–Colombian political scientist Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez on a CIA-organized meeting of U.S. military officials to discuss developments in Colombia1

COLOMBIA TODAY is facing its worst crisis in decades. The economy is mired in the worst recession since the 1930s. After growth declined to zero in 1998, the gross domestic product (GDP) declined by more than 7 percent in the first two quarters of 1999 and continues its decline. Industrial production has declined by more than 9 percent. Official unemployment stands at more than 20 percent. Another 25 percent of the population is underemployed. Of those Colombians who are employed, 77 percent make less than the minimum wage of four dollars a day. More than half of the population lives in poverty, and at least half of the country’s children go hungry.

The crisis comes amid several years of neoliberal policies in which the Colombian state has sought to sell off vital state enterprises and cut social spending to reduce its $36 billion debt. This is happening in a country where the state is notorious for its inability to provide basic services to large parts of the country.

The raw statistics on the scale of the crisis don’t begin to tell the story. In October 1999 in Bogotá, armed guards kept order as more than 10,000 people lined up to fill out applications for 22 jobs cleaning the city’s sewer tunnels.2

At the same time, the state faces a decades-old but escalating civil war that pits the Colombian army and paramilitary organizations against a guerrilla insurgency. Left-wing guerrilla groups operating mostly in the countryside now control roughly 40 percent of Colombia. They have also brought their war to the cities through increased kidnappings and extortion of wealthy Colombian business owners.

Paramilitary groups have intensified their savage campaign of massacres and assassinations against small farmers and agricultural workers, trade unionists, human rights activists and members of left-wing guerrilla and political organizations. It is estimated that 35,000 civilians have died over the last 10 years as a result of the civil war. The Economist magazine reported in November 1999 that "the guerrilla war accounts for less than 20 percent of the violent deaths in Colombia."3 There are three to four thousand political assassinations in Colombia each year.4

The U.S. has grown increasingly concerned over the increased strength of the guerrillas. Clinton has asked Congress for $1 billion in military aid for Colombia in the coming year (up from $289 million in 1999)–an amount that nearly equals Colombia’s total military budget for 1998.5 Not to be outdone, Republican senators just introduced the Alianza Act, which would put $1.635 billion toward the Colombian military.

Both Colombian and U.S. officials have deliberately blurred the distinction between the guerrillas and narcotraffickers, lumping them into a single "narcoterrorist" threat. The former head of anti-narcotics operations in Colombia, Colonel J.C. Hiett, was more candid about the real reasons for U.S. involvement in Colombia. In a recent letter to a member of the Colombia Support Network in Wisconsin, he wrote:

Hiett has since stepped down from his post in disgrace. His wife was indicted for using the American embassy post office in Bogotá to send $500,000 worth of cocaine and heroin to New York. This may be why his remarks contained not a single reference to his alleged reason for working at the Embassy in the first place–to head up U.S. anti-drug efforts.

The roots of violence

The roots of Colombia’s crisis lie in its historically weak state, a divided ruling class and a closed two-party political system that has blocked any participation or voice from the mass of the population.

Colombia has a long history of violence and civil war going back to its origins in 1810, when one of Latin America’s poorest and most divided oligarchies gained independence from Spain. During the nineteenth century, the ruling landed oligarchy (or latifundistas), divided between the Conservative and Liberal parties, waged constant war for control of the country. One historian described Colombia during this period as a "country of permanent war."7

The growth of coffee as Colombia’s main cash crop in the early twentieth century provided the capital to establish the country’s first industries. As Colombian industry established itself, workers sought to organize unions and political parties to defend their interests against the new industrial bosses. Workers and intellectuals, inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, founded Colombia’s first socialist party in 1921. In 1926, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR) was formed.

Factions within the Liberal Party began to seek electoral support by appealing to the aspirations of the new middle class, working class and urban poor of the towns. "I don’t see any reason for founding a third political party," said one Liberal candidate in 1922 about the newly formed socialist party, "when all the aspirations of workers fit with liberalism."8

Working-class militancy grew in this period, culminating in the 1928 strike of workers against United Fruit, during which the government shot down 1,000 banana workers. The Colombian Communist Party (PCC) was formed in 1930 after the working-class movement had been brutally crushed. Under directions from Moscow’s "Popular Front" period, the party became uncritical supporters of the Liberal Party. Under López Pumarejo, the Liberals finally won the presidency in 1930. In his first years of office, López embarked on policies influenced by Roosevelt’s New Deal, aimed at modernizing Colombia’s economic and political structure. But this period did not benefit the working class, as wages fell and social spending stagnated.

In spite of the anti-working class policies of the López government and the latifundistas’ violent assault on peasants fighting for land, the PCC remained staunch Liberal supporters.

"Our post," the Communist Party declared in its newspaper, Tierra (Land), in February 1937, "is at the side of the reformist government of López…Today we are not subversives. The only subversives are the falangist [Spanish fascists-ed.] Conservatives. We Communists aspire to become the champions of order and peace."9

Under the PCC’s influence, the main trade union federation in this period became tied to the Liberal Party. The division of the labor movement between two essentially state-controlled federations–one Liberal and one Conservative–held labor in check until the late 1970s.

