Repudiate the brutal murder of the workers’ leaders Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández and Carlos Requena!

For a big national and international campaign to demand trial and exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime!

Yesterday, Thursday, November 27, comrades Richard Gallardo, national coordinator of the UNT and chairman of the Aragua section, Luís Hernández, union leader at Pepsi Cola, and Carlos Requena, work safety delegate from Alpina, militants of the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI), were murdered in Cagua (Aragua state).

These comrades were leading the effort of solidarity with the Alpina workers, at a business owned by Colombian capital, that the workers seized in struggle against a breach of the contract and in the face of a threat to close the firm. Just that day, the workers had to resist a fierce police repression that included cops entering the plant and an eviction, with a toll of four workers wounded. As a result of the solidarity offered by workers and union leaders of the UNT, the workers recovered the plant again. That afternoon, the comrades had publicly demanded a statement by the recently elected PSUV governor, Rafael Isea; they also warned that if the factory was closed, the workers would opt for starting production under their own control, following the example of the comrades from Sanitarios Maracay. That night, comrades Gallardo, Hernández and Requena were shot in the La Encrucijada district, in Cagua.

Already on previous occasions, leading comrades of the UNT-Aragua, one of the most combative regional sections of the UNT, had received several threats. This brutal murder is not isolated from the situation of sharp labor conflicts in Aragua, not accidentally the state where the exemplary struggle by the Sanitarios Maracay workers for nationalization under workers’ control gained a lot of strength, including carrying out the first regional workers’ strike in almost a decade, in May last year.

Already last year, we could see how in the conflict at FUNDIMECA, the Valencia factory for making fans, the bosses used paid assassins to try to smash the hard struggle by the women workers for their rights, with the result that one female comrade got shot in the leg. All this happened with the complicity of the judges and state police.

From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), together with our workers’ and student leaders, we declare our solidarity with the grief of the relatives and fellow militants of the comrades, a sorrow that is also ours, since we have shared a trench of joint struggle on more than one occasion. We join the call to the political organizations of the workers’ and socialist left, to political and intellectual personalities, to the union, student and human rights organizations, to declare themselves forcefully against this crime and carry out a large and active national and international campaign to demand exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime against the working-class vanguard of our country. We demand that the national and regional government immediately open an investigation in the hands of a commission made up of workers and human rights organizations, to discover the truth about this crime.

This is one more action that shows not only that there is no revolution nor socialism in the country, but that the institutions of this bourgeois state, as could not be otherwise, are completely on the side of the bosses’ interests against the struggles of workers and the impoverished people, when hundreds of murders of peasants and workers at the hands of paid assassins have gone unpunished. Between repression by the Guardia Nacional and the police on one hand, the “justice” system on the other, and murderers hired by the bosses, without the need to agree, they form a pair of pincers against the most hardened struggles the working class is beginning to wage. Our slogan must be to trust in our own class forces, without putting any confidence in projects of class conciliation!

Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo

Caracas, November 28, 2008

Translation by Yosef M.