Latin America - November 19, 2025

Trump government is coming for everything, to fully recover its "backyard" ownership, which other imperialist powers have contested. The US is coming to impose the FTAA (ALCA), which the anti-imperialist struggle of the Latin American masses had prevented USA from doing since the beginning of the 21st century.
Imperialism first used the native bourgeoisies, Stalinism, and trade union bureaucracies of every stripe to contain, divert, and betray the various revolutionary waves that shook all of Latin America, such as those of the first half of this century or those of 2019-2023.

It was the "Bolivarian" governments and those of the "Gringo left" that emerged in the last period, such as Petro, Boric, and Lula, all rigorous implementers of imperialist plans, who opened the doors to the imperialist beast, with the masses in resistance or sidelined, so that it could launch a colonising offensive across the entire continent.

Today, with more than 10,000 men, a powerful naval fleet, and using all the military bases that the US has in Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and in the Colombia under  Petro (the "left" manager of the country, servant of the Chiquita Brands), the invasion of Venezuela is being prepared. So, as Clausewitz would say, the USA show all their military forces to the cowardly "Bolivarian" bourgeoisie so that it surrenders. Indeed, arrangements for a meeting between Maduro and Trump have already been made public.
There is no doubt that the "Bolibourgeoisie" is and will be willing to hand over all of Venezuela's oil and its most important riches to the USA, provided they are left a share of the business. They fear the armed and mobilised masses more than they fear the US Navy, which will ultimately respect the private property of the capitalists if they invade Venezuela.

Whatever the immediate development of these events—the military aggression against Venezuela, the peoples of the Caribbean, and all of Latin America, has already begun. The fascist Trump's gang has began with a trade war. It launched a political offensive that first used "squeezed lemons" in the form of the "left-wing" governments, so that now its direct agents and managers like Milei, the new governments of Ecuador and Bolivia, and soon in Chile, can come to directly look after its business manu militari.

But the bourgeoisie and imperialism know that it is one thing to advance to win direct agents for their colonisation plans in most Latin American countries, which is being done with severe repressive blows, political and electoral processes, under conditions of crash and economic crisis, and thanks to the perfidious class collaboration policy of the proletariat's leaderships. But quite a different thing is to apply the plans of hunger, of maquilation (extreme exploitation) of the working class, of national surrender, of misery and deep impoverishment of the great masses, and the expropriation of all the resources of these oppressed nations, in real life. This will not be decided in any electoral process, but in the class war.

The coups of Áñez yesterday in Bolivia and then of Boluarte in Peru were defeated or weakened by enormous mass responses. Milei in Argentina, beyond his recent electoral victory, must impose a fierce labour flexibility that has the support of the traitors in the trade union bureaucracy... but that is to be done. It must be imposed on the masses in the streets. And whether they will be able to do all this, remains to be seen.

For this very reason, the USA naval fleet has come to stay. It is a handgun to the temple of the entire Latin American working class. It is part of the counter-revolutionary offensive against the 30 million Hispano workers and families who are persecuted, prosecuted, imprisoned, and deported in the US. The USA gunboats are thus coming to support imperialism and the capitalists in this new war against the exploited and the oppressed peoples. They are coming to take everything.

The handicap that favors the USA offensive in Latin America is the betrayal of the leaderships the masses have at their head.
They are the true "submarines" and "aircraft carriers on land" of the imperialist war

What conspires against the masses is the brutal betrayal of their leaderships. In the US, they are trying to bring them back to the feet of the Democratic Party with the false "socialist" Mamdani of New York, who neither takes nor will take any anti-capitalist measures and only serves to strengthen the party of the imperialist "Democrats" of Wall Street.

Trade union bureaucracies such as that of the COB in Bolivia or the CGT in Argentina have already agreed and negotiated all the plans of hunger and attack on the working class in those countries with the so-called "right-wing governments".
Boric in Chile has guaranteed maintaining the model of plunder that the USA wants to impose across the entire subcontinent. This time, this was done by the government of the Stalinist scum, the "red pacos" (police), as the rebellious youth use to call them; they turned out to be the truly dangerous ones, who took the masses out of the struggle in the Plaza de la Dignidad to submit them again to the Pinochetista regime of the USA bases.

