We forward the statement that was published in the blog Red Guards Los Angeles supporting the 23 and denouncing the sentences against them. There was also a statement recently published in the Red Guards Pittsburgh.
“We reaffirm what we have said over the years: FIGHTING IS NOT A CRIME! Crime is the state of calamity offered to the people in the line of hospitals, crime is the lack of space in public nurseries, crime is the expensive and overcrowded buses, crime is what is practiced daily in the favelas (slums), bloody by the genocide of black and poor people. These are crimes! And these crimes, be sure, will not go unpunished forever.” – Declaration of the [Brazilian] Activists Condemned by the 2013-2014 Manifestations[1]
Two months ago 23 activists in Brazil, including Comrade Igor Mendes da Silva, were sentenced to five-to-13 years in prison for protesting against the devastatingly anti-people FIFA World Cup. The world soccer championship is like an Armageddon for the masses in the host country, especially in reactionary and fascistic countries in Latin America. The mass-scale countrywide urban redevelopment that followed the World Cup was an assault on the Brazilian masses, literally destroying entire peasant and proletarian neighborhoods and nearly pushing the Brazilian masses off the shores and into the sea.
Approximately one million people poured into the streets in protest to the World Cup[2]. While different political lines existed within the mass movement, all the masses united on one thing: that they will not go easily.
That revolutionary commitment and discipline is embodied in the student and young Communist leader Igor Mendes. He is not deterred sitting behind bars. His spirit, his Communist morale, is not dampened. Like all Communists, like all Maoists, he calls on his comrades to continue the struggle forward.
As Igor Mendes and his comrades defiantly state in their public declaration[3]: the fight for the 23 activists is a fight for everyone in Brazil – and as our Red Guards comrades add, it is an international fight against capitalism-imperialism:
“If they accuse us of this, we must accept with pride what our executioners say. Because that’s exactly what we did; that is, we fought. Everyone needs to understand that it is our entire generation that they seek to condemn and intimidate with this infamous sentence. But they will not accomplish that: we carry the stubbornness of those who insist on having faith in life, faith in the struggle, faith in the people. The stubbornness of the thousands who marched at Saens Peña Square on the day of the World Cup final just hours after dozens of activists were arrested and sent to Bangu’s Penitentiary Complex. We choose a side, and it is not the oppressors’ side. If they accuse us of all this, then we have to be thankful.”
Brazil prioritized the aesthetics of international capital and investment, the lure of a modern metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, Brazília, São Paulo and Fortaleza. Brazil wanted the world to see its near-opulent beauty, the shining new soccer stadiums, never mind that beneath those structures was the still-wet blood and broken bones of Brazilian proletarians who were killed during their construction.
This is the progress the vampiric comprador and vile bureaucratic bourgeoisie of Brazil promised. And they lived up to their promises!
So what else is there left to do when the corrupt and vicious Brazilian state reigns down on the people? The people, under revolutionary Communist leadership, fight back! They rebel, and as Maoists we all know it is right to rebel!
International support from the International Communist Movement continues to grow for Igor Mendes and the Brazilian revolutionary movement. The Brazilian masses, including friends, comrades and families of the 23 activists, have rallied in support of the political prisoners[4]. Protestors continue to face off with the militarized Brazilian police. Lessons are everywhere. This is yet but another reminder that all capitalist states are militarized – it would be foolish suicide for Communist Parties, as Chairman Gonzalo calls for, not to militarize.
Here in Boyle Heights we see the revolutionary masses taking matter into their own hands and encouraged and aided by revolutionary leadership to resist gentrification. Here, too, our class and our people are being pushed out of our homes. Evictions, police violence, deportations and ICE raids, all in the name of urban redevelopment.
Here, too, we see the new Banc of California Stadium which houses the Los Angeles Football Club, redeveloping its immediate surroundings, allowing public drinking to promote alcohol consumption and mass numbness, promising millions of dollars in investment to the poor and proletarian neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. But all we’ve seen is more County Department of Public Health raids on vendors, more LAPD, more California Highway Patrol, more California State Police and more ICE arrests and detentions.
Our Black proletarian brothers and sisters are being slain by law enforcement and our immigrant proletarian brothers and sisters are being kidnapped by ICE and deported.
The farce of bourgeois democracy, here and in Brazil!
So-called “socialist” office holders, like former guerrilla-turned-capitalist roader Dilma Rouseff, and contemporary corrupt comprador Michel Temer, are popular due to the so-called “21st Century Socialism” pink tide that has swept across the Americas and stubbornly, like a stain, lingers on – but it is a fading stain.
Candidates in Brazil make speeches and declarations about what the Brazilian masses want but are only serving bureaucrat capitalism. The ruling class fights to maintain its order within corrupt Brazil.
Igor Mendes shows us that on the road to Communism, there will be many bends and arrests, and of course martyrs. But behind Igor there are thousands and even millions of people becoming better fighters through class struggle. And alongside those people there are Communists training and preparing and building in clandestinity, reconstituting the Brazilian Vanguard, the Communist Party of Brazil (Red Fraction), guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, and the universal applications of Gonzalo Thought!
Long live the Brazilian masses!
Long live Igor Mendes da Silva and his 23 comrades!
Long live proletarian internationalism!
People’s War until Communism!
—
[1] https://medium.com/@supportthe23/declaration-of-the-activists-condemned-by-the-2013-2014-manifestations-230d49d61603
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-protests/one-million-march-across-brazil-in-biggest-protests-yet-idUSBRE95J15020130621
[3] Ibid.
[4] https://maoistroad.blogspot.com/2018/08/brasil-mepr-manifestacao-em-defensa-dos.html?m=1
Red Guards Austin solidarity statement: https://redguardsaustin.wordpress.com/2018/07/28/freedom-for-comrade-igor-mendes/
Red Guards Pittsburgh solidarity statement: https://redguardspittsburgh.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/free-igor-mendes-and-the-other-anti-fifa-23/
Red Guards Charlotte solidarity statement: https://redguardscharlotte.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/freedom-for-comrade-igor-mendes/
Red Guards Kansas City solidarity statement: https://kcmlm.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/freedom-for-comrade-igor-mendes-libertad-para-igor-mendes/
