Suddenly, Greenland doesn’t seem so outlandish. Not since before the end of the Cold War has the United States so forcefully and directly intervened in the Western Hemisphere. Amassing an armada to blockade Venezuela before bombing the country and kidnapping its president. Threatening the president of Colombia with a similar fate. Suggesting action against Mexico as well, while intimating that it’s the end of days for the Cuban government—and indeed any government that doesn’t toe Washington’s line. The US government couldn’t be clearer about its intentions, which White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/05/politics/video/senior-white-house-aide-stephen-miller-says-us-military-threat-to-maintain-control-of-venezuela-digvid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">outlined in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday</a>: 
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world—the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time ... The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
The audacity is shocking, but this didn’t come out of nowhere. And it is certainly <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-long-and-bloody-legacy-of-the-us-in-latin-america">not unprecedented</a>. The first Trump administration made no secret of its desire to shore up what it, and almost every US government of the last 200 years, considers to be its property and primary “sphere of influence”. So in 2019, national security adviser John Bolton, <a href="https://ni.usembassy.gov/national-security-advisor-ambassador-john-r-bolton-delivers-remarks-at-bay-of-pigs-veterans-association-brigade-2506/">while announcing sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua</a>, declared: “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”.
That policy, outlined in 1823 and later named after its originator, James Monroe, the country’s fifth president, was a warning to the European powers that the US would not tolerate them interfering in the region. It was a bold assertion by a pre-industrial state that had only recently gained independence: we claim an exclusive right to oversee the Western Hemisphere.
Eighty years later, <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/roosevelt-corollary#transcript">the so-called Roosevelt Corollary</a>, named after Theodore Roosevelt, expanded the Monroe Doctrine. The president addressed the Congress in 1904, declaring that the United States would not only oppose European influence, but directly intervene into the affairs of regional states:
“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
This was a precedent setting doctrine for more than a century of overt and covert interventions into the Caribbean and Central and South America. Now, the White House is asserting the “Trump Corollary”, outlined in the latest <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf">national security strategy</a>, issued in November. The document lists the “restoration of American power and priorities” as one of five “core, vital
national interests”:
“[T]he United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets.”
So much for all the ink spilled by foreign policy commentators about Trump’s purported “isolationism” and reluctance to deploy US power. The national security strategy at times reads like a white supremacist manifesto. Understandably, much of the commentary related to it has focused on its warnings about the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe and its attacks on European governments for facilitating decades of non-European people’s migration into the continent.
Yet, for all its departures from convention, the core goal of this administration is consistent with all other US governments: retaining US geopolitical pre-eminence. Indeed, ever since the <a href="https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1987.pdf">first formal strategy document</a> issued by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in 1987, US governments have used the language of mobilising or employing “all facets of national power” to maintain US dominance of the world. This motif appeared in the grand strategy documents of presidents <a href="history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1997.pdf">Bill Clinton</a> and <a href="history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2002.pdf">George W. Bush</a>, Barack Obama’s <a href="obamawhitehouse.archives.govhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf">2010 national security strategy</a>, Trump’s <a href="trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf">2017 national security strategy</a> and <a href="dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">2018 national defence strategy</a>, and Joe Biden’s 2022 <a href="whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf">national security</a>, <a href="media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF">national defence</a> and <a href="jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20_%20Signed.pdf">national military</a> strategies.
Key differences today are, first, that there is a belated recognition in Washington that a war against China in Asia is probably unwinnable; and, second, that the growth of Chinese industrial power and economic sophistication have been severely underestimated. Indeed, Trump’s and Biden’s attempts to use the tariff weapon have resulted only in Beijing increasing it’s industrial output and positive trade balance with the world, while precipitating a series of Chinese high-tech breakthroughs considered almost unthinkable just a decade ago. 
The “Trump Corollary” is therefore refining US imperialism’s approach. China is now South America’s main trading partner; Beijing has invested billions of dollars in nearly two dozen seaports and the broader continental logistics network, firmly integrating several supply chains into its economic orbit. Plus there are increasing financial and military links. So US strategists are initiating what they consider a rearguard action to shore up their region as an exclusive US domain.
Last year, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/16/panamas-president-alleges-us-threatening-to-revoke-visas-over-china-ties" target="_blank" title="alleged" rel="noreferrer noopener">alleged</a> that the US embassy threatened to revoke visas of Panamanian officials because of China’s close ties to the country. And after the US bailed out Argentina, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that President Javier Milei was “committed to getting China out” of the country. Now, the “Corollary” is in full view: a full-throated strategy not only of political interference, but of economic imperialism:
“We must re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life. This will require expanding American access to critical minerals and materials … [And] establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations…
“Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades. 
“Successfully protecting our Hemisphere also requires closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”
All countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, then, have been put on notice that a new era of US imperialist meddling has begun. It’s here that Greenland again comes into focus, both as a resource rich territory—with significant deposits of rare earth elements, other minerals and metals, and offshore oil and gas—and as an island of military value. 
In the interview with CNN’s Tapper, Miller, the White House aide, reiterated that the position of the Trump administration, going back to the president’s first term, is that Greenland should become part of the US and that there is no basis for Denmark’s territorial claim. Indeed, the formal position of the US government is that Greenland is a required territory for NATO’s operations in the arctic. Because the US is the only NATO signatory capable of projecting power in that area, Miller concluded, “obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States”.
There’s a precedent. During an April 1941 White House conference, Denmark’s ambassador to the US, Henrik de Kauffmann, told reporters: “Greenland [belongs] to the American continent”. The New York Times concurred, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1940/04/11/archives/greenland-raises-hemisphere-issue-monroe-doctrine-to-be-applied-if.html">noting</a>
that the island “lies well within the Western Hemisphere on all standard maps”. A short time later, President Franklin Roosevelt <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-from-the-press-conference-42">declared</a>: “We are applying to Denmark what might be called a carrying out of the Monroe Doctrine ... and we are protecting Greenland against any other European nation”.
This was all occasioned by Germany’s occupation of Denmark, beginning the previous year. Roosevelt turned Greenland into a US protectorate, establishing military bases and taking control of its minerals, using the territory as a base of operations when it later entered the Second World War.
So again, the “Trump Corollary” isn’t as radical a departure as many suggest. But it is nevertheless a major escalation. We have become accustomed to referring to postwar periods: the post-Second World War era, the post-Vietnam era, the post-Cold War era. But we have potentially entered a new and dangerous prewar era of intense superpower jockeying in which bloc politics returns to the fore.

Ben Hillier

The Trump doctrine: a new prewar era?

President Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is just the latest move in a long and bloody history of US imperialism in Latin America. As US leaders prepare to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary this year, there is little to celebrate for the region south of its border, which Yale University academic Greg Grandin has aptly labelled the “workshop” of the US empire. 
When the thirteen former British colonies on the North American east coast formed the United States in the late eighteenth century, the dominant power on the American continent was the Spanish empire. But it was an empire in decay and, by the early 1820s, a series of independence wars ended over three centuries of Spanish rule in most of Latin America (as well as Portuguese rule in Brazil). The defeat of the Spanish, however, only intensified imperialist competition in the region as other European powers saw opportunities on the resource-rich continent. The US entered the contest with its Monroe Doctrine: a declaration of US hegemony in the region, ruling it off limits to the European powers. Through a series of treaties it was fairly successful in stopping any direct recolonisation of the area.
The threat of European imperialism was one of the main factors guiding US actions in the region in the early nineteenth century. The other was slavery. From the time of independence, the US southern states had maintained slavery in the face of a northern abolitionist movement by incorporating new slave states into the union. This gave rise to a strong movement in the South pushing for expansion into Mexico and Central America. The strategy bore fruit with the Mexican–American war of the late 1840s, US victory ending with the incorporation of the land roughly from Texas to California—more than half of Mexico’s territory. The US emerged from the war as a true continental power, its borders now stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
After the defeat of the southern confederacy in the 1860s, US imperialism in Latin America took on a different form. Territorial expansion was no longer its primary objective. With slave labour abolished, the forces of industrial capitalism were unleashed. Vast plains to the west, enthusiastic investors, and millions of former slaves and impoverished white workers provided the three essential ingredients for capitalist development: land, labour, and capital. The result was that the US in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced rapid capitalist development. Within a few decades, it became the world’s largest industrial and agricultural producer.
But underneath the growth hid a dangerous contradiction. The productive capacity of the US economy grew so large that by the end of the century the domestic market could no longer absorb its output. Rapid growth, consequently, was accompanied by a series of deep recessions due to severe falls in prices as supply so quickly outpaced demand. The expansion of the post-civil war period, therefore, was also a period of extreme crisis for the US ruling class. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, in an 1898 speech, acknowledged the problem: 
“American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours ... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? ... The power that rules the Pacific ... is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic.”
This is the background to the Spanish–American war of the late 1890s. The US could never reach its true imperial potential while the European powers denied it access to certain markets and held colonies. The defeat of the last remnants of the Spanish empire, which still held important Caribbean islands such as Cuba and Pacific islands like the Philippines, was the pre-condition for the US entering a new period of imperialism in the early twentieth century. As one lawyer, Brooks Adams, wrote: “This war is the first gun in the battle for the ownership of the world”.
Victory in the war in 1898 established Cuba as nominally independent but an effective US colony. The only reason it did not become the 51st state was because the US sugar industry opposed the additional competition that would have come from Cuban sugar being sold tariff-free in the US market. The Philippines, however, was the real prize. The US occupied the country until the end of the second world war, crushing several independence movements.
With dominance secured in both the Atlantic and Pacific, a central priority became the construction of a canal linking the two oceans, allowing US firms privileged access to a key global trade route. The only problem was that the proposed site lay in Panama, which at the time was a province of Colombia rather than an independent state. When Colombia rejected a proposal to lease the territory, the US threatened military action and backed a separatist movement. A treaty was then swiftly concluded with a small group of Panamanian elites, granting US control over the canal in exchange for diplomatic recognition. This period, beginning with the Spanish–American war, opened a period of even more aggressive US imperialism. The supposedly peace-loving liberal President Woodrow Wilson expressed the sentiment in 1907: 
“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.” 
Wilson’s words quickly became true. As Sydney Lens writes in his book The Forging of the American Empire: 
“By 1913 ... the United States had gained control of the tin industry in Bolivia, copper in Chile and Peru, and meat packing in Argentina and Paraguay. Its economic role was still distinctly secondary to Britain in that part of the world, but the American star was rising. J.P. Morgan and W.R. Grace operated the Chilean-Andean railroad, and American firms were making inroads into river transportation in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. John Bull [England] was already outpaced for the trade of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, and being pressed in Peru and Ecuador ... By making the Caribbean an “American lake” the United States guaranteed its dominance over the banana industry of Panama and Guatemala, the coffee industry of Haiti and El Salvador, the sugar industry of the Dominican Republic.”
And when economic means failed, military force was always available. In 1915, the US invaded Haiti because it would not cede control of its customs houses, resulting in a nineteen-year occupation. A year later, it invaded the Dominican Republic. A 1922 report from the US Congress, while the occupation was ongoing, admitted that “homes were burned; natives were killed; tortures and cruelties committed; and ‘Butcher’ Weyler’s horrible concentration camps were established”.
But for the US rulers, nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of the country’s rise. In the twenty years after the Spanish–American war, US manufacturing output increased six-fold. The two world wars further accelerated this trajectory. As the Cold War began and the European powers lost the last remnants of their empires, US control over Latin America was stronger than it had ever been.
Despite US hegemony, however, Latin America was one of the regions in which Soviet influence reached furthest. Through local communist parties, Russia established itself in some countries within the working class and the left. In other cases, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, pro-Moscow groups took state power. In the post-war period, therefore, the battle to maintain Latin America under US domination against Soviet influence became the lens through which foreign policy planners viewed the region. As US diplomat and the great theoriser of Soviet containment, George Kennan, said in 1948: “We have half the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.
That “pattern of relationships” in Latin America took the form of direct US military interventions (including biological and chemical weapons attacks, and forced starvation through the poisoning of crops), backing military coups, sponsoring right-wing death squads, and plunging entire countries into years-long civil wars. 
In 1944, a popular revolution in Guatemala overthrew a dictatorship and led to the election of a reformist government. But after ten years and subsequent democratic elections in which Jacobo Arbenz was elected, the US had had enough. This was particularly the case when the interests of the US United Fruit Company were threatened. Arbenz initiated a mild agrarian reform program, expropriated only unused land and offering compensation to the owners. The land reform program, consequently, had virtually zero impact on the United Fruit Company. Nonetheless, in 1954, the US orchestrated a coup to overthrow Arbenz. The military and paramilitary units unleashed horrendous violence upon the civilian population, murdering, raping and torturing thousands.
The Arbenz government was what US scholar Noam Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example”: any government or movement that, even in modest fashion, tries to improve the lives of ordinary people, is a threat to US interests because it offers the example of an alternative. This idea took on increased importance for the US after the Cuban revolution in 1959. When the forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew a US-backed dictator 90 miles from Florida, it set off major alarm bells for US foreign policy planners. Two years later, when those same rebels declared themselves to be communists and allied themselves with the Soviet Union, the US decided to make an example of Cuba. A strict trade embargo was placed on the island and, in 1961, the CIA trained a group of right-wing mercenaries to invade and overthrow the government. Although it failed, a clear message had been sent to the entire continent: this was the price of defiance.
The problem for the US, however, was that the Cuban revolution inspired the Latin American left. In nearly every country, guerilla groups formed with the goal of repeating some variation of the Cuban revolution. This combined with the radical period of the 1960s and 1970s, in which a series of urban mass movements developed across the continent. In some cases, the movements toppled governments, both democratic and dictatorship. In response, the US unleashed its infamous death squads in Central America and backed military regimes in South America, such as Chile.
Nicaragua was a prime example. Its case goes back to the early 1930s, when President Roosevelt, under the “good neighbour” policy, supported a military coup that brought Anastasio Somoza to power. He and his two sons established a family dynasty that ruled for 43 years. Nicaragua suffered a particularly violent fate because it was the only other country after Cuba in which a left-wing guerilla group actually won state power. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, financially and politically backed by Castro, won mass support among the peasantry and working class and played the leading role in the revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. 
When the Sandinistas took power, they gave land to the peasantry, expanded healthcare and education, and lifted a big group of the population out of poverty. As a result, Washington decided that Nicaraguans had to be punished. It was another case of the “threat of a good example”. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the US became uncompromisingly committed to the violent overthrow of the Sandinista government. The CIA trained opposition paramilitaries and by early 1982 had launched airstrikes in the country. Despite the Sandinistas holding and winning elections in 1984, they lost in 1990. After a decade of civil war and more than 30,000 lives lost, they voluntarily gave up power to a US-backed candidate.
The early decades of the 21st century in Latin America gave rise to the so-called pink tide. Across the continent, left-wing, reforming leaders won elections on the promise of wealth redistribution to the poor and the working class. Many governments achieved significant improvements in quality of life for millions of people, largely thanks to China’s vast demand for Latin America’s resources. But the economics of this model were undercut around 2011 as China’s growth began to slow, leading many left governments, like the Workers’ Party in Brazil, to implement austerity. While some were prepared to challenge US economic control in the region, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who partially nationalised the oil industry, they were all bound to the logic of capitalism and the necessary alliances with imperial powers that stems from it. As such, the independence from the US that some of them won was replaced by reliance on China.
Remembering the bloody history of the United States in Latin America is essential in light of Washington’s latest criminality in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves. With China rapidly catching the US economically and militarily, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza having laid bare the sham of international law, there is little need for Trump to cloak US imperialism in the language of “democracy” and “liberty”. The might makes right imperialism of the early twentieth century is returning.

