Dear comrades,

With regards to the current situation, it appears necessary to express the
opinion of those who desire acracy (1), therefore we wish to send this
message, to show our consternation with this afternoon's events.

As is usual, the mean and miserable darkness of power scorns any respect for
life and freedom. This never-ending crime of the State and of all vertical
systems is revealing itself here and now in the demonstrations which are
demanding the resignation of the president of Venezuela.

The political scene got tense a few days ago when [workers of] the oil
company, PetrOleos de Venezuela, went on strike, showing its difference with
the decisions the president had taken with regards to personnel. They
demanded the return of the sacked workers and the validity of meritocracia
(2) in the company.

To this end, thousands headed towards the governmental Miraflores
Palace,with the goal of making Chavez resign. In this protest, the same as
in the other ones which took place before it, a counter-protest also took
place,called by the official powers, demonstrating the puppetry used by
those who are in power. On the on hand, the Chavez supporters, pushing his
authoritarian Bolshevik schemes, and on the other hand, the
opposition,composed of the middle-class who see their feuds of power at
risk, and the subjects of the ghosts who usually turn out to be the
scoundrels of the moment who end up handing the post over to some lieutenant
colonel (without using capital letters nor any type of respect) who does
not seem to want to share the spoil with them.

The results so far are nine dead (according to the bourgeois press) and
dozens of injured by snipers on the rooftops of nearby buildings and by
national guards who are trying to break up the demonstration, and also by a
few civil friends (3) of the president, who are taking part in the
officalist demo, unloading their pistols against the demonstrators as if
they were playing a video game.

Sadly, amongst the people who are taking part in this march, we have not
found any form of an answer. While the opposition wishes to kick out the
current president, it does not seem to have in mind what should come after.

The only solution it seems to offer is a return to the old game of
you-go-away-and-I-take-over, which makes any sort of change difficult. It is
depressing to see how human beings can die in a struggle for power which
will only serve to keep them under control.

As anarchists we are not for Chavez nor for any other president. We think
that now more than ever our labour must show the people that the problem is
not this president, or the one that will come after, but rather the vertical
system of representative democracy. We must fight to show alternative
systems of horizontal organisation, which, while it might not be put into
practice on a large scale in the near future, will create a conscience so
that in the future, instead of demonstrating to replace our tyrant, we will
eliminate any type of governmental parasite forever, and begin to be each
one of us the owner of our own lives. The way towards a libertarian world is
process, not a single event.

a. By Acratic (4) individuals and collectives in Venezuela.
b. Neither the army nor right-wing businessmen!
c. Free and self-managed grassroots rebellion and organisation

(1) Meaning "no power," a term frequently used by Spanish-speaking
anarchists to describe themselves.
(2) Literally, "the power of merits," as a guess, possibly s sort
of productivity bonus scheme.
(3) Presumably the "Cνrculos Boliviarianos," the Venezuelan equivalence to
the Cuban Revolutionary Defence Committees.
(4) The adjective used to describe "no power."