The coronavirus pandemic that has been spread out over the world, already counting on more than one million people infected, threatening mostly the lives of the poorest populations, fully demonstrates that the unburied corpse of imperialism, upper and last stage of capitalism, no longer has a place in humankind.  It is enough! The trumpets of the great storms and social, political and ideological changes have sounded!

None of the mantras used in the last 50 years to try to distort the brutal exploitation of the great majority of the human beings by a handful of billionaire people, the lords of weapons, money, land and mass media were able to prevent that a simple well-known virus mutation could cause so much damage, deaths, misery, starvation, repression and the State of War.

“Globalization”, “neoliberalism” versus socialdemocracy ( included the whole electoral opportunist left-wing), liberal democracy versus religious fanaticism and terrorism, ultra-liberalism followed by fascism and reactionarism of the State, nothing, nothing at all has worked out. And all the arrogant, garrulous persons, fascists, false intellectuals, and the ‘market’, the heralds of this rotten system, have turned overnight from very powerful tigers into kittens, unable to explain how this so developed world, where they are the greatest ones, has sunk to its knees before the coronavirus pandemic.

There is a lack of hospitals, respirators and medications in the so-called rich countries, imperialist countries, and also, in a scale million times superior, in the colonies and semicolonies, the so-called poor countries. People are dying, the corpses are placed in military trucks, their dear ones cannot say goodbye.

And then, in a complete commotion and  lack of control, the world leaders of this rotten imperialism that survives manu militari ( with the use of the military force), mostly because of the prey of the large majority of the people of the oppressed  and exploited  countries (  in exchange of the remains of the significant profits that they have captured for the ruling classes and their lackeys), announce the release of million dollars and euros to mitigate the devastating economic consequences of the pandemic.

Where was all that money that has now come into existence? And the crisis that ‘has forced’ the European and North-American governments, for the last 30 years, to reduce time and again a series of social rights – manpower, health, education, social welfare – that had already been achieved by the population of those countries, mostly after the defeat of nazifascism in the Second World War?

The naked truth is just one: the coronavirus pandemic has wide opened the general crisis of capitalism ( a relative overproduction crisis – more merchandise than one can afford), exposed the cruelty of the system that propagates everything; but more than 90% of the world population do not own anything and survive under the toughest conditions than before when the humankind had developed less scientific knowledge. The social inequality is astronomical; 1% of the population ( the richest) has 67% of the whole world wealth. Were it not for the pandemic, this crisis would break out somehow or other, sooner rather than later.

THE PANDEMIC IN BRASIL

The wealthy were the ones who brought the coronavirus to Brasil. Traders or tourists coming from travels abroad. And the responsibility for the pandemic here belongs to the military government of the generals of the reactionary High Command of the Armed Forces (ACFA)  and the fascist Bolsonaro who keep insisting that the “social isolation” is an exaggeration, everybody will die one day and some other nonsenses.

Everybody remembers the drama for removing the isolated Brazilians in China; it occurred only after the protests to be propagated in internet. And after that, the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa), led by a neo-Nazi Admiral that even today defends the Earth is plan, did not make any arrangement for tests at the airports and harbours ( the door through which the foreigners from Europe and USA enter in Brasil) and the biggest of the crime: they do not cancel Carnaval. The great majority of the contaminations of Brazilians happened in that period.

Brasil needs everything: safety face protection, alcool gel, hospitals, hospital beds in the Intensive Care Unity, respirators, public transport, housing, employment, basic sanitation, drinking water and coronavirus tests. And it takes any individual slightly informed to consider that the number of infected Brazilians is infinitely larger than the one informed by the media and the government. Not to mention the known illnesses that can be cured and in colonial and semicolonial countries like Brasil kill more than coronavirus, as for instance dengue and H1N1 epidemics, malaria and tuberculosis, persistent year on year, mostly among the poor and working people at the end of Summer and beginning of Autumn ( the rich people are attacked by these syndromes but, gainning access to the health system and vaccines, the number of casualties is much smaller), are not counted as deaths that could  and should be avoided.

