Cruz Villegas: Defender of the rights of the working class (+seeding)

Published at: 11/01/2025 08:24 AM

On January 11, 1994, Cruz Villegas Sequera, a defender of the rights of the working class and a prominent Venezuelan journalist, died.

As a bricklayer in the Ministry of Public Works (MOP), he was part of the trade union movement in the Association of Masons of the Federal District (DF), with which he joined the strike of June 1936 against the Lara Law and in support of workers and peasants in the states of Aragua, and Miranda, DF and other regions, a fact that was the genesis of his history of combat for workers.

He was imprisoned in 1952, in the prison of the Bishop, in Caracas, for more than three years; and then he was sent to the jungles of the Casiquiare Department of the Amazon.

Given his organizational and leadership capacity, he was press and propaganda secretary of the Unified Federation of Workers of the Federal District and Miranda (1958); member of the General Council of the CTV, elected at the Third Workers' Congress (1959); member of the IV Workers' Congress, which gave rise to the Unified Central of Workers of Venezuela (CUTV) (1963); member of the VI Congress of the World Trade Union Federation (WSF) 1965, in Warsaw, Poland; leader of the Union of Marble, Mosaic and Similar Workers; member of the General Council of the World Trade Union Federation (1965), president of the CUTV by the V Congress of Workers (1967), ratified in office at the VI and VII Congresses of the Central; member of its Executive Bureau during the Congress of the FSM (1969); Honorary President of the CUTV; and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela.

This history of struggle earned him several awards, including the Lenin Memorial, awarded by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (1973).

Mazo News Team