The Governments’ diatribe attempting to de-legitimize the
insurgency, labeling it as a terrorist threat, would not
merit the slightest response were it not for the opportunity
it provides to deepen the analysis of the Colombian
conflict’s causes and characteristics.
The governmental argument disseminated at various national
and international venues according to which in Colombia
there is no conflict but instead, a terrorist threat, is so
ridiculous that it has given rise to a real avalanche of
contradictors from many areas on the part of all sectors of
Colombian society and of prestigious organizations and
personalities of other countries.
Today no one is unaware that what exists here is a severe
conflict, which we of the FARC-EP have characterized as
social and political in order to underline the causes that
have given rise to it and the forms it has taken in the
course of its complex historical development.
Why is the characterization made of the Colombian conflict
so important? Simply because if the physician makes an
erroneous diagnosis, it is only logical that he/she will
also be mistaken about the treatment and as a consequence
the patient will get worse instead of improving. This is a
problem of common sense.
So, how can one deny that at the roots of the Colombian
conflict lie the contradictions fundamental to a country
whose ruling class in power, so attached to its narrow
interests, refuses to resolve the problems vital to our
economic development and the building a more just, sovereign
and democratic society?
At present in Colombia, the big landowners, less than 1% of
the population own 55% of the arable land. 7,000 families
monopolize 29 million hectares while on the other hand, one
million campesinos do not have even one square meter of land
and another 700,000 campesinos have only one or two hectares
to cultivate.
Obviously such inequity can only be maintained by means of
the violence and terror that has been systematically
unleashed by the big landowning bourgeoisie relying on the
official army and its paramilitary gangs. This likewise
explains from where the three million displaced compatriots
have come and who has taken the lands robbed from them.
Titles to more than six million hectares are in the process
of being legalized at the new land registry office in Santa
Fe de Rialto. Do they say something about terrorism?
How is possible to claim the conflict has nothing to do with
the more than 3.5 million Colombians without work and the
8.4 million who survive with their families from things like
leftovers and sifting through trash?
Or the 4 million who suffer the heartless exploitation of
big capital forced by necessity to work for less than the
monthly minimum wage? And what is to be said about their
counterparts, the bosses who are barely 8% of the population
but have in their hands 87% of the production and sales of
the country’s goods and services?
What must these same workers think about the 8 trillion
pesos that have been robbed from them and have gone to
fatten the fortunes of their bosses thanks to the Uribista
labour reform that put an end to overtime pay and extended
the legal day of exploitation to 10 pm? Just who is to
blame for terror here?
Are not the 800,000 families who are victims of the
financial system’s vampires and in danger of loosing their
homes or are forced to pay ten times the real cost, also
victims of the Colombian conflict? Why shouldn’t we ask
them what they think of the usurers of the financial system
that dominates this country? Who are the terrorists in this
case?
How is it possible for them to try to talk to us about the
beauties of the Colombian system when here in the 21st
century we have 16 million compatriots without health care,
while public hospitals are being systematically closed. And
what about the planned bankruptcy of the institution of
Social Security for the purpose of creating conditions for
its privatization?
Does the figure of 5.6 million inhabitants without potable
water not produce terror? What impression about development
must the 3.5 million illiterate youth currently in Colombia
have?
In what truly democratic country is it possible to auction
off for a song the main and most important enterprises for
strategic development built with everyone’s resources, all
without consulting the people about these decisions?
Would not the democratic course be to ascertain the will of
the sovereign people concerning fundamental decisions like,
for example, the rate of exploitation of natural resources
and the “negotiation” of a “free trade accord”?
What sovereign and democratic nation would consider
extraditing its nationals and signing an “accord” giving
up the right to judge US civilian and military functionaries
implicated in crimes like torture of the kind the gringos
are shamelessly practicing in Guantánamo, Iraq and
Afghanistán?
And what sort of a model of democracy is this wherein mafia
money finances electoral campaigns, the paramilitary chiefs
boast of controlling the “honourable” Congress that has
approved the law guaranteeing them impunity for their crimes
and where only 51% of the potential electors participate in
the elections, including the votes deposited at the more
than 5,600 tables disputed in the last vote for the Congress
of the Republic?
Is not the existence of only one nationally circulating
daily newspaper, of the monopoly over the local press, the
radio networks, television channels and the principal
magazines all held by the same families and economic
conglomerates that control industry, commerce, the banks and
the top positions of State and Government, something more
illustrative than any harangue by a paisa flatterer looking
for support for his militarist delirium?
Can a regime guilty by action or by omission for the murder
of more than 100 labour unionists every year be called
democratic? Are not more than 5,000 leaders and militants
of the Patriotic Union and the Communist Party shot full of
bullets in the back at the hands of the regime’s
psychopathic killers sufficient to strip naked the terrorist
nature of the Colombian State?
Without being complete, is not this sketch of the country
more than sufficient to provide legitimacy for an insurgency
forged by the people itself over more than 40 years of
heroic resistance until it has become the alternative and
certainty of the New Colombia that is arising?
The intense military confrontation that extends all around
the country with the participation of the armed forces of
the State, gringo mercenaries and paramilitary gangs trying
to break the heroic resistance of the people and its
revolutionary army, and which in the east of the country
alone last year caused 4,700 casualties, dead and wounded,
in the official forces and 521 in the insurgent ranks, is
surely one expression more of the social and political
conflict that involves the whole of Colombian society and
threatens to send us into the abyss if we do not in time
halt the fire spitting lunatic who by means of a media coup
has been imposed upon us as ruler?
Thus, whatever is said to attempt to diminish this hard
reality is utter babble!
