By Marea Socialista Venezuela
Marea Socialista (MS), section of the International Socialist League in Venezuela, denounces and declares that it is undertaking a national and international campaign in response to the situation faced by Jean Mendoza, worker of the Chilean transnational Masisa and labor leader, and member of this organization, who is a victim of harassment and judicial-police persecution promoted by this company with the collaboration of complacent elements of certain institutions.
This employer action seeks to criminalize the labor demands that our comrade Jean Mendoza has been an important part of, together with his co-workers who work in the Chilean transnational, with the purpose of achieving his imprisonment, in order to silence his voice and separate him from the labor struggle. Mendoza is being accused of “incitement to hatred” and for alleged “simulation of a punishable act,” for pointing out the labor rights violations committed by the company.
The activities carried out by the labor leader Jean Mendoza and his co-workers have consisted of expressing to the company and publicly, and even in the courts, their defensive claims and just demands of the workers of Masisa, in the face of the violation of the collective bargaining agreement and business practices characterized by the use of mechanisms contrary to the Labor Law and in violation of labor and constitutional rights, as well as by the salary conditions to which they are subjected.
The boss´ offensive is due to the fact that Jean Mendoza is a solidarity building worker with a firm class conscience, who has promoted legal demands against the systematic abuses of the transnational, and constructively supports the unity and mobilization of the workers of Guyana. They want to neutralize and punish him for raising his voice on behalf of the workers, for a decent standard of living and for trade union and organizational freedoms of the working class. They want to subjugate and remove him from the stage for confronting the de facto elimination of wages, labor benefits and decent employment, while the transnational increases its profits exponentially at the cost of appropriating the value of the labor of the working class.
This retaliation is not the product only of the complicity of businessmen and institutional mercenaries. This anti-worker action is the product of a policy directed against the working class that uses, among other tools, the decree issued by the government of Nicolás Maduro known as Memorandum 2792, which gives private enterprises the prerogatives to carry out the super-exploitation of workers and ignore previously achieved rights, with hunger salaries and bonuses that do not cover even one tenth of the food basket and much less the basic basket (violating Article 91 of the Constitution). In addition to giving employers full liberty to act against the working mass and its leaders, as they also do in the state companies, today the government and businesses keep hundreds of workers blackmailed, prosecuted and imprisoned.
Faced with this new onslaught by the private employers, supported and accompanied by the anti-worker policy of the Maduro government, Marea Socialista is promoting a petition for signatures in support of Jean Mendoza, to avoid at all costs that he be imprisoned and his human rights be violated, as we have been doing with workers who are imprisoned or are under threat of being arrested, simply for demanding the most elementary rights and carrying out labor struggles. For these reasons today imprisonment, procedural delay, judicial blackmail, police harassment and all kinds of attacks on our rights are being applied in Venezuela.
That is why we declare ourselves once again in a permanent national and international campaign, as we have been doing for the imprisoned workers, this time in defense of our comrade Jean Mendoza, in continuity with our actions to confront the repression implemented with the criminalization of struggle, which is carried out with the “legal” instruments devised by the government, in the recent ANC and in the current AN, with the approval of the PSUV and its allies: this is the case of the disgraceful “Law Against the Instigation of Hate,” the aforementioned Memorandum 2792 and the so-called “Anti-Blockade Law.” For the international campaign we will have the support of social and political leaders of sister parties from all over the world, who are joined in the International Socialist League (LIS-ISL).
We reject this new attack against the workers’ struggle!
We are all Jean Mendoza!
No to the criminalization of the struggle for wages and labor rights!
No more repression of workers!
Active class solidarity!
In this link you can sign online and we ask that you send it to the following email zuleikamatamoros@gmail.com after you adhere to this link or in case you cannot access it.