On October 3, 2008, a group of comrades of the “Null Vote” Committee held a rally in the “Children’s Square”, known as the Quilombo Yellow Lagoon square, to call for a Null Vote in the municipal elections. The comrades were acting on the resolution of the Assembly for the Null Vote (convened on September 24th in the “B” CCH auditorium in the UFMA, Maranhao Federal University), and were painting posters and propagandizing their position for the Null Vote.
The aggression started when Joerbeth Prado used the microphone to defend the Null vote position. (He is known as Fusca, and for several years had been a militant close to PSTU, stood on their slate for the elections in the Philosophy College in 2007, and on the PSTU-PSOL slate, “Barricades Open Ways” in the elections for the Students Central Executive in the UFMA in June 2008). He said that the candidates of the PSTU and PSOL, among others, were at the service of the popular front. Urban Quilombo and PSTU members immediately took the microphone off him, claiming they were using that space to call to vote for PSTU and did not allow any one to put a position other than theirs.
Immediately after that a torrent of verbal abuse was directed at Patricia Arantes and other comrades: “What does that pussy cat want around here?” “Go get yourself a playboy somewhere else!” “What’s that faggot doing here?” Following that, Fabio Jardim, Claudio and Jardes were physically attacked by Diogo Rogelio and other members of Urban Quilombo – who waited until the comrades parted from each other, so they could attack them, one at a time and beat them up.
Two days after this attack, on October 5th 2008, Comrade Fabio Jardim went to da Liberdade (a neighbourhood in Sao Luis where Urban Quilombo and PSTU gather together) and he tried to establish a dialogue with Urban Quilombo leaders about the violence used against the comrades. Diogo Rogerio, one of the thugs was there, in a PSTU office. He started to abuse and threaten comrade Jardim again; telling him “you are one more on my list”.
On the afternoon of October 6th 2008, in the Federal University of Maranhao, the activists of the Committee for the Null Vote looked for members of the Trotskyist Fraction-VP, and told them about the verbal and physical aggression that they had suffered. FT-VP militants said that the way to stop the verbal and physical aggressions, slanders, threats and the gangster-like methods that some organizations and groups (which pretend to be working-class fighters) use is to publicly denounce them and call everybody who claims to be in the workers’ movement to condemn these methods.
On October 7th, the total membership of the Committee for the Null Vote publicly denounced this aggression in a statement. This statement points out correctly that the purpose of the attack is to avoid political discussion, and to silence any militant who disagrees with the PSTU’s policy. It was an attack against the student comrades of the UFMA, who are mostly PSTU militants but disagree with PSTU’s policies. It was an attack also against the Trotskyist Fraction of Brazil and against the CONLUTAS minority, since comrade Balthazar was a CONAT delegate at the foundation congress of CONLUTAS in 2006, and he was one of the leaders of the left opposition current against the majority leadership of CONLUTAS who represented 5% of the present delegates.
Clearly the brutal physical and moral attack by Urban Quilombo (actually a PSTU front group) seeks to solve the political differences by silencing those who think differently with clubs and slander. That is the way the PSTU treats those who oppose its politics!
The FLT repudiates what we consider a conscious direct attack against the comrades of the Committee for the Null Vote, against our comrades of the Brazilian FT (that is, an attack against our international fraction), and against Brazilian workers and youth militant vanguard, particularly against those thousands of honest fighters who split from the PT and CUT and in looking for a revolutionary road joined the CONLUTAS and CONAT in 2006.
Urban Quilombo’s letter admits to use of violence
The Urban Quilombo leadership responded to the public denunciation made by the Committee for the Null Vote in a letter on October 8th. In this letter, the Urban Quilombo leadership itself accepts that it beat up the comrades. Their “reasons” to such behaviour are typical of the union bureaucracy, Stalinism and their thugs, focusing their attack on comrade Baltazar, a leader of the FLT and Brazilian FT.
“… It happened when their group of students, under the influence of drugs, came back to the square and provoked our militants, saying that they were armed. Both sides became aggressive which was sad but inevitable. One of the students mentioned by Baltazar has problems of drug dependence that badly affects his memory, and Urban Quilombo militants have been approached for help to get him off the “paco” (a cheap drug made with the rubbish left from cocaine, NT). Mr. Baltazar a teacher of many years experience should help these people (especially those from the slums) and not use them for his own deplorable political ends.”
