Miguel Alexander Escobar | Unitary Trade Union Federation of El Salvador (FUSS), Rafael Aguiñada Carranza Inter-Union Coordinating Committee (CIRAC, El Salvador)
Comrades, brothers and sisters of the working class of the world, receive a cordial and militant greeting from the Unitary Trade Union Federation of El Salvador (FUSS), affiliated with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and part of the Rafael Aguiñada Carranza Inter-Union Coordination(CIRAC). From the heart of Central America we send a class-conscious greeting and our congratulations to the Founding Conference of the World Anti-Imperialist Workers Platform—an organization that we are certain will be an instrument of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, antifascist, and anti-neofascist struggle, one that will help emancipate our peoples and build a world worth living in.
Comrades, allow us to share, from the everyday experience of our grassroots base, the situation the Salvadoran people are living under the yoke of the neoliberal model imposed for decades by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the local oligarchy, which have systematically dismantled the welfare state through the reduction of the state to its bare minimum: privatizing health, education, and public services; the precarization of pensions; labor flexibilization that turns work into a disposable commodity. The minimum wage isn’t even enough for the basic food basket, while inflation and foreign debt strangle working families.
The persecution of dissenting voices: this is not just union repression—mass layoffs, blacklists, and criminalization of protest—but a comprehensive offensive against all critical thought. Popular organizations, human rights defenders, autonomous universities, and community media are surveilled, stigmatized, and prosecuted. The “state of exception” has become repression and persecution against the poor, but not against financial capital.
Criminalization of poverty: working-class youth are seen as potential enemies; rural and Indigenous communities as obstacles to extractivism; unions as illegitimate “pressure groups.” Formal democracy is dying while real power remains concentrated in a few hands, directly tied to transnational interests and subordinated to North American imperialism.
1. The current Salvadoran government, far from exercising sovereignty, has become a junior partner of U.S. imperialism, accepting crumbs in exchange for opening the doors to metallic mining, militarization, and migration control in service of Washington’s interests.
2. Comrades, despite facing very adverse conditions, we are not bowed, because we know our history and we know our people resisted and defeated the military dictatorship, built its vanguard of revolutionary unity—the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)—and signed peace with the dignity of those who never surrendered, and whose legacy lives on in the generations who refuse to be anyone’s colony.
Facing this scenario, we reaffirm before the Founding Conference of the World Anti-Imperialist Workers’ Platform that our struggle is for national and social liberation, not cosmetic reforms. Capitalism in its imperialist phase is incompatible with a dignified life, social justice, and sovereignty. That is why we take as our paradigm the construction of a socialist, democratic, and popular state, where labor is the axis of society, common goods serve the majority, and democratic planning replaces the chaos of the market.
Comrades, the working class does not ask permission, because we are obligated to occupy our place in the streets, in the territories, in the factories, in the countryside, and also in public institutions. That is why, as class-based organizations alongside progressive organizations, we have decided to support the FMLN in the upcoming elections, convinced that the dispute over political power is part of our struggle. We do not do this with reformist illusions, but as a tactical front to open spaces for organizing, denunciation, and the accumulation of strength.
We maintain our work of territorial organizing, door to door, workshop by workshop, community by community. Where the neoliberal state abandons, popular class organization builds solidarity, political education, legal defense, and active resistance. We form cadres, we form consciousness, we forge the new society in the womb of the old.
Comrades of the World Anti-Imperialist Workers’ Platform: we come to tell you that we are in the same trench. The struggle in El Salvador is a battle of the global movement against dependent capitalism, patriarchy, and structural racism. What happens in our small country is a mirror of what imperialism plans for all of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and for the oppressed peoples of the world.
Long live the founding of the World Anti-Imperialist Workers’ Platform!
Workers of the World, Unite!
