[News] The Spectacle and the Movement in Colombia

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross07282008.html

July 28, 2008


Kidnapped by Hunger, Held Prisoner by Poverty


The Spectacle and the Movement in Colombia

By CLIFTON ROSS

Sunday, July 20th was Colombian Independence day, 
and hundreds of thousands of Colombians in 60 
countries went out into the streets to call for 
the liberation of those kidnapped in Colombia’s 
fifty-year-long war.  In Pasto, the capital of 
the border province of Nariño, an elderly woman 
said she was present at the demonstration to plea 
for the liberation of all people being held 
against their will by all parties. One of the 
singers on the stage in the city’s main plaza 
where about two thousand people had gathered, 
took the opportunity to call for the “liberation 
of those kidnapped by hunger, those held prisoner 
by poverty, the street children, and those held prisoners by ignorance.”

But neither the sentiments of the singer, nor 
those of the elderly woman with whom I talked, 
were echoed in Colombia’s mainstream media. In 
the Independence Day event, as broadcast live 
over most stations, especially the large open air 
concert in Bogotá featuring the likes of Shakira, 
Carlos Vives and Dr. Krapula, the media chose to 
focus only on the kidnapped victims of the FARC. 
Meanwhile, the paramilitaries, which have 
theoretically been disbanded, still operate in 
large areas of the country and continue to be 
responsible for between 60 and 80 percent of 
political deaths and disappearances.

Most Colombians recognize multiple players in 
this war: the Colombian and U.S. governments; the 
oligarchy, whose greed has made Colombia, along 
with Brazil, a rival for last place in terms of 
distribution of wealth (65% of Colombians live in 
poverty); the paramilitaries, sometimes employed 
by local oligarchs, and other times soldiers 
operating out of uniform; and finally, on the 
other side, the leftist guerrillas who make up 
two separate armies, the National Liberation Army 
(ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Attempts to peacefully resolve the war in recent 
years have failed for various reasons. The 
president prior to Uribe, Andres Pastrana, had 
made what appeared to be serious efforts to 
negotiate with the FARC, but the guerrilla leader 
and co-founder of the FARC, “Marulanda,” made a 
major blunder and didn’t show up for the 
negotiations. My friend, Martha, a school teacher 
in Bogotá, told me that “that’s the image most 
Colombians have burned in their minds: Pastrana 
sitting at the table with a frustrated 
expression, waiting beside an empty chair 
reserved for Marulanda, who never arrived. That 
convinced most Colombians that the guerrilla 
weren’t interested in peace. That they only 
wanted to take power by force of arms.”

As a result of that debacle, which also had the 
effect of undermining Pastrana’s presidency, most 
Colombians voted for Alvaro Uribe, who ran on a 
platform of annihilating the guerrilla, a 
strategy he has pursued, with the help of the 
U.S. government, ever since taking office. People 
like Martha and Leonardo Perafán, of the Bogotá 
based Institute of Studies for Peace and 
Development (INDEPAZ),  hate to hear such talk, 
but they remain in the minority. Most believe 
that the annihilation of the FARC/ELN will bring 
peace to Colombia, but Leonardo disagreed. Even 
if it were true, Leonardo contended, “the FARC is 
far from defeated on the battle field. Go to the 
U.N. website and you’ll see that practically 
every day there’s an armed confrontation going on 
in the country. They’ve suffered blows to morale, 
certainly, but that doesn’t mean they’re defeated 
militarily. And a military defeat is going to be 
very difficult, if not impossible, to pull off. 
The only solution is through negotiations,” Leonard said.

Nevertheless, negotiations seem to be another 
improbability, given the recent history of 
Colombia, in particular, the tale of the 
Patriotic Union (UP) of the 1980s-1990s. Leftist 
guerrillas at that time turned in their arms and 
took up the political struggle as the UP and 
within a few years between five and six thousand 
of their members had been murdered. In this 
context, Uribe’s proposal that in order for peace 
negotiations with the ELN to begin, the 
guerrillas must first enter a small area of the 
country and turn in a list of all their members. 
Given the collective memory of Colombia’s left 
and Uribe’s commitment to annihilate the 
guerrilla in Colombia, the ELN is almost 
guaranteed to refuse the offer. FARC, for its 
part, has stated there are no grounds for 
dialogue and it has petitioned to meet with 
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to consult on the process of the war.

I went to Popayán specifically to visit the 
offices of the Regional Indigenous Center of 
Cauca (CRIC) in hopes that someone there could 
help unravel some of the complexities of 
Colombian society and politics. Leonardo Perafán 
had spoken highly of CRIC, calling it the 
organization at the core of “Colombia’s most 
vital social movement.” In his office in Bogota 
Leonardo had pulled up images of CRIC members and 
their supporters, armed only symbolically with 
batons that show their status as guardians of the 
tribes, confronting a black wall of police in 
riot gear sporting shields and helicopters which shot live ammunition.

