[News] Post-FARC Scenarios

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Post-FARC Scenarios

July, 23 2008

By Raul Zibechi
Source: ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento

In the first quarter of 2008, a strong political 
shift has emerged, which allows the local and 
global rightwing and multinational corporations 
to regain their positions and boost their 
offensives. This shift is not limited to 
Colombia, which represents its centre, but 
extends to countries like Argentina, Bolivia, and 
Peru, essentially affecting the entire region.

If there ever was a balance between the FARC and 
the Colombian Armed Forces, over the last few 
months it has fallen heavily in favour of the 
state. The guerrilla has lost all possibility of 
negotiating a humanitarian accord under 
favourable conditions, it cannot maintain 
military or political offensives, it has been 
intensely discredited by the population, and it 
lacks sufficient national and international 
allies. Even given this reality, the most 
probable scenario is that the FARC will continue 
on, with diminished capacity and a likely 
fragmentation among its leaders and fronts, a 
situation suggested by the outcome of the liberation of the 15 hostages.

The strategy employed by the Southern Command and 
the Pentagon, as expressed through Phase II of 
Plan Colombia, contemplates neither the 
definitive defeat of nor the possible negotiation 
with the guerrilla. Removing the FARC from the 
scene would be bad news for the imperial strategy 
of destabilization and re-colonization in the 
Andean region, which Fidel Castro has defined as 
"pax romana." This project cannot be realized 
without war, be it direct or indirect; which is 
to say, without permanent destabilization as a 
form of territorial and political reconfiguration 
in this strategic region, which includes the arc 
of Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay, passing 
through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

On one hand, it is about clearing the Andean 
region to facilitate the current multinational 
business model (open pit mining, oil and gas 
exploitation, biodiversity, monocultures for 
‘biofuels') which requires the appropriation of 
common goods as much as it does the displacement 
of the populations that continue to live in these 
spaces. We are not facing so-called "normal" 
capitalism, which was capable in a given moment 
of establishing alliances and agreements which 
gave life to benefactor states based on the 
triple alliance between the state, national 
businesspeople, and unions. Instead, this is a 
financial-speculative-accumulation-by-dispossession 
model, which substitutes negotiations with wars 
and the extraction of surplus value by 
appropriating nature. In other words, this is war 
capitalism in an age of imperial decadence.

This system assumes the form of criminal or mafia 
capitalism in countries like Colombia, not only 
because it functions well through war and theft 
but also because war and theft form its central 
nucleus, its principle form of accumulation. This 
explains the close link between private war 
companies, which in Colombia employ two to three 
thousand mercenaries, or ‘contractors' as they 
are now called, and the paramilitary state, 
headed up by President Álvaro Uribe, situated in 
an alliance between paramilitaries and narco-traffickers.

In Colombia, there are three forces that have 
faced off against the current state of affairs: 
the guerrilla, the political left of the Polo 
Democrático Alternativo and social movements. The 
first believes that they can win through weapons 
or negotiate with this new power. The Polo 
Democrático rejects the role of Washington and of 
multinational corporations as designers and 
beneficiaries of the paramilitary mafia state, 
and thus overestimates the margins of democracy. 
Social movements, for their part, have massive 
difficulties in emerging out of local and 
sectarian struggles and are not in the condition, 
at present, to position themselves as alternative actors.

Phase II of Plan Colombia is the mechanism used 
in designing this militarist state, and in this 
moment, is seeking to consolidate it. Now that 
the FARC do not represent any major risk for this 
project, the objective of drawing out the 
conflict over the long term becomes clear. Far 
from opening spaces for negotiation, as is the 
desire of the left, the message over the last few 
months has indicated a single way forward: 
neither peace nor surrender will guarantee the 
lives of guerrillas. They either fight and 
resist, or wait for their extermination, as 
happened at the end of the 1980s. The idea is to 
hit the territorial heart of the guerrillas in 
order to displace them towards border zones with 
Venezuela and Ecuador, where Plan Colombia II 
aspires to convert them into instruments of regional destabilization.

For this reason, Venezuela and Hugo Chavez have 
adopted the strategy of reducing tensions with 
the Uribe government. It is not an ideological 
question, as some analysts claim. That argument 
is fine in coffee shops and academic circles, but 
of little value when the subject matter is the 
survival of projects of social change. If the 
imperial project is consolidated, the entire 
region will suffer from polarization, and it is 
from there that the urgency to deescalate the 
conflicts stems, as much in Colombia as in Argentina and Bolivia.

Neither will an eventual triumph of Barack Obama 
change things. It may temper the most 
authoritarian strains of ‘Uribismo', which 
explains the extreme nervousness of Bogotá and 
its solid alliance with John McCain, the 
Republican candidate. What is certain is that the 
plans of the Southern Command do not depend on 
who is in the White House, and that their aim is 
to promote comprehensive actions that convert the 
region into a stable, impregnable bastion for the maintenance of US hegemony.

In sum, the imperial elites aspire to use 
physical armed force to regain their decadence in 
the re-colonization of Latin America. In moments 
like this, only popular mobilization and action 
through political channels can weaken the offensive coming from the North.


Raúl Zibechi is a Uruguayan journalist, professor 
and researcher in the Latin American Franciscan 
Multiversity, and an advisor to various social groups.

(Translated by Dawn Paley for the La Chiva 
Collective, a Colombia solidarity group based in Western Canada.)

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From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: 
<http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18244>http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18244 




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