Colombia - March 30th, 2020
THE PANDEMIC MAKES US SICK…
CAPITALISM, THE REGIME OF U.S. MILITARY BASES AND THE DUQUE GOVERNMENT KILL
For them,workers and exploited’s lives are worthless
Amidst hunger, missery and massacre, now they are exposing us to die due to Coronavirus pandemic
General Strike right now!! The Strike Committee must call all worker, peasant, student and health organizations of Colombia to a Crisis Committee of Public Health
In this decaying capitalist system, while those on top “isolate”themselves in the best conditions possible, living like kings, and the government deploys the repressive forces imposing a de facto state of siege, thousands of workers and exploited are taking to the streets and shouting “WE ARE HUNGRY!”
Millions of Venezuelan immigrant siblings are strolling around the streets or hide to prevent repression and prison, while the government refuses to provide them shelter; they cannot even have now the money they get by begging or selling candies on public transports or to passersby in the streets, which are empty due to the quarantine.
Thousands of people in need are gathering at the Town Halls of Bogotá, Medellín, Pereira, Riohacha, etc., demanding food and assistance to pay the rent and public services; they are brutally repressed by the murderous police and ESMAD, under the pretext of violating the “preventive isolation” established previously to the declaration of national quarantine until April 13th.
Before the shortage of goods and the lack of food, the first hunger uprisings have started, like in Riohacha, Manaure, La Paz, Cesar and Barranquila in the Colombian coast, where the people marched towards the supermarkets looking for food and other essential goods, facing repression by the police and ESMAD.
While this happens, the government, which does not care about the people’s lives and health, only provides sources for the big capital, as for example the decree 444/2020 recently signed by Duque moving public funds to save the banks. However, it is the workers in the laboratories, health, transport and food industry the only ones who risk their lives to make everything work during the pandemic. They are the only ones looking after the health and lives of the people!
Not only the so called essential services (like health, transport, cleaning, food distribution, etc) are currently working, also building and engineering, IT, etc keep working, as well as those in the exceptions to the decree 457/2020 which include financial banks and payment system, harvest services, production, imports and exports… dock activities, cargo; air and dock operations; “strictly necessary activities” in the industrial plants, mines which require uninterrupted production. Most of these companies, as denounced by the workers, do not provide personal protection devices like face masks. This exposes the voracity of the exploiters, who do not care about the quarantine for the workers and force them to work even if they are not providing an essential service and are instead risking their and their families’ lives under insalubrious conditions.
This situation is going on thanks to the complicity and silence of CUT, CTC and CGT treacherous union bureaucracy, which have been negotiating with the government for years selling out all our conquests, like health, as well as guaranteeing capitalists’ profits. They have allowed the factories to keep working without elements of protection, risking millions of workers’ lives.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Neither the government nor treacherous union bureaucracy care about workers, peasants and the exploited’s lives.
Therefore, there are two strategies and two politics in the working class to confront this crisis.
On the one hand, union bureaucracies and left parties are calling the working class to postpone their fight against this social crisis and advice the bourgeoisie over how to confront the pandemic, leaving the solution of the humanitarian crisis in the hands of bourgeois governments and regimes.
On the other hand, we revolutionaries call workers to confront this policy of truce to Capital. We call to confront the pandemic with the method of the class struggle, so that the working class and the exploited lead the struggle against the social crisis and the pandemic.
For that, National, Regional and Local Strike Committees must call worker, peasant and students’ organizations to set up right know a Public Health Committee to face the pandemic and take the struggle against starvation in their own hands; such Committee would recruit the best health professionals (doctors, nurses and scientists from the Universities) to set up an emergency plan to protect people’s health.
Such program must include the expropriation of clinics and private medicine, laboratories and factories, without compensation and under the Health Committee’s control in order to get supplies and prevent the outbreaks of the disease. The EPS abandoned facilities, the schools, churches and sport facilities must be used to look after the sick.
Against the bosses’ blackmail and threats to force workers to work, without caring about these workers’ and their families’ lives:
General Strike Now! Production must be stopped in the factories and the countryside, wherever it is not essential for the people’s health and life so that workers can stay at home in the quarantine with our families without wage cuts, paid 100% by the bosses. No to the lay-offs and suspensions!
Half the workers of the country earn their lives day by day working in the streets; they must not be left to starve to death, just like they shout: “We’d rather die of the flue than starve to death.”
For a $ 1.500.000-minimum wage for the off the book workers. Unemployment benefits equal to the cost of living for the unemployed workers and also to our Venezuelan siblings sentenced to starve and to live as beggars, based on taxes of big fortunes of the Colombian oligarchy and imperialist transnationals.
For a catastrophe tax of 50% of profits, paid by the bankers and industrial businessmen to subsidize the poorest in every basic need.
Against the shortages and the skyrocketing cost of living: price freeze, expropriation of big supermarket and all those who are speculating with people’s hunger. Let’s organize Supplying Committees controlled by workers, small rural producers and the people.
Let’s conquer the power of those in the bottom to stop the attack and massacre by the counterrevolutionary and military regime of the US in Colombia.
OUT WITH DUQUE! OUT WITH IMPERIALISM!
Núcleo Revolucionario Internacionalista of Colombia
Adherent to the FLTI
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03/24/2020 Protest in Bolivar Square, Bogota.
Thousands of workers and exploited protest shouting
“We are hungry!”
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