On March 1, Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez launched his campaign for reelection. In order to do so, the Colombian congress—dominated by paramilitary death squads and other pro-Uribe forces—amended the constitution in 2004 to allow him a second term.
After months of proclaiming the success of the U.S.-supported Colombian counterinsurgency offensive called Plan Patriota, Uribe announced, “the snake is still alive.”
 The United States supports the Colombian counterinsurgency with military equipment and personnel. Photo: Jobard/SIPA |
The “snake” that the death-squad president was referring to is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples’ Army (FARC-EP). The FARC-EP, the largest guerilla army in the Western Hemisphere, grew out of a few peasant self-defense communities attacked by the CIA and Colombian government in 1964.
By 1999, the FARC controlled 60 percent of the country. They currently have a presence in every municipality nationwide. In some places, they create alternative institutions, including schools, medical facilities and grassroots judicial structures.
The U.S. State Department, the European Union and the Colombian government have characterized the FARC-EP and the other main guerilla army, the National Liberation Army (ELN), as terrorists in an effort to legitimize an all-out war on Colombian social movements. First under the guise of the “war on drugs” and now of the “war on terrorism,” the U.S. government has increased its military aid and involvement in Colombia’s civil war.
The real terrorists are the paramilitary death squads organized by big landlords and the Colombian military. These groups are responsible for 95 percent of human rights violations. The death squads are supported and staffed by the Colombian military, according to human rights groups. The paramilitaries receive 80 percent of their funding from drug trafficking, while the FARC is indirectly connected to, at most, 2.5 percent of all coca cultivation in the country, not through trafficking but through taxation of the coca trade.
The United States has sent $4 billion in military aid to the Colombian government over the last five years, making the Colombian death-squad regime the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt. Most of these funds were funneled straight into the country’s decaying military, in order to revitalize the counterinsurgency war in Colombia.
The huge increase in military aid began during the Clinton administration. After a massive offensive by the FARC-EP in 1996, then-president Andrés Pastrana opened up peace talks with the FARC-EP in 1998. Using the talks as breathing space, Pastrana and the U.S. government worked to reshape and retrain the Colombian military and intelligence units. The Colombian government purchased Blackhawk helicopters, and U.S. military presence increased in the region in the form of hundreds of military “advisors.”
Talks broke off in 2002, shortly before Uribe took power.
‘Plan Patriota’
 The FARC-EP is the largest guerrilla army in the Western hemisphere. |
In June 2003, the Colombian and U.S. governments formally launched Plan Patriota. According to a memorandum sent to the U.S. Congress by the Washington Office on Latin America, “the Patriot Plan signals the entrance of the United States into a new, more intense phase of military involvement in Colombia’s internal armed conflict.” The memorandum also describes Plan Patriota as “the most ambitious counter-insurgency offensive ever undertaken by the Colombian government.”
Plan Patriota was essentially a declaration of all-out war on the guerrillas. The plan involves a force of 17,000 to 20,000 Colombian soldiers led and supported by the United States military. Counting the U.S. Marines, military advisors and contracted ex-military mercenaries, there are currently 1,400 U.S. military personnel in Colombia, according to a May 13 Miguel Urbano Rodrigues article.
The main target of this expanded counterinsurgency campaign has not been the guerrilla army itself, but the unarmed peasants that make up the social base of support for the FARC-EP. In a March 2 statement, FARC-EP commander-in-chief Manuel Marulanda stated, “Forty-five percent of the mass organizations have been physically attacked, removed from their lands, jailed and denounced as suspect. Many have been killed … because of the action of paramilitaries, the army, the police and the secret services of the State during operations. However, these facts have not reached public opinion because of the censorship of the radio and press.”
According to a Jan. 10 International Press Service article, “Plan Patriot is aimed at hemming in the insurgents in a 260,000 square kilometer region in Southern Colombia. … The strategy is aimed at tracking down the rebel leaders and surrounding them with rings of elite counterinsurgency troops.”
The FARC-EP initially responded to Plan Patriota by withdrawing into the mountains to regroup and spare the peasant populations targeted by the government campaign.
In February 2005, the insurgency launched a counteroffensive, inflicting the worst damage on the Colombian armed forces since Uribe took office in August 2002 and pledged to defeat the guerrillas. In February 2005, the FARC’s Eastern Block—one of seven major units across the country—averaged one attack on government forces per day.
In April 2005, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B. Myers claimed, “we’re winning” in Colombia. Despite the Pentagon’s optimism, Plan Patriota has clearly not produced the intended results. The FARC-EP remains strong in its struggle against the Colombian oligarchy, and the government campaign has been unable to destroy the guerrillas’ social base.