Tom Sullivan

The long and bloody legacy of the US in Latin America

The US has launched airstrikes against Venezuela, kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, and is attempting a regime change—although at this point the government still stands. The order for this naked display of gangster imperialism came from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club for the one percent, where just days earlier he auctioned a portrait of Jesus for US$2.75 million and said his new year’s resolution was “peace on Earth”. 
There can be no peace with the Washington regime enforcing order. On every continent, military bases, CIA stations and multinational companies are engaged in a global war to continue or expand US domination. Extortion and terrorism are the norm for this rogue state. But this latest act is so brazen, so arrogant, that it beggars belief. This is the lawlessness of a criminal syndicate; the act of a mob-boss state.
Regime change in Venezuela has been a long-held goal of US foreign policy planners since the left-wing Hugo Chavez won the presidency in 1999 and initiated a program of wealth redistribution towards the poor and the working class. The country’s oil wealth underpinned the new president’s program. With the world’s largest known reserves, Chavez partially nationalised the sector. He and his successor Maduro increasingly turned to China as Washington turned the screws, including signing deals to sell oil at below world market prices.
Trump’s actions must be understood in the context of intensifying imperialist tensions between the United States and China. For Washington, the world’s largest oil reserves in a region it considers its “backyard” being sold at cut-price rates to its principal geopolitical rival was scandalous. This was part of the motivation for the US-backed coup attempt in 2002, when Chavez was detained for two days but ultimately failed. It also inspired the first Trump administration’s recognition of little-known politician Juan Guaido as the country’s “true” president. Guaido unsuccessfully called for the military to oust Maduro in a coup and publicly supported a US invasion.
While oil is important in US calculations, Maduro’s ouster is part of a broader attempt to shore up the Western hemisphere under US domination. Many governments have been overthrown in this region purely for not toeing the US line and displaying some concern for their own citizens’ wellbeing. Also, the region is home to crucial natural resources and has gradually been slipping out of US control. Such a brazen move to oust the leader of a country that has forged closer ties to China and Russia sends a clear message about what the US is prepared to do to maintain its hegemony.
Why now? Regional dynamics are important. The first decade and a half of the 21st century was dubbed the “pink tide”, as left-wing or left-leaning governments came to power across the continent. These leaders often used Chinese demand for their natural resources to lift millions of people out of poverty. But this model began to break down around 2011 when Chinese economic growth began to slow. Many of pink tide leaders turned to austerity and authoritarianism. 
Over the last decade, the political pendulum in the region has tipped back to the right. But it was not the same right as before the pink tide. Today, it is a hardened and radicalised right, inspired by Trump. Such governments are in power in Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia and just won elections in Chile. 
Crucially, there is also a government-in-waiting in Venezuela. Since Chavez’s first election victory, Venezuela’s far right have openly supported US intervention. Now, they have finally got their wish. At the time of writing, it’s unclear how much, if any, of the US’s actions were coordinated with Venezuela’s far-right leaders and dissident military officers. 
Should they end up in power, however, the plan is clear. Their most prominent leader, Maria Corina Machado, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, recently summed it up: “We will bring rule of law. We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment and a transparent massive privatisation program that is waiting for you.”
That’s the “peace on Earth” that Trump, and apparently the Nobel committee, desire: a fire sale of public assets to predatory US companies, and a government pliant to Western corporate and geopolitical interests.
Many questions remain unanswered. The role of the Venezuelan military looms large. Its top echelons are deeply integrated into the Venezuelan capitalist class, running important sections of the economy. Along with Venezuela’s large military budget, this has underpinned their loyalty to the government for many years. It is unclear how the leading generals will respond to Maduro’s ouster, but voluntarily handing over their control of the world’s largest oil reserves seems unlikely.
There are more questions. Will the opposition unite around a clear program and person? It’s impossible to know, but the more moderate sections are not unanimous in supporting US intervention. How much of this is driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose political career has been animated by an almost manic desire for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba? 
What political impact will this have domestically in the US and on Trump’s MAGA movement? The legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan left a section of Trump’s base strongly opposed to regime change operations. It is notable that the few statements by Trump and Rubio have framed the actions as a “law enforcement” operation to bring a “criminal” drug trafficker to justice. 
Most important of all, how does the Venezuelan population respond? Having turned the country into a corrupt, authoritarian state stalked by poverty weakened the strong support Chavez enjoyed, but the Venezuelan population also has a long history of opposing US imperialism. Many understand that Washington’s crippling sanctions regime has been a key source of economic misery in the country. They know that Washington will only plunder them further.
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the ouster of Maduro marks a step towards greater, and more naked, imperialist aggression. After Israel’s genocide in Gaza, there now appears little need for even the pretence of international law. Might makes right is the guiding ethos of US imperialism. There will be no peace until the empire falls.

