers' program that includes transitional slogans TO DEVELOP THE DUAL-POWER ORGANISMS as the following:

• Fighting to set up a revolutionary leadership in the unions.
• Calling to set up the organizations that group, coordinate and centralize the millions of workers, unemployed, young rebels, etc., who enter the combat, in self-defense committees and workers' militia.
• The working class has in its hands the task of leading the struggle to weld the worker and peasant alliance, historically divided by that sinister popular front of Stalinism into the countryside on one hand, and the subjugation of the labor movement in the city on the other, to which today bourgeois Petro's Human Colombia, held from the left by the PST, is added. By expropriating the banks, the Chiquita Brand, the mining and oil transnationals, the proletariat will be able to guarantee the land to the peasants, definitively solving the agrarian question in the country.
• Disavowal of the FTA and all the pacts with imperialism and the IMF. No to the repayment of the fraudulent foreign debt contracted by the shameful regime of the US military bases, paid for with the hunger and misery of the people. Only in this way can we conquer our demands and end with all the tragedies and hardships of the Colombian masses.

The imposition of more taxes to the poor people will be stopped, wages, land and decent work will be won for all ... with the INDEFINITE GENERAL STRIKE, which must not stop until there are no traces left of the pro-imperialist regime.
In the struggle of the Colombian working class, the struggle of the Latin American and Central American masses continues together with the martyrs of Chicago of today, the Palestinian masses who have returned to combat against the Zionist occupier and our class brothers who in Syria resist ten years of massacre and genocide at the hands of the fascist al-Assad and the butcher Putin on behalf of imperialism supported by the entire world left.
FOR WORKERS TO EAT AND LIVE! THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS VICTORY: INFEFINITE NATIONAL STRIKE! OUT WITH DUQUE!
This 28 must be the spearhead towards May 1, transforming that day, an appointment of honor of the proletarians of the world, into a day of struggle against the imperialist capitalist system.
STAND UP BY THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS! LONG LIVE MILITARY INTERNATIONALISM!

FORWARD TO THE WORLDWIDE WORKERS AND SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!

Núcleo Obrero  Internacionalista (Internationalist Worker Nucleus) of Colombia
Adherent to FLTI