The Liberal Party now became the repository of political and social discontent. A liberal faction led by left-wing populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán gained mass support in the 1940s over his call to unite "the people" against the "oligarchy." Gaitán sought, according to author Jenny Pearce, to "make capitalism socially responsible."10 But even this was too much for members of the ruling classes, who felt that the social order was threatened by Gaitán’s popular appeals. Gaitán’s popularity coincided with a rising wave of mass protest, including hundreds of strikes, demonstrations and street protests. His assassination in 1948 provoked a massive riot in Bogotá, known as the Bogotazo, in which 2,000 people were killed. More than a decade of violent civil war, known as La Violencia, was unleashed. Eduardo Galeano describes its character:

While terror raged in the countryside, the ruling class achieved labor peace by smashing all expressions of urban opposition. As a result, Colombia experienced its greatest period of capital accumulation, with industrial production increasing by 56 percent between 1948 and 1953.12

Democracy in name only

The formality of democracy has long been maintained in Colombia, but the substance of democracy has been missing. Instead, Colombia has been controlled from top to bottom through a system of "clientelism" in which everything from the judiciary to social services has been controlled by the bosses of the two main parties.

In 1957–after five years of military rule–the Liberals and Conservatives formed the National Front and made a pact to run Colombia jointly. Leaders from each party would take turns at the presidency. Jenny Pearce explains:

No expression of social conflict was permitted outside the control of the two traditional parties.13

For three-quarters of the last 40 years, the Colombian state has operated under a "state of siege" or, as it is now called, a state of "internal commotion." This has allowed the government to suspend various political and social rights. Even the most moderate, social-democratic left-wing opposition has been violently suppressed or simply co-opted into the two-party structure. This fact has not been lost on voting-age Colombians. In the October 1994 elections for mayors, governors, city council members and provincial deputies, for example, voter absenteeism ran at more than 70 percent.14

After the Conservatives and Liberals made peace in 1957, La Violencia became purely a war to suppress left-wing insurgency in the countryside. The PCC pledged its willingness to cooperate with the National Front "in any way we can."15 But this was the period of the Cold War. In the late 1950s, some PCC members organized armed defense of peasants who were taking over unused land in the central and southern regions of the country. Most of these peasant "colonists" had been uprooted by the carnage of La Violencia. Communist Party guerrillas declared the areas they controlled in the south to be "independent republics."

The Colombian army began a campaign to displace those peasants who had seized land years earlier. With the training and support of the U.S. and the use of both foot soldiers and aerial bombardments, the army attacked the independent republics. Embattled peasants joined with a small number of disaffected Liberal and Communist guerrillas to form the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1966.

Around this same time, the Army of National Liberation (ELN), inspired by the victorious strategies of the guerrillas who led the Cuban Revolution in 1959, formed in the countryside. The Communist Party-Marxist Leninist (PC-ML)–the pro-China party that emerged out of the Sino-Soviet split–also established the Popular Liberation Army (EPL) as its armed wing in 1965. The Colombian army together with paramilitary death squads has fought a vicious war to wipe out these and other rebel groups that have formed subsequently over the last three and a half decades.

The state’s crisis of legitimacy

For a time, the ruling parties were able to maintain their hold on Colombian politics by locking out all opposition. But this strategy began to break down in the late 1970s as the political setup was increasingly unable to respond to the massive economic and social changes in Colombia. As Jenny Pearce writes:

With growing frequency, workers, peasants and sections of the middle class took to the streets in massive protests. For the first time in decades, popular movements that asserted their independence from the traditional parties of the ruling class emerged.

Sixty-four percent of the strikes in the period between 1974 and 1980 were organized by newly emerging unions that were independent of the two trade union confederations controlled by the Liberals and Conservatives. Under pressure from the rank and file, the unions came together in 1977 to organize the country’s first national civic strike. In 1986, after the working class held two more national civic strikes, a new trade union confederation was formed. The Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) soon came to embrace the majority of organized workers, absorbing a number of smaller confederations–including one controlled by the PCC.

The guerrilla movement also grew in this period, represented most dramatically in 1985 by the armed seizure of the National Palace of Justice by the M-1918–a middle-class, populist guerrilla organization demanding the right to operate as a legal electoral party.

In line with efforts in places such as El Salvador to demobilize the guerrilla struggle and reform the political process, Conservative president Belisario Betancur allowed for such things as the democratic election of mayors in 1986 (for the first time in Colombia’s history). More importantly, his administration launched an effort to negotiate with guerrilla groups. He offered the opportunity to organize and operate in the electoral arena in exchange for disarmament. The offer was taken up first by the FARC in 1984, then by M-19. Both guerrilla groups demobilized and formed electoral parties. FARC leader Manuel Marulanda, known by his nickname Tirofijo (Sureshot), spoke at this time of his desire to return to political life as a town councilor. One of M-19’s leaders, Antonio Navarro Wolff, spoke of the organization’s desire for "political space…Simply we asked for modernization, the opening of the bourgeois state. We asked for the bourgeois revolution."19

The results of this process reveal how little the peace accords fundamentally changed politics in Colombia–and how dangerous it is in Colombia for parties to the left of the traditional parties to operate openly.