US gangster regime kidnaps Venezuelan president

SANTIAGO—Only six years ago, the left in Latin America was hailing the estallido social (social explosion) in Chile as a marker of a continental resurgence in the class struggle. Similar developments were occurring in Ecuador.
Fast forward to this year, and Ecuador’s leader, Daniel Noboa, was one of three Latin American presidents to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, along with Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Milei has just claimed a victory in the midterm elections and is preparing to extend the workday to twelve hours and make holiday leave an employer prerogative. Most emblematically, the political party-movement that for many represented the hopes of a sustained resurgence of popular struggles and a left political alternative, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, has completely imploded.
With the Cochabamba rebellion in 2000, the emergent political movement in Bolivia had re-awakened the left’s imagination and put the issue of movements “taking power” back on the debate stage. Bolivia became an international reference point. John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power played out in all its messiness on this stage. In its early days, the MAS’s “democratic and cultural revolution” was celebrated as the success of a new model. In the 2009 elections, the MAS won 64 percent of the votes, which was unheard of in Bolivian political history. Then it won 61 percent in 2014 and a still convincing 55 percent in 2020. 
In August, the MAS lost 73 seats, leaving it with two in a lower house of 130. Bolivia is now back on the merry-go-round, like Brazil and Peru, of alternating centre-left and far-right regimes trying to resuscitate the neoliberal model. In Peru, the far-right-dominated coalition is taking no chances. On 24 October, the judiciary sentenced leftist congressional representative Guillermo Bermejo to fifteen years in prison for allegedly having ties to leaders of Shining Path, an outlawed guerrilla organisation. Bermejo was emerging as a potential presidential challenger. 
Enter Chile, Latin America’s model neoliberal regime and origin story of capitalist shock treatment economics under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-89). For decades, Chile has been lauded by neoliberal ideologues for its so-called economic stability, market freedoms, competitiveness and innovation. The country boasts the highest GDP per capita in Latin America and is one of just four continental members of the World Bank’s high-income category. The 2025 Allianz Global Wealth Report ranks Chile 34th in the world, above Mexico (43rd), Brazil (45th), Colombia (49th), Peru (51st) and Argentina (55th).
Chile encapsulates the meaning of neoliberal “success”. In plain language, you find something that the national economy can produce and profitably sell on the world market, you squeeze the working class for every possible cent to maximise productivity, and bingo, economic growth (for some). Chile’s extractivist economy—highly specialised in and dependent on copper and lithium exports—has maintained high growth rates at the expense of manufacturing, and with a susceptibility to commodity price fluctuations and a generally weak currency, leading to high import prices.
The result of this neoliberal “success” is that Chile remains one of the most unequal countries in the world: only 28 of 151 countries with data collected in the World Inequality Database present worse than Chile. The richest 10 percent own 80 percent of all national wealth; the top 1 percent own half. Almost half of Chilean workers earn less than 600,000 pesos monthly, equivalent to less than A$1,000. Only 5 percent of workers earn more than A$4,000 a month. Yet the cost of living is not far off Australia, a litre of milk here setting you back around A$2. In addition, unemployment, at 8.5 percent, is high even by Latin American standards, and 26.2 per cent of employment is in the informal sector.
Not surprisingly, Chile’s “success” comes with permanent volatility—and not just economic. Working-class history here is steeped in struggle. Over the course of a century, it birthed several mass party organisations influenced or led by Marxists: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Left Movement, and the Popular Unitary Action Movement, to name a few.
This history casts a shadow over capitalist stability, so much so that post-dictatorship neoliberalism has relied on the calming influence of centre-left governments, which have held six out of eight presidencies since 1990. The two Pinochetista presidencies of Sebastián Piñera (2010-14 and 2018-22) both fuelled important estallidos sociales: the mass student-led protests of 2011 and the even bigger explosion of 2019, which demanded a new constitution. Both governments controlled by the traditional right in these years generated institutional crises for Chilean capitalism.
Chile heads into presidential elections this month with a sense of trepidation. On the one hand, the right has been gaining ground since the defeat of the 2019 estallido’s aspirations: while 80 percent of voters in an October 2020 plebiscite supported constitutional change, only 38 percent voted for the proposed new constitution the following year. Once students and the working class had been demobilised, the right took the initiative.
Since former student leader Gabriel Boric was elected president in 2022, the political situation has worsened. His centre-left government’s tepidness has increasingly emboldened the traditional right and invited the growth of a new radical far right. A recently published survey suggests that, in the five years since the estallido, the proportion of people identifying with right-wing ideas has increased from 18 percent to 38 percent. The shift is fundamentally due to the centre-left’s association with neoliberal politics sprinkled with piecemeal, symbolic and inadequate social measures.
Dissatisfaction with centre-left politics manifested clearly in the June primaries organised by the ruling centre-left block. The Communist Party’s candidate, Jeanette Jara (minister for labour and social provision in Boric’s government), trounced her main opposition, Carolina Tohá (from the Party for Democracy, a right-wing split from the Socialist Party) and Gonzalo Winter (from Boric’s Broad Front). Jara’s 60 percent reflected aspirations for a more decisive left-wing program.
In the historical spirit of the Communist Party, fearing a radicalisation that would split the Popular Front with the bourgeois political parties that are part of the current government, Jara’s campaign since June has largely followed the agenda set by the right. She has emphasised her anti-immigration and public security credentials while wooing the most right-wing elements in the governing coalition, in particular the Christian Democrats.
Jara will win the first round of the presidential elections but will likely face one of three right-wing candidates in the run-off: Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of the Independent Democratic Union, representing the traditional, unreconstructed Pinochetista right and a mirror political reflection of the Chilean capitalist class; José Antonio Kast, from the far-right Republican Party; or Johannes Kaiser, founder of the radical far-right National Libertarian Party, styled along Trump and Milei lines but arguably more offensive.
Regardless of her opponent, Jara will come armed with a blunt instrument: a centre-left program incapable of fundamentally tackling the country’s social and economic problems and bound to a government associated with growing unemployment and underemployment, social spending cuts and the repression of mobilised opposition.
Jara’s opposition will be armed with a far-right, populist agenda that claims to understand the general discontent and promises a new, shinier nationalism, robed in racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, and blaming everyone but the capitalist class for the country’s problems.
In the global context of authoritarianism becoming the new normal of capitalist democracy, a victorious far right will double down on every channel of exploitation (pushing down wages, pensions and social spending) with a confidence that will not spare state repression, aiming to isolate the more politically advanced sections of the working class. If Jara wins, it will be “más de lo mismo” (more of the same), a continuing weight holding down the radicalisation of larger contingents of the working class, unable to resolve the problems borne of a model of accumulation nearing exhaustion, and fanning the spread of far-right ideas.
If Chile does elect a “communist” president, it will not signal any major change. However, it will create new contradictions and opportunities for the revolutionary left. The Communist Party is not the post-Marxist left of the Broad Front. The CP’s history, especially its role in the anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s, ties it to a political memory that the new left cannot claim. That political memory is an important glue shared by the working class’s more combative and radicalised elements. Every high school and university student protest, every major workers’ struggle, all manifest this political memory.
This combativeness has barely got a look in during the presidential elections, bar the propagandistic interventions of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party, running 23 candidates in the parliamentary elections, and the Maoist Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action), whose presidential candidate has raised demands such as the nationalisation of the mines, an issue the centre-left won’t touch but which is critical to any meaningful left governmental program.
If Chile elects a far-right president, it will encourage the hawkish sensibilities of the Trump administration. US imperialism hopes to regain influence in Latin America in order to boost its global pretensions. An alignment of far-right governments in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia might even give a green light to the unimaginable—a US intervention in Venezuela. That would be a particularly complicated endeavour given that the Venezuelan military is not a ready-made proxy for imperialism.
The challenge for the revolutionary movement continent-wide is to build influence amid the instability of a spent economic model that creates a merry-go-round of governments, dissolving previously long-lasting parties and alliances, creating monsters in an instant, and seemingly scattering political memory in the whirlwind.
It’s a challenge that must be accepted.

