Following the call of our ICOR organization Socialist Platform "Golpe de Timón", the ICOR condemns absolutely the present coup d'état that is developing in Venezuela, perpetrated this past 23rd of January through the self-proclamation of the President of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as President "interim" of the Republic in contempt of the Supreme Court. This is an attempt to usurp the power that the people, fully exercising their sovereignty, gave to the legitimate president reelected, Nicolás Maduro, in the democratic elections held on May 20th, 2018.

This forced attempt at regime change has been driven by US imperialism, shamelessly taking the vanguard of the political leadership of the lackey opposition and with the backing of the right-wing puppet governments in the region.

The genesis of the current political crisis lies in the intense economic blockade suffered by the Venezuelan people and perpetrated from the imperial centers of the USA and the EU, which, based on a strategy of strangulation, seek to close the ways in which the state obtains food, medicine, equipment, spare parts, etc., taking advantage of the dependent and monoexporter character of the economy, in order to stimulate a national economic and social crisis to detract popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution.

The same policy is pursued by NATO forces. Venezuela has thus been put in a critically vulnerable situation. This criminal move on the part of Britain, Germany, France and other EU members is part of a broader strategy of looting the oil reserves of Venezuela and effectively curtailing the growing influence of China and Russia not only in Venezuela but in Latin America as a whole. So on the backs of the Venezuelan people the inter-imperialist contradictions greatly intensify, involving the danger of a military confrontation.

However, the crisis that Venezuela is going through does not only respond to threats and external actions. It is important to point out that mistakes have also been made in the direction of the government, the concessions that have been given to sectors of the bourgeoisie, the materialization of vices of corruption, bureaucracy and inefficiency, have also affected the conditions experienced by the Venezuelan people, whereas the Venezuelan left has not been able to consolidate its organizational strength and a proposal to have greater incidence in the national political reality that leads to dispute the directionality and positioning of the strategic direction to socialism, weakening the possibility of advancing in the conquest of the revolutionary challenges. **

The aforementioned conditions push, on the one hand, for the popular bases to assume positions of rejection of the social-democratic character that increasingly seems to gain more ground within the correlation of government forces. And on the other hand, permit sectors of the rightist opposition to focus the discontent, gaining popular areas where before they had no possibility of developing their actions. For this reason, in some of these communities there were acts of violence masked as protests and led by extreme right-wing groups, including the activation of paramilitary cells.

The situation is no longer just a threat, it is an attempted coup d'état unquestionably initiated in Washington, where the USA keeps a gun at the temple of the Venezuelan people, using it as a hostage so that the national government surrenders or accepts "negotiation", proposals ranging from simple delivery to the demagogic call for "free" elections. The success of the attempted coup d'état would bring, as a consequence, the disintegration of the nation-state, affecting the entire continent.

The Bolivarian Revolution brought about groundbreaking improvements of the situation of women, in education, health care, geriatrics, for single parents and the municipal administration; forms of self-organization of the grassroot developed. That was a signal for all of Latin America.

In this hour of declarations, the pronouncement of solidarity by allied countries, multilateral organizations, parties and social movements of the world is important, with the purpose of integrating that great anti-imperialist movement that makes use of the truth of Venezuela, reject overwhelmingly the possibility of war, exhorting to the search for solutions without tutelage or interventionism and accompanying in the defense of the homeland, promoting solidarity with the people and the legitimately elected government in the face of the siege.

Only the unity and courage of the Venezuelan people, both civilians and people in arms with deep anti-imperialist historical roots, in unity with international solidarity, will be the guarantee of defeating US imperialism once again.

To reconstitute popular morality, revolutionary political organizations have the challenge of moving forward to build a program that allows unifying the struggles of the people, channels energies towards the conquest of political leadership, and thus achieves that the Bolivarian Revolution resumes its revolutionary path towards the socialist horizon.

We do not doubt for a second, that the victory of the Venezuelan people means the failure of the imperialist strategy in the resumption of control of Latin America, and its decline, in this attempt of war in Venezuela, its credibility is played as masters of the world.

The way out of the crisis is revolutionary!

** This paragraph is not supported by NDMLP Sri Lanka, but they do agree to the resolution as a whole.