The victory of the Soviet Union over Nazism was perceived in Venezuela as a great advance in the struggle of the people to achieve democracy and social progress. For our people, it was the culmination of a brilliant moment of democratization and international liberation.

In the political consciousness of Venezuelans, the main factors of the fascist threat had manifested themselves very clearly in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. To this day they mark the main political and ideological currents in the country.

Starting from the beginning of the XX century Venezuela was under a strong military regime. In the 1930s, without legal political parties in Venezuela, the democratic forces organized the struggle through the Venezuelan Student Federation, a supporter of the Republic in Spain and opposed to fascism.

Fascist sympathizers responded by creating a parallel organization, the National Union of Students, supportive of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. The leaders of that organization would later create the Copei party, from which Justice First and Popular Will emerged, the two structures that act today in Venezuela as spearheads of the aggression by the United States against the Bolivarian Republic.

The fight against fascism allowed the left forces of Venezuela to have a legal framework of action for the first time, with the Communist Party of Venezuela as the leader. The impact of the vision promoted by the Popular Anti-Fascist Front created the political conditions for a process of democratization of the country.

Although Venezuela was not directly involved in the war, on January 16, 1944, at 2.44 am, the German submarine U-502 torpedoed a group of oil tankers in the waters of the Gulf of Venezuela.

The ships Tía Juana, Monagas, San Nicolás, Pedernales and Arkansas were sunk under attack. More than 20 Venezuelans died, while several crew members remained stranded for days off the coast of the La Guajira peninsula.

Given the incipient state of its Navy, Venezuela’s response capacity to this attack was practically nil, and was limited to rescue operations.

Venezuela had broken off diplomatic and commercial relations with the Axis powers, and established them with China and the Soviet Union, thus bypassing the strong anti-communist tradition of the dictatorships that had ruled the country.

During the war, Venezuela constantly supplied the United States with oil, a supply that was crucial for moving its war machine. Venezuelan oil production almost doubled over this period, from 406,000 barrels per day in 1942 to 702,000 barrels per day in 1944. This factor made Venezuela a tactical target for Nazi Germany.

While the colonialist powers of Europe struggled to preserve or extend their areas of domination, the peoples fought on the many fronts of anti-fascist war beyond the purposes imposed by some of the governments involved in the war.

Despite the fact that shortly afterwards the United States once again imposed a severe anti-communist policy on all the countries under its influence, the anti-fascist action of the people created the necessary conditions to put an end to colonialism and to achieve the social welfare policies that had favoured millions of people for decades.

More than any other force, the Communist parties organized and led the people’s resistance against fascism. Their vision included workers and peasants who fought for a better world after the war.

The narrative of the war against the Axis, which assigns a disproportionate role to U.S. participation, sometimes admits the coexistence of official armies and resistance, but presents them as one. They erase from the collective memory the differences and contradictions in military and social objectives, ideology, tactics and structures.

One element that can illustrate this disparity is the fact that, during the Spanish civil war, the Western Allies supported Franco, a fascist, rather than the Republic. This support continued well beyond the war.

The West only began the conflict with Nazi Germany when its policies proved ineffective in curbing Hitler’s expansion into the territories of British and French influence.

Fascism is the negation of these fundamental values cherished and defended by all the peoples of the world.

I write from the perspective of a people who are today besieged and subjected to permanent aggression by far-right domestic factors that serve U.S. interests. In our case, very clearly, fascism is a threat today and not just a subject of history.