The M-19’s first presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, was assassinated before the 1988 presidential elections. His replacement, Navarro Wolff, won 12 percent of the popular vote–the largest vote for a left candidate in Colombia’s history. The political party formed by demobilized sections of the FARC, Union Patriótica (UP), faced even worse repression. Two of their presidential candidates and between 3,000 and 5,000 members–mayoral candidates, elected officials and activists–were murdered by death squads. One of the few remaining UP members, former mayor of Apartado José Antonio López, told The Progressive, "When I see pictures of the rallies we had in the 1980s, they are a roster of people who were killed."20

The ruling class in Colombia rejected Betancur’s efforts at peace and reacted with ferocity to the movements that grew in this period. Jenny Pearce describes the reaction within the military to the growth of social protest and the guerrilla struggle:

This was part of a strategy the Reagan administration promoted throughout Latin America. Colombian bosses turned increasingly during this time toward paramilitary groups, which had grown to number 140 (five of them nationally organized) by 1989. Private businesses–primarily those of cattle ranchers and rich drug barons–often provided funding for these death squads. High-ranking military officials often worked together with the death squads or even initiated them and used the armed forces’ artillery and equipment to assassinate trade unionists, peasant leaders, indigenous activists and opposition politicians.

By the early 1990s, the toll of the reaction had been severe. According to the Inter-Congregational Commission of Peace and Justice, there were an average of 23.4 political killings per day in Colombia between 1988 and 1995. Shockingly, only 7.4 percent of fatalities came from the army-guerrilla conflict.22 And the vast majority of killings were not drug-related. For example, between May 1989 and June 1990, there were 227 drug-related fatalities compared to 2,969 politically motivated murders.23

The violence has only worsened over the course of the decade. In 1991, there were 166 massacres involving 929 victims. As of September 1999, 289 massacres involving 1,357 victims were reported. (A massacre is defined here as a killing involving four or more victims.)24

The "dirty war" unleashed by the ruling class in the 1980s has intensified in the last few years. As the Colombian economy has descended into its worst recession in 70 years, the two most influential rebel movements that remain in Colombia–the FARC, which returned to armed struggle after the slaughter of UP candidates, and the ELN–have more than doubled in size. Workers have also been fighting back in greater numbers, and the Colombian state finds itself increasingly unable to maintain order.

The "war on drugs" fraud

Clinton’s top drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, insists on calling Colombia’s rebels "narcoguerrillas" and derides as "ludicrous" any attempt to separate the "drug problem" from the "insurgency problem." Representative Dan Burton (R-Ind.), a prominent member of the House International Relations Committee, said recently: "Whatever pressure needs to be exerted on the narcoguerrillas down there needs to be exerted. The entire northern tier of South America could be lost to narcoguerrillas and traffickers, and that would be horrible for the United States."25

This is nothing new. "Fighting drugs" has become a common justification for U.S. military intervention in Latin America, replacing communism as the new American bogeyman.

Drugs are used as an excuse to fight left-wing states and guerrilla insurgencies. But for years, the same Reagan and Bush administrations that complained of "narcoterrorism" were funding a war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua through the illicit cocaine trade. Meanwhile, in Panama, George Bush engineered a bloody 1989 invasion under the auspices of removing drug-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega (formerly backed by the U.S.). However, U.S. drug agents admitted that within a year of the invasion, Panama became a base for the Cali cartel to flood the U.S. market with cocaine.27 According to former Colombian drug kingpin Carlos Lehder, who testified at Noriega’s trial, the Medellín cartel gave $10 million to Reagan’s contra army fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government. In other words, the narcoterrorists in Central America were Washington’s chief allies.

As the authors of Cocaine Politics show,

Far from considering drug networks the enemy, U.S. intelligence organizations have made them an essential ally in the covert expansion of American influence abroad.28

The State Department’s record of fighting drugs in Colombia fits this pattern.

The administration of President Ernesto Samper collapsed amid scandal in 1998 after revelations that he had accepted at least $6.1 million in campaign contributions from the notorious Cali cartel. In 1996, the commander of the Colombian armed forces was forced out because of his ties to drug traffickers. Though American officials were publicly critical of these leaders’ ties to the drug cartels, the U.S. continued to prop up the Colombian military with millions of dollars in aid.

More recently, U.S. Customs officials in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, found 1,634.6 pounds of cocaine aboard a Colombian air force plane. Colombian prosecutors claim to have conclusive evidence that the Colombian air force has been infiltrated by the cocaine cartels at the highest levels.29 Apparently, the hand-in-glove relationship between drug cartels and the Colombian president, chief of armed forces and the rampaging militaries is not a cause for U.S. concern–but the growth of the left-wing rebels is.

A number of officials who are themselves directly involved in anti-drug efforts admit that left-wing guerrillas are not the locus of drug production. The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Donnie Marshall, recently testified before Congress that "[the DEA hasn’t] come close to the conclusion that [the main rebel armies have] been involved as a drug trafficking organization." And President Pastrana said in an interview with the Argentine daily Clarín in July that the rebels "were not narcoguerrillas." "There is no evidence," he said, "that the FARC are drug traffickers."30

The real "narcoterrorists" in Colombia are the military and the paramilitaries–the former implicated in one drug scandal after another, the latter launched with drug traffickers’ money in the early 1980s. An analysis from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs states:

The U.S. role

Gerald Haines, a senior historian for the CIA, wrote in 1945 that the U.S. has "assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system."32 This is especially true in Latin America, the "backyard" of the U.S. American corporations, from Coca-Cola to emerald-mining and oil companies, have operated for decades in Colombia. Coal, oil, bananas, coffee and minerals are all fantastic sources of wealth in Colombia and neighboring countries.

