On International Working Women’s Day in 2025,Cilia Flores, the wife of VenezuelanPresident Nicolás Maduro,read a poem she wrote highlighting the historic role played by Latin American women in the fight against imperialism.
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We’re not flowers the wind can pluck,we’re roots of rebel and loyal land,we’re grandmothers, mothers, daughters, granddaughters;we are woman.
Our blood pulses with the Manuelas,Luisas, Josefas, Juanas, Cecilias,Apacuanas, Bartolinas, Eulalias,Martas, Anas Marías, Barbaritasand so many others who legacy inspires,commits, and strengthens usto continue walking and traveling our path.
And in our hands and chestsa light is on that nobody will ever turn off:love, peace and liberty.
– Cilia Flores,International Working Women’s Day 2025
One year later, she languishes in a cell in New York City, having been dragged out of her room and kidnapped by U.S. forces on the January 3 attack on Venezuela.The first images after her abduction showed her face bruised. We later learned she had broken ribs, 23 stitches in her forehead, and deteriorating health inside U.S. custody.
Flores is no ordinary first lady. She first rose to prominence in 1992 as a defense lawyer for a group of Venezuelan military officers who rose up against the government ofCarlos Andrés Pérez,which had massacred thousands of people in the Caracazo of 1989–nationwide riots following the imposition of neoliberal austerity measures. Key among those officers wasHugo Chávez, the founder of the Bolivarian Revolution.
In 1993, Cilia founded the Bolivarian Circle of Human Rights and aligned herself with Chávez’s revolutionary movement. In 2000, having helped Chávez win consecutive presidential elections, she was elected to the legislature. By 2006, she became the president of the National Assembly, the first woman in Venezuela’s history to occupy the post. Flores held important positions in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and became the country’s Solicitor General in 2012, a post she left to run Nicolás Maduro’s presidential campaign after President Chávez’s passing.
Source: Global Research
