TROTSKYST LEADER RAMIRO MENDEZ DIES AT 82 YEARS OLD

Agricultural worker from his youth he dedicated his life to the fight for socialist revolution and for recovering and re-founding the Fourth International

Founder of the International Workers Party of Chile (POI-CI) and Head of the International Trotskyst Leninist Fraction (FLTI)

Today we bid farewell to a revolutionary militant of the international working class

Comrade Ramiro:
FORWARDS TO SOCIALISM, FOREVER

Comrades, all of us Trotskyists have just received a severe blow. This morning, Comrade Ramiro, our leader, our comrade, passed away. An impeccable and honest revolutionary has gone, fighting for Trotskyism and the Fourth International until his last breath.

We believe that all the comrades and all the revolutionary workers and youth vanguard of the world deserve to know who the comrade was and how he fought all his life. Because Ramiro was one of those indispensable revolutionaries, someone who did not fight for a few years, but  dedicated their whole life to the cause of the liberation of the proletariat.

Ramiro started working very young, at the age of 15, in the fields, as an agricultural worker in Chile. He told us that there he had known firsthand the injustices, hardships and exploitation that the bosses imposed against the workers. And that is how his working class hatred had arisen, which over the years only increased against the enemies and traitors to the working class and the masses.
Fighting against these conditions that they suffered in the countryside, Ramiro met the Communist Party of Chile and began to be a militant in 1959. That same year the revolution in Cuba reached victory. Like hundreds of thousands of workers on the Americas and the world, Ramiro vibrated with the triumph of the Cuban workers' state. This led him to break with the Communist Party because he realized its objective was not revolution, quite the opposite.  After a brief passage through a Maoist current, he joined the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) in 1968.
Ramiro belonged to the generation of workers that led the '70s revolution in Chile, as part of the revolutionary rise of 1968 -'74 worldwide. In those years Ramiro was working in a textile factory called Comandari and participated in the San Joaquín Industrial Cordon in the South of Santiago. He told us countless anecdotes about the heroism of that great revolution and also how its traitors and the ones who sold it out had acted. He always remembered, above all, the massive march that took place after the failed military coup called "Tancazo" in June 1973. Workers in their thousand hundreds asked for arms and for Parliament to be closed, while Allende was sitting down to negotiate with the Christian Democrats that were preparing the coup and then put Pinochet as a member of the cabinet, saying he was a "democratic general." This was the "peaceful way to socialism" that Fidel Castro went to proclaim in Chile, which ended up being the "bloody way" to the imposition of the jackal Pinochet and imperialism's counterrevolutionary coup.
But Ramiro always remarked to us that this was not the worst thing. For him the tragedy was his being within the MIR, which supported this policy from the left. When he broke with the MIR, he was briefly a member of the Mandelist, Communist League; he also met Vitale and Valenzuela, who were the leaders of the POR, the group of the Fourth International in Chile, which under the orders of Pablo and Mandel had dissolved within the MIR.
He told us: "I met the first 'Trotskyists' (in quotation marks) from within a Castro-Stalinist party. There was no independent Trotskyist party in the middle of the revolution, when it was most needed”.

When Pinochet's bloody military coup was imposed on September 11, 1973, Ramiro had to go underground. And a few years later he went into exile in Europe. He lived in Belgium for several years.
There he met different groups that claimed Trotskyism abroad. And he ended up joining the LIT as a militant. Upon returning to Chile, he later joined the PTS and finally in 2003 he began to fight in our ranks, proud of having entered what he always defined as "principled Trotskyism." The comrade had spent decades searching for a revolutionary path, a revolutionary organization. He fought for his convictions as a impeccable revolutionary does, even if being wrong. When he became convinced of the program of the Fourth International of 1938 and the need to conquer an international revolutionary leadership to defeat the treacherous leaderships, he did not stop fighting for it not for a second. "Trotskyism saved my life," he always told us. Because for him, having found a program and a revolutionary current for which to give his life was everything.

The comrade faced enormous health problems many years ago. He suffered from diabetes for decades. He said it was a "silent cancer", which caused him to lose his vision and have both legs amputated. He was blind and in a wheelchair, but he was never a tired soul and he never stopped fighting for the revolution and for Trotskyism, for the Fourth International, against its liquidators and against Stalinism, whom he hated with all his might.
He never stopped studying and passionately following the entire international fight of the FLTI, especially in Syria and the Middle East. He never stopped trusting the working class and hating its traitors and those who sell it out. He never stopped discussing with his companions passionately his positions and differences. He never stopped giving the political fight to embrace Marxist theory; always instilling in the younger comrades above all the need to study theory, because revolutionary Marxism is not for the ignorant and the working class deserves the best.

The battlefield is full of political invalids, careerists, debris from reformist and counterrevolutionary currents. There are many more corrupt than irreducible on the planet. You Ramiro are one of the latter, one of the upright combatants for the cause of the proletariat. That is why you are the president of the FLTI and founder of Chilean internationalist Trotskyism. It was an honor and a pride to having been able to fight alongside you.

Comrade Ramiro: Forward to Socialism forever! Towards the triumph of the international socialist revolution! Long live the fight for the refoundation of the Fourth International!

Partido Obrero Internacionalista- Cuarta Internacional (POI-CI) de Chile
(International Workers Party - Fourth International, from Chile)