The U.S. has long operated in concert with the militaries of the region to safeguard the interests of American corporations or investors who do business there. Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and current president of the Colombia Permanent Committee for Human Rights Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa once wrote that "during the Kennedy Administration, [Washington] took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads."33

Almost 10,000 Colombian officers have received training at the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia in the years since then–far more than from any other country. Dozens of these officers have headed up military units implicated in massacres throughout Colombia.

The Colombian state has been an important U.S. client state since the Cold War, when the U.S. first began helping it build its first modern army. Today, the U.S. finds itself facing a period of increased economic and political instability in a strategically vital region. The states which surround Colombia–from Ecuador to Venezuela, are themselves suffering severe economic crises. Colombia sits at the crossroads of this region, and American leaders are increasingly worried that the civil war will spill over into its neighbors’ territories, including Panama, where the U.S. relinquished control of the canal and withdrew all military forces at the end of 1999. The State Department clearly sees demobilizing the rebels and shoring up the Colombian state as key to a larger project of reasserting control in the region and restoring some level of stability.

In early November 1999, President Clinton told the Spanish-language television network Telemundo that the U.S. shouldn’t "be drawn directly into [Colombia’s] conflict, because I think it would boomerang…If we were to become directly involved, I think it would ensure a disastrous result for the Colombian government, and people would accuse us of being imperialists in some way."34

Even if the United States is not ready to send in the marines, the Clinton administration already has almost a decade’s worth of blood on its hands. From 1990 to 1998, the U.S. spent more than $1 billion on aid to the Colombian military, despite the armed forces’ record of committing the greatest number of human rights violations in the hemisphere.

The Pentagon initially turned down the administration’s request for increased military aid to Colombia earlier in the decade. Undeterred, Clinton turned to an emergency-overdrawing fund for assistance. And the Clinton administration has conducted a massive covert operation in Colombia for the last several years. According to a 1998 report in the Dallas Morning News, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf War veterans and CIA agents all have been involved in training Colombian soldiers and even fighting in direct combat against Colombian guerrillas.35

According to the New York Times, the State Department has used the same legal loophole to bolster the Colombian regime that it used in order to train the Indonesian troops that propped up the former dictator Suharto: a 1991 program called Joint Combined Exchange Training. Human Rights Watch notes that "at least 24 Colombian army units comprising a significant percentage of total troop strength, devoted primarily to counterinsurgency and with a disturbing record of human rights violations, have received U.S. weaponry."36

Over this past year, Clinton has dramatically stepped up U.S. support for the Colombian military. The U.S. sent Colombia $289 million in military aid in 1999, up from $96 million over the previous two years combined. This made Colombia the recipient of the third-largest amount of U.S. military assistance in the world, after Israel and Egypt. The notoriously brutal American Special Forces recently finished training a special "anti-narcotics" unit of 1,000 Colombian soldiers deployed to rebel-held territory in December. The Clinton administration is now proposing that money should be set aside for the training of four more identical teams.

Four hundred and eighty American soldiers were stationed along Colombian borders with Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru for most of 1999. And the U.S. has been able to muscle Brazil and Peru into deploying troops to the zones that mark their borders with Colombia as well. At least 200 American military officials have been deployed to rebel-held territories. Vietnam-era UH-H1 "Huey" helicopters have also been refurbished to be sent to Colombia for the spraying of defoliants in the countryside. Blackhawk helicopters will perform surveillance of rebel areas. And when an American military plane loaded with high-tech spying equipment crashed in a remote rebel stronghold of Colombia in July 1999, several U.S. officials acknowledged that the plane was taking part in ongoing U.S.-Colombian joint efforts to monitor the guerrillas.

The rebel threat?

The Clinton administration’s increased military buildup in Colombia has everything to do with the growth of left-wing guerrilla armies there. The largest rebel group, the FARC, has grown from about 7,000 combatants in the early 1990s to about 15,000 now. Last November, newly elected President Pastrana granted the FARC a swath of territory the size of Switzerland to govern independently, hoping that this would convince the organization to come to the negotiating table. This zone is in the southeastern part of the country in a jungle and savanna region with a population of only 90,000.

The citizens of the main town in this region, San Vicente Del Caguán, report that under FARC control the area has become, according to one Washington Post reporter, an oasis of calm.

In July 1999, the FARC embarked on a massive campaign throughout the country, attacking army units in 11 provinces. The guerrillas were able to advance to within 25 miles of the capital city of Bogotá. The Colombian army succeeded in putting down the offensive, but only after days of intensive combat in which it lost scores of soldiers and killed hundreds of rebels. Though driven back, the FARC had brought the war uncomfortably close to the urban center of Colombia.