James Brittain, a sociology lecturer writing in the September 2005 Monthly Review, noted that “while maintaining its guerrilla structure, the FARC-EP has been moving away from small scale operations and into large-scale continuous direct confrontations implemented through well-orchestrated simultaneous attack on state forces in many parts of the country.” Guerrilla attacks on the economic infrastructure doubled from 2004 to 2005.
On Dec. 27, 300 FARC soldiers attacked a 90-soldier counterinsurgency unit in Meta, south of the capital Bogotá. Twenty-nine soldiers were killed and as many as 24 wounded. Right-wing senatorial candidate and military analyst Alfredo Rangel called it “the worst military embarrassment of the government,” according to a Jan. 10 IPS article.
Elections amid war
In anticipation of the March 12 congressional elections and the May presidential elections, the FARC-EP has again stepped up its campaign against the repressive U.S.-backed Uribe regime.
The FARC-EP has instituted two travel bans in order to disrupt the elections, which it considers illegitimate. It has carried out numerous attacks on police, soldiers and politicians. It has launched intensive attacks in Meta, Guaviare, Arauca, Caqueta, Viehada and Huila provinces. (Xinhua, March 1)
As part of the political struggle surrounding the elections, the FARC-EP has reiterated its proposal for a New Government of National Reconstruction based on a 10-point plan. In an interview with INVERTA, a progressive Brazilian publication, Comandante Raúl Reyes explained, “The guerrillas of the FARC are formulating a proposal to create a New Government of National Reconstruction to the most diverse social, political and economic expressions of the Colombian people. It guarantees peace with social justice, in defense of our people’s dignity, sovereignty and the definitive independence necessary for the construction of a New Colombia, free from exploitation.”
The FARC-EP is not the only revolutionary insurgency in Colombia. The ELN was also formed in the early 1960s. The Colombian government attempts to use differences between the FARC-EP and ELN to its advantage. While the government refuses to negotiate with the FARC-EP, it is set to begin formal negotiations with the weaker ELN in April. In preparation for those talks, arrest warrants for two ELN leaders have been withdrawn. Meanwhile, the Colombian military through Plan Patriota is continuing to hunt down the leaders of the FARC.
The ELN is participating in the elections, and has even declared a ceasefire for the duration of the elections. It is joining with the leftist Social and Political Front, Democratic Pole and Democratic Alternative in support of a single candidate. The platform for the left campaign is based on five points: no to Plan Colombia, no to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, yes to negotiations between the government and the insurgency, no to fiscal reform and privatization and no to the reelection of Uribe.
ELN international relations coordinator Milton Hernández stated that “a historic opportunity exists in Colombia to have for the first time a government that is democratic in character, a government of political transition, between the state and the guerrillas, which does not correspond to neither the neoliberal model nor to the fascist model of the State Department and which is possible on the basis of a grand unity of will of the patriotic left sectors.”
The FARC-EP’s tactical orientation toward the elections is different. Given the government repression, it considers the elections at best a sham democratic veneer for brutal ruling-class oppression, and at worst a deadly trap for working-class and progressive activists.
Colombian history is filled with examples of how the electoral path can be a dangerous trajectory for revolutionaries in Colombia. The M-19, a revolutionary armed group famous for its 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice, entered the electoral process when they renounced armed struggle in the late 1980s. They have since become almost entirely irrelevant as a revolutionary force in Colombia.
The experience of the Patriotic Union in the 1980s, although altogether different, is also instructive. Following negotiations between the FARC, the government and others in 1984, the Patriotic Union was created to explore the possibility of electoral struggle without surrendering the armed struggle. Over the next ten years, 4,000 leaders and members of the Patriotic Union were murdered by right-wing paramilitaries acting in coordination with the Colombian military.
Conditions compel the struggle
The Colombian elections and civil war take place in the context of continued neoliberal economic plunder, brutal state repression and paramilitary violence directed against social justice movements. Comandante Marulanda notes, “all our actions are in response to the violence of the state allied to paramilitarism.”
The attacks on the working class and peasants have been carried out before a backdrop of constant class polarization and economic plunder. In Colombia, the richest 3 percent own 70 percent of the arable land. Fifty-seven percent of the people subsist on 3 percent of the land, while the richest 1 percent of the population controls 45 percent of the wealth.
Uribe has continued and expanded these trends, not only pursuing the policy of total war, but also reducing overtime wages, raising the retirement age and cutting the salaries of public-sector workers by a third.
With the material and political support of U.S. imperialism, the Uribe regime and the Pastrana administration have earlier used different strategies to obtain the same goal of demobilizing the revolutionary forces and suppressing the Colombian social movement.
Despite the Colombian government’s periodic victory proclamations, it is clear that the guerrilla struggle will not die as long as the conditions that produced that struggle remain. The intensifying repression from the capitalist class has been matched and will only be matched with intensifying resistance and a growing fight for national sovereignty.
Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.