They continue:
“Unlike left parties like PSTU, Baltazar always slanders Urban Quilombo because of its origins in the slums, which besides verbal debate, uses the methods of street gangs as self-defence.” (our bold)
This letter with its Stalinist methods is a confession of UQ responsibility for those attacks, and proof of their aggression against the comrades of the Committee for the Null Vote and FT comrades.
In this letter, Urban Quilombo leadership tries to justify the attack against the comrades saying that they were “stoned on drugs and alcohol.” It is a vile lie. But even if was true, the Urban Quilombo leadership is “admitting” that they act just like police in physically repressing youth that see no future under capitalism and become victims of despair or drugs. And these people cynically claim to be “fighters against racism and inequality!”
But this is not all! In the purest of Stalinist traditions, UQ slanders comrade Baltazar accusing him of “infiltrating” the left as a right-wing “infiltrator” (the same slander made by PO of Argentina- Partido Obrero/Worker Party- against LOI-CI DO leader Juan Pico Muzzio in 2002, who was beaten and handed over to the police and bosses’ justice by the PO!). They say: “Mr. Baltazar, uses irresponsible people and others who need clinical help, to further the criminalization of our group by the bourgeois state. Baltazar has never defended us against the state’s persecutions, but he is ready to slander revolutionary organizations like The Flash, and to stir up a political witch hunt with documents like this. There is nothing strange about this as historically the rightwing has infiltrated revolutionary organisations to destroy them. The history of Bolshevism is proof of this. In the same way FBI and CIA used dependency-creating drugs in the US ghettos to criminalize and destroy the Black Panthers Party.”
Comrade Baltazar, who is accused today by UQ of being an “agent provocateur,” is currently a teacher, but he used to work as an unskilled labourer in civil construction in Sao Paulo (from 1981 to 1983). In Natal he also worked until 1988 as a general labourer either in civil construction or as an assistant upholsterer. Between 1988 and 1990 he worked as a substitute teacher in public schools in Rio Grande do Norte (RN). From 1994 to 1997, he worked in the municipal teaching network in Natal, and since June 1997, he has worked at the Federal University of Maranhão as a teacher. That makes more than 20 years of work.
He has been a militant of the student, popular and union movement since 1982. He has been a member of the Academic History Centre of the UFRN, of the Student Central Directory of UFRN, of the opposition of the Association of Residents of Nazare neighbourhood in Natal, and a member of the opposition in the Teachers’ Union in RN (SINTE-RN). Since 1997 he has been a rank and file militant of APRUMA-ANDES, a former member of the Council of Representatives of APRUMA. He has been a delegate to the ANDES congresses, actively participated in every strike of the teachers movement since 1998. He is a militant of the movement that fights for the reinstatement of Sociology in the high school, especially since 2005.
Since 1982 comrade Baltazar has been a Trotskyist militant joining O Trabalho in Sao Paulo-SP. He was member of the old Socialist Convergence from 1988 to 1992 but left because of its support for the popular front. At the beginning of 1997, he joined TPOR, but in the same year split because of Lora’s national-Trotskyist policy. In 2004, comrade Baltazar and the Trotskyist Fraction (VP) of Brazil joined the Liaison Committee for an International Conference of the principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organizations. Finally, in 2005, together with CWG of New Zealand, POI (CI) of Chile, LTI of Peru, LTI of Bolivia, and LOI (CI) – Democracia Obrera of Argentina, he founded the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT). That is 26 years of militancy within revolutionary Marxism.
But, most of all, by slandering him as a right wing “infiltrator,” Urban Quilombo and its ally the PSTU want to hide the fact that comrade Baltazar was a delegate to the CONAT congress of 2006, representing the Sociologists Union of Maranhão, being elected by the rank and file with a show of hands in an assembly. He is a founding comrade of CONLUTAS that led the opposition in that congress.
This is comrade Baltazar, a working class fighter for 26 years, with a staunch record of public activity clearly visible to the workers and youth vanguard in San Pablo, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba, Maranhão and Ceará; a founding leader of CONLUTAS, in opposition to the present leadership of CONLUTAS (PSTU), and the UQ tries to pass him off as a rightwing “infiltrator”!
