The triumph of the social revolution, which will put an end to exploitation by the bourgeoisie and imperialist domination, is a reality. It comes nearer as the crisis affecting Ecuadorian society sharpens and at the same time the struggle of the working class and the peoples for social and national liberation is strengthened and radicalised. In order to lead this process of social transformation to victory, for forty years the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador, PCMLE, has been working and struggling, fulfilling its mission of organising and leading the fight of the working class and peoples along the path of the revolution and socialism.

On August 1, 1964, a handful of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries gathered at the Founding Congress of the PCMLE, to give life to the party of the Ecuadorian working class. Its foundation was an answer to the need to provide the Ecuadorian workers with their vanguard organisation, the principal instrument of struggle to win their liberation, since the opportunist leadership of the old Communist Party betrayed the revolutionary postulates by placing itself at the service of the ruling classes, covered by a pseudo left-wing phraseology, with which for some years they trafficked in the struggle of the working class.

We were born to organise and lead the revolution, to put an end to the power of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, and to build the society of the workers: socialism and communism, and we work with that perspective. To organise and carry out the revolution successfully is not a simple task; but neither is it impossible. We must defeat powerful enemies such as imperialism and the bourgeoisie, with its State structured to guarantee its class rule and to repress the struggle of the workers. But the force of the working class, the peasantry, the youths, the indigenous peoples, the women, the people of the cities and the countryside, is still more powerful. We have waged battles that bear witness to the strength of the mass movement: the popular uprisings that put an end to the governments of Bucaram and Mahuad are an example.

This is an example that marks the course of the struggle, as is also the historic experience of the international working class which, at its time, knew how to defeat the rule of capital and to open the avenues to a new world. There is the example of the Russian proletariat which, in 1917, inaugurated the era of socialism; there are the victorious revolutions in China, Albania, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. that we claim as our own because they sum up the effort and the ideal of freedom for the workers, the peoples and the revolutionaries.

We make our own those revolutions and struggles that the proletariat and the peoples have waged at every time and place to fulfil the mission of burying capitalism. The social revolution is an international movement, which takes concrete form in each country in which our Marxist-Leninist parties fulfil the role of vanguard detachment. We are fighting for the victory of the Ecuadorian revolution, considering it as part of the international proletarian revolution. Our internationalist conviction has led us to work, together with our fraternal parties, in forming the International Conference of Marxist-Leninists Parties and Organisations, which was formed as a focal point for the organisation of the Marxist-Leninists of the world and as an instrument for leading the struggle of the international proletariat. At same time, we are working to strengthen our unity of action with organisations, movements and parties of the revolutionary left, with which we are advancing in the formation of a front of struggle of the peoples against imperialist domination and for the national and social liberation.

In these four decades of revolutionary work we have advanced in spite of the blows we have received. The enemy has sought to weaken and eliminate us. Its efforts towards this end have been various; they have acted inside our ranks with degenerate elements who tried to divide our organisation and divert us from Marxist-Leninist principles, but the ideological strength of our Party has allowed us to unmask them and purify our ranks. Each of these ideological and political struggles within our Party have reaffirmed our belief in Marxism-Leninism, as have also the efforts that we make each day to better understand and apply Marxism-Leninism to Ecuadorian reality.

We have also been seen the repression of the class enemy, which has taken the lives of several comrades such as Jaime Hurtado, Milton Reyes, Jorge Tinoco, Miguel Pozo, Rosita Paredes, Pablo Tapia, Carlos Castro, Freddy Arias and others, who are heroes of the Ecuadorian revolution, as well as Washington Álvarez, Rafael Larrea, Lucio Tinoco, Alberto Pilalot, leaders and members of our Party who have dedicated their lives to this cause. We pay homage to them, as we do to all popular fighters who have given their lives in workers; strikes, in land seizures, in street battles.

These have been forty years of struggle and advance. We have developed our organisation and presence in the whole country and in various popular sectors. We are in the workers’ protest, in the student struggle, in the demands raised by the peasants and the teachers, in the blocking of highways carried out by the indigenous communities, in the songs and works produced by artists committed to change, in the democratic thought of an intelligentsia which places its confidence in the social transformations. We are uniting these actions with the cause of the struggle for power, for the revolutionary victory.

We are wherever our people live and struggle and, together with them, we are organising new struggles, new actions, the final battles, the armed insurrection of the masses, because only this can put an end to the power of the rich, and will be able to maintain the power of the workers: socialism.

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