Jorge Jorquera

The resurgent right in Latin America and the challenge for revolutionaries

Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, suffered a setback in the elections of the province of Buenos Aires on 7 September. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) won in just two of the eight electoral areas in Argentina’s most populous province, home to more than 17 million people or 40 percent of the entire Argentine electorate. With the national mid-term elections due to be held in late October, this was an important test for the government.
Milei came to power in 2023, and immediately implemented a series of draconian anti-protest and anti-strike laws, combined with mass cuts to public spending, large public sector lay-offs and privatisations. During the Buenos Aires provincial election campaign, he promised his supporters, “We’re going to put the final nail in their coffin”, referring to the centrist Peronist opposition. But even Milei could not spin the result into something positive. On election night he struck a very different chord, saying “Without a doubt, on the political front, today we have suffered a clear defeat”.
The major beneficiaries of this defeat are the Peronists, a coalition of various parties from the centre left to centre right. Closely linked to the union bureaucracy, the Peronists have governed Argentina for the majority of the years since its return to democracy in the 1980s, introducing a range of neoliberal measures during that time. The Peronists won 47.3 percent of the vote in Buenos Aires, claiming victory in 100 of the 130 municipalities. LLA, by contrast, won just 33.7 percent. In the two most populous and working-class electoral areas, the Peronists beat Milei’s coalition by 25 and 10 percentage points respectively. 
The strong Peronist vote much more reflects a rejection of Milei’s program than enthusiastic support for the Peronists. In just two years, Milei’s austerity has savaged the living standards of the working class. Last year, the poverty rate reached a record high 54.8 percent. A full 70 percent of people run out of money for monthly expenses by the 20th of the month, according to economist Guillermo Oliveto. Milei dismissed this statistic, saying, “If it were true, you would have to walk down the street and it would be full of corpses”. 
On top of his clear indifference to mass poverty, Milei’s administration has been mired in corruption scandals, which have likely had an impact on some voters who bought into his self-described “anti-elitistism”.
The other encouraging outcome of the election was the strong vote for the Workers’ Left Front (FIT-U), a coalition of far-left socialist parties. Across the province, the FIT-U won 4.3 percent of the total, or 350,000 votes. Electorally, the province is divided into eight areas. In the third and eighth areas, which have respective populations of more than 5 million and 600,000, the FIT-U consolidated itself as the third political force, winning just over 5.5 percent in each. 
In La Matanza, the largest municipality in the country with nearly 2 million people, the FIT-U won 7.5 percent. In other areas, its vote reached between 6 and 8 percent. The strong result means the FIT-U will hold on to its two lower house MPs. The party’s program includes massive expansions of public health and education, nationalisation of key sectors of the economy, putting politicians on a teachers’ wage, cutting regressive taxes and establishing a national jobs program. Its success shows that even a relatively small party, when it puts forward a decent left-wing program, can win a section of workers and students.
Ana Paredes Landman, a teacher, will hold one of the seats for the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), one of the four parties that make up the FIT-U. In a statement she pointed to the resistance, led by the left, to Milei’s program as responsible for his defeat:
“There were the workers of the Garrahan (hospital), the disability movements, retirees and so many popular sectors who, with the support of the Left Front, kept the resistance alive while other spaces linked to the union bureaucracy and Peronism chose passivity. The good electoral result of the Left Front marks a recognition of those of us who uphold a consistent proposal, who do not turn our backs and who always defend the rights of workers and youth in the legislatures and in the councils.”
Another important part of the FIT-U’s approach is that it doesn’t just offer an electoral alternative but also actively builds resistance in the streets, university campuses and workplaces. The MST have been leading some of the most high-profile resistance to Milei’s austerity. One example is the Garrahan paediatrics hospital in Buenos Aires. Milei’s attacks on the free and public hospital, which treats 40 percent of Argentina’s paediatric cancer cases, have turned it into a symbol of resistance. The MST is the dominant political force in the Garrahan union. It has led a series of strikes at the hospital and marches on congress—one of which ended with healthcare workers surrounding the congress building. The union general secretary, Norma Lezana, an MST member, has tried to link the Garrahan struggle to the broader struggles of all workers, saying that while their action “is centred on the Garrahan, it includes all the demands of the population ... if the Garrahan wins, and we manage to keep it from closing, that will also be a victory for the entire population”.
Ultimately, the election is an important setback for Milei and his ultra-conservative agenda. While two general strikes and other major industry strikes in the first year of his term stymied some of the most extreme elements of his program, the resistance has become more isolated since then. Only the best organised sections of the working class, often where the socialist left is strong, have kept up the pressure with consistent strikes and protests. 
Nonetheless, the Buenos Aires election shows that the far right’s advance can be checked, and that the centre can make gains electorally against it. While the Peronists and their partners in the union bureaucracy have largely given up the fight against Milei in the streets and workplaces, the presence of a sizeable far left with some weight in key sections of the working class has been crucial in building resistance. 
Unfortunately, the far left is still too small to challenge seriously the influence of the Peronist movement. But for a growing section of workers, it does provide a political alternative capable of leading at least some of them in action. Continuing to build and strengthen a genuinely anti-capitalist movement that reaches further into the working class is the key to challenging seriously both Milei and Peronism.

Setback for far-right Milei and advance for left in Argentina

Since 2012, Chilean elections have involved voluntary primaries, in which parties or coalitions of parties can run regulated polls to elect presidential candidates, parliamentary deputies, senators and mayors.
The left-of-centre Unity for Chile (Unidad por Chile) coalition, which currently forms President Gabriel Boric’s government in the National Congress, held primaries to select a presidential candidate on 29 June. The candidates included Jeannette Jara from the Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Chile, PCCh), Gonzalo Winter from the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), Jaime Mulet from the Social Green Regionalist Federation (Federación Regionalista Verde Social), and Carolina Tohá from the Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia, PPD) in partnership with the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and the Liberal Party.
The 20 percent lower turnout for these primaries, compared to the 2021 primaries that led to the selection of Boric, is a clear indicator of the loss of enthusiasm for a government that watered down what progressive agenda it had after the 2022 defeat of its constitutional referendum. Clearer still was the primary vote for Gonzalo Winter, from Boric’s Frente Amplio, who managed only 9 percent. The PPD’s Tohá got 28 percent, based on a barely disguised scare campaign of anti-communism. The Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara won the primaries convincingly across the entire country, with more than 60 percent (825,835 votes).
This is not surprising, as the few reforms the government has celebrated—in pensions, work week and minimum wage—were largely the work of the Communist Party, with Jeannette Jara leading the Ministry for Work and Social Provision. None of the reforms came for free. The 40-hour week and increased minimum wage both involved trade-offs in labour “flexibility”, and the pension reform was more a capitalist modernisation.
The fact that the Communist Party will lead the centre-left’s parliamentary campaign in the upcoming national election signals an important change in the balance of forces and reflects the growing polarisation across the continent. The mainstay of Chile’s post-dictatorship capitalist stability has been the centre-left forces of the neoliberal Socialist Party and PPD, alongside the historically weakened Christian Democrats. The Frente Amplio was always a swamp without a clear social base or ideological commonality.
The Chilean Communist Party is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1912 as the Socialist Workers Party. It has a long history of supporting what it variously labelled progressive or nationalist bourgeois forces, participating in governments, and standing at the head of workers’ movements only to lead them into defeats, including the persecution of its own members. 
Most tragically, the Communist Party bears significant blame for attempting to demobilise the workers’ movement during the Allende government and weakening it at its most decisive historical moment, before General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government in a coup in 1973. The Communists were the most conservative, conciliatory section of the Popular Unity coalition, leading attempts to hold back factory takeovers, strike deals with centrist parties and marginalise revolutionary forces.
Throughout this history and to date, it has maintained significant levels of support among workers. The party has the third largest electorally registered membership and, in recent years, has been top of this list. Unlike most other parties, centre-left and right, the PCCh’s 45,000 or so membership is significantly more meaningful, with neighbourhood-level organisation still existent in many parts of the country. 
The PCCh youth organisation probably has more than 6,000 members, who are active at secondary school, university and neighbourhood levels. While this does not compare with the 100,000 organised militants it had in 1972, it is still a significant political force in a country where youth mobilisations have been centre stage for decades. Two of the key figures of the Boric government, Camila Vallejo (government spokesperson and head of education) and Karol Cariola (chair of the lower house), were important leaders of the Jota (as the Communist youth are known).
The Chilean Communist Party has a long Stalinist history and, like many of its counterparts, evolved in a Eurocommunist direction from the late 1960s onwards. However, the defeat of 1973 and the persecution that followed somewhat immunised the party from the precipitous decline and right-wing trajectory of many similar organisations worldwide. By 1984, the PCCh had shifted its perspective, resolving that the most probable road to democracy was a national uprising. It joined with revolutionary forces and, for a period, helped lead the democracy movement. This included setting up armed militias through the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, famed for the attempted assassination of Pinochet.
While relatively monolithic, the PCCh has its historically rooted tensions. The case of PCCh leader Daniel Jadue illustrates the continuation of these. Jadue, a Chilean of Palestinian origin, was mayor of the working-class Santiago district of Recoleta from 2012 to 2024. He became very popular for opening public pharmacies, popular libraries and an open university and for establishing a public housing builder. He contested the primaries in 2021 against Boric, getting almost 700,000 votes, compared to Boric’s million. 
In 2024, Jadue was charged with crimes related to the funding of the public pharmacies, essentially for buying medicines with non-existent public funds. Since then, the entire political establishment has done everything possible to vilify Jadue and keep him off the political stage, including current efforts to prevent him from running in the coming parliamentary elections. In recent months, the PCCh president has engaged in public squabbles with their presidential candidate over whether Jadue would play a role in the election campaign.
The case of Jadue complicates the support the Jara campaign seeks from the centre of Chilean politics. As in the past, the more the PCCh looks in that direction, the more it plays into the hands of the right. In waiting are presidential candidates Evelyn Matthei, supported by two of Chile’s main modern bourgeois parties, National Renewal (Renovación Nacional) and the Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente), and Antonio Kast, from the more newly established darling of the far right, the Republican Party.
[Red Flag will report from Chile on the presidential elections in October-November.]

Will a Communist be Chile’s next president?

