Fernando Braga was born on August 26, 1982. As a child, he moved with his mother from Brazil to the Bronx. He went to Brooklyn Technical High School where he first became politically active in the fight against racism and mistreatment of students. Fernando’s first antiracist struggle came in helping organize his fellow students who wanted to re-create a “Media” major at Brooklyn Tech. High School. When the class first told their teacher what they wanted in the major, the teacher told them that they needed the students to work together with him to create this Media major. Fernando was a leader in not just figuring out what to do but in actually doing the work which also motivated the other students.
At Brooklyn Tech Fernando met Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Fernando said he had always known that we needed an antiracist, antisexist, completely egalitarian society and started organizing for PLP at Brooklyn Tech.
Antiracist student leader
In 1999 a Black 23-year-old student worker, Amadou Diallo, was murdered by the NYPD. He was shot 41 times by cops in front of his apartment while reaching for his wallet. Students from high schools around the city walked out and joined the many protests demanding justice. Fernando was one of the leaders of a large group that met after school and discussed fighting against racism, imperialist war and for true equality.
 The group at Brooklyn Tech along with a similar group from Clara Barton High School decided to organize a demonstration. Fernando and two others presented a proposal to a “progressive” sanctioned school club to have a walk-out. The advisor was afraid of a walk-out. The students decided to do it anyway. After they handed out a flyer, there was push-back and threats from the administration. Fernando and other students came up with the idea of stickers. The school is six stories high. Most students couldn’t take the elevators and the stairwells were plastered with the walk-out stickers.
On the day of the demonstration well over 2500 students walked out. Classes were empty. A massive group from Brooklyn Tech joined students from Clara Barton at Fulton Square in downtown Brooklyn. After a student-led rally in the square, hundreds crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to go into Manhattan. Of course, a militant, multiracial demonstration didn't make the news except in CHALLENGE.
Fighting the bosses on the battlefield
While in high school, Fernando developed a passion for films and screenwriting. He pursued this love as a film major at Hunter College. While at Hunter, Fernando, a member of the National Guard, was deployed to Iraq. While there he started writing a movie called Broken Soldier. In Iraq Fernando became a leader in his unit and looked out for the interests of his fellow soldiers and workers from Iraq as well.
While out on a convoy his unit came upon a truck stopped in the road with a group of Iraqis standing beside it. His Platoon Sergeant tried to force the Iraqis to move the truck. When they didn’t he told the platoon to get ready to fire on them. Fernando, who spoke no Arabic, made eye contact with one of the Iraqis who signaled him that the truck was broken and couldn’t be moved. Fernando understood the message and was able to stop the Sergeant from opening fire. The unit moved on and left the Iraqi workers to fix their truck.
Upon returning from Iraq Fernando became active in Iraq Veterans Against the War and was instrumental in creating the Winter Soldier II hearings. This conference, modeled after the anti-Vietnam War conference from the 70’s, included testimony about U.S. atrocities in Iraq from soldiers and Iraqis as well.
A working-class champion until the end
Fernando was also a NYC Transit worker and proud member of the Transit  Workers Union (TWU). He distributed CHALLENGE newspapers to his friends on the job and talked to them about fighting for communism. He was involved in several job actions when his safety and the safety of his coworkers were threatened. He also took pride in his work and enjoyed playing poker and dominos with his coworkers.
In 2013 Fernando went to Vassar College as part of the first group of veterans to attend Vassar since the end of WWII. He became a popular student who helped act as a bridge between the veterans and traditional Vassar students. On campus Fernando worked hard at his studies, learning Chinese and earning his Bachelor’s degree. He became a leader on campus who introduced people to communist ideas and participated in fights against racism.
On June 10 around 100 people gathered in Brooklyn to remember Fernando and to celebrate his life and his commitment to the working class. Many of those who knew him from high school, college, the military, and loved ones, including his young daughter, shared their memories. He will be missed.

Ecuador: strike vs. capitalist crisis
On June 13 here in Quito, Ecuador, a mobilization began towards the capital in response to the call of the Conaie Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CCINE) for a national strike against the neoliberal government of Guillermo Lasso. The strike and march on the capitol have been triggered by rising fuel prices and transportation costs, unemployment, massive layoffs, and budget cuts for health and education. Added to this is an escalation of violence by the uniformed officers towards the population, even going so far as to sign a cooperation agreement with the U.S. A bill presented in the United States Senate recently called again, “to Strengthen ties of the Association between the United States and Ecuador,” but with the U.S. in charge.