In addition, the FARC and the smaller ELN have stepped up kidnappings of wealthy Colombians and members of the clergy over the last year. The number of Colombians seeking refuge in the U.S. from rebel attacks and threats at home has increased to the point where the Immigration and Naturalization Service is considering whether to grant Temporary Protected Status to the estimated 100,000 Colombians who have come to the U.S. over the past several years.

Many Colombian soldiers are demoralized and have been reluctant to continue fighting, which in part explains the continued willingness of many military officers to work through the paramilitary organizations instead. Because these groups are accountable to no one, they can operate with impunity against the civilian population. The paramilitaries do not directly confront the guerrillas–their war is mainly against the civilian population. They declare open season on anyone who expresses opposition to the government–trade union activists, civic protesters, guerrilla sympathizers and human rights activists. As General Luis Carlos Camacho Leyva, defense minister from 1978 to 1982 explained, social protest was simply "the unarmed branch of subversion."38

The Colombian state looks increasingly weak and discredited against this backdrop. President Pastrana was elected on the promise that he would finally bring peace to Colombia. But it took Pastrana 10 months to convince the rebels–who cited the escalation of paramilitary violence as a sign of the government’s lack of sincerity–to sit down in negotiations. Pastrana’s pledge to sever links between the military and the death squads resulted in the firing of only three officers in 1999–despite the fact that the attorney general’s office has documented the involvement of at least 68 officers in paramilitary organizations. It is increasingly clear that Pastrana follows the lead of Colombia’s military and the Clinton administration in talking peace, while pursuing war.

What accounts for the survival–and even growth–of guerrilla struggle in Colombia, while in the rest of Latin America it has collapsed? One reason is that the Colombian ruling class and its two parties have virtually shut out electoral participation from anyone to their left. The battle for what is known as "the agricultural frontier" has been an interminable source of rural warfare. Large landowners and multinationals have long used the army and paramilitaries to drive campesinos off the land. The FARC continues to offer protection to peasants, whose only ability to survive often depends on growing coca. The guerrillas have also been able to survive because of the vast jungle terrain in the eastern part of the country and the mountainous terrain in the rest of the country.

The politics of the insurgent movement

In some ways, the FARC–and the PCC, which operates in the main cities–have changed little from their Stalinist past.39 They are essentially nationalists, committed to ridding Colombia of foreign domination. Moreover, they still look to Cuba, China and former Communists in Russia as genuine political alternatives. The FARC, for example, sent a letter to the Chinese Communist Party offering its condolences for the death of Deng Xiaoping. In the letter, it expressed its "friendship and admiration at this difficult time" for the "great socialist nation of China."40 The PCC’s magazine, Voz, recently argued that the only way out of Russia’s crisis would be "a return of the Communists to power."41

But there have been some political changes too. In July 1999, Raúl Reyes, a leader of the FARC, held a summit at his jungle headquarters with Richard Grasso, the head of the New York Stock Exchange. Grasso reportedly explained markets to Reyes. "Although ostensibly Marxist," wrote a Miami Herald reporter about the FARC, "its ideologists say they don’t oppose foreign investment or free-market mechanisms as long as social justice is guaranteed."43

The FARC, in spite of its name, is fighting not for a revolutionary transformation of Colombia, but to use force as a lever for reforming the Colombian state. Raúl Reyes calls for a "democratic peace" that builds "sovereignty, true social justice, political rights and liberties in equal conditions for rich and poor." He concludes that this is "an investment" that requires the

In its public statements, the FARC calls for "a strong economic investment in the countryside and in the cities; with [an end to] corruption and weakening the State security forces so they never again use arms and laws against the hungry and dispossessed."45 These politics are echoed by the PCC, which stated at its Seventeenth Party Congress in 1998:

In the rural areas the FARC now controls, it acts much as a local state: collecting taxes, providing services like basic health care and education, administering justice and–most importantly–acting as a protection force for civilians from military and paramilitary attacks. It is through this role of protector that the FARC has come to dominate so much of the rural countryside, as peasants weary of state-sponsored violence have welcomed its presence. But while the FARC is undoubtedly more congenial to the peasants who live in its territories than the military or the death squads might be, the fact remains that the FARC is a military organization. It does not function as a democratically elected government with participation from the civilians who live in its territories.

Though both the FARC and the ELN have grown, most analysts do not believe they will be in a position to assume control of Colombia in the immediate future. Even if such a development were possible, however, neither group looks to Colombia’s workers, or peasants for that matter, as independent actors. They are in no way seeking to build a society where workers themselves take over the means of production–the textile factories, the oil refineries or the emerald mines. Indeed, the FARC has on occasion included workers, indigenous people and peasants in its attacks.47 Like all guerrilla movements, the FARC sees itself acting on behalf of the mass of Colombians, as this May Day greeting to Colombia’s workers makes clear: "The men and women…of the FARC will continue fighting for you until we conquer political power and take on the building of a new Colombia."

