Raúl Reyes: A hero murdered by Colombian fascism

The writer is a former editor of the weekly newspaper Avante in Lisbon, Portugal, a former senator in the European Parliament and a current editor of the Portuguese-language Web magazine, odiario.info, who met Raúl Reyes in 2001 in Colombia.

Raúl Reyes WW photo

March 2—The government of Álvaro Uribe murdered Comandante Raúl Reyes of the FARC at dawn on March 1 in an operation conceived and executed with U.S. support.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s defense minister first announced this news in a triumphant official statement that greatly distorted the facts of the events so as to hide the criminal nature of the terrorist act.

According to Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, Raúl Reyes was killed in a camp in Ecuador one mile inside the border during a bombardment his country’s air force carried out from Colombian territory in order to “not violate the sovereignty” of neighboring countries.

But soon he clarified that troops of the Colombian army later crossed the border to collect the body of Raúl Reyes and bring it to Bogotá to prevent FARC guerrillas from burying it.

The minister’s note is thus nonsense, even somewhat surrealist. It is unthinkable that any airplane can rain bombs on a camp, hitting the target at a horizontal mile distance. This grotesque lie was followed by the confession that forces of the Colombian army had, after all, shortly afterward violated Ecuadorian sovereignty.

In reality, things happened differently.

Informed by U.S. satellite surveillance, Uribe knew of the presence of a group of FARC guerrillas on the Ecuadorian side of the Colombian Department of Putumayo in the Amazon region.

Bogotá knew that Raúl Reyes was there. The revolutionary leader had a price on his head, dead or alive, of $2.7 million. The informant was paid and Super Tucan airplanes of the most powerful and well-equipped air force in Latin America rained bombs on the FARC camp.

Besides Reyes, the revolutionary singer Julián Conrado—the great artist of the clandestine Voice of Resistance Radio—and 16 guerrillas died in the aerial pirates’ criminal attack. They had been massacred as they slept, in conditions still only poorly known.

When he received the news, Uribe congratulated the Air Force. Reyes’ body, mutilated by shrapnel, was taken to Bogotá. Soon photographs of the hero’s bloody corpse appeared on television and in the newspapers of dozens of countries. The publicity followed almost the same macabre ritual as that accompanying the murder of Che Guevara in October 1967 in Bolivia.

Background for the crime

The terrorist act occurred at a moment when the campaign for the release of the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt had inspired headlines in the so-called great international press. Never have there been more lies about Colombian reality than in these days when, using as an excuse the suffering of the former presidential candidate, the FARC has been the target of a mountain of slander.

One day it will be evident that in the discussion regarding the humanitarian exchange, the FARC always acted with openness and revolutionary authenticity in moving toward a humanitarian goal, while Uribe acted with hypocrisy, cloaking hidden intentions.

Responding to the insistent appeals from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Colombian Senator Piedad Córdoba, the FARC had decided in a first phase to free Clara Rojas and former member of the House of Representatives Consuelo Perdomo unilaterally. The operation had to be postponed for some days because Uribe intensified the concentration of troops in the area where presumably both would have to be delivered to the International Red Cross and ferried to Caracas in Venezuelan helicopters.

The FARC were conscious of the enormous risks that the operation involved. Those who know the geography of Colombia with its 440,831 square miles and 45 million inhabitants, crossed by three mountain ranges, gigantic rivers and to a large extent covered by the dense Amazon rainforest can evaluate the challenge of leading the two women from an unknown camp until they reached Guaviare Department, close to the Venezuelan border. It is useful to remember that the Colombian army violated the cease-fire agreement and began to bomb the place one hour after the helicopters had flown away.

U.S. satellites had obviously transmitted detailed information to Bogotá on the path followed by the guerrilla command charged with delivering Rojas and Perdomo to the Red Cross.

The FARC had later insisted on demilitarizing the cities of Pradera and Florida as an indispensable condition for the humanitarian exchange, as demanded by the Colombian people—an operation that could foresee the exchange of 40 hostages held by the FARC—including Ingrid Betancourt—for 500 guerillas jailed in government-run penitentiaries.

Uribe refused to accept all the international proposals he received that had the objective of permitting an agreement that would allow the exchange.

Despite the neofascist president of Colombia’s intransigent attitude, the FARC, in accordance with a new appeal from Hugo Chávez, had taken the decision to free, also in a unilateral gesture, four members of the House of Representatives it was holding.

One more time the operation was postponed because the army, on the eve of the coming date, mobilized powerful forces, concentrating them in the Departments of Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare, where the FARC has deep roots and where the parliamentarians could pass.

This government initiative had a two-part objective.