Other sectors have joined the strike, although timidly. The brutal repression in  October 2019, under the regime of then-President Lenin Moreno is still present. The leader of CCINE, Conaie Leonidas Iza, was violently arrested and kidnapped for 10 hours, but the mobilization is being strengthened day by day, with strikers more resolved to see that their 10  demands are met and many calling for the resignation of the President.
The mass media portray the indigenous people as violent coup plotters, trying to turn public opinion against the national strike. Spanish-language media outside the country has given little or no importance to this crisis.
But the violence and repression come from the government through its Decree 455 that established a state of emergency for certain provinces, allowing the use of lethal weapons by the uniformed police and military against protesters, court intervention and internet blocking. All this shows how the government serves imperialism and the local capitalists.
Thousands of workers in Ecuador are protesting, claiming their right to enjoy the benefits they produce, demanding better education, better health services, a better system of protection for citizens, not repression towards them, but above all respect for their humanity with better living conditions, including employment with wages that support good living. We are the ones who produce and run everything, therefore we demand respect that our work and production be valued. But the only way we can ever enjoy the fruits of our collective labor is when we take power away from the bosses with communist revolution, and produce for our needs, not for their profits.
*****
Capitalist atrocities, not just statistics
I read the article “Racist bosses further displace homeless workers” in CHALLENGE, 6/8/22. Soon after I read the article, I had a conversation about homelessness with a friend, a working class tenant who recently began reading CHALLENGE. These two things made me think of the similarities between the struggles of housed and unhoused workers both in the U.S. and around the world.
Here in Los Angeles County, the official “Point-in Time” count of the homeless population in 2020 was 66,436. According to Dr. Margot Kushel of UC-San Francisco, this number is likely an undercount because the vast majority of unhoused here are “unsheltered,” meaning they live outdoors, and are therefore more difficult to count. Homelessness is deadly. Almost 2,000 unhoused workers in LA County died from April 2020 through March 2021, a 56 percent  increase from the 12 months before the pandemic began (NY Times 4/25/22).
But for the working class, homelessness is an international plague which has skyrocketed worldwide during the pandemic economic crisis. For example, between 2014 and 2019, official government statistics show a 50 percent increase in the numbers of homeless workers in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. On the ground homeless advocates say those numbers went up further from 25,000 before the pandemic to 60,000 at the end of last year. Mass racist unemployment of 13 percent and falling worker incomes have forced more and more workers in Brazil into the streets (voanews.com 12/20/21).   
In Inglewood, California (a predominantly Black and Latin city adjacent to Los Angeles), long-term racist unemployment, gentrification and displacement are everywhere and have vastly increased the homeless population. Meanwhile, Inglewood’s mayor and City Council, who passed a punitive “anti-camping” ordinance in 2021, have been the main cheerleaders for the new multi-billion dollar football stadium (SoFi) and a new multi-billion dollar basketball arena (Intuit Dome).
A public campaign forced these Inglewood politicians to enact rent control in 2019, but the ordinance has loopholes benefitting landlords. Because the ordinance allows vacancy decontrol, landlords have an incentive to refuse to make basic repairs, forcing tenants to move and then jacking up the new rents. The Tenants’ Union that I am part of has been organizing against evictions of tenants unable to pay rent, and to demand repairs for apartments with unlivable conditions. Union members have worked closely with a number of tenants, including my friend.
After my friend called me, we met outside the apartment complex and he walked me to a vacant lot near where he lives. In the middle of the lot, was a makeshift shelter dug underground along with a couch and some large plastic bags with belongings. The shelter had clearly been bull-dozed, maybe by the City. Standing from the back of the lot and looking out, one could clearly see So-Fi Stadium in the background. My friend asked me to take a picture of that scene. He said that the picture “is worth a thousand words” and shows “where we’re at.” Afterwards, I sent the picture to the Union text chat, describing it as “the latest atrocity of capitalism”.
Not long after, my friend and one other tenant who the union has been working with received summonses to go to eviction court. Conditions in their apartments were so bad that both failed the annual inspection by a city-run rent subsidy program. When the landlord adamantly refused to make repairs, the City stopped paying its portion of the rent. The Tenants’ Union is organizing to support both tenants and to prevent yet two more workers from becoming statistics in the local homeless count. My friend sees the connection between racist gentrification, billionaire-funded “redevelopment,” displacement and homelessness. I will continue the political struggle with him and other tenants about why we need communist revolution around the world to end racist unemployment, homelessness, and the commodification of human needs like housing.          