Facing the crisis of such a magnitude, the big bourgeoisie, the landownership and imperialism speed up this war plans against the people in Brasil, trying to save the system, the large enterprises, the export landownership, the banks. All measures taken so far have this in mind.

Although in this moment the right thing to do is that people stay home to prevent the risk of contagion, such a necessary measure would have to be ensured by the State, that extort the people with taxes, the workers’ salaries with signed labour cart, an income guarantee for million of informal workers (more than 40% of Brazilians nowadays are  without any rights, working as slaves, selling their lunch to buy dinner), distribution of food and tests for everybody, in the order of priorities: healthcare personnel, non stop essential activities, tests at the labour places. And for the million of the slum residents and urban concentrations in the large cities: distribution of cleaning products, masks and desinfactants for all, transport in alternate schedule ensuring the conditions for the persons in the public transport …

What is the meaning of the social isolation in Brasil ? To prevent the masses to fight for their rights, do tests, have access to medical attention, hide the giant dimension of the exploitation and lack of minimun conditions for survival, with or without coronavirus. As much as they want to show off as the people’s health defenders, the press monopoly, Globo Network at the head, the murderer and terrorist Witzel, in Rio de Janeiro, and the Paraisopolis executioner, Dória, in SãoPaulo, ( as all public administrators that have obtained their mandate through the electoral farce), the ones that have defended the freezing of the healthecare and education expenses, the Social Security ‘reform’, knowing that million people would die because of that, do not have any moral to pose as ‘humanitarians’, being worried about the people’s health. They are responsible for the deaths in the pandemic and not only so, and anything they do will erase it.

On the other hand, the fascist, liar and demagogue Bolsonaro does not want to save anybody’s employment. He wants to save his salary as a president. When preaching the ‘vertical isolation’, copied from his extreme-right wing foreign bosses, Trump et caterva, he wants to gain time for not spending the trillions Brasil has saved to pay the interests to the banks that have financed him.

It is false the ‘debate’ between vertical and horizontal confinement. It is a lie that we have to chose between dying either of the sicknesses caused or aggravated by the virus or starve to death.

Bolsonaro does not defend the truck drivers, the street salesmen, the small tradesmen. When he affirms that the economy cannot stop, that should die who has to die, what he means is to take advantage of the pandemic to do what he has not done so far with the Social Welfare Reform. But only for a while: to kill the poor old people to relieve the finances of a bankrupetd and rotten State. If he had other opportunities, this fascist and a bad character man would organize his ‘militias’ command to murder those that could contract the virus and stay in hospital, something like purifying the race as Hitler has done. Any similarity is not a mere coincidence.

Until today, the government has not released any cent for the people and most of their programmes will indebt still more the workers (he is paying the FGTS and umemployment compensation, acquired rights, the workers’ money). And the well-known R$600,00 for the informal workers, besides ridiculous, is a way to legalize that the people can survive with less than the miserable minimum wage, around R$1050,00.

As to the High Command of the Armed Forces (ACFA), americophilic and anti-communist to the core, the ones that de facto rule Brasil, they celebrate Bolsonaro, on the one hand, to repress the people without dirtying their hands when the looting starts ( their words) and celebrate the landownership and the big bourgeoisie – although they prefer not to need their filthy repressive jobs to keep ruling. And they do not shy away from using the weapons when having their privileges, luxuries and unlimited usury threatened. For that the firearms corporation, high officials, are royally paid and revered.

Bolsonaro’s war declaration against the poor peasants, indigenous people and quilombolas, when starting his government, exposed by the League of the Poor Peasants before the crisis, is turned into a war against the whole Brazilian people.

THE OLD SYSTEM: THE BASE OF THE PEOPLE’S HARDSHIPS

Nonetheless, it is necessary to go to the root cause. The crises have offered this opportunity.

Why are the large Brazilian cities crowded with people living squeezed, sleeping poorly, undernourished, overnighting in the streets for not having money to pay for the public transport? Why so much begging, so much delinquency, so many drug addicted persons living like zombies? Why are there people selling cheap food to earn a change, persons becaming Uber drivers, others biking kilometres to deliver meals, so many selling candies or performing acrobatics at the traffic-lights? Why are so many people gathered in the slums and poor districts, six to ten persons in huts with two or three rooms? Why does the flooding choose these people to kill them and dislodge them? Why, while the coronavirus spreads among them, will not the government of bourgeois, landlords, generals and imperialism agents be able to hold on?

Because the landownership is the basis of imperialism for reproducing the bureaucratic capitalism in Brasil. Were it not for the maintenance, preservation and stimulus to the reproduction of the landownership, the coronavirus menace would not be so drastic and lethal. Many persons were expelled from the countryside and, with respect to the ancient procedure, this has taken to the extreme during the fascist military regime of 1964 to 1985. Who are those who die in the flooding? The peasants, newcomers to the big cities. Which is the largest asset of the assassin and terrorist multinational Vale, handed over by Fernando H. Cardoso for a very low price? Then, why Brumadinho? Vale’s asset is the richness of the Brazilian subsoil, the land they stole from the poor peasants, indigenous people, quilombolas and the Union!

How would it be to control the coronavirus in small towns, all of them producing food, with basic sanitation and hospitals, persons knowing each other and commiserating with the population, helping, protecting themselves and the others? Millions time easier to deal with the virus!

Without the fact that, although a natural procedure, the viral mutation is also a consequence of so much antibiotics, poisons and other aggressive procedures in animals and plants, since the essence of the agrobusiness is to produce in colonial and semicolonial countries for exporting primary products; and a minimal production of fruits and some other food, mostly for the imperialist countries and the products have to present a good appearance and withstand longer from the productor to the final consumer.The quality? Capitalism is only concerned with the appearance, a fetish!  

THE WAY OUT IS IN THE HANDS OF THE POOR PEOPLE

Only the poor people, peasants and workers, city workers, honest intellectuals, small traders, the true patriots can conjure the epidemic. Imperialism, big bourgeoisie and landownership have already accepted their failure: they are uncapable to move the productive forces, the most they aim at is the “flattening of the disease spread curve”. The opportunist electoral left-wing that focus on Bolsonaro as the cause of all evils, glorify the generals’ government. The pathetic statements of the governor of Maranhão, Flávio Dino/PCdoB, show it clearly when demanding the substitution of Bolsonaro by general Mourão, as a means of ensuring the functioning of the corrupt electoral farce. The imperialists are on their knees! In USA, the hegemonic superpower, the number of daily fatalities overcome the ones recorded in the social-imperialist China. And, believe it or not, a private treatment costs around R$200.000 in Uncle Sam’s land. Everything has ended up, gentlemen!

The people are going to conjure the pandemic organizing Health Committees for the People’s Defence against the coronavirus pandemic, organized by streets, buildings, set of residential buildings, by blocks, villages, small towns. By electing people’s representatives, identifying the infected persons, helping to gather food, producing and distributing masks and gloves, supporting the isolation of the old age fellows, men and women, the sick that are in the risk group, training and forming our youth so that they can exercise the condition of health agents. The peasants’ experience in their fight for the land, the demonstrations organized in columns and distance one from the others are experiences that will now be very useful for our brothers in the large cities.

To organize these Committees, this is the main task! Give shelter to those who want to protect themselves in the countryside. We will overcome the epidemic! People can. The masses can. The government of the minority of big bourgeoisie and landownership, lackeys of imperialism, cannot!

And by declaring war on the people with the subterfuge of combating the virus, the government, that had already declared war on the poor peasants, has thrown millions on the same boat!

The people will conjure the coronavirus pandemic and will charge the rulers for that!  

Long live the Agrarian Revolution!

National Commission of the League of the Poor Peasants, April, 2020