Besides, after admitting to be slanderers and using violence against political dissidents, the Urban Quilombo leadership has the nerve to compare themselves, shamelessly, to the Black Panthers of the United States! This is a blatant lie. Sadly, the Black Panthers, a movement of African-Americans that in USA that in the ‘60s and the ‘70s were the vanguard of the resistance to the Vietnam War and the imperialist US regime, were destroyed by their co-option by the Muslim black bourgeoisie.
The victimizer today wants to present itself as the victim. But the Black Panthers were decimated because of the same class collaborationist policy followed today by the PSTU and UQ, which supports Morales bourgeois movement in Bolivia, which called for a vote for Lula-Alencar in 2002, and in Argentina supported the bourgeois Kirchner government in the fight with the agrarian bourgeoisie, and so on.
A silent PSTU (LIT-CI)
Immediately after the Committee for the Null Vote’s denunciation of UQ was published, a number of condemnations of UQ were made in support of the Committee. Darío Catrihuala, Bilbao and Rosales, Las Heras workers and political prisoners in Puerto Deseado and Pico Truncado, pronounced themselves in solidarity with the attacked comrades and condemned the aggressors. The family commission that fights for the freedom of the political prisoners also denounced UQ. Clovis Oliveira, leader of the teachers union of Rio Grande do Sul, LCT of Argentina, among others, has made a statement in support of the Committee.
Nevertheless, until now, PSTU (LIT-CI) has said nothing. There has been a total silence from the Urban Quilombo despite being publicly known as an organization closely associated with the PSTU. On the PSTU TV shows, Urban Quilombo militants make appearances campaigning for that party. Further more, UQ and PSTU fought together for the referendum demanded by the CUT (the union central that is pro-government) for the re-nationalisation of the gold mine of Vale do Rio Doce. There are militants that introduce themselves as UQ militants in the meetings of CONLUTAS-MA and, at the same time, they appeared in a PSTU TV show as PSTU militants. Marcio went to last CONLUTAS congress as an Urban Quilombo observer, but he claims to be a member of the PSTU.
Furthermore, in Urban Quilombo’s blog there is posted the information: “Hertz da Conceição Dias, Teacher; Reginaldo Neves Rocha, student and Afonso Henrique Vale Coqueiro, hair stylist; all of them members of Organized Hip Hop Movement of Maranhão Urban Quilombo, while Hertz is a democratic member of the Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU)…”, just to mention only another example.
Also, as we said above, when on October 5th comrade Fabio (one of the victims of the physical violence) went to la Liberade neighbourhood, present in the premises of PSTU and Urban Quilombo was, Diogo Rogerio (former leader of PSTU youth in Maranhão and Urban Quilombo militant) who led the attack; Claudia Durans (PSTU leader in Maranhão), Noleto (PSTU leader who ran for the council in the October 5th 2008 elections), Nicinha Durans (several times a PSTU candidate, and according to Fabio, an Urban Quilombo leader), Hugo (PSTU youth leader) among others.
PSTU can’t keep silent anymore: We challenge them to state their position on these facts.
But this silence by the PSTU (LIT) doesn’t surprise us at all. LIT sadly has a long tradition of attacks and slanders against those who think differently. In 1988, the Argentinean MAS (the most important party of the LIT at that time) expelled the Internationalist Bolshevik Tendency (TBI, who later founded the PTS) by accusing them of being “a group of petty bourgeois, drug addicts and faggot students”, the same accusation that its ally, Urban Quilombo, uses now. But not only that: in December 1989, after a mobilization to oppose the US invasion of Panama, MAS security guards ambushed and attacked in a railway station in La Plata (Argentine city) a group of workers and their families, together with students, all members of PTS, who were returning home after the mobilization. Tens of workers and their children were brutally beaten and ended up in hospital.
The next year, the MAS attacked a group of students, members of PTS again, in the Letters and Philosophy College of the UBA. Its security guards, fully armed, filled the college building and chased PTS militants through the classrooms and halls, brutally hitting one of them. When a un-teacher worker (who wasn’t a PTS militant) tried to stop that the comrade was hit, he was brutally attacked and he ended up in a coma at the hospital. The next day, the teachers and workers union of UBA held a strike to repudiate the actions of the MAS.