It is not that guerrilla organizations ignore mass struggle. On the contrary, as the PCC’s Seventeenth Party Congress shows, the struggle is seen as one that involves a number of fronts. The PCC, for example, which supports the FARC’s armed struggle, has also sunk roots in the trade union movement, and a number of its top leaders are union leaders as well. However, the working class is not seen as an independent political force, but rather one that fights as part of a broad front for a democratic opening of society. Again, the PCC’s Seventeenth Party Congress program states:

This is in essence Antonio Navarro Wolff’s demand for "the bourgeois revolution" in Colombia. In such a scenario, the working class plays an important but subordinate role in the struggle to democratize Colombia.

The working-class struggle

Colombia today is an urban society. Seventy-four percent of its population lives in the cities. According to the World Bank, in 1998 agriculture accounted for 14.5 percent of the GDP, industry for 27.1 percent and services for 58.4 percent. The workforce numbers approximately 11 million.49 Though overall unionization is only 7 percent–down from a high of 26 percent in 1980–unions are strong in some of the most important sectors of the economy, such as the oil, coffee, banana and coal industries. Workers are also well organized in the public sector, especially among teachers and health care workers. Private-sector workers are less organized than public sector workers, and teachers alone account for three-quarters of unionized public workers.

Colombian workers have fought tooth and nail for the right to organize unions at all. The first independent trade union federation did not even appear until 1986, when left-wing workers (including Trotskyists and Communists) organized the CUT in the context of a growing strike wave and reforms passed under the Betancur administration.

Workers have faced deep, vicious resistance in their struggles to organize from Colombia’s bosses. More than 2,300 trade unionists have been murdered since 1987. The banana workers on the Atlantic Coast, for example, have withstood unbelievable repression from the death squads and the army. Hundreds of banana workers have been massacred over the last 10 years (200 in 1987 alone). On December 13, 1999 César Herrera Torreglosa, General Secretary of the banana workers union SINTRAINAGRO, was machine-gunned to death while entering one of the union’s regional offices. Death squads have repeatedly bombed union headquarters throughout the Urabá province where bananas are grown. And the army has deployed helicopter gunships, tanks and fighter planes to destroy union leaders’ homes throughout the area. Jenny Pearce described an army attack:

Yet the banana workers have taken to the streets by the tens of thousands time and again to protest the bombings, massacres and disappearances. They have organized work stoppages in direct response to murders of their comrades. Through their struggle, they have won a unionization rate of 96 percent throughout the industry.

The experiences of the banana workers in many ways mirror those of workers in a number of other companies, including Coca-Cola, Nestle, British Petroleum and Ecopetrol, Colombia’s state-owned oil company. Since oil has become Colombia’s most important export–surpassing coffee in the 1980s–oil workers have become the most strategic sector of the labor movement.

Workers’ struggle has revived significantly in the last few years in response to the state’s extreme austerity measures, which have centered primarily on public workers. In February 1997, public sector workers staged a daylong strike against benefit reductions. In October 1998, 800,000 public workers struck for 21 days–the longest public-sector strike in the country’s history–against government austerity plans to cut jobs and services and to increase taxes. In Bogotá, 200,000 marched while the army forcibly removed oil workers who had occupied refineries and bank workers sprayed police with high-pressure hoses to stop them from evicting them from bank premises.

Though the unions were unable to prevent the austerity measures, they won wage increases of 15 percent, barely keeping up with inflation. But the cost was tremendous. Twelve union leaders were assassinated during the strike, including Jorge Luis Ortega García, vice president of the CUT, and Hortensia Alfaro Banderas, a nurse who headed the health workers’ union. The state has attempted to use the notorious Decree No. 180, a law that allows the government to brand strikers as "terrorists," to break the union movement. Public-sector workers, including health workers and oil workers, staged another daylong general strike in April 1999 and were joined by 300,000 striking teachers.

Against the backdrop of such repression, the fact that between 1.5 and 2 million workers came out into the streets as part of a general strike against the austerity plans of the Pastrana government in September 1999 is nothing short of heroic. In this strike, workers risked their lives not only to shut down their workplaces, but also to shut down major highways and city streets as well. And when the army attempted to occupy a working-class neighborhood in the capital city of Bogotá, workers threw up barricades and fought to keep them out.

The strike was significant for the political demands it raised and the level of support it garnished. Called by a coalition of Colombia’s unions in conjunction with various civic, peasant and student organizations, the strike involved 20 million people who struck, marched and blocked roads throughout the country. The strike’s organizing committee, called the Comando Nacional del Paro (National Strike Command or CNP), advanced 41 demands involving canceling the foreign debt, increasing social spending and putting an end to violence and human rights abuses. While social spending has been cut drastically, funds have been diverted to pay for servicing Colombia’s burgeoning debt. The unions are challenging the government’s efforts to obtain a $3 billion International Monetary Fund loan that will come with conditions that the state cut needed social spending, freeze wages and lay off thousands of workers to pay its rich creditors.

The way forward

The September general strike shows that the struggle against the regime is by no means limited to the guerrilla front. In fact, in the middle of the general strike, the FARC had to play more of a supporting role, taking over a power plant for a day in solidarity with the strikers’ demands.

Ordinary Colombians have the right to arm and defend themselves against the unimaginable horrors inflicted on them by Colombia’s ruling class. But the guerrilla struggle has not–and, we would argue, cannot–topple the regime. To do that would require the mass of Colombians who live in the cities–in particular, Colombia’s combative working class.