The traitors of the Cuban Communist Party, a thousand times traitors, treat the island's proletariat as badly as or worse than Batista would have. They transformed working and peasant Cuba into a big business for imperialist hotel companies and transnational nickel corporations. In the exploitation of the land and in commerce, they associated and became a new commercial and agrarian bourgeoisie. They thus liquidated all the gains of the Cuban revolution.
The scoundrels of Castroism isolated the struggle in defense of Cuba against the imperialist blockade because they left isolated and betrayed all the revolutions of the American continent.

 In the ‘70s, with their pseudo-theories of the "peaceful path to socialism," they handed over the Chilean revolution to Pinochet's massacre and to those that followed him in the entire Southern Cone.
They betrayed the revolution in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the ‘80s by negotiating with imperialism and shooting the revolutionary masses in the back.

  Already in the 21st century, they led the continent's working class and its heroic struggles to support the "progressive bourgeoisies," the "Bolibourgeoisies," which were merely a detour for imperialism and its regimes to maintain control of Latin America and for this Stalinist scum from Havana to become a new bourgeoisie.
Wretched and traitors! Imperialism knows that in the government of Cuba there is no ally of the Latin American working class. The Díaz Canel and other satraps of the island have been responsible for mercilessly beating and imprisoning Cuban workers who take to the streets and lead barricade fights against the hunger, misery, and exploitation that came with the restoration of capitalism and the isolation of the Cuban revolution from the revolutionary struggles of the masses of Latin America and the US.

The problem are not the masses. The problem is the Stalinist scum who yesterday, in 1989, handed over the USSR, China, Vietnam, and other former workers' states to the USA. And now, with the handover of the Cuban revolution, they have cried out to the heavens, as Fidel Castro himself did, that "socialism can no longer be, not even in Cuba". Traitors! This is happening at a time when the rotten capitalist system is already threatening to lead the entire civilisation to a war of extermination, including nuclear war.

The tragedy of the Latin American masses is the crisis of their leadership. The betrayers of the Fourth International have followed Stalinism as the body follows the soul. They did it in '89 and they are doing it now. Then they will say that the masses "are backward," when it is those betrayers who deceived them and told them that taking the heavens by storm was a "reactionary utopia" or a "task for the future"... Wretches!

The task of the moment is the struggle to establish revolutionary Trotskyist parties from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. The reformists, who previously spoke in the name of the Fourth International, are exploding into a thousand pieces here and there, because here and there they have been used by imperialism to betray the working class in the name of Trotskyism and socialism, an impersonation that no one can believe anymore.

The gunboats in the Caribbean, the massacres like in Palestine, the Russian occupation of Ukraine, and the imperialist colonisation of Kiev already foreshadow that the era of parliamentarianism has ended amidst the breakdown of the capitalist crash. The era of small concessions is over. The margins for class conciliation have been exhausted. Palestine’s has become a war throughout the Middle East to impose "Greater Israel". The one in Ukraine threatens to become a great European war, including military clashes of greater magnitude in the east of that continent. The one in Venezuela seeks to open the first Latin American war of imperialism since the Malvinas/Falklands one, beyond other occupations and counter-revolutionary actions. The reason is the USA is not willing to hand over control of the global economy and politics to any competing imperialist power.

The path to a new world catastrophe, a Third War, will be plagued by political and military defeats of the proletariat, if it does not select in time a new revolutionary leadership for its struggles. Ahead, the alternative between socialist revolution or war becomes increasingly crucial. In these conditions, reformism is being used at will by imperialism. Every worker seeking a path to revolution will know there is not in those currents.

It is time for the revolutionary forces of Trotskyism to return to the masses. The military wars, the fierce struggles of the US American working class, the genocides, and the capitalist crash create the conditions for the resurgence of Bolshevism and to recover the clean banners of the Fourth International from the hands of the traitors who surrendered it, on the condition of not betraying.

The Editorial Committee of "The International Workers Organizer"