A former agent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile has been living in Australia avoiding justice for her role in the aggravated kidnapping, torture and murder of at least seven Communist Party activists in the 1970s. 
Adriana Rivas is accused of being part of a government campaign of terror and genocidal violence unleashed on the left and the workers’ movement by the dictatorship after the coup of 11 September 1973. 
Rivas lived as a free woman in Australia from 1978 to 2006, working and living in Bondi, Sydney. While visiting Chile for a family wedding in 2006, she was arrested and later charged for her role in Pinochet-era crimes. But while released on bail in 2010, she fled Chile, making her way back to Australia. 
In 2014, Chile formally requested her extradition. The Australian government failed to act on the request for five years before arresting her in 2019. While several Australian courts have confirmed the legitimacy of her extradition, Rivas and her lawyers continue to appeal the extradition order in the High Court. 
In 1970, Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition were elected to office in Chile, promising to carry out a parliamentary road to socialism. The election of a left-wing government, and the resistance of the Chilean capitalist class to its progressive reforms, unleashed a wave of strikes across the country. 
The struggle reached revolutionary proportions in 1973, when workers began to form industrial cordones, institutions of working-class power and industrial democracy independent of the government, to coordinate struggle, defend workers’ gains and pressure the government to implement the promised nationalisation of industry, which Popular Unity had retreated on. 
Tragically, the revolutionary process was drowned in blood. In August 1973, Allende invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet in an attempt to appease the Chilean and international capitalist class. On 11 September, Allende was murdered in the Presidential Palace. Militants from the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the revolutionary MIR and working-class activists were rounded up in their thousands, ushered into the National Stadium of Santiago to be tortured and summarily executed. 
The regime continued to hunt down left-wing workers and socialist militants for nearly two decades, while receiving the full diplomatic support of Western governments, including Australia. 
In 1974, the Pinochet dictatorship passed Decree Law 521, which created the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), a Gestapo-like secret political police force reporting directly to Pinochet. DINA became infamous for its apparatus of repression. This included torture centres, extrajudicial murder and the forced disappearances of thousands of civilians. 
The murder of prisoners sometimes occurred through suffocation, the experimental use of sarin gas or injection with cyanide. Survivors have testified that prisoners were killed through beatings, their bodies disposed of in lime mines or thrown into the sea via helicopter in notorious “death flights”.
US support for these crimes is well known. In August 1970, a month before Allende and Popular Unity were elected, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser for President Richard Nixon, had discussed the feasibility of the US supporting a military coup against Popular Unity. 
After the coup, the US supported DINA significantly. In 1974, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters hosted a luncheon for DINA Director Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The following year, the CIA briefly put the DINA director on its payroll as a paid asset.
Between 1973 and 1977, Adriana Rivas worked for DINA as part of the Lautaro Brigade, operating under the name “La Chani”. The Lautaro Brigade was an intelligence unit within DINA that targeted Communist Party activists with the aim of liquidating the underground leadership of the resistance to the regime. Rivas was the personal secretary of Army Colonel Contreras, who oversaw DINA. 
Many of the Lautaro Brigade’s crimes and its agents were not exposed until 2007, when a former agent gave evidence as part of the Conference Street I and II judicial processes. These two cases covered the aggravated kidnapping and disappearance of Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyan Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Hector Veliz, Reinalda Pereira and Victor Diaz, secretary of the Communist Party at the time. Rivas is accused of being a participant in the disappearance of all seven. 
In 2007, a former DINA waiter turned witness, Jorgelino Vergara—whose own guilt led him to expose the Lautaro Brigade torture centre—claimed that Rivas participated fully in the torture as well as the administrative side of the Lautaro Brigade’s work. In an article in El Dinamo, Vergara claimed he saw Rivas in the gym hitting one of the detainees, who was sitting in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back.
While Rivas denies involvement in kidnappings, beatings and disappearances, she remains unrepentant about the violence of the Pinochet era and DINA. In a shockingly candid interview with SBS Spanish in 2013, she claimed that the torture of Communists was “the only way to break people” and described her time at DINA as “the best years” of her youth. In the interview, she proudly recounted guarding Pinochet’s hotel room door. 
It is a travesty that the Australian government allowed Rivas to live freely in Bondi until 2019 despite knowledge about her crimes coming to light as early as 2006. The Australian government’s indifference to justice for the Chilean victims of Pinochet’s agents should not be surprising, given Australia’s past. 
Despite having a reputation for welcoming Chilean refugees, Australia gave full diplomatic recognition to the Pinochet regime for its entire existence, and Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) spies aided and abetted the CIA in destabilising the Allende government and cultivating conditions for a military coup. 
In 2021, declassified Australian documents revealed that, in 1970, Liberal Foreign Minister Billy McMahon approved an ASIS request to open a base in Santiago. The heavily redacted papers show that Australian spies operated in concert with the CIA, but very little detail has been revealed—in line with Australia’s secretive approach to security documents. 
In 1972, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closure of the Santiago office, while working strenuously to avoid “embarrassing” the CIA. But after his dismissal in 1975, Whitlam suggested his orders to ASIS may have been ignored. 
The next High Court hearing for Adriana Rivas is on 10 March 2025. Chilean militants with Movimiento Anticapitalista, including Camilo Parad—the grandson of one of Rivas’ victims, Fernando Ortiz Letelier—have called on the <a href="https://anticapitalistas.cl/2024/11/20/el-caso-de-la-represora-adriana-rivas-la-impunidad-como-legado-dictatorial/">Australian left to mobilise to pressure the courts to extradite Rivas</a>. 
The attorney general must act to extradite Rivas without further delay. Every day that she remains in Australia is another insult to the people of Chile, as well as the thousands of Chilean Australians who fled to this country as refugees. In addition, all records relating to ASIS operations in Chile in the 1970s must be fully declassified and released. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Chloe Rafferty