*****
‘Profit is the name of the game’
 On June 21 members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined hundreds of tenants in a spirited protest against rent hikes in New York City. As we chanted with the Housing Coalition we carried signs saying “Capitalism = Homelessness” and “Contra desalojos, tenemos que luchar” and distributed 77 copies of CHALLENGE. One friend joined PLP and another is seriously considering it.
Black, Asian, Latin and white working class tenants united inside the auditorium where nine  mayoral appointees on the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) met to vote on rent increases for over one million rent stabilized apartments in NYC. Tenants were angry when less than half of the protesters got inside because we didn’t know to bring proof of vaccination against Covid-19.
The week before the RGB vote tenants protested at the Brooklyn building owned by mayor/landlord Eric Adams. Adams argued that landlords like him need rent increases. Adams has overwhelming backing from the NYC real estate industry.
Since the politicians lifted the rent moratorium put in place during the pandemic there are 230,000 eviction cases for unpaid rent, which tenants can’t pay in NYC courts. Tenants are organizing to monitor cases in court, but we need a much stronger fight back. Nearly 50,000 women, men and children are homeless in NYC while racist mayor Adams has ordered cops to clear the homeless out of the subways and destroyed 239 encampments in the city.                                    
  In the end the RGB gave the landlords their increases. Like our chant says, “Adams, landlords all the same, Profits is the name of their game!” The working class housing crisis will explode so long as the working class allows this racist, profit driven capitalist system with its enormous inequalities to exist! We need revolution! Only communism with workers’ power and PLP can fight for housing for our class. The struggle is long! We remain determined!
*****
Red on radio: ‘U.S. is a capitalist dictatorship’
I got on WBAI radio New York for the last five minutes of the July 4 “What’s Going On” program at 7 am which was discussing the failures of the capitalist economy today. The supposedly anti-capitalist economists like R.Wolff and others were providing excellent statistics about the reasons for the problems of workers today. When I spoke for a brief five minutes, I asked why the speakers never mentioned that the US is a capitalist dictatorship and that the capitalists’ fear of the working class they discussed is not only of the power workers represent but on how communist ideas and organizing in the 1930s forced capitalists under threat of communist revolution to pay for the many working class survival benefits that have mostly been taken back today. I said real anti-capitalists today need to call for a communist revolution for workers' dictatorship.
To access the useful statistical information from the program you can search the WBAI “What’s Going On” archive for July 4. However, good statistics must be coupled with the correct political analysis, which is provided by the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party.

*****

The government of hope has arrived…We are going to develop capitalism in Colombia.
--Gustavo Petro in a June 19 victory speech

The election of misleader Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia is a desperate move by the country’s capitalist rulers to pacify millions of angry workers with empty promises of a social “transformation.” On the heels of a humiliating Summit of the Americas (see CHALLENGE, June 22), his victory reflects the U.S. bosses’ decline in their old imperialist backyard. But while every electoral circus is a lose-lose proposition for the working class, liberals and fake leftists like Petro are especially dangerous.  Reforms by “anti-establishment” politicians will never meet workers’ needs. Liberal democracy is a dictatorship of the capitalist ruling class; the game is rigged to serve their interests. Capitalism everywhere is built on racism, sexism, exploitation, and violence. Only communist revolution, led by the international Progressive Labor Party, can transform society by smashing the vicious profit system and creating a world run by and for the working class. From Colombia to Haiti, from Mexico to Pakistan, workers will continue to rise up against poverty, state terror, gangster impunity, and racist inequality and need a Party like PLP to smash this system once and for all.
Racist inequality and state terror
Latin America has the highest level of economic inequality in the world, and Colombia has the worst income inequality and the least social mobility in Latin America (statista.com; Foreign Affairs, 6/19). Forty percent of the country’s population lives in poverty; 20 percent of young adults are jobless. The income gap has widened in the pandemic, especially in rural areas that are home to large indigenous and Black neighborhoods.
Enraged by the breakdown of public services, tax hikes, a plan to privatize health care, and more than five decades of civil war, hundreds of thousands of workers and students have mounted mass demonstrations, culminating in last summer’s “national strike.” At least 46 protesters were killed by Colombia’s kkkops (New York Times, 6/19). It was Petro’s job to steer the angriest workers with the least to lose—women, young people, the most impoverished sections of the working class, and Black and indigenous workers—off the streets and back into dead-end electoral politics. He did it well enough to beat Rodolfo Hernandez, a Trump-type businessman who praised Adolf Hitler and declared that Venezuelan women were “a factory for making poor children” (New York Times, 6/19). In a sign of workers’ disgust with the status quo, the old guard’s candidate, Federico Gutierrez, failed to make the runoff.
