Support the workers’ will, stop the spread of US reaction to Brazil
Lula sworn in at Congress in Brazil, 2022. (Photo: Mídia NINJA /Flickr)
The American Party of Labor fully rejects and condemns the reactionary uprising in Brazil and demands that the will of the workers and the legitimate results of the elections be observed. The American Party of Labor also understands that as long as bourgeois-democratic institutions exist, like the current Brazilian state, the working class and its allies will have to continuously fight for its democratic rights and for its will to be implemented. It is only through the construction of a revolutionary workers’ state in Brazil, where the workers themselves govern their fate, that the will of the masses will ever be protected. We in the APL extend our solidarity to all those struggling for the creation of such a state and to all those struggling against the current wave of reaction that is attempting to destabilize the country for the benefit of the capitalist class.
In the United States we have witnessed the real effects that right wing political stunts can have, as the January 6th, 2021 storming of the capitol in Washington DC led to an emboldened reactionary movement that has received only wrist slaps from the bourgeois justice system. American imperialism continues to play a leading role in empowering the right in Latin and South America, and we see the American right today applauding and celebrating the attack on Brazil’s electoral system. The connection between American imperialism and international anti-democratic and anti-working class forces has never been clearer.
Bolsonaro, like many deposed despots before, now hides out in Florida, eluding the charges raised against him. His flight came in the wake of the conclusion of the Brazilian presidential elections after weeks of electoral struggle with the victory of left-wing candidate Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva of the Partido dos Trabalhadores over the far-right then-President Jair Bolsonaro. This victory over the regressive leadership of Bolsonaro was won by the working class of Brazil and its allies struggling within the electoral arena to ensure that the anti-democratic and anti-people sections of the bourgeois that Bolsonaro represented no longer remained in leadership of the Brazilian state.
Since Lula officially took office on January 1st, 2023, in which over 300,000 Brazilian workers gathered to demonstrate support, an attempt has been made by the proponents of the ousted Jair Bolsonaro to destabilize the new social democratic leadership in Brazil. In events that are reminiscent of the January 6th riots that occurred in the US capital in 2021 reactionary forces that are dissatisfied with the legitimate results of the Brazilian elections have stormed the country’s Supreme Court and Congressional building, and surrounded the Brazilian Presidential Palace in an attempt to re-install Jair Bolsonaro as president through anti-democratic measures that would ignore the immediate will of the workers in Brazil, even though Bolsonaro has already fled to the US seeking life in Florida, after his loss to masses of people in Brazil who rejected his anti-people policies in favor of Lula’s left-wing reformism. In response to the riots Brazilian President Lula has announced that the “vandals, neo-fascists, and fanatics” will be “punished” for their involvement in the destabilization and riots. In the US and Brazil, the working people, across all boundaries, must crush the neo-fascist reaction exported by US imperialist forces.