Red Flag Party (in Spanish: Partido Bandera Roja) is a communist party in Venezuela. It was formed in 1970 by anti-revisionist members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). The Red Flag Party initially supported the ideology of Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Party of Labour following the Sino-Albanian Split, though in later years it has gravitated back towards Maoism.
In the 1970’s up until the 1990’s it was engaged in guerrilla warfare against the government. A young Hugo Chávez’s first assignment in the Army was as commander of a communications platoon attached to a counter-insurgency force—the Manuel Cedeño Mountain Infantry Battalion, headquartered in Barinas and Cumaná. In 1976, it was tasked with suppressing the guerilla insurgency staged by the Party.
The party is currently led by Gabriel Rafael Puerta Aponte. After the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez in 1998, the party started aligning itself with the right-wing and social democratic opponents of Chávez, labeling him as a social-fascist. This has led to desertions from the party, as many cadres instead joined the Chávez camp.
The party was suspended from the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (Unity & Struggle) in 2005. It was succeeded within the organization by the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Venezuela.
In the 2006 presidential election, the party supported the candidature of Manuel Rosales. The party got (as one of several parties backing Rosales) 18,468 votes (0.16% of the nationwide vote) in that election.
As of 2009 its popularity has rapidly diminished from its prior years and is reported to have less than 100 militant members.
The Espresso Stalinist 