Revolución Comunista [Communist Revolution] is here! On the 23 March, during a Marxist School titled, “Lenin’s life and ideas”, Revolución Comunista was officially launched, a new organisation, which aims to organise communists in El Salvador and which has as its medium-term goal the founding of a Revolutionary Communist Party.

Last week, in a desperate gamble the Bukele government in El Salvador introduced a new Bitcoin Law that will make the volatile cryptocurrency legal tender in the Central American nation. The measure has been extremely unpopular and has met with all manner of technical and political problems. Since the first of these two articles was written, a massive protest of 10,000 people against the Bukele regime took place on 15 September, marking El Salvador’s 200 years of independence. The comrades from the Bloque Popular Juvenil (Salvadorean section of the IMT) participated actively.

This document was unanimously approved at the congress of the Salvadoran section of the International Marxist Tendency held on 15 November 2020.

Workers of Florenzi Industries in El Salvador are battling their bosses and the state institutions over factory closures and non-payment of wages. Send your support to redaccionmilitantebpj@gmail.com and post declarations of solidarity on social media with the hashtag #SolidaridadObrerasFlorenzi, along with images and videos.

This statement by the El Salvadorian comrades of Bloque Popular Juvenil criticises the limited measures taken by the government to fight the coronavirus, particularly those that undermine democratic rights. Non-essential production must be halted, health services adequately supported, and the population protected. Make the bosses pay!

On 9 February, the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, militarised parliament. Only days before, he called for an insurrection of the people using Article 87 of the constitution, which sanctions insurrection when the constitutional order has been disrupted. These actions mark a turning point in the recent history of the country.

The new labour minister, Rolando Castro – a former unionist – has started a crusade against the Salvadoran Institute of Social Security Workers’ Union STISSS. Using the state apparatus and with “legal” manoeuvres, he has organised a coup d'etat against the union's leadership. The leadership that was elected in a general assembly in 2018 has been dismissed and expelled from the organisation. Based on an “assembly” that never took place, and with the backing of “legal” accreditations from the Ministry of Labour, a gang of puppets commanded by Ricardo Monge (an old trade union bureaucrat) has arbitrarily taken control of the union's leadership.

We have now reached and exceeded the $1,300 target of our campaign to raise money for the El Salvadoran comrades. In total, we raised $2,700. This, together with the fundraising effort the comrades have made themselves, will mean that they will be able to purchase the duplicator they need. It will be an important step forward for the work of spreading Marxism in El Salvador in the coming years.

On 1 May 2019, IMT comrades in El Salvador were very proud to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Militante - BPJ, the paper of the revolutionaries of the BPJ (Popular Youth Bloc). The enormous amount of work that has maintained our publication on a more-or-less regular basis over these past 10 years would not have been possible without the invaluable collaboration of sellers, writers, designers, correspondents, but above all, the help of all our readers. We can say proudly, and without exaggeration, that they are spread all over the country.

The Salvadoran section of the International Marxist Tendency, Bloque Popular Juvenil, has marked 10 years of publication of its paper BPJ – Militante. From a modest first issue in February 2009, when it was a quarterly three-page tabloid, the paper has improved into a regular monthly paper with a print run of 600 copies, which doubles for the May Day edition.

We publish here a second round of May Day reports, from Pakistan, Indonesia, El Salvador and Nigeria. In all these countries, the on-going capitalist crisis has led to great exploitation and injustice, and workers are engaged in struggles on several fronts for decent wages and living conditions. Many are drawing radical conclusions, and responded very well to our comrades’ message of revolutionary class struggle!

Comrades and supporters from around the world are continuing to put pressure on the Pakistani state to release the Marxist student activist, Rawal Asad, who is still being held on the scandalous charge of sedition and has been denied bail. Meanwhile, protests are ongoing in Pakistan, where comrades, students and workers are demanding that Rawal be immediately released.

The worldwide solidarity campaign for the release of Rawal Asad, a comrade from the Progressive Youth Alliance who was arrested in Multan and scandalously charged with sedition by the Pakistani state, has forged on apace. Photographs, videos and messages of solidarity have been flooding in from all around the globe.

We publish here a joint solidarity statement from the comrades of Bloque Popular Juvenil (El Salvador), Izquierda Marxista (Honduras) and La Izquierda Socialista (Mexico) to the thousands-strong migrant caravan travelling from Central America to the United States. The migrants have been met with prejudice, attacks by the media and state repression – their plight expresses the suffering of a whole region, plagued by the policies of American imperialism and oligarchical rule.

Yesterday, Sunday, comrade Atilio Jaimes Pérez, General Secretary of SELSA, was released. [See our previous appeal]. However, the charges against him have not been dropped.