Venezuela


Caracas, September 7.

Thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets of Caracas and other major cities across the country on September 7, calling for peace in their country and rejecting right-wing opposition plans to destabilise the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

The march was called by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and joined by civil society groups and grassroots movements.

"We are facing severe economic and political destabilisation in Venezuela. The leaders of the right-wing opposition have been trying to create fear in the country for many weeks now," Eulalia Reyes, a Venezuelan activist in Australia, told a Sydney forum on September 3.

She was in Venezuela during the violent opposition protests in 2014, and more recently from October 2015 to June 2016. She presented an eyewitness account of what is really going on in Venezuela today.

Pro-revolution march on August 30

The statement below was released by the Philippines-Venezuela Solidarity Network (PhilVenSol) on August 31. It comes after calls from Venezuela for international solidarity against new US-backed destabilisation against the elected government and revolutionary movement.

Violent opposition protest in Caracas

Thousands of Venezuela's right-wing opposition took to the streets in Caracas on September 1 in a menacing march labelled “the taking of Caracas”.

United States State Department spokesperson John Kirby said on August 31 that Brazil's democratic institutions had acted within the country's constitutional framework when the Senate voted to oust elected president Dilma Rousseff and install Michel Temer as the new leader. The US defence of the process that removed Brazil's elected president stands in contrast to many critics, including several Latin American governments, who have labelled it an institutional coup.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro warned his country’s right-wing opposition leaders on August 9 not to stir up violent unrest as the threat of a recall vote against him waned, the Morning Star said on August 11.
Venezuelan labour minister Oswaldo Vera announced on August 10 that the government had taken over another shut-down manufacturing firm, the Morning Star said on August 12. Vera said the Guardian de Venezuela laminated glass plant in Monagas state would be occupied and re-opened by its workers.
Aragua Governor Tarek El Aissaimi with workers

Venezuela's newly nationalised Kimberly-Clark factory has produced 2,068,800 sanitary towels its the first month since reopening following a worker takeover in July, Venezuelanalysis.com said on August 10. Last month, the Texas-based consumer products giant shut down its operations in the country without warning, firing nearly 1000 workers.

Venezuelans taking part in a voluntary program to boost a slowly developing agricultural sector, described by the US media as "slavery". The United States media’s latest offensive against Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro targets a new sustainability program that transplants urban workers to farmland. Some quarters of the mainstream media have equated it with slave labour.
Former National Assembly member Vestalia Sampedro has officially filed the right-wing Movement for Sowing Right's opposition to same sex civil marriage in Venezuela. Sampedro cited “pro-family” as among the reasons for the conservative group's filing before the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ).
As US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton led a team committed to delegitimising the politics of the late socialist president Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, secret emails published by WikiLeaks reveal. Clinton publicly welcomed improved relations with Venezuela as Secretary of State, but she privately ridiculed the country and continued to support destabilisation efforts, leaked emails show.
Warehouses belonging to Kimberly-Clark Corporation — which recently had its factory seized and handed over to the workers — were found to be full of raw materials. This is despite the insistence from the factory's owners that they could not produce goods, Venezuelan industry minister Miguel Perez Abad said on July 15.