If there was a direct clash, Uribe would hold the FARC responsible for the death of the members of the House of Representatives. Simultaneously, the airplanes, equipped with a technology that Washington had previously only provided Israel, were extremely active.

The U.S. satellites had transmitted valuable information to Bogotá.

But the FARC had once more succeeded, which did nothing to stop an intensification of the campaign for the immediate release of Ingrid Betancourt.

Under the existing conditions, it was impossible to fulfill this demand. A fragile, sick person could in no conceivable way walk for days through the jungle, where the Colombian troops would be able to intercept the unit responsible for the trip.

The FARC had therefore renewed its proposal for demilitarization of Pradera and Florida, without which the humanitarian exchange would be impracticable.

A hero fallen in combat

Comandante Raúl Reyes was, after Manuel Marulanda, the most distinguished member of the Secretariat and the Central Committee of the FARC.

A revolutionary since his youth—he was now 60 years old—his first political struggles were as a trade unionist. These had been an initiation for other battles. More than 30 years ago, Luis Edgar Devia took to the mountains, joined the FARC and became Raúl Reyes.

I met him in May of 2001. I had received an invitation to spend some weeks in the FARC camp near San Vicente del Caguán, capital of what was then the Demilitarized Zone. I accepted with pleasure.

Raúl Reyes’ physical appearance made no strong impression. Short, his hair lightly graying, his voice had a soft timbre. But the first night, after supper, when we talked in his command post—an austere office, with a table and two chairs, installed under a tent hidden by the high vegetation of the Amazon—I perceived that this fragile guerrilla was an exceptional individual. We spoke about the world in crisis before he offered me books and documentation as an indispensable prologue to approaching the struggle of the FARC.

He was responsible for the peace negotiations that were taking place in those weeks in the hamlet of Los Pozos with the representatives of the government of President Andrés Pastrana.

Those were the times when Pastrana greeted Manuel Marulanda with the kiss of Judas, days when ambassadors of countries of the European Union came to compete for the words and the smile of the legendary Tirofijo, supreme commander of the FARC.

I traveled with Reyes to La Macarena, where the FARC had unilaterally freed 304 soldiers and police, who had been prisoners of war, and I had the privilege of holding long discussions with him in the cool forest mornings about his revolutionary organization, of Latin America and of the strategy of U.S. imperialism, the greatest enemy of humanity. And also about life.

I wrote my own encampment articles for “Avante!” on the combatants of the FARC and also published an interview in the Portuguese Communist Party’s weekly newspaper.

The atmosphere had something unreal about it, because the texts themselves were transmitted by Reyes’ secretary to an addressee who later directed them to the periodical. The Internet, paradoxically, could function as instrument at the service of a revolutionary guerrilla. I felt honored that Raúl Reyes continued in contact with me. I often received his messages, through the intermediary of friends of the commander, at times expressing thanks for articles published about the FARC’s struggle.

I remember that little shortly before the capture in Ecuador of Comandante Simón Trinidad—who was later delivered by Uribe to the U.S.—Reyes suggested that I return to the Colombian forest. The project was then put aside because the Ecuadorian border had become very unsafe.

Until his last day, Reyes was the voice of the FARC in its dialog with the world. But the guerrilla commander, responsible for countless tasks, still found time to write articles, some on complex ideological questions, for the magazine Resistencia, the international organ of the FARC, and to give interviews to periodicals in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. In these articles, he showed the firmness of a hardened Communist complemented harmoniously by the culture of a humanist intellectual.

Uribe is now celebrating the death of the combatant who, in the words of homage of Jaime Caicedo, the secretary general of the Colombian Communist Party, was an exemplary revolutionary who “delivered his life for the cause in which he believed.”

The triumphal bearing of the neofascist president of Colombia, who financed paramilitaries when governor of Antioquia and who has his name on the list of narcotics traffickers published by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, but is today the supreme ally of Bush in Latin America, does not have the power to make history.

Uribe and Bush’s presidential terms in their countries will leave only the memory of shady deals and crimes against humanity. The March Against Paramilitarism and for Peace in Colombia, to take place on March 6 in that country and in the various capitals of Europe and Latin America [and in the U.S.—tr.], also will take on the role of a posthumous homage to Raúl Reyes. Solidarity with those who fight and die for a democratic and progressive Colombia is necessary, now more than ever.

As he disappears, murdered, Raúl Reyes enters the Pantheon of the heroes of Latin America. Like Sucre, as Bolívar, as Artigas, and Che, Raúl Reyes crosses the border to the only possible form of eternity—that of the men and women who have lived to serve humanity and contribute so that humanity continues to survive and prevail.