The League of Poor Peasants salutes November 20 by extolling the heroism of the warrior leader Zumbi dos Palmares! Saluting the history of resistance of quilombos against slavery and for the construction of a free life without exploitation and oppression.

It is a day to salute and reaffirm the example of struggle and resistance of the black people in our country, which is the image and likeness of the popular classes in Brazil and will have its particular liberation, as an ethnic group massacred by the system of imperialist exploitation, with the victory of the revolution of all the oppressed people, of which blacks are part and are the majority.

Brazil was the territory where the most enslaved Africans were "received". More than 6 million human beings were kidnapped from their nations of origin on the African continent, brought in conditions of unspeakable cruelty by the colonizers, tortured daily and forced into forced labor. For more than 300 years, blacks were enslaved in the country. Generations and generations born slaves and sold like any other commodity, entire families forcibly separated, degraded in their human condition, treated worse than animals. 

Together with the native indigenous peoples, blacks were the first workers in Brazil, they made up the first oppressed and exploited social class that built all the wealth of the colonial system and their exploitation served to raise and consolidate the development of the capitalist and imperialist system.

The black people constitute the nucleus of the forces – the driving force and the main one – of the Brazilian Revolution, as the majority in the working and peasant class. The whole history of their struggle for freedom is a prelude to the struggle that this huge and powerful black mass that makes up the worker-peasant alliance, which has unleashed the liberation struggles over the centuries and is the one who is unleashing the struggles to bring the New Democratic Revolution to the end. The Revolution is the only way to liberate the entire class and other popular masses and definitively settle this debt of humanity to the black people and all the oppressed peoples of our country and the world.

The struggle for the self-affirmation of the black people and all their history and culture, the struggle to confront the genocide of the black people in the big cities and in the countryside will awaken as never before throughout our history the organized and invincible revolutionary fury. Resentments, desires for revenge and fury that for centuries have been repressed by the most brutal repression by fire and sword by the exploiting and oppressive ruling classes and not infrequently in their uprisings diverted by the action of opportunism, with their sugary speeches of splitting, corporatist and racist petty-bourgeois intellectuals, tied to and as a complementary part of the old bourgeois-landowner state at the service of imperialism.

The racial question is historically linked to the social question, in particular the agrarian question, of land ownership. Land from which the indigenous peoples were expelled by the invasion of the Portuguese conquerors. Land from which the work, sweat and blood of the enslaved black people extracted wealth for the kingdom of Portugal and England. Land that in the 515 years of history of our country has been plundered and denied to poor people, denied to blacks by the infamous land law of 1850, in force to the present day, to finally deny land to all poor peasants!

Thus we find ourselves in the twenty-first century and the agrarian question in Brazil remains unchanged. More than in any other historical era, these 13 years of PT/Lula/Dilma rule represent the complete semi-colonial domination of the country and the same semi-feudal poor base. The failure of the "government agrarian reform" proves that this old state does not want and cannot destroy the latifundia for its very essence and nature as a pro-imperialist bourgeois-landlord class.

The PT government – in fact mere shift management – covered up by welfare practices, corporatist of the impoverished masses and intense and infernal lying propaganda of the end of misery and poverty, was the worst for the poor in the countryside: it increased the concentration of land, promoted the most organized and most brutal repression with persecution, imprisonment and murder of peasant leaders, quilombolas and indigenous people throughout the country, as well as the most engineered genocide on the poor and especially black people of the favelas, villages and neighborhoods on the outskirts of the cities. He financed and promoted "agribusiness" and appointed no less than Katia Abreu, queen of the landowners to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Now with the country sunk in crisis and in the face of the great demoralization of the PT and the defeat of its anti-people and sell-out project of false "developmentalism", more than ever it is proven that only the revolutionary path can materialize the historic demand of the Brazilian people for land, water, bread, justice and New Democracy!

Long live Zumbi dos Palmares, hero of the Brazilian people!

Down with the genocide of the Black People!

Cleomar lives! Death to the Latifundia! Long live the Agrarian Revolution!

Long live the New Democratic Revolution!