25 years ago: A dozen immigrant farmworkers killed in Spanish train-van collision
In the early morning on January 3, 2001, 14 Ecuadorian immigrants being transported to the farm fields to pick vegetables in an 8-passenger van collided with a commuter train in the city of Lorca, Spain. 12 of the farm workers died—8 men and 4 women—from their injuries. The remaining two immigrants were seriously injured but survived after being bulldozed over 650 feet. Some of the deceased involved several family generations: a mother and son, and a father and son. Several left behind large families and debts in Ecuador. The train passengers suffered only minor injuries from the deadly impact.
The system of immigrant exploitation from Ecuador to Spain, bankrolled from the corporate offices to the slums of the proletariat, provided the framework and sowed the conditions for the brutal train crash. Spanish-owned agribusiness conglomerates abetted the desperate plight of workers in Ecuador, a country with a population 65 percent unemployed or underemployed.
In Lorca, alone around 12,000 Ecuadorians labored under oppressive conditions and poverty pay. In the surrounding region of Murcia, 20,000 lived and worked. After mortgaging their homes and financing their travels with debt, immigrants arrived undocumented, a fact that the corporations exploited. None of the immigrant workers had resident or work papers.
Instead of driving the direct route to the job, the driver, who made daily trips back and forth transporting farm hands to the field for a private company, took a longer, secondary route in order to avoid running into Civil Guard patrols looking for undocumented immigrants.
Avoiding the motorway meant using the railroad crossing where the collision occurred.
Early every morning, immigrants gathered by the hundreds in the Plaza del Ovalo in Lorca, waiting for the small agricultural managers and middlemen for the big agribusiness to select them for a day's work. They then huddled onto the vans that transport them to the fields, greenhouses and warehouses where broccoli and lettuce are reaped and processed, working up to 11 hours for around $3 an hour.
Alternatively, they were contracted on a piecework basis paid 10 pesetas (less than 1 US cent) for a kilo of broccoli. Often they were forced by the employers to work at night to avoid the labor inspectors and were continuously under threat of being reported to the authorities for working without permits if they protest.
The company implicated, Greensol S.L., had been declared provisionally insolvent yet continued operations; owners were reportedly absent after the crash. The trade unions—UGT and CC.OO—responded to the tragedy with calls for administrative probes but upheld the corporatist frameworks (tripartite accords) that have facilitated temporary contracts and precarious conditions of work.
50 years ago: Venezuela nationalizes oil industry
On January 1, 1976, Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez officially proclaimed the nationalization of the country's petroleum industry. The move established the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) and transferred the assets and concessions of major international energy corporations to the Venezuelan state.
Pérez framed the nationalization as a “second independence” for Venezuela and a triumph of national sovereignty. During the ceremony at the Mene Grande oilfield, he declared: “This is a decision of the Venezuelan people. We are now the masters of our destiny and the owners of our own wealth. We are taking the path toward the recovery of our fundamental resources to put them at the service of our country's progress.”
The nationalization of Venezuelan oil was not a socialist reorganization of oil resources to meet social needs. Rather, it was a realignment by the Venezuelan ruling class to capture and centralize a larger share of massive oil rents, which had quadrupled following the 1973 oil crisis.
Prior to 1976, ownership of Venezuelan oil was held primarily by the US and European major oil companies including Exxon (Esso), Gulf, Mobil, Texaco, and Royal Dutch Shell. These monopolies controlled production through long-term concessions, or exclusive contracts, where the companies both managed the technical infrastructure and dominated global marketing chains, siphoning off the vast majority of profits. The 1976 decree converted these concessions into state property, making PDVSA the most important economic entity in Venezuela.
The nationalization did not represent a rupture with imperialist capital. Despite the populist rhetoric, the Venezuelan government paid approximately $1 billion in compensation to the expropriated firms. The transition was carefully managed to ensure the continued profitability of the international oil companies. Under “technical service contracts” and “association agreements,” permitted under Article 5 of the nationalization law, foreign companies continued to provide specialized technology, management, and marketing services in exchange for lucrative fees and guaranteed access to crude oil.
In many cases, the “nationalized” subsidiaries of firms like Exxon and Shell were simply renamed (e.g., Lagoven and Maraven) and allowed to function as semi-autonomous entities, often staffed by the same pro-Western elites. This layer of oil managers would come to form the social backbone of the political right-wing in Venezuela.