Guerrilla capitalist
Petro came of age as an urban “rebel” who refused to rock the capitalist boat. At age 17 he joined M-19, whose members “defined themselves as more reformist than revolutionary, closer to the teachings of South American liberation hero Simon Bolivar than those of Marx” (Americas Quarterly, 10/31/17). After 12 years as a noncombatant guerrilla and 16 months in jail, Petro jumped inside the bosses’ tent with both feet. Over the last three decades, mostly in Colombia’s Congress and Senate, this self-styled “socialist” has served as a willing capitalist stooge, moving steadily to the right as he got closer to real power.
From 2012 to 2015, as mayor of Bogotá, Petro fired hundreds of bus drivers, cut aid to the disabled, and closed community kitchens. Those who dared to demonstrate were bashed by Petro’s allies in the unions and brutalized by Petro’s police. Fitch, the U.S. credit agency, praised the mayor’s “conservative debt policy” (finance.yahoo.com, 6/22)—capitalist code for austerity attacks on workers.
In Petro’s latest presidential campaign, his third try, he promised big changes: land reforms, tax reforms, pension reforms, guaranteed employment, subsidies for single mothers, free higher education for all. Playing to reactionary identity politics, he recruited a Black woman as his running mate for vice president. But Petro was careful not to go too far or to alienate Colombia’s wealthy landowning elite. He promised not to expropriate private property and danced around the issue of abortion rights. To expand his voter base, he embraced allies of ex-president Alvaro Uribe, the fascist butcher who gave free rein to murderous paramilitaries and drug traffickers, and whose military slaughtered thousands of civilians and dressed them as guerrillas to earn bonuses (americasquarterly.org, 1/10). A booster of clean energy, Petro said he would ban new oil projects but leave existing ones intact—enabling oil and gas producers to keep drilling through 2026, when the great reformer has promised to step down after one term (finance.yahoo.com, 6/20).
Meanwhile, splits in the Colombian ruling class—and the nature of capitalism—will place severe limits on Petro’s agenda. His minority party can be outvoted in Congress, and the country’s constitutional courts are run by judges tied to the big landowners. Colombia has a narrow tax base and is awash in debt, and Petro will need the corrupt private pension funds to keep buying the bonds that keep the government afloat. Like pathetic Jim Crow Joe Biden, Petro will struggle to push through even weak reforms. According to a political science professor at Bogota’s Rosario University, he will “have to abandon certain parts of this program….[H]e does not have a majority to implement everything he has promised” (NYT, 6/20). Or as Bruce Mac Master, president of the National Business Association of Colombia, put it: “Petro is an economist. He understands economic issues” (Financial Times, 6/19).
Capitalism is built around maximum profit for the few at the expense of the many. History shows that any crumbs the bosses give us will be small and short-lived—and taken back in their inevitable next crisis.
Playing both sides
Colombia has long been the most reliable U.S. ally in Latin America and is now the region’s second largest recipient, after Mexico, of U.S. arms (visualcapitalist.com, 5/9). Beginning in the 1960s under President John F. Kennedy, and escalating in the Dirty War waged by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the U.S. promoted state terror in Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador. According to Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, Colombia’s former minister of foreign affairs, Washington “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades” (Huffington Post, 3/24/14). To this day, the U.S. “war on drugs” has done nothing to constrain Colombia’s cocaine industry. But with the CIA running point, the U.S. played a central role in funding the fascist paramilitaries and death squads that targeted trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights monitors, journalists, and other suspected "subversives” (Progressive, June 1998).
During the Cold War, when U.S. imperialism dominated the atmosphere, it sponsored coups against elected leaders who threatened its interests, from Guatemala to Brazil to Chile to Argentina. But with the rise of imperialist arch-rival China, the game has changed. Deals must be cut with politicians the U.S. might once have assassinated. With the latest wave of reformist “pink tide” misleaders now in place in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, and Mexico, and Lula da Silva mounting a strong comeback campaign in Brazil, the U.S. needs to hold on to its foothold in Colombia to slow the spread of Chinese influence in the hemisphere.