Australia must extradite Pinochet agent Adriana Rivas

In Buenos Aires, the Workers’ Socialist Movement (Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores, MST), a Trotskyist party, is holding a day school for militant workers from the Italian Hospital. It’s 8:30am and the worker militants are trickling in, carrying pastries, sandwiches and maté gourds (a local tea). They are here to discuss everything from the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to the concept of exploitation and the legal framework in Argentina under which unions operate. Some comrades are dressed in their hospital scrubs.
These workers are facing a fierce offensive from President Javier Milei and the hospital bosses and are struggling for their own living conditions and the rights of their class. 
Argentinian workers have experienced a protracted crisis for most of the 21st century. Hyperinflation has eaten away the purchasing power of workers’ salaries as much as it has eaten away the credibility of the major political parties. This includes Peronism, the nationalist party that historically has attracted working-class allegiances. Since last year’s election of Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist and far-right outsider, a new offensive has been launched against every aspect of working-class life. In the first six months of the Milei government, poverty levels rose by more than 11 points to reach 53 percent of the population. 
Two significant sectors facing attacks are health care and universities. Nurses and medical professionals from the Italian Hospital are discussing the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to prepare for the struggles of today. Between sips of maté they give thoughtful answers to questions about labour history and thought experiments about how left-wing trade union militants should respond in various scenarios.
One of the questions passed around on slips of paper and discussed in small groups is something like: “You’re creating a new trade union. What principles should it adopt to prevent bureaucratisation?” Another is: “A local factory is being shut down. What political and legal tactics do you adopt?” 
These are not purely hypothetical questions. In 21st century Argentina, there have been waves of working-class struggle resulting from debt crises, hyperinflation and a series of bosses’ offensives attempting to radically restructure government and society in favour of capitalists. In 2001, under President Fernando de la Rúa, a wave of protest known as the Argentinazo
was unleashed. Protests, strikes, factory occupations and unemployed workers’ struggle partially pushed back a government offensive and toppled five presidents in the space of two weeks. 
Today, the workers are answering very practical questions, and some have direct experience of trying to figure out how to respond to workplace closures. A discussion about the limitations of workers’ cooperatives ensues. They also talk about the possibility of demanding the government nationalise private firms. 
In the crisis of the early 2000s, a range of strategies were adopted by Argentine workers, many of whom were left with factories and workplaces abandoned by the bosses. Some were occupied and transformed into cooperatives, but most of these could not last after government subsidies were withdrawn. As one comrade comments, “The market forces us to exploit ourselves”. Other workplaces struggled for nationalisation: “That workplace closed down, but each worker was guaranteed a job”. 
Our translator, Frederico, tells us the period during and after the 2001 Argentinazo was important in rebuilding the influence of Trotskyist groups, including the MST, in the trade unions. Influence was built through hard-fought battles against the entrenched Peronist leadership. When Frederico says “hard fought”, it is not a metaphor. Going against the hegemonic Peronist leadership in trade unions is no small thing in a country where Peronist trade union bureaucrats are willing to cheat, collude with the bosses and threaten the left with hired muscle. 
On our lunch break, the comrades share pastries, including those named by the anarchists of the early Argentine workers movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were given outrageous titles, which parodied the villains and methods of the workers’ and radical struggles: bolas de fraile (“friar’s balls”), facturas
(“bills”) and bomba (“bomb”), so named after the anarchist penchant for individual violence. Cesar, a socialist militant introducing the discussion, references these pastries as an example of the hidden history of the working-class struggle that existed long before the arrival of Peronism in the ’40s and ’50s. 
A revolutionary socialist lawyer joins the second half of the meeting to teach the delegates about their rights and the relative and always conditional protections of capitalist law. The lawyer comrade is conscious of conveying the gulf between the pretty words of the law and the reality of workplace exploitation. As she says of a UN convention on labour rights, of which Argentina is a signatory: “The bosses use this paper to wipe their asses”. 
Delegates, she says, should know their rights so they can be steadfast defenders of the workers they represent. She is quick to demonstrate, through legal precedent and a wealth of practical examples, that the courts cannot be relied on: they enshrine only those rights that are backed by the organisation and force of the workers.
On Wednesday, we head to the Hospital Garrahan, the largest paediatric hospital in Argentina. Norma Lezana is chairing a meeting of health workers from across the country. Norma is another MST militant and secretary general of the union. They meet in a room in the hospital; others join on Zoom. Worker after worker rails against the inaction of the dominant trade union bureaucrats. One says:
“Enough of controlling the nurses and saying that we are doing politics; the truth is the bureaucracy should be ashamed. We don’t want more [leaders] who don’t represent us. We want true union representation that defends the workers and the entire health team, of course, but for us nurses, as the most discriminated against in the entire health system, there is total disgust and total indignation.” 
Another comrade from the province of Río Negro talks about the collusion of the provincial governors with Milei’s austerity plan, including Peronist governors: 
“Their relation to the privatising project is explicit. The governor of our province? He invited us to withdraw from the public health system if we are not satisfied with that. And this has been happening. The [health] teams are empty in the mountains. They’re closing! They’re closing the intensive care services.”
In attendance at the meeting are activists from the universities. Two socialist students from the medical faculty of a Buenos Aires university speak on the importance of linking the struggles of the public health sector to the fight for public universities. The students are preparing for a march on 12 November, building from a wave of university occupations last month. They invite the health workers to their demonstration and explain that the medical school is discussing the struggle taking place at the Hospital Garrahan. 
Another speaker, Luciana Franco, from the nursing graduates’ association, talks about the struggle of Buenos Aires nurses to win official recognition as “professionals”. Nurses from the association are about to attend the Buenos Aires legislature to pressure politicians to adopt their plan for professional recognition. They have been invited there by Cele Fierro, a deputy from the Workers’ Left Front—an electoral coalition of revolutionary parties from the Trotskyist left. 
After the meeting, Norma invites us back to the hospital later in the week. From 10 in the morning to 10 at night workers from the Hospital Garrahan will be on strike. A festival will take place all day as part of the struggle. As Norma says, this fight is to defend three sectors: the public health system, the families of the patients who rely on the hospital and the workers inside it. 
On Wednesday morning, we wake to the news that Donald Trump has won the presidency in the United States. What this means for workers in the US and around the world is still unclear. Surely it will give a boost to far-right projects the world over, including the government of Javier Milei. Milei believes, or hopes, that Trump will waive debts that the Argentine government owes to the US. If delivered, this could significantly boost the credibility and success of the Milei’s economic shock plan. 
The left the world over could learn a lesson from the serious, hard-headed organising taking place in hospital wards and tyre factories, on the streets and in the universities in Argentina. In the face of rising inequality around the world, a climate crisis and the surging influence of the far right, no-one is coming to save us but us.