In Washington, the administration of President Gerald Ford maintained an outwardly neutral stance. While Ford expressed concern in private correspondence that Venezuelan control over its own oil would lead to potential oil price hikes, his administration's primary objective was to ensure a “dependable supplier” and safeguard US corporate interests.
The 1976 nationalization highlights the inherent limits of bourgeois nationalism. While the move redirected a larger share of the oil profits to the Venezuelan state, it did not transform the underlying class relations of production. The industry remained subordinated to the global capitalist market and the imperatives of imperialist finance.
75 years ago: North Korean and Chinese forces recapture Seoul
On December 31, 1950, China's New Year's Offensive of the Korean War began when the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (PVA) attacked South Korean forces along the 38th parallel. The offensive resulted, only a few days later, in the evacuation of Seoul by US forces.
Seoul, the capital of South Korea, had been held since late September by the US-led forces. But they suffered severe setbacks in the war after China intervened to reinforce the North Korean campaign, which culminated in the military evacuation of US and South Korean forces from Pyongyang in December.
The New Year offensive continued China's southward advance, beginning on December 31 with a large-scale attack on Republic of Korea (ROK) divisions that were stationed along the 38th Parallel. Following several days of fighting and retreats by the ROK, US Army commanders ordered the military evacuation of Seoul on January 3, out of fear that the PVA would be able to continue their advance and encircle the US troops stationed there.
PVA troops, accompanied by a deployment of Korean People's Army (KPA) soldiers, arrived in Seoul on January 4, but by that time the entire city was evacuated. The following days saw the PVA/KPA troops capture the town of Gimpo and Incheon, but shortly afterwards the military campaign came to a halt, in part due to the exhaustion of the troops who had essentially fought continuously for over two months since the beginning of China's Second Phase Offensive.
Though Seoul would once again change hands in favour of the US two months later, the recapture of the South Korean capital marked the second time in less than six months that US and South Korean forces had lost the city. It further shattered claims made only weeks earlier that the war was nearing a successful conclusion. It occurred amidst proposals from high-ranking officials in the US to dramatically escalate the war, including with the use of nuclear weapons.
100 years: Massive funeral procession for poet Sergei Esenin in Moscow
On December 31, 1925, Moscow mourned the death of Sergei Esenin, one of the most popular poets in the Soviet Union. Esenin had committed suicide in the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad and written a death poem in his own blood. Following his death, his body was transported to Moscow, where tens of thousands formed a “living wall” along the streets.
The procession was led by fellow writers and friends, including Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Aseev, who carried the coffin on their shoulders. A pivotal moment occurred at Tverskoy Boulevard: the pallbearers carried the casket around the Pushkin Monument three times. This “handover” from Russia’s greatest literary icon to the “last poet of the village” moved the crowd to tears. Mourners tossed flowers onto the snow-covered base of the statue.
At the Press House of the Writers Union, a telegram from the former wife of the poet, the famed American dancer Isadora Duncan, was read: “The news of Esenin's death has given me the greatest pain. He had youth, beauty, genius. Unwilling to settle for the ordinary, he destroyed his young life. His spirit lives on in his poems, which are forever in the heart of the Russian people.”
Esenin’s poetry is a soulful lament for a disappearing rural Russia, blending raw, “hooligan” vulnerability with vivid imagery of the agrarian landscape. It captures the friction between the spirit of the peasant village and the encroaching reality of the industrial Soviet age. His death provoked a sustained debate in the communist press and in the literary journals. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote a poetic “response” to Esenin’s suicide and Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik leader then serving as Stalin’s theoretical frontman in the struggle against the Left Opposition, wrote that Esenin’s poetry represented the “worst elements of the Russian peasantry”—drunkenness, nostalgia, and a “defeatist” melancholy.
One of the most sensitive and penetrating eulogies was written by Leon Trotsky in an essay that appeared in January. Also worth noting are the words of the great soviet literary critic, a member of the Left Opposition, Aleksander Voronsky: “In his poems and verses, in the life, fate and demise of the poet, in his poetic and life’s image, there is commingled what is tender and brittle, subtle and moving, doomed and beloved.”
In the coming years, as the Stalinist bureaucracy tightened its grip on Soviet culture, Esenin’s books would be removed from libraries and he would be written out of official histories. It became dangerous to display his photo. He was only readmitted to his place in Soviet literary history after the Khrushchev “thaw” of the 1950s.