The Communist Front of Italy expresses its full solidarity with comrade Héctor Alejo Rodríguez, member of the Political Bureau and Secretary for International Relations of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), victim of a persecutory judicial attack by the PSUV regime in power.
Comrade Rodríguez, an employee of the Ministry of Oil, was notified of administrative dismissal along with a provision of preventive suspension on the basis of an anonymous complaint accusing him of having stolen fuel from the ministry and supplied it to “extreme right” elements who were planning to create turmoil during the elections of July 28th. The only “evidence” cited is some media statements by the PCV on national political issues that have nothing to do with the oil industry or with fuel supplies within the country.
The proceedings against comrade Héctor Alejo Rodríguez have a totally arbitrary and persecutory character, are a punishment for his consistency in political militancy and are carried out within the framework of the plan, implemented by the PSUV regime, for the liquidation of the PCV in order to eliminate the communists’ forceful opposition to the anti-democratic and anti-worker policies implemented by the Maduro government in favor of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
The crisis of the disastrous model of “21st century socialism” in Venezuela is the crisis of a “rent-based” monopoly capitalism that shows all its vulnerability precisely because it depends almost exclusively on oil revenues and therefore undergoes the high volatility of oil prices. The decrease in oil revenues combined with the repayment of the due installments of the very high foreign debt have seriously affected the country’s economy, pushing the PSUV government to find the financial resources needed to support private capital, land rents, the state bureaucracy and the huge PSUV apparatus by reducing wages and dismantling welfare and worker protections. Economic sanctions worsen the situation, but they are not the cause of the crisis, which is the crisis of the capitalist mode of production and comes along with the intensification of anti-communist and anti-worker repressive measures, with restriction on political, electoral and trade union rights, judicial persecution, arrests and unjustified detentions of workers and vanguard elements in workers’ and peasants’ struggles.
The Communist Front of Italy reiterates its fraternal solidarity with comrade Héctor Alejo Rodríguez, the Venezuelan working class, the Communist Party of Venezuela, its leaders and militants, and demands the revocation of the vexatious proceedings against him, his reinstatement in his workplace, the end of the interference of the Venezuelan government in the internal affairs of the PCV, the restoration of democratic rights, the end of the persecution and the release of the labor unionists, communist militants, workers and peasants unjustly arrested. The struggle of the Venezuelan comrades is part of the struggle of the communists in the whole world against the repression by the bourgeois state, against social democracy as the ally of capital, for workers’ power and socialism-communism.
HANDS OFF THE PCV!
PROLETARIANS ALL OVER THE WORLD, UNITE!
Rome, July 29, 2024
COMMUNIST FRONT of ITALY
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee
