Venezuela’s Vice-minister for Africa of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Yuri Pimentel, participated on Thursday on a virtual forum called “The Importance of the Upcoming Parliamentary Elections,” with South African and Namibian leaders, to talk about the need of the parliamentary elections that will be held on December 6, when the people will elect their representatives to the National Assembly, a body that must be inaugurated on January 5, 2021, as established by the Constitution.
Vice-minister Pimentel thanked for the solidarity of the African participants at the forum, where he gave an overview of the imperialist aggressions against Venezuela through the unilateral coercive measures imposed by the U.S. Government to disturb the stability of the Venezuelan people and their defense of sovereignty and self-determination.
In this regard, the Venezuelan diplomat stressed the importance of the parliamentary elections “to recover the democratic nature of the National Assembly,” a body that has been kidnapped by the Venezuelan right wing subordinated by Washington and that has lost its institutional nature.
Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa and member of the African National Congress (ANC), Alvin Botes, ratified that his country’s position on the forthcoming elections in Venezuela is embodied in the Freedom Charter of South Africa (1955), which is characterized by its opening demand, “The People Shall Govern!,” and “no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.”
“The electoral process to undertake serve to deepen the democratic orientation of Venezuela, and it is fundamental to maintain a dialectic relation between the people and the State,” pointed out the South African deputy minister, who also said that “complaints and disputes must be solved peacefully through the appropriate mechanisms and processes established in the Constitution of Venezuela and its electoral laws, with no foreign influence.”
Vice-president of the Economic Area of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Jesús Farías, also participated in the virtual meeting and said that for 22 years, the Bolivarian Revolution has been victim of “systematic imperialist aggressions, which have drastically worsened, especially in the last 2 years.”
Farías condemned that “threats of military intervention, undercover operations to perpetrate assassinations and coup d’États, mercenary raids, political violence, sabotage to public services, psychological terror on the media and imperial criminal policies shape a long record of aggressions against our people in order to produce a regime change in our country.”
Likewise, the Venezuela political leader explained that “the sanctions that have been applied for three years are designed to asphyxiate our economy, and have mainly affected the oil industry, which generates 95% of the foreign currencies in an economy highly dependent on imports, 75% of the state’s income, and plays a central role in our economy’s performance. The Venezuelan people are getting ready for an electoral process that will be marked by a great political offensive.”
At the meeting, the secretary-general of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) discussed what the elections in Venezuela represent to the world, especially in the defense for multilateralism, sovereignty and the peoples’ self-determination, reaffirmed their strong support and commitment to the Venezuelan people and government, and rejected the unilateral coercive measures imposed by imperialism and that affect the Venezuelan people’s wellbeing.
Political analyst Diego Sequera also attended the meeting to explain the large-scale social engineering developed by the United States, including their intervention in electoral processes in Latin America and the application of unilateral coercive measures in the case of Venezuela.
The virtual forum was organized by different South Africa’s political organizations in solidarity with Venezuela, including the South African Communist Party (SACP), the ANC, the South African Association of Solidarity with Venezuela, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and Africa 4 Palestine.