Note: For background on this case, see this article. According to the article, a worker was shot and killed at a workers’ protest. Originally, the union bureaucrat Hector Maicán was arrested and his gun was confiscated. Then, after pressure from the powers-that-be, he was released and Álvarez was arrested despite the fact that several witnesses said that he was far from the shooting. Álvarez was one of the organizers of the protest.

Reprinted from Venezuelavoices.

To the venezuelan working class and the world proletariat:

After eight years in prison, I have understood that my case is not of a penal nature, where as a citizen I have the right to prove my innocence according to the bourgeois laws of the Venezuelan capitalist state. During these eight years, I have been confined in several prisons, far from my family and my life and work comrades. The Ferrominera company located in the state of Bolívar, property of the Venezuelan State, fired me, took away my salary and the benefits enjoyed by my three children under a collective contract.

In these eight years I have suffered three attempts against my life. Today, as a result of this, I find my right hand crippled, the State that boasts that the El Rodeo II prison is a model prison, has not guaranteed me safety or medical attention. In these eight long years there have been few hearings in the 12th Trial Court where the witnesses and experts promoted by my defense have been able to testify, making it clear that there is no element that incriminates me, proving that I am innocent. The few times that the trial has advanced, it has been interrupted by the judge and the prosecutor.

At the beginning I was accused by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and two private lawyers financed by the government of the state of Bolívar directed for that time by Colonel(r) Carlos Rangel Gómez. Once his tem as governor ended he fled to Mexico, the private lawyers gave up because the government stopped paying their fees, only the Public Prosecutor, who has not attended the last three hearings, remained as accuser. My defense has made use of all the resources established in the Code of Criminal Procedure, but they still keep me prisoner, denying me all the benefits that by their own laws correspond to me.

In these eight years I have been denied the right to a defense, the process is interrupted and has restarted for the eighth time, the fellow workers who are key witnesses and have declared in my favor, have been detained. At the last hearing, the secretary of the court in the case told me in an altered manner and with desperation, “it’s enough, Rodney, don’t you want to be with your family? Your union abandoned you, so did your first defense team, until when are you keeping up with this? We know that you are innocent, that the killer is Maican, but the order is that you assume the guilt and we immediately give you the benefit of parole. You have been here eight years, and you will only be under a parole. Otherwise you will rot here”.

Now with all that I am living, I look back to see and remember my ancestors, and I only remember that I am the son of proletarians, born in a working class neighborhood in the state of Bolívar, once I reached majority of age I went to the factory to sell the only thing that has belonged to me, my labor power, to earn my livelihood, generating profit, surplus value for the employer Is that what I am condemned for? for being a worker, for belonging to the class that is called to break with the slavery of wage labor?

Then I check the resume, the background of my captors, of my jailers, and I see that the current attorney general, Tarek Williams Saab and as his private secretary, Mrs. Dalia Vegas, are the same ones that in 2009, as the governor and his secretary in the state of Anzoátegui, ordered a platoon of 60 policemen to repress a demonstration of workers of the company Mitsubishi who were demanding a higher salary, as a result of which the comrades Pedro Suarez and José Marcano were shot and killled. The antecedent of the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, lawyer Maikel Moreno is his involvement in the first degree murder of a worker in Ciudad Bolivar in the year 1987, as well as the murder of a young man on May 4, three months after the Caracazo of 1989, time at which he was an active agent of the political police (Disip, now Sebin). They are my captors, my jailers.

In this sense I inform the working class and the world proletariat, that I declare myself in rebellion, that I have understood that it’s the working class who is being persecuted, I am a political prisoner, I will no longer follow the game of my captors, I will no longer attend the courts, the Palace of Injustice, I will no longer follow the game of judge Paolette Guevara and the court secretary. It only remains for me to tell my captors, my kidnappers, at some point in history it will be you who will sit on the bench where you have me now, to be held accountable for all your actions, with hands stained with the blood of the working class, and you can be sure that you will be given a free, simple and expeditious trial.

Messages of support for Rodney and or messages of protest can be sent to this Facebook page:
https://m.facebook.com/LibertadParaRodneyAlvarez/