One of the solutions put forward to solve the crisis has been the "Mandate for Peace," a broad initiative that calls upon the combatants to declare a cease-fire and begin talks. The sentiment for peace is extremely popular, as shown by the mass peace marches of millions of Colombians in October 1999. After decades of bloodshed, this sentiment is justified.

The problem is that the violence is not equal on all sides. It is largely a one-sided war of the Colombian state and its hired thugs. Yet, more often than not, the demands to end the violence begin with the demand that those most oppressed give up their guns first. For good reason, many doubt the sincerity of the paramilitaries, the government or the employers. The October demonstrations were called by the editor of one of Bogota’s biggest conservative newspapers, and were backed by the country’s main business organization.51 As a 1996 Human Rights Watch report aptly commented, in Colombia "peaceful political participation has proven to be more dangerous than armed struggle."52

It is a fantasy to think that ordinary Colombians’ problems will be solved if the guerrillas simply lay down their arms. In El Salvador the guerrillas traded in their fighting uniforms for pinstripe suits, yet the mass of workers and peasants face the same conditions that prevailed before the peace. In Colombia, it is not even clear that disarmament is an option. As Nicolas Bautista Rodriguez, military representative of the ELN, told an interviewer in 1997, "It’s wrong to speak of peace and think that we will just hand in our weapons, because the government will never hesitate to use its guns when strikes, demonstrations and other struggles take place and those in power feel threatened."53 The only "successful" example of disarmament in Colombia–that of M-19–was possible because its leaders agreed to play by the traditional rules of Colombian politics. M-19 asked not for "upheaval," but merely for "participation."54

The argument for socialists is not whether to choose a peaceful or violent road to change. If a peaceful road were possible, socialists would be wholly for it. But all too often, a peaceful road in Latin America has led to a slaughter of our side. The conclusion must be that socialists in Colombia need to focus on organizing where power lies–Colombia’s working class in factory and field–and be willing to defend that movement if necessary, including by force of arms. The 1973 coup in Chile illustrates what savagery the Latin American ruling class metes out to those who attempt a "peaceful road" to socialism.55

At the end of the day, to simply see the argument as one over tactics (violence vs. nonviolence) avoids the question of what the goals of the struggle should be. More than a century ago, young Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg took up the debate of reform vs. revolution in this way:

Different century, different continent, but the argument applies as much to Colombia as it did to Europe more than a century ago.

1 Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez, "Clouds Over Colombia," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, September/October 1999: p. 6.

2 "Jobs, Hope in Short Supply," Orlando Sentinel, October 11, 1999 <http://orlandosentinel.com/archives/>.

3 "Pastrana’s Many Battles," The Economist, November 27, 1999: p. 31.

4 Coletta Youngers, "U.S. Entanglements in Colombia Continue," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. XXXI, No. 5, March/April 1998: p. 34.

5 U.S. State Department, "Annual Report of Military Expenditures, 1998: Colombia" <http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/98_amiex1.html#co> (as of December 9, 1999).

6 1999 letter to Dennis Grammenos of the Colombia Support Network.

7 Gonzalo Sánchez quoted in Jenny Pearce, Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth (London: Latin America Bureau, 1990), p. 17.

8 Pearce, p. 30.

9 Pearce, p. 41

10 Pearce, p. 44.

11 Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 116-17.

12 Pearce, p. 58.

13 Pearce, p. 65.

14 "Voter Apathy & Rejection of Traditional Parties Mark Local Elections," Notisur, April 11, 1994 <http://ladb.unm.edu/notisur>.

15 Pearce, p. 64.

16 Pearce, p. 115.

17 Pearce, p. 119.

18 The M-19 (April Nineteenth Movement) was formed by ex-FARC members together with a section of ANAPO (Popular National Alliance), a populist organization set up by General Rojas Pinella in the 1960s.

19 Pearce, pp. 179-80.

20 "Stop the War in Colombia," The Progressive, September 1999 <www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/progresv.htm> (as of December 19, 1999).

21 Pearce, p. 205.

22 Javier Giraldo, Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996).

23 Giraldo, p. 20.

24 Ricardo Peñaranda S., Eduardo Pizarro L. and Jaime Zuluaga N., "Incertidumbre ante la estrategia gubernamental," Colombia Thema: Análisis de la Situación Social y Política <http://colombia-thema.org/nov99/coyuntura-tercero99.html> (as of December 19, 1999).

25 Juan Forero, "Colombia turmoil plays out like upheaval in Kosovo," Houston Chronicle, May 7, 1999.

26 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 3.

27 Scott and Marshall, p. ix.

28 Scott and Marshall, pp. vii-viii, p. 4.

29 "Colombia: Drug-Laden Plane Points to Military Role in Drug Trafficking," Notisur, November 20, 1998 <http://ladb.unm.edu/notisur>.

30 "Colombia’s Pastrana plays down FARC’s drug links," Reuters, July 29, 1999 <http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/farclinx.htm> (as of December 19, 1999).