Like any good opportunist, Petro is playing both sides. While recognizing China as a strategic partner in trade and finance, he declared that the relationship between Colombia and the U.S. was “of great importance…and the historic closeness of this relationship must continue” (El Espectador, 2/6). Petro might not have been the first choice for U.S. finance capital, but the biggest bosses seem to think they can work with him. After the president-elect strongly hinted that he would name a “moderate”—possibly an ex-central banker—as his finance minister, Morgan Stanley, the multinational banking giant, heaved a sigh of relief: “In the near term, we expect the administration to look to broaden its coalition and do not foresee disruptive policy proposals” (Financial Times, 6/19). In other words, the rich will keep getting richer while Colombia’s workers sink more deeply into poverty.
Fight for communism!
The election of class traitors like Gustavo Petro can’t change the fundamental conflict between the capitalist bosses and the international working class. The only good boss is a dead one! Workers’ anger won’t be contained by a few limited reforms. In the end, only the destruction of capitalism can resolve these contradictions. Only communism can create the world we need. Onward, working class! Join PLP!

CHICAGO, Jun 15—On a 100-degree afternoon, 100 students, parents, and workers marched through the south side Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago in the fifth annual “We Walk For Her” march organized to bring awareness to the Black and Latin women and girls that have gone missing because of sexist violence. This deadly sexism and racism is part and parcel of a system based on profit and exploitation.
Militant students led the action, from chants to marshaling the march. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members marched with dozens of workers and distributed fliers and CHALLENGE. Workers were receptive to our message of communist revolution and a worker-run society as being the only solution to the countless attacks that the international working class faces daily. Many took the Party’s literature and engaged in deep discussions in the blazing heat.
A system flooded with racist and sexist violence
Chicago has tragically been home to an increasing number of murders of women workers, the majority of them Black. These deaths have spanned from the South to West sides where the most vulnerable Black and brown working-class people live. Chicago’s long history of racist discrimination has facilitated the unsolved and forgotten fate of our working-class sisters.
The capitalist kkkops and kourts, far from protecting women workers, are some of the worst abusers, guilty of terrorizing, incarcerating, and murdering them! Having Lori Lightfoot as the city’s first Black gay woman mayor has done nothing to alter this state-sponsored violence, and no politician ever will. The bosses make billions of dollars in profits from racist and sexist super exploitation, and the role of the state is to manage and ensure that. They are not neutral, nor do they have the interests of the working class at heart.
As capitalism spirals into chaos, it has become a free for all, with violence against workers on the rise, and Black women taking the brunt. In May, a 36-year old Black woman was found chained up in an abandoned building after screaming in order to get the neighbors attention (Block Club Chicago, 5/23). Also in May, a teenager from Chicago was found by hotel workers in a hotel in Tuscaloosa, Alabama after she had been sex-trafficked (WVTM-13, 5/23). In both instances, it was not politicians, the kkkops or capitalists with many institutions at their disposal that found these Black women; it was other workers who stood up and did something.
Black trans women workers have faced relentless attacks in Chicago, often times going missing and later found to be murdered by men who let the dehumanizing alienation and sexism abundant under the profit system to determine their actions.
A system that perpetuates violence and inequality against women and young girls should not exist. The political and economic system of capitalism is designed to do just that! In 2020, there were over 200,000 women under the age of 21 who were reported missing (Dame, 1/10).
Black women account for less than 15 percent of the U.S. population but more than one third of all missing women. The racist and sexist foundation of capitalism in the U.S. would have it no other way.
Lessons from Claudia Jones, Black communist woman leader
In 1949, revolutionary Black communist Claudia Jones wrote and published the pamphlet An End To The Neglect Of The Problems Of The Negro Woman! where she laid forward the argument that the struggles faced by Black women workers had been not only ignored obviously by the capitalists, but also by the left and the Communist Party USA. This racist and sexist indifference occurred despite the fact that Black women were a super-exploited labor force and gave outsized but often unrecognized leadership to the international working-class movement. Her sharp insight back then guides how we build the struggle today.
The leadership of Black women workers is key, and it holds true today when we witness their fearless fightback during the 2020 antiracist uprisings, to the strikes in healthcare currently erupting in Zimbabwe and in textile factories in Haiti. Black women workers regularly face the most brutal exploitation and oppression under capitalism, and for this reason are a section of the working class best suited to be leaders in the fight for revolution.
PLP is organizing to build this new egalitarian communist society, but it will not happen until many more working-class people decide to rise up and break the chains of capitalism. Bold leadership is essential to fighting back, but only communism is able to smash sexist exploitation and violence at their root and establish an egalitarian society. The international PLP invites workers here in Chicago and everywhere else to join us in building this fight!