Colombia in Pentagon crosshairs
By Natalie Alsop
An article entitled "Anti-rebel role for U.S.
increases in Colombia" appeared in the Nov. 17 San Francisco
Chronicle. It described growing U.S. involvement in Colombia's
40-year civil war, including the recent training of a special
operations battalion and plans for another. It calls this "a
sharp departure from previous policy" for Washington.
In fact, the U.S. has been expanding its direct intervention
since the 1998 approval of Plan Colombia, a $1.8 billion
package of primarily military aid. In July 2002 the Bush
administration announced that all U.S. aid to Colombia, past,
present and future, could be used in the counterinsurgency
effort. Previously, the aid had been nominally restricted to
the "war on drugs."
The continued expansion of U.S. intervention is a response
to the inability of the Colombian ruling class to destroy the
progressive guerrilla insurgencies and implement neo-liberal
social and economic policies that benefit the U.S. bosses.
Plan Colombia was an attempt to shore up the decrepit
Colombian military, which had relied almost completely on its
paramilitary death-squad allies for intelligence. Bush's
announcement of direct support for counterinsurgency and
continued economic and political support for the regime in
Bogotá was calculated to open the door to wider U.S.
intervention.
The latest reports of direct U.S. intervention and training
come at a time of political setbacks for the Colombian ruling
class, including the results of the Oct. 25-26 elections.
President Alvaro Uribe hoped a referendum on Oct. 25 would
give him a popular mandate for increased privatization and
expansion of the war. It included provisions to freeze the
wages of public sector workers for two years and decrease the
size of Congress.
An alliance of labor union leaders, activists, and the
ruling-class Liberal Party opposed the referendum, encouraging
voters to abstain. Every point of Uribe's referendum was either
voted down or did not receive the required minimum of 6.25
million votes.
In the Oct. 26 municipal and departmental elections, Lucho
Garzon was elected mayor of Bogotá, widely considered
the second most important political office in the country.
Garzon is a leader of the Polo Democratico Party and a former
union leader. He has been outspoken in his criticism of Uribe's
policies.
Leftists also won in other large cities and important
departments.
Colombian and U.S. officials and the big-business media
applauded this as proof that leftists can participate in the
electoral process in Colombia and the revolutionary insurgency
is obsolete. Historically, leftists have been assassinated for
participating in Colombian elections. This was the case with
the Patriotic Union (UP), which participated in elections in
1984 as part of peace negotiations between guerrillas and the
government. Some 4,000 UP leaders and members were murdered
during the following decade.
Lucho Garzon's election doesn't represent the vindication of
Colombian democracy or the end of the necessity for armed
resistance. It doesn't address the social and political
conditions that are the basis of the revolutionary struggle of
the Colombian people. But it does signify that the people of
Colombia--even the middle class and parts of the ruling
class--are not united behind Uribe's fascist program of total
war and repression.
In the two weeks after the referendum and municipal
elections, the interior, defense and environment ministers all
resigned. The military chief resigned as well.
While the corporate media claim Uribe has a 70-percent
approval rating for his "hard line" policies, the recent
elections prove that the majority of people in Colombia don't
support his agenda. And this is affecting even the ruling
class, which was previously been united behind Uribe and his
program of ending the civil war by destroying all resistance,
armed or otherwise.
Despite the billions of dollars spent by the Colombian and
U.S. governments to destroy it, the resistance continues.
Reprinted from the Dec. 11, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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