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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted
from the Oct. 3, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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After years of bloody repression at the hands of the U.S.-backed government, the people's movement in Colombia has taken the offensive.
In recent weeks, workers and farmers have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands at the same time as the armed revolutionary groups have unleashed the most sustained military campaign in decades.
NBC News reported Sept. 20 that 300,000 people had demonstrated in the working-class town of Facatativa, near the capital city of Bogota. Workers clashed with soldiers and riot police, fighting back against police repression with firebombs and stones.
That demonstration capped a week of protests in the area. Workers had erected a barricade across the highway connecting Bogota and the second-biggest city, Medellin. The workers were demanding a cut in electricity rates, which had risen by as much as 300 percent. The government has been aggressively slashing subsidies to public services.
Peasants in southern Colombia have also been demonstrating against the government. Tens of thousands have clashed with the government over attempts to wipe out coca and poppy fields. These are the only crops farmers can sell that bring in enough money on the open market to earn a living.
On Sept. 9, soldiers attacked protesting peasants trying to cross a bridge to the city of Florencia, the capital of the state of Caqueta. The farmers pelted the troops with stones and cut the power lines to an electric fence set up by the army.
The next day, intermittent negotiations resumed. On Sept. 12 peasant leaders signed an agreement with the government. The settlement commits the government to spend $14 million on education, health and public works in Caqueta.
The demonstrators' main demand-an end to the aerial fumigation campaign-was not fully addressed, according to the Sept. 15 Nicaragua Solidarity Network's Weekly News Update on the Americas.
The mass movement has escalated at a time of severe political crisis for the Colombian government. President Ernesto Samper has been under pressure to resign by opponents in the bourgeois political arena. Originally this was based on alleged contributions by the drug cartels to Samper's 1994 presidential campaign.
Now, with the heightened mass struggle, charges of cartel influence have given way to charges of weakness in the face of the people's movement. Humberto de la Calle, who resigned as vice president in mid-September, charged that the Samper government is unable to halt threats to "democratic stability," according to a Sept. 8 Reuter report.
The Sept. 7 issue of El Espectador, one of Colombia's main daily newspapers, editorialized, "The country is disintegrating in the shaky and inept hands of our leaders."
Samper has so far maintained his position against his bourgeois political rivals. He named Colombia's ambassador to Britain, Carlos Lemos, as the new vice president-a choice meant to win over support from the opposition Conservative Party. Lemos will preside over the vice presidency from London, keeping his diplomatic post.
These maneuvers have yet to pay off. As Samper flew to New York to address the United Nations, an "anonymous tip" led to the discovery of a shipment of eight pounds of heroin on the Colombian president's jet. Eleven members of the plane's crew, including a colonel and a major, were arrested pending an investigation of the shipment, clearly designed to embarrass Samper on his trip to the United States.
Some commentators-including the newspaper El Diario/La Prensa's Hector Rodriguez Villa in New York-have wondered out loud if the U.S. government was behind the plot to discredit Samper with the heroin shipment.
Unable to unite the Colombian capitalist class behind him, Samper has also been pushed into a confrontational posture toward U.S. imperialism. In August, the U.S. State Department revoked Samper's visa to enter the United States, accusing him of complicity with the drug cartels.
In his Sept. 23 speech at the UN, Samper denounced U.S. "neointerventionism." He charged that "developing countries are subjected to all kinds of conditionalities" by Washington.
Samper has been a loyal agent of the International Monetary Fund in Colombia. His government has carried out IMF-dictated neoliberal economic policies, including plans to privatize the state-owned Ecopetrol oil industry.
Finance Minister Jose Antonio Ocampo announced in mid-September that the government would cut its 1997 budget by $2.92 billion, slashing spending on health and education and laying off 12,000 government workers.
But in a Sept. 20 meeting with Colombian industrialists, U.S. Ambassador Myles Frechette complained that the terms of the privatization were not sufficient for U.S. businesses. "U.S. oil companies do not think the current contracts are sufficient to generate their industry," he said. "But changes could make Colombia more attractive and would be beneficial to its economy."
Colombia is the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid in the Western hemisphere. In fact, human-rights advocates charge that the United States gives as much military aid to Colombia as it does to all the other countries in the Western hemisphere combined.
There is an important distinction between Colombia and the many other Latin American countries where mass demonstrations have challenged neoliberal governments. The difference is the presence of several armed revolutionary movements.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) stepped up armed actions against the government in September.
The FARC launched a series of successful attacks against army bases across Colombia-including an Aug. 30 attack that wiped out a military base in southern Putumayo province. Sixty government troops were captured in that operation.
The ELN has stepped up a campaign of bombings against oil pipelines in Colombia. The Ecopetrol pipeline has been dynamited over 400 times since 1986.
The FARC and the ELN have also paralyzed transportation across the country with a series of roadblocks and armed strikes.
The Colombian army has responded with a brutal counter-insurgency campaign, strafing villages and jungle areas with U.S.-built A-37 fighter bombers and Blackhawk helicopters. The Colombian government requested an additional 12 Blackhawks from the United States-and the Associated Press reported Sept. 19 that U.S. Congressional approval is "imminent."
The popular movement-unions, peasant organizations, and progressive political organizations along with the armed revolutionary groups-have suffered intense repression over the last decades. Human-rights groups in Colombia document political murders of as many as 10 people a day at the hands of the army or right-wing death squads.
Over 3,000 members of the progressive Patriotic Union, the Colombian Communist Party, and other political opponents of the government have been assassinated.
Using the "war on drugs" as a cover, Samper has turned over control of five states directly to the military. In addition, his government has created over 100 "Community Associations for Rural Vigilance"-paramilitary adjuncts to the armed forces designed to combat the popular movement.
The Colombian bourgeoisie makes no mistake about its stake in the developing conflict. On Sept. 19 Reuter quoted Finance Minister Ocasio as having received the approval of "several of Colombia's most powerful economic groups" to require rich Colombians to buy "war bonds" to finance the war against the revolutionary movement.
In a May 1996 statement, the FARC identified its objective in the current phase of struggle as "the conquest of power to change the political regime and with the armed people ... to continue advancing in the conquest of the New State, of the State whose hegemonic direction is in the hands of the proletariat."
The most serious obstacle to that goal has always been U.S. imperialism. Will the cracks in the Colombian ruling class-and between the Colombian ruling class and U.S. imperialism-provide the opportunity for the revolutionary forces to break through?
That's the question that is being decided in factories and fields across Colombia today.
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(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com. Web: http://www.workers.org)