The March 1 Colombian attacks in Ecuadorian territory on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) killed their number two commander, Raúl Reyes, many of his comrades and four Mexican students. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez commented on his weekly television program “Aló Presidente” that “the Colombian government has turned into the Israel of Latin America.”
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As Latin America shifts to the left, Colombia’s value to U.S. imperialism becomes ever more significant. Just as Israel does in the Middle East, Colombia serves as a U.S. garrison state and as a proxy force that extends U.S. power in the region. Numerous parallels can be drawn from the struggle within Colombia and the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is critical that revolutionaries and progressive people be able navigate through the colossal imperialist propaganda campaign against the FARC-EP and emerge with a clear understanding of the four-decade-long war against imperialism in Colombia.
Rise and growth in the midst of struggle
In his article “The FARC-EP in Colombia: A Revolutionary Exception in an Age of Imperialist Expansion,” James Brittain, a sociology professor at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, noted that little has changed in Colombia since Che Guevara drove through the country. In his now famous “Motorcycle Diaries,” Che wrote that the so-called oldest democracy in Latin America had “more repression of individual freedom” than any other county he had visited. (Monthly Review, Sept 2005)
Che’s words were written in the middle of a particularly violent era in Colombian history, appropriately known as “La Violencia,” or “The Violence.” During that period, Colombia began to fulfill its role as the “Israel of Latin America”: it became the first state to receive assistance from the World Bank (then called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the first to receive official U.S. counterinsurgency and military assistance.
The consequences of these policies are very clear in present-day Colombia. A small group of wealthy landowners and capitalists have a stranglehold over all political and economic power, resulting in deep-running contradictions between rich and poor.
The richest 3 percent now own over 70 percent of the arable land while 57 percent subsist on less than 3 percent of that land. The richest 1 percent of the population controls 45 percent of the wealth and 37 large landholders hold half of all farmland. The ratio of income between the poorest and richest 10 percent doubled from 40-to-1 in 1990 to 80-to-1 by 2000.
These economic conditions combined with a strong tradition of leftist opposition were the seed from which the FARC was born.
The Cold War offensive in Latin America, which intensified under the Kennedy administration, led to the United States and Colombian government agreeing to carry out attacks against rural collectives that were formed in direct opposition to the central government in Bogotá.
The military assault aimed at the Marquetalia region in southwestern Colombia commenced on May 27, 1964. It was made possible by extensive U.S. economic and military support through the Latin American Security Operation Plan.
Rising in resistance against this assault, the FARC-EP considers May 27, 1964, as the official date of its origin. Washington seeks to turn reality upside down when it claims to use force in response to the violence of armed groups; in reality, oppressed peoples resort to armed struggle to combat the violence of their oppressors, who block all peaceful avenues to liberation.
The FARC-EP’s growth over the past four decades reveals the extensive support it enjoys from the most oppressed communities in Colombia despite the media’s negative portrayal. In 1964, the FARC-EP was only active in four municipalities out of 1,050, but by 1999 had increased its reach to more than 60 percent of the country. In 1995, it was estimated that over 93 percent of all “municípios (counties) of recent settlement” in Colombia had a guerrilla presence. (Violence in Colombia 1990-2000, 15)
The FARC-EP formally provides some areas with schools, medical facilities and grassroots judicial structures, while others may have just a smaller guerilla presence due to the conditions wrought by the civil war.
The popular support enjoyed by the FARC-EP is illustrated by the increase over the past several years of rural inhabitants who have migrated to FARC-EP inhabited areas.
The number of rural inhabitants entering the demilitarized zone maintained by the FARC-EP is revealing. Prior the establishment of the DMZ during the 1998-2002 peace talks, the population was only 100,000. By the time the Colombian government invaded the region and ended the peace negotiations, there were roughly 740,000 Colombians who had migrated to the guerrilla-held territory. (“Elusive Peace: Struggling Against the Logic of Violence,” NACLA Report of the Americas 34, no. 2, 2000: 32-37)
The reasons for migration range from security to solidarity and also the ability to create alternative community-based development projects.
The FARC-EP’s 1964 troop count of 48 swelled to 50,000 by 2004, with the largest increases coming in the 1990s during the brutal implementation of neo-liberal economic policies and the introduction of Clinton’s Plan Colombia.
The FARC-EP’s leadership, support base, and membership have been developed from the very strongholds it enjoys in the rural and mountainous regions of Colombia. The organization has been largely made up of peasants, some of the most oppressed people in Colombia, who account for roughly 65 percent of all members. Brittain correctly notes that “this is important to understand when discussing the contemporary forces” fighting against the guerrillas—namely, the forces of a “rancid oligarchy,” as Chávez calls the Colombian elite, and their imperialist supporters in Washington.
The FARC-EP has grown from its base in subsistence peasantry to incorporate indigenous populations, Afro-Colombians, displaced landless rural laborers, intellectuals, unionists, teachers and sectors of the urban workforce. Forty-five percent of its members and comandantes are women.
The role of the FARC-EP today in Latin America
It is difficult to discuss all the dynamics of the FARC-EP in its struggle against the Colombian oligarchy and its influence over the collective battle of the people of Latin America to shed the historic chains of imperialism and neo-colonialism.
However, it is important to note that the developments leading to the assassination of Raúl Reyes have to be understood in the context of a massive destabilization campaign against the entire leftward shift in the region after the defeat of the Venezuelan constitutional reform referendum in December.
The international crisis that developed after the Colombian raid, and the accusations levied by narco-president Álvaro Uribe, particularly those tying the FARC-EP to a transaction to buy materials to develop a dirty bomb, were clearly meant to justify further actions against Chávez and other leftist forces in Latin America under the false banner of the “war on terror.”
This interpretation is supported by the recent push by the U.S. Congress to classify Venezuela as a “terrorist state” and Uribe’s threats to prosecute Chávez under the International Criminal Court.
In the revolutionary struggle for socialism in Latin America, the FARC-EP remains a leader in a country notorious for its brutal repression and subservience to U.S. imperialism. It is the duty of revolutionaries in the United States to struggle in solidarity with our Latin American sisters and brothers in order to raise the banner of socialism worldwide.