On May 1st 2000, the PSTU (LIT) attacked the Brazilian Worker’s Cause stand, destroying it completely and beating up the PCO militants that were there. Of course, PCO and PO (PCO’s brother group in Argentina) did not call for a Moral Tribunal then to condemn the PSTU action. On the contrary, they waited for several months, and when a PSTU delegation traveled to Buenos Aires, to participate with the FOS (the LIT group in Argentina) in a demonstration against ALCA (FTAA), the PO attacked them causing several serious injuries. So, far from uniting the Argentinean and Brazilian working class, LIT and PO and their international currents, “educate” the workers of both countries in the worst union bureaucracy and Stalinist methods. They “educate” the workers with the “street law” that Urban Quilombo proudly proclaims. These methods are enemies of the most basic worker’s democracy that allow the workers to organize themselves, discuss and decide, as class brothers and sisters, their political differences. For these currents, that is what “internationalism” means!
Last but not least, in 2002, when Juan Pico Muzzio, a leader of LOI (CI) Workers’ Democracy of Argentina was hit and handed over to the police by Partido Obrero, and many workers organizations and workers parties around the world publicly came out in his defense calling for an International Moral Tribunal to condemn the PO leadership as responsible for these reprehensible actions, the PSTU and the LIT kept silent.
Today, PSTU keeps quiet, even though its close ally, Urban Quilombo, confesses to beating the comrades, and tries to justify this attack by raising lying charges against the members of the null vote committee, against Baltazar, the Brazilian FT, and, hence, against the whole FLT.
If the PSTU-LIT does not immediate publicly repudiate the attack and the aggressors, then the FLT will publicly hold the PSTU and the LIT leadership responsible for the attacks on the physical security of the comrades of the FT of Brazil and of all the comrades of the null vote committee.
In defense of the proletarian principles and morality and workers’ democracy in the working class organizations!
For an International Moral Tribunal to judge and condemn before the international worker’s vanguard the thugs and liars who acted against the comrades of the null vote committee and the Trotskyist Fraction of Brazil, a member of the FLT!
The methods used by Urban Quilombo, the close ally of the PSTU-LIT, as we have proved, including its “street law” (the methods of gangs, criminals and thugs), are straight out of the fifth-columnist-Stalinist arsenal, and alien to proletarian morality and principles. They want to settle political differences with clubs and silence their political opponents with clubs. These methods destroy workers’ democracy, the only truly principled method in the working class that allows workers organizations to settle their political difference in front of the worker’s vanguard and the exploited masses.
These methods make the enemies of the working class seem like their allies, and their allies seem like enemies. But in reality they are designed to demoralize the workers and youth vanguards as they are entering into the class struggle.
Besides the use of violence that destroys worker’ democracy, these methods leave comrades exposed to the attacks of the bourgeois state. When militant workers are labeled “alcoholic” or “drug addict”, and especially an “infiltrator”, they can be isolated from the working class and without the support of other workers, exposed to the state’s attacks. We will not allow it! We must condemn the thugs and liars and come to the defence of the stainless class morality of Baltazar and the assaulted comrades!
This is why the FLT makes an urgent appeal to campaign for an International Moral Tribunal that investigates and passes judgment before the eyes of the world workers’ movement on those who are responsible for the physical and moral aggression towards comrades of the null vote committee, and in particular Baltazar, a member of the FT. We call for a tribunal with six members, workers whose history of fighting their class, and whose moral qualities, are beyond dispute. We propose that the PSTU nominates three of the six members. The FLT proposes three members, a rank and file mine worker of Huanuni (Bolivia), Clovis Oliveira, a long-standing militant of the Brazilian Trotskyist movement and a leader of the teachers union of Rio Grande do Sul, and Manoel Boni, the historical leader of the homeless workers of the West Diadema-SP Association and leader of the Marxist Workers’ Party of Brazil.
We call on all the workers organizations of Brazil, Latin America and the world, on the rank and file workers of CONLUTAS in Brazil, on the militant miners of Huanuni in Bolivia, on the dock workers of local #10 of ILWU of USA, on the rank and file members of C-CURA of Venezuela, on all the rank and file workers that belong to all organizations of the ELAC, hosted in Brazil last July. We call on them all to be a part of this internationalist call to create an International Moral Tribunal, in defense of proletarian principles and morality and in defense of workers’ democracy inside the organization of the proletarians and the masses.