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News > Latin America

Zulu Nation Backs Venezuela, Plans Solidarity Hip Hop Tour

  • Members of the UZN.

    Members of the UZN. | Photo: Youtube / Pinky YumYum

Published 25 August 2017
Opinion

The Zulu Nation has built strong ties of solidarity with Venezuelans in the last decade, and are planning an “International Hip Hop 4 Humanity Tour."

The Universal Zulu Nation (UZN), the self-described “hip-hop awareness group” based in the United States, released a statement Thursday in support of the “Venezuelan Bolivarian Government” and the “sovereign right of the Venezuelan people to both struggle and determine their own destiny.”

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The group first built solidarity with Venezuelans in 2007.

That year, its members, through an event put on by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Afro-Venezuelan Network in New York, learned of the “concrete examples of international humanism & African ancestry exhibited by the then Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.”

Since then, the group has planned a hip hop tour inside the country, both to “build solidarity and to provide material support for our Venezuelan Sisters and Brothers”, said UZN’s statement.

The planned tour is to take place in 2018.

“The Bolivarian Government has always recognized the significance of the Haitian Revolution, remained an ally and supporter the Cuban Revolution,” the group pressed. “They have never tried to hide the fact from us that racism, poverty and economic problems existed in Venezuela and have always asked for our solidarity and support in helping to build & resolve these problems.”

“The Venezuelan revolutionary government is also one of the few nations on this earth which acknowledges our U.S. government captured Black/New Afrikan & Puerto Rican Freedom Fighters,” the hip hop group continued.

The group also has “always respected the fact that a head of state (former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez) would not only visit Harlem & The Bronx, but that he would openly admit to being proud of both his kinky hair, thick lips and African-Indigenous heritage.”

They also lauded the Venezuelan government’s oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, and its U.S. subsidiary, Citgo, for using its surplus oil resources “to selflessly support numerous grassroots inner-city programs in the Bronx, New Orleans, Boston and Chicago when U.S. based oil companies have not.”  

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As such, the group concluded, it respects Venezuelans and their right to “determine their own destiny without the historically racist and capitalist economic interference, right wing political influence, mainstream media propaganda and planned military intervention by a fascist President Donald Trump & Senator Marco Rubio led United States Government and it's puppet drug cartel driven allies of the Organization of American States.”

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