There has been yet another general strike in a Latin American country. There is now an endless list of countries experiencing serious social and economic crises welcoming the Dominican Republic into their ranks. Haiti’s neighbour has joined the French-speaking country that is suffering social convulsions and putting the entire island into deep unrest.

The national enlarged meeting of the Bolivian Workers’ Union (COB) gathered in Cochabamba on January 22, and decided to call for an indefinite general strike with road blockades in twenty days time if Mesa’s government does not concede the demands of the October insurrection and continues with its announced austerity measures. The COB meeting “ended with the decision to take power, by closing down Parliament." This decision marks the end of the truce given by the worker and peasant leaders to Carlos Mesa’s government.

We publish here the statement of the founding of the Revolutionary Marxist Current in Venezuela. This country has been living through a revolutionary process for the last five years, the roots of which can be traced back to the semi-insurrection of 1989, popularly known as "Caracazo". The programme of moderate reforms and national sovereignty of president Chavez (land reform, literacy programmes, no privatisation of state companies, and above all no privatisation of the oil company) has clashed with the interests of the local oligarchy and imperialism. In this period of capitalist crisis and intensification of imperialist exploitation they cannot allow any country to apply even the

Haiti celebrated the 200th anniversary of its independence on January 1, 2004. The history of Haiti is a long history of colonial struggle against imperialism and has recently been the scene of deep political and social unrest. It is not yet clear what the outcome of the situation in Haiti will be, what is clear however, is that the workers and peasants of Haiti can only rely on themselves to solve the problems they face.

My attention was recently drawn to an article signed by Luis Oviedo, entitled The Counterrevolutionary Position of Socialist Appeal(in Prensa Obrera nº 826).Having read the article, I could not decide whether it was the product of bad faith or simple ignorance. Certainly, the method used is contrary to every basic principle of Marxism and above all Trotskyism, which comrade Oviedo and the Partido Obrero (PO) claim to defend.

This is an article written for Pierre Broué's magazine Cahier Leon Trotsky under the name of Michel Wattignies in answer to Luis Oviedo's article.
See the original in French:
Début de la deuxième révolution bolivienne

The election of Carole James as leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party represents a victory for the status quo. James ran a campaign that concentrated on one thing and one thing only… Carole James. What we did not see were any commitments to actually do anything—no commitment to renationalize the Liberals’ sell-off of public assets, no commitment to reverse the Liberals’ regressive tax hikes (sales tax, medical plan fee, etc.) or negate the $2 billion tax cut to the rich, and definitely no commitment to do anything that would go beyond the position of the previous NDP government. This is of course intentional; the view of the party bureaucracy is that the BC NDP was

This is a joint statement of El Militante and El Topo Obrero (The Workers’ Mole) from Venezuela regarding the rumours of a new coup attempt on the part of the reactionary opposition.

"This government is not at all different from the government of Sanchez de Lozada. Carlos Mesa has not listened to the message of the El Alto Indian rebellion against the sale of gas" These are the words of one of the leaders of the Bolivian October insurrection, Roberto de la Cruz.  They sum up very clearly the real meaning of the bourgeois government of Carlos Mesa and the conclusions sections of the masses and most of the revolutionary vanguard are already drawing.