Activists discuss ‘Latin America at a crossroads’

Huntington, W.Va. — A public forum headed by an expert panel of activists was held on the campus of Marshall University on April 17. The event, titled “Latin America at a Crossroads,” was sponsored by Workers World Party, Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST) and Students for Appalachian Socialism.

Members of the panel highlighted various struggles of the workers and the oppressed in Latin America. Martha Grevatt, a member of an international observer delegation to the Honduran elections last November, gave a presentation on the people’s fightback to the 2009 coup that ousted democratically elected Mel Zelaya and the violent suppression of the leftist, pro-Zelaya Libre Party in the recent election.

Janine Borges, a member of the Socialist Youth Union of the Communist Party of Brazil and an international student at Marshall, spoke about the U.S.-backed military dictatorship in Brazil that ended in 1985. Dr. Chris White, professor of Latin American History at Marshall, discussed the massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador, where the U.S.-backed Salvadoran Army killed around 1,000 civilians in what the army termed an anti-guerrilla campaign.

Ethan Young, president of SAS, discussed the importance of Cuba, Venezuela and the Bolivarian states. He stressed the need for revolutionaries in the U.S. to show solidarity with the workers and oppressed in Latin America by raising opposition to the neocolonial interventions of Wall Street and the U.S. capitalists.