On Thursday night, Left Voice posted a beautiful photograph taken by Fredy Henao of trans women leading a march in Colombia. They are participating in the mobilizations which have occurred over the last two weeks. The protests exploded around a tax hike, which has since been rescinded. But the genie is out of the bottle and the mobilizations continue — against the brutal repression against Colombia, against the right wing government of Ivan Duque and the US funded Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron (ESMAD). Dozens of protesters have been murdered and hundreds injured. 

By Friday, Left Voice had received hundreds of messages from Myanmar in solidarity with Colombian protesters — most from queer people in Myanmar who are participating in the protests and see their struggle reflected in the struggle in Colombia. 

The people of Myanmar have been in the streets since a military coup on February 1 that ousted democratically elected President Aung San Suu Kyi. Millions of people in Myanmar have engaged in protests, as well as general strikes and partial strikes over the past months. Hundreds of people have been murdered in the protests that have raged. 

Here are some of the messages from Myanmar to Colombia. You can see the Facebook messages in solidarity here and here. We invite people in Colombia to send messages to Myanmar in solidarity as well. 

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Keep fighting Columbia. We feel your pain. Cause we are facing a similar situation in Myanmar. Just want all the Colombians to know that we, people of Myanmar, are so proud of you. Fighting.

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No matter where you look. That very oppressive community, “LGBT” came out for Protest/Revolution for they know well what it means to be oppressed! My respect.

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Get weapons in your hand. Join all the forces you get.

Life without weapons is worse than you can imagine. If you have weapons, you will win for sure. Don’t believe the U.N. and don’t hope for foreign help. I am from Myanmar and I know how you feel.

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We (people from Myanmar ) strongly stand with you Colombia . We must win this Fight. Be Safe Guys . Let’s Fight TOGETHER

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I just wanna tell the Colombian people to stay strong and I truly support the people. I believe in people’s power. The LGBTQs and the straight people whoever they are, they deserve what they want.Politics must be based on the civilians’ desires for their future.
Please stay strong,I’m praying for Colombia. I’m from Myanmar. We don’t know when they will cut off the Internet access again.

God bless you Colombia.

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To the people from Colombia. Stay safe and stay fighting till you get what you want . You’ll win for sure. We are on the same boat fighting for freedom. Myanmar stands with you.

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We’re all together in this fight against injustice! Greetings from Colombia, brothers and sisters from Myanmar.

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Myanmar’s revolutionary generations stand with you. Keep fighting Stay strong.Don’t give up guys.

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The people of Myanmar understand what you are suffering. They are standing by you. Try it. Overthrow the unwanted government.

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Stay strong guys We are also fighting for it too so we can totally relate how much you all go through. stay safe and be careful praying from Myanmar

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Colombia and Burma (Myanmar) are the two countries with the longest civil wars. The people of both countries have suffered for decades from brutal oppression by their right-wing governments. Indigenous peoples in both countries have, over time, experienced the destruction of their cultures and existence by the ravages of their racist governments. Under the ploy of investments from the powerful capitalist countries and the pretext of economic development, workers from both countries are being constantly pushed into poverty.

The culprit behind all these oppressions is the global capitalist economy. Only with the solidarity of the people of the world, including the people of Myanmar and Colombia, can capitalism be overthrown. Only internationalism can bring unity and world peace to the human race.

Comrades from Myanmar stand in solidarity with the Colombian comrades with no exceptions. 

Workers of the world, Unite!

Burmese:

ကိုလံဘီယာနိုင်ငံနဲ့ ဗမာနိုင်ငံဟာ ပြည်တွင်းစစ် အရှည်ကြာဆုံး ခံစားကြရတဲ့ နိုင်ငံတွေဖြစ်တယ်။ လက်ယာဝါဒီအစိုးရတို့ရဲ့ ရက်စက်စွာ ဖိနှိပ်ခြင်းကို နှစ်နိုင်ငံလုံးက ပြည်သူများက ဆယ်စုနှစ်ပေါင်းများစွာ ခံစားခဲ့ကြရတယ်။ နှစ်နိုင်ငံလုံးက ဌာနေလူမျိုးစုများရဲ့ ယဉ်ကျေးမှုများနဲ့ ဖြစ်တည်မှုများကို လက်ယာ အစိုးရများက ဖယ်ရှားဖျောက်ဖျက်ခြင်းကို အချိန်နဲ့ အမျှခံစားကြရတယ်။ အရင်းရှင် နိုင်ငံကြီးများရဲ့ ရင်းနှီးမြှုပ်နှံမှု အကြောင်းပြပြီး စီးပွားရေးဖွံ့ဖြိုးတိုးတက်မှု ခေါင်းစဉ်အောက်မှာလည်း နှစ်နိုင်ငံနေ အလုပ်သမားများဟာ ဆင်းရဲတွင်းထဲ တွန်းပို့ခံရပြီး ဖိနှိပ်ခံထားရတယ်။ 

ဤကဲ့သို့ ဖိနှိပ်မှုများကို ဖြစ်နေစေတဲ့ တရားခံဟာ ကမ္ဘာလုံးဆိုင်ရာ အရှင်းရှင်စီးပွားရေး စနစ်ဖြစ်တယ်။ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံနှင့် ကိုလံဘီယာနိုင်ငံတို့မှ ပြည်သူများအပါအဝင် တကမ္ဘာလုံးရှိပြည်သူများရဲ့ သွေးစည်းညီညွတ်မှုဖြင့်သာ အရင်းရှင်စီးပွားရေးစနစ်ကို ဖြိုချဖျက်စီးနိုင်မှာ ဖြစ်တယ်။ နိုင်ငံတကာဝါဒဖြင့်သာ လူသားမျိုးနွယ်စု အတွက် ကမ္ဘာ့ငြိမ်းချမ်းရေး ဖော်ဆောင်နိုင်မှာ ဖြစ်တယ်။

ဗမာပြည်မှ လုပ်သားရဲဘော်များဟာ ကိုလံဘီယာပြည်မှ ရဲဘော်များဘက်မှာ ခြွင်းချက်မရှိရပ်တည်ပါတယ်။ 

ကမ္ဘာ့လုပ်သားများ သွေးစည်းညီညွတ်ကြ!