Former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt has become a darling of the liberal human rights movement since her July 2008 release from captivity by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP). One admirer has even described her as a “secular saint.”
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Betancourt has become the figurehead of a movement aimed at delegitimizing the armed struggle of the Colombian people. She recently finished a whirlwind tour of visits with foreign presidents and pop musicians such as Madonna and Bono as part of this effort.
Betancourt’s dramatic rise in popularity coincides with a concentrated propaganda effort by the corporate media in both the United States and Colombia to declare the FARC defeated. This campaign highlighted the deaths of FARC leaders Raul Reyes and Manuel Marulanda, and the staged freeing of Betancourt and three U.S. mercenaries as catastrophic defeats for the FARC.
Though effective as a tool to manipulate public opinion, the propaganda campaign discounts the reality of the situation in Colombia.
The Colombian economy has long been suffering the bitter consequences of years of neoliberal, pro-corporate policies that have privatized whole industries. It has one of the highest unemployment rates in Latin America: 10.8 percent as of Nov. 2008. The worsening global economic situation has only aggravated the predicaments of the country’s working class.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed Uribe government has been rocked by scandal after scandal in 2008. Many of those scandals concern the connections between the president and congress with top drug traffickers.
But this paled in comparison to the most explosive charge. The highest levels of the Colombian military were implicated in a program that executed civilians then camouflaged them as FARC fighters. Soldiers were offered rewards for corpses, their victims mostly homeless men. The deaths were used to inflate FARC casualties in a further attempt to fabricate evidence of a FARC collapse. A military general resigned after other commanders were eventually fired for their involvement in the death-squad program.
Paramilitary groups operate within Colombia, in cooperation and coordination with the Colombian military, to terrorize the population. Colombia is still one of the most dangerous places in the world for unionists and other progressive organizers.
Betancourt wants to lead the chorus of voices attempting to discredit the armed struggle in Colombia in general, and the FARC in particular. However, the armed struggle of the Colombian people is based not on a whimsical desire to achieve power through violence. It is a struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist hegemony that has denied the Colombian people the right to their own lands and resources. These conditions have created dire poverty perpetuated by brutal state repression.
Betancourt and other liberal critics have accused both the right-wing Colombian government and the FARC as being equally unwilling to compromise. Betancourt has also said that “in the two years that remain before the next elections, the FARC could change its position drastically and finally enter a peace process.” (Latin American Herald Tribune, Jan 14)
In fact, the FARC has committed to peace negotiations as one method toward a political solution of the crisis in Colombia. On Dec. 21, the FARC again offered to release six prisoners of war as a good faith effort to restart negotiations between the Colombian government and the rebels. (AP, Dec. 30, 2008) The offer to release prisoners is typical of many earlier gestures towards the renewal of a peace process. Their gestures have not been reciprocated by the Uribe administration, which stands by its hardline approach built on military violence.
The ongoing violence and the expansion of poverty and repression in Colombia are the sole responsibility of the Colombian capitalist class and their imperialist backers in Washington. The Colombian government has repeatedly undermined and abruptly ended peace negotiations. It has also brutally violated its most basic agreements. During a negotiated peace arrangement in the 1980s, the Colombian state systematically murdered over 5,000 organizers and activists of the Patriotic Union. The FARC, meanwhile, is alive and well.