31 "Drugs replace communism as the point of entry for U.S. policy on Latin America: U.S. policy towards Colombia about to massively veer off-track," Wednesday, August 24, 1999 <http://icdc.com/~paulwolf/hemisphr.htm>. There is a close relationship between the drug cartels, the paramilitaries and their efforts to become a part of the "legitimate" business world. According a report by Colombian professor Alejandro Reyes, 42 percent of the best land in Colombia is now owned by the drug mafia. Much of the land has been purchased–in what is known as "counter land reform"–after paramilitary terror has driven peasants off their land.

32 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, "The Culture of Fear," Znet <http://www.lbbs.

org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html> (as of December 19, 1999).

33 Chomsky, "The Culture of Fear."

34 Clinton quoted in "Clinton Says No Direct U.S. Role in Colombia," Reuters, Friday, Nov. 5, 1999.

35 Tod Robberson, "U.S. launches covert program to aid Colombia," Dallas Morning News, August 19, 1998.

36 Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States (Washington: Human Rights Watch/Americas Human Rights Watch Arms Project, 1996), p. 88.

37 Serge F. Kovaleski, "Colombian Town Basking in Peace: Many Welcome Rebel Takeover," The Washington Post, January 25, 1999: p A15.

38 Colombia’s Killer Networks, p. 16.

39 For more on Stalinism and the Latin American left, see the article in this magazine on page 43.

40 Letter to the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Resistencia Edicion Internacional No. 17 <www.contrast.org/mirrors/farc/zemin.htm> (as of December 19, 1999).

41 "La Debacle Rusa," Voz, Edition 1991, September 16-29, 1998 <http://www.

nodo50.org/voz/160998/160998-17.htm> (as of December 19, 1999). Translation from the original Spanish by Bridget Broderick.

42 "17th Congreso del Partido Comunista Colombiano: Resolución política. POR UNA SOLUCIÓN POLÍTICA Y DEMOCRÁTICA DE LA CRISIS COLOMBIANA," Voz, Edition 1993, October 14-27, 1998 <http://www.

nodo50.org/voz/141098/141098-11.htm> (as of December 19, 1999). Translated from the original Spanish by Bridget Broderick.

43 Frank Bajak, "Stock Exchange Chief, Rebel Talk Economics in Colombian Plains," Miami Herald, June 27, 1999: p. 8A.

44 "State Policy for Peace," editorial, Resistencia Edicion Internacional No. 17 <http://www.contrast.org/mirrors/farc/editoril.htm> (as of December 19, 1999).

45 "The Two Colombias," editorial, Resistencia Edicion Internacional No. 20, <http://burn.ucsd.edu/~farc-ep/Resistencia20/editorial_i.htm> (as of December 19, 1999).

46 "17th Congreso del Partido Comunista Colombiano: Resolución política. POR UNA SOLUCIÓN POLÍTICA Y DEMOCRÁTICA DE LA CRISIS COLOMBIANA." Translated from the original Spanish by Bridget Broderick.

47 The FARC received a great deal of press when its members killed three American environmental activists who were living with the U’Wa Indians last summer. Though the FARC attempted to distance themselves from the attack by saying it was carried out under the orders of a rogue commander, they have nonetheless been implicated in the killings or kidnappings of oil workers, peasants and other potential allies. For instance, according to War Without Quarter: Colombia and International Humanitarian Law, the 1998 Human Rights Watch Report, "In May 1997, the José David Suárez Front of the UC-ELN announced over a Casanare radio station that it would consider the 1,300 workers at facilities belonging to British Petroleum ‘military objectives.’" According to a February 4, 1998 report published by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), the Fifth Front of FARC squads "now specifically target members of SINTRAINAGRO [agricultural workers’ union] and ‘Esperanza, Paz y Libertad’ (Hope, Peace and Freedom), a movement which includes former guerrillas committed to nonviolent democratic political action." <http://www.iuf.org/iuf/wp/03.htm>

48 "17th Congreso del Partido Comunista Colombiano: Resolución política. POR UNA SOLUCIÓN POLÍTICA Y DEMOCRÁTICA DE LA CRISIS COLOMBIANA." Translated from the original Spanish by Bridget Broderick.

49 The informal sector, which consists of small businesses, illegal trade, street vendors and so on, accounts for about half of Colombia’s economy.

50 Pearce, p. 225.

51 "La Paz, Más Que un Trapo," Desde Abajo, Año VI, No. 42, Septiembre de 1999, p. 1.

52 Quoted in The Drug War in Colombia: The Neglected Tragedy of Political Violence (Washington: Human Rights Watch Report, 1990), p. 120.

53 "They Promise Bridges Where There Are No Rivers," Internationalen, December 16, 1999 <http:www.internationalen.se/sp/ivp92.htm>.

54 Navarro Wolff quoted in Ana Carrigan, The Palace of Justice: a Colombian Tragedy (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993), p.30. Carrigan also interviewed an M-19 spokesperson who complained that the UP was "stupid" because "every time they opened their mouths they insulted the army."(Carrigan, p. 31.)

55 For a discussion of how the parliamentary road to socialism led to a bloodbath in Chile, see Tom Lewis, "Chile: The State and Revolution," International Socialist Review No. 6, Spring 1999: pp. 24-33.

56 Rosa Luxemburg, "Reform or Revolution," Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, (New York: Pathfinder, 1994), pp. 77-78.

PARAMILITARIES: THE REAL THREAT