Popular Vanguard Party of Costa Rica warns against authoritarianism

The statement warns against Laura Fernández's call on citizens to “pressure” the Judiciary, while some might present this as a defence of “democracy” PVP advises the people to carefully observe what is really happening.

“The Popular Vanguard Party has historically maintained that the Costa Rican justice system needs profound transformations, and that this will not happen in a system as corrupt as the one we live in Costa Rica. Working people are all too familiar with the slowness of judicial processes, the inequality in access to justice, and the frequency with which large economic groups seem to receive different treatment than the working class. Faced with the inefficiency of the Constitutional Chamber (Sala IV), the working class suffers the consequences of cases dragging on for years or even decades. Criticizing these shortcomings is legitimate and necessary.”

PVP reminds that the current move is not a struggle between the people and the elites, which creates the danger. 

“We are facing a dispute between different power groups within the system itself. While the cost of living is hitting thousands of working families, while wages remain frozen, while social programs are cut and essential public services deteriorate, the government is trying to direct popular outrage toward a political war against other state institutions.”

PVP lays out the historical pattern of authoritarian projects as they arrive promising order, claiming to represent the people as well as having blatant anti-communist views.

“Today, the judiciary is being questioned, but so are labour unions. Before, it was public universities, the press, autonomous institutions, and any sector that dares to question the ruling power. The problem isn't that the government criticizes the judiciary. The issue is that it seeks to place itself above any institutional, political, or social limits.

We communists are not called to choose between one elite and another. We are not called to decide which dominant group should administer the same system of exploitation. Our task is to organize the working class to build its own independent political force, assume power, and construct a true people's democracy—a democracy of the people, not of the swindlers and plunderers who have plunged us into poverty, thousands of families into misery, without homes or land to cultivate, who are destroying public education and healthcare, and who are after water, electricity, banks, and every institution that generates more wealth for them at the expense of the Costa Rican people.” 

PVP exclaims that they reject both those who have historically used institutions to defend their privileges and those who today seek to exploit popular discontent to concentrate more power in their hands—the seeds of a dictatorship.

“The working people do not need strongmen. They do not need saviours. They do not need false prophets of a circus act. They require organization, they require awareness, they require mobilization. They need to build their own political alternative to confront the economic groups that govern Costa Rica, regardless of who temporarily occupies the Presidential Palace. When an authoritarian government attempts to seize legitimate popular outrage, manipulate it, and turn it into a tool to consolidate its power, the duty of revolutionary forces is to warn of the danger.”

“True transformation lies in the organized people conquering that power to transform the economic structures that produce inequality, exploitation, and dependency.”