From the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSL), a section of the IWU-FI of Venezuela.
18 April 2022. Note from the editors IWU-FI
Rodney Alvarez is a worker for the Venezuelan state-owned company Ferrominera del Orinoco, in the Guiana region of eastern Venezuela, home to the country’s main steel and mining industries. Alvarez was imprisoned for 10 years and 10 months for a crime that many witnesses believe was committed by a union leader from the ruling Chavista party, PSUV. The struggle for his freedom became a symbol of confrontation with the criminalization of workers’ and popular protests carried out by both the Chavez government and Maduro’s repression. From the first moment, the Party for Socialism and Freedom, the Venezuelan section of IWU-FI, unconditionally stood by Rodney’s side and became the vanguard of a movement that, after more than a decade of struggle, achieved his release, which is still ongoing.
We call Rodney Alvarez’s RELEASE a victory of the workers and the people, despite all the weight with which the State destroyed him, separated him from his family and loved ones, from his job and his work colleagues, and destroyed his life, which today has no scruples.
Rodney Alvarez has never bowed to the bad example of hundreds of people who fall for handouts and the rhetoric of false socialism of the 21st century, much less accepted the imposition of a debt that belongs to someone else. If anyone has shown dignity, fortitude and respect for his situation as a common worker, it is Rodney Alvarez.
But the release of Rodney Alvarez, moreover, is embedded in a struggle that has revealed all the depravity of the capitalist system and the justice system in Venezuela. Countless judges, prosecutors, judicial officials, and high, middle, and low officials of the PSUV have given themselves over to slander, imposing on society the criterion that Rodney Alvarez is guilty of killing a colleague in the company where he works: Ferrominera Orinoco, where those present, in broad daylight and in a gathering of workers, saw Hector Maican shoot Renny Rojas and wound Luis Quilarte and Agustin Lezama, which was recorded on a security system video that was later altered by company management and those involved, and finally annulled as evidence of the crime.
For the Chavez and Maduro governments, the fall of Rodney Alvarez meant the fall of the workers in Guyana and the rest of the country. That is why the list of workers imprisoned in Venezuela today is long, it could be over a hundred, because the Chavista governments first advanced the political defeat of the autonomous workers’ and trade union movement and then imposed an inflationary austerity and anti-worker package.
Rodney Alvarez’s freedom is a victory of the workers and the people because it was achieved and won through mobilisation and struggle during the crushing of workers’ struggles imposed by the anti-worker and authoritarian Maduro government and the CBST (Bolivarian Central Workers Union), in order to impose an anti-worker package with Memorandum 2792, the wage tables, the bonus and the destruction of wages for the benefit of the high bureaucracy and the entire Venezuelan bourgeoisie and transnational capital.
The release of Rodney Alvarez is the result of a joint and systematic campaign of denunciations and protests on this case, carried out by the relatives of the imprisoned workers, by various trade union and human rights organisations, by political workers’ parties and revolutionary socialists, who have not hesitated to insist on the unity of effort, the search for strategies and the mobilisation of the workers to achieve this goal.
The release of Rodney Alvarez, his vindication as a member of the working class, is part of the struggle for his complete freedom, as we will continue to work for the immediate and complete freedom of all imprisoned workers. This task rests solely with us, the working class. We do not have to beg and plead for the freedom of our colleagues. We must lead by example and defend our rights with tenacity.
But also forcing the freedom of Rodney Alvarez can undoubtedly influence the consciousness of the workers that it is possible to defeat this anti-worker and authoritarian government and strengthen the united struggles of the working class of Venezuela to achieve a wage and pension equal to the basic basket of goods, the abolition of the wage scales, the abolition of the wage premium, the restoration of the unions as instruments of struggle, the fulfilment of collective agreements, the renewal of access to health care and the provision of security equipment.
It is time for the workers to come together and appropriate the strength that unity gives us in the struggles to save the mobilisation, the meetings and the street protests to present ourselves.