In Argentina, the struggle continues

The same scene is playing out in more than 70 university campuses across Argentina: students fill gymnasiums, outdoor spaces, lecture theatres and streets. They sit, stand, drape themselves, drink maté, a herbal tea. They’re occupying their universities, and they’re planning a fight. “The students have awoken”, hospital worker and socialist Cesar Latorre told Red Flag via WhatsApp.
In February, far-right President Javier Milei cut university funding by 71 percent. Students responded with mass protests, including a million-strong march in April. In early October, Congress passed a bill to increase funding for state universities and to raise staff salaries to deal with the effects of inflation, which reached an annual rate of 236 percent in August and left many university staff impoverished. Milei threatened to block the bill, so students and staff held another set of nationwide mass rallies to defend it on 2 October. In the early hours of the following day, Milei vetoed the bill.
And so, on 5 October, at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Philosophy and Letters campus, students crowded around Ari, a young socialist holding a microphone. “They tell us we need to take the money from someone else”, she said. Milei has insisted that if universities want proper funding, Congress will have to take it from other sections of the budget, likely pension or welfare payments.
“If you want to know, in the opinion of the students, and of the teachers, where the money will come from for the increase in the budget for universities”, Ari declared, “we have to take it from the IMF, the church and the multinationals!” The crowd of students and teachers roared.
The occupations began in early October in the Philosophy and Letters faculty and the Psychology faculty of the UBA. The banners hanging from the buildings read, in big black letters, “tomada”, meaning “taken”. It’s more apt than “occupied”, because what the students are doing goes beyond a conventional sit-in. They’ve taken over the running of the faculties, establishing committees to take responsibility for cleaning, security, holding lessons and organising food.
During the day, they bring in supportive teachers to give lessons in the street, blocking off roads with their desks. Staff are allowed to clock in for their shifts (so that they get paid) but are promptly sent home. Senior staff, like the faculty deans, are banned altogether. As it gets dark, crowds move to the thrum of street drums, and barbecue smoke lingers.
When Milei vetoed the bill, students in Buenos Aires convened mass assemblies and debated what to do. They overwhelmingly voted to “take” despite their lack of experience in doing it: the last occupations of this scale happened in 2018. Socialist groups have a significant presence at universities nationwide, leading the argument for occupying alongside independent left-wing students. Now, they’re trying to draw more unaligned students into the committees and leadership of the occupations.
Student unions across Argentina are run by students from right-wing political traditions. In many places, the student union leaders argued against occupations while attempting to portray themselves as oppositional to Milei. Some of these leaders are Peronists, a nationalist political current that dominates the trade unions and ran the government before Milei came to office, presiding over an inflation crisis and austerity for workers.
The most significant political group in the student unions is the Radical Civic Union, a traditional centre-right party. But despite the weight of these groups in official student politics, videos posted online show vote after vote being carried nearly unanimously for occupying, from Buenos Aires to the remote provinces, with glee on the students’ faces and cheers filling the gymnasiums.
Universities are one of Milei’s favourite punching bags for his right-wing culture war rhetoric. In a speech to the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he said that public education is where “leftist educational curricula proliferate, openly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, in a country where what is needed is more capitalism and more freedom”.
His attack on public education stems partly from his ideological opposition to universities, but more from his desire to slash and burn as many public services as possible—from hospitals to airlines, oil refineries to cinemas. In fact, at the same time as the students were marching in defence of the Congress-approved education bill, Milei was <a href="https://twitter.com/wolfofwallst/status/1841516226272784774">meeting</a>
with Jordan Belfort, the criminal stockbroker turned free market culture warrior whose fall from grace was depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Milei has systematically tried to divide the population and turn them against each other to dampen the prospects of a fight against his government. He’s tried to turn workers and middle-class people against the poor by complaining that they don’t work hard enough to deserve welfare benefits.
He has attacked state employees by using the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of former US President Donald Trump, painting public services and those who administer them as a bloated bureaucracy stealing from the country.
When cutting funding to the arts, he painted them as luxuries undeserving of public support. Now, he’s portraying universities as elite institutions that serve “no-one but the children of the rich and those of the upper-middle class”.
It isn’t true. According to economist Daniel Schteingart, Argentina’s university population has <a href="https://twitter.com/danyscht">increased</a>
from just 275,000 in 1970 to nearly 4 million today, and the expansion of higher education has overwhelmingly benefited the working class. For example, at the National University of La Matanza, in the outer suburbs of Buenos Aires, around 80 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend university, according to the vice-chancellor.
Argentina’s working class remains highly organised compared to most other countries, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent for formal workers. This, along with a considerable presence of socialists in some important unions, helped to push union officials into calling two general strikes in January and May. Those strikes defeated some of the harshest aspects of Milei’s program, including the privatisation of the state airline and the state oil company.
But since then, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), Argentina’s main union body, has refused to call a third general strike. The CGT is linked to the centre-right Peronist party. Milei’s draconian attacks on the right to unionise, compulsory union membership and dues, and union control over pension funds threaten the social position of top CGT officials. Yet the CGT officials prefer to negotiate with the government while Milei’s attacks devastate workers’ living standards.
The poverty rate is now at a two-decade high of 53 percent. Substantial public spending cuts have slowed the rate of consumer price inflation but also caused a recession. In addition to Milei’s mass lay-offs in the public sector, there have been huge job cuts in the private sector. Without the call for a third general strike, which could unite the union movement, resistance has become increasingly restricted to the better organised sections of the working class like healthcare workers, public sector employees, teachers and aviation workers.
The failure of the CGT to continue a serious fight has emboldened Milei. He sees an opportunity to privatise industries he failed to sell immediately after taking office. For example, the important victory that the first two general strikes achieved in stopping the privatisation of Aerolineas Argentinas is now at risk of being undone. Aviation workers are well organised and have held several days of strike action, causing major disruption to the economy.
In a significant act of solidarity, the Brazilian aviation workers’ union declared that it would not allow its members to operate domestic Argentine flights. And on 30 October, broader layers of transport workers will hold a 24-hour national strike. This will be supported by a 36-hour national public sector strike scheduled to start the day before and carry over into the next.
There has been an ebb in action since the general strike in May. But the students have provided a new spark to the broader movement and have pulled university workers into the fight. On 21 October, university workers began a 48-hour national strike. Workers in one of the big university unions voted to extend the 48-hour strike to an entire week and said that supporting the student movement was one of the main reasons for extending the strike. And while a recent 24-hour strike was passive and didn’t include a march, the week-long strike will include open, public classes held in the streets.
Student assemblies in the streets outside university buildings will decide the future of the occupations over the coming weeks. Can they sustain the movement into November—and will workers’ strikes spread?

Jasmine Duff

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

Students are occupying more than 70 different faculties of 30 public universities across Argentina. At least twelve faculties in Buenos Aires, the capital, are tomada (taken). The occupations stretch into remote areas in the far north and south of the country. 
The events mark a new stage in an ongoing fight against far-right President Javier Milei, elected last year promising mass privatisations and budget cuts to pay down government debt owed to the International Monetary Fund, while funnelling money to the rich through tax cuts. 
At the beginning of the year, Milei took a chainsaw to public university spending, cutting funding by 71 percent. This provoked mass protests involving 500,000 students in Buenos Aires and large numbers in the rest of the country. 
Last month, politicians voted to increase university workers’ salaries, the purchasing power of which has been undermined by rampant inflation—consumer prices have increased by more than 200 percent in twelve months. 
When Milei threatened to veto the bill, more than 1 million people marched to fight for its passage. But in early October, the president confirmed he would block it. That sparked a wave of protests and occupations by students across the country. 
Carlos Barros, a student activist at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement, spoke to Red Flag’s Jasmine Duff about how things look on the ground.
--------------------
Why are students occupying?
Students decided to occupy universities because of the ongoing defunding of public education, which has been taking place for several years by all governments but has reached a new level with Milei’s administration. Universities don’t have sufficient funding to increase the salaries of professors and university staff (which are far behind inflation), or to improve the conditions of the buildings used by students. It could result in the eventual cutting of jobs and closure of universities altogether. 
The occupations started when Milei vetoed a bill to increase the funding for universities. The Congress approved the veto with the complicity of representatives from the Radical Civic Union [a liberal political party] and even some of the Peronists [the main political current in the country, dating from the rule of Juan Perón immediately after World War Two]. 
This enraged students all over the country and led to the calling of assemblies at universities. The first were at the faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires, where hundreds of the students voted to occupy the faculties. In the following days, the occupations spread to other faculties and to universities in the rest of the country. We are witnessing the rise of a new Argentinean student movement, which many have said has been in decline for years. 
Videos circulating online show students taking mass votes, holding debates inside their faculties, and setting up desks on public roads to hold teach-ins. What’s it like inside a faculty occupation?
Basically, an occupation means that students take control over the university. We undertake all of the tasks of the administration of the university, including cleaning, organising lessons, providing food, security, etc. For each task, there are different commissions that students can join and participate in. 
Regarding security, there are always students at the door to stop the dean and other members of the faculty administration from entering the building. The staff of the faculty are only allowed to enter to clock on, but they cannot perform their usual tasks, since they are being performed by the students. Professors cannot hold lessons inside the building, save for a few exceptions. 
Every day, a soup kitchen provides food for the students at the occupation and people who may need it in the neighbourhood. The soup kitchen is supported through donations. Every night, we do activities to entertain ourselves and strengthen our sense of community. There are film screenings, live music, karaoke, games and obviously lots of political discussion. We’re having a great time. We sleep inside classrooms with sleeping bags or mattresses. It is kind of like camping. 
All lessons that students would normally have inside the faculty building are taken outside to the street. Students bring seats and blackboards outside and block the street. We want to continue studying while also protesting and bringing more visibility to this conflict. All lessons must be held outside, save for the cases where specific elements of a classroom are needed or for exams.
Socialist organisations are prominent in the struggle, but many student unions are run by political tendencies and parties that are part of Milei’s government. What role have these student leaders played in the movement, and what debates are taking place?
We are having many debates with the bureaucratic student union leaders and the grassroots of the students movement about how to advance the struggle for our right to public education. Most student unions are led by Peronists or Radicals. They are political forces of the capitalist regime. As such they try to avoid losing control over the student movement and demobilise it while posing as critical of Milei. 
They call for few or no assemblies at all in some cases, decide things without consulting the students or, worse, negotiate with the university authorities behind the students’ backs. 
The Socialist Workers’ Movement and the left are doing our best to radicalise the student movement, and to bring more independent students to participate in their respective assemblies so they can overcome the bureaucracies. 
We are also campaigning for inter-faculty and inter-university assemblies. And we are coordinating actions with the rest of the working-class sectors so we can all agree on a unified plan of struggle to stop this attack by the government.

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