We march 60 years after the April Revolution: Against imperialism, apartheid and fascism!

     We will join the united march in commemoration of the great April Revolution of 1965, in which the armed people fought against the right-wing coup and the invasion of US imperialism. We are marching 60 years later, in a context that urgently calls for popular organisation and mobilisation to resist the advance of the anti-democratic, repressive, anti-worker, environmentally predatory, misogynist and racist policies of the pro-Yankee government of Luis Abinader. We also march in to confront the advance of neo-Nazi paramilitarism, and at the international level, to stand in solidarity with those who are resisting US imperialism, especially the heroic Palestinian people.

     The struggle against Yankee imperialism and its invading forces, in 1965, marked a turning point in the history of the Dominican Republic. The struggle united the working people in arms; the trade unions, women, artists and intellectuals, the Haitian commandos made up of exiles, like the writer Jacques Viau, and the military, who turned their guns on their corrupt and reactionary leaders. This unity signalled the possibility of a different, more democratic and independent Dominican Republic, in which the possibility of moving towards freedom and socialism was opened up. However, this path was closed in blood and fire by the invading imperialists and their local minions, which led to the dictatorship of Joaquín Balaguer in 1966.

     Sixty years on, today we live in a country dominated politically and economically by the United States, with a perremaist government (PRM – Modern Revolutionary Party), that hands our sovereignty over to the mining mega-companies, such as Barrick Gold, Gold Quest, Unigold and Cormidom; which hands over our rare earths to the gringos and remains tied to the CAFTA-DR treaty (Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement); which denies the right to free, quality public health and education; which violates women’s right to life, the right to decent wages and freedom of association. We live in an apartheid regime, which denationalises the Dominican population of Haitian descent and cruelly and brutally persecutes the Haitian working community. At an international level, the Dominican government unconditionally supports the great crime against humanity of our times, which is the Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

     The Dominican regime over-exploits the working people, while at the same time offering huge tax breaks (more than 300 billion pesos last year) to big capitalist businessmen. It is a criminal regime that supports and protects big capitalists, like the owner of the Jet Set nightclub (where the roof collapsed on April 8th this year, killing 232 people and injuring 225 others), whilst the armed forces and the National Police execute our youth in their neighbourhoods every week, and where neo-Nazi paramilitarism gathers in criminal gangs to lynch black workers. It’s a regime that uses the author of the racist ruling 168-13 (a judgement issued by the Dominican Constitutional Court in 2013, which retroactively withdrew Dominican nationality from thousands of people born in the Dominican Republic to foreign parents, mainly those of Haitian descent. It cancelled the principle of the right to citizenship by birth and applied it retroactively to all births between 1929 and 2010, leaving thousands to face statelessness), Milton Ray Guevara, to promote new racist laws.

     Abinader is Joaquín Balaguer’s political heir, and the neo-Nazis aspire to be the heirs of the Banda Colorá terrorists (a para-police force created by General Enrique Pérez y Pérez in the 1970s to break up strikes and persecute young revolutionaries, torturing them and making them disappear) of the Balaguer dictatorship. The government supports Israel because it aspires to consolidate a similar regime of racial oppression in the heart of the Caribbean, racially conditioning social, economic and political rights.

     We marched on April 27th, for the unity of the workers and popular sectors, to confront the fascist paramilitary movement and defeat it in the streets, to defend the dignity and democratic rights of the entire working class, to confront and defeat the oppressive and anti-democratic framework of this regime, which has ruled for five years through a de facto state of exception.

     At the international level, we face the danger of the government of the far-right Donald Trump, who wants to reoccupy the Panama Canal, invade Greenland, turn Gaza into an amusement park on top of a giant mass grave, divide the world with the other imperialist powers, and keep the Dominican Republic and Haiti under total subordination.

     Today, more than ever, it is necessary for the example of April, which is the example of the 1965 revolution and also of the 1984 popular uprising, to be transformed into organisation, mobilisation and resistance against this brutal right-wing government, so that the possibility of the working people taking their destiny into their own hands and moving towards liberation can once again emerge.