“There were several wounded and one killed in 
this demonstration,” he told me, clicking through 
images of the wounded and one picture of a hand 
holding bullets. “These are some of the bullets 
that were being shot from the helicopters,” Leonardo explained.

It’s not only the police that members of CRIC 
have to contend with; they are also caught in the 
war between the paramilitaries and the FARC. The 
paramilitaries have thus far confined themselves 
to the murder of mestizo union and campesino 
activists but the paramilitary presence, along 
with the presence of the FARC, still make the 
state of Arauca one of several zones of conflict.

In the offices of CRIC, in a large building 
without a sign, I met with Jorge Caballeros, a 
good-humored, bearded mestizo with a twinkle in 
his eyes, who looked to be in his early to 
mid-sixties. Jorge thinks that Sunday’s march, 
called “The Second Independence” was just a media 
event backed by the government, in particular, 
the Ministry of Culture, big businesses and 
cultural organizations, a spectacle aimed at 
further weakening the FARC and covering up what 
he calls the “hundreds of thousands of victims 
kidnapped by the paramilitaries.”

  “They’re kidnapped, because their cadavers 
haven’t turned up. So, for instance, we have the 
hundred murdered in Naya [paramilitary/military 
massacre in Cauca in April, 2001]. We know 
they’re dead; forty bodies were recovered, but 
where are the other hundred-odd people who are 
missing? They’re technically kidnapped,” Jorge 
says. These “kidnapped,” and hundreds of 
thousands more, weren’t favored with a march on 
Sunday, July 20 and they will likely never receive national attention.

Jorge finds it ironic that Colombia will be 
celebrating Independence Day this year, given 
that it has now signed the Free Trade Agreement 
with the US. “July 20 is the anniversary of 
Colombia’s independence from Europe in 1810, but 
today Colombia isn’t independent. It is submitted 
to neoliberalism; it’s submitted to the United 
States; it’s submitted to the policy of 
“democratic security” which really are 
international policies to favor international capital.”

Jorge points to evidence of this in the recent 
“rescue” of Ingrid Betancourt, a joint operation 
between the Colombian military, U.S. intelligence 
agencies, Israeli advisors, French and Swiss 
intermediaries whose roles are still unclear and 
now, it seems, even the International Red 
Cross.  “It seems that the international 
community was quite clear about what was going 
on, and not just the intelligence agencies,” 
Jorge says. “These deceptions [referring to the 
illegal use of the symbols of the Red Cross as a 
cover for the rescue, and numerous lies about the 
operation] raise all sorts of questions. First of 
all, what is the role of the international 
community in the internal issues of the peace [process]?”

Even as Colombians make new appeals for the 
release of those thousands of kidnapped victims 
of Colombia’s war, Jorge believes that the way 
Uribe conducted the “rescue” operation of 
Betancourt and the others, in particular the use 
of the Red Cross as cover for a military 
operation, will virtually condemn the remaining 
victims of kidnapping to perdition. “The Red 
Cross accepts the apology [from Uribe] but now 
they’re compromised. No one will trust them in 
the context of this war here because they’re 
infiltrated. And this is an enormous crisis, 
especially for those who have been kidnapped. 
They’re in great risk now. It seems intentional, 
that is, that there is a great deal of interest 
that those who have been kidnapped not reappear 
alive. And if the international community doesn’t 
respond in some way to this breach 
[misappropriating the symbols of the Red Cross] 
it’s going to be terrible for international law.”

“And we also know that the FARC is infiltrated; 
but if the FARC is infiltrated what are the 
autonomous armed political projects of the FARC 
if they know they’re infiltrated? Now that we, 
and they, know that the FARC is infiltrated, we 
have to wonder about the origins of each action, 
if it’s their own autonomous political action or 
the action of the infiltrators.”

  “Colombia is suffering a crisis of 
institutionality,” Jorge says.  “And so the DAS 
(Departamento Administrativa de Seguridad, 
Colombia’s secret police) is also infiltrated, as 
we all know, by narcotraffickers. Sixty five 
percent of the Colombian congress is infiltrated 
by “parapolitica”(paramilitary politics). The 
national government is infiltrated by special 
interests with whom they made irregular and 
illegal agreements so as to stay in power, and it 
has thus lost its legitimacy.”

“It can’t yet be claimed with certainty that the 
[Colombian] intelligence service has infiltrated 
the international community but all this is to 
say that all these institutions have lost 
legitimacy. And so there is no institutional 
legitimacy (institucionalidad) nor political 
proposals that haven’t been infiltrated and all 
the government can do is make pay-offs. All that 
is left, then, is that everyone expects nothing more than a pay-off.”

“Given this, the only coherent position to take, 
it seems to me, is civil disobedience.”

In a time when all other institutions have lost 
all legitimacy, the social movements, Jorge 
believes, are “of supreme importance for 
autonomy, participation and democracy in the 
country.” Moreover, he maintains, they’re the 
only institutions with any legitimacy left in the 
country despite all attempts of the Colombian 
government and mainstream society to discredit them.

“As the guerrilla continues to weaken in 
Colombia, the social movements will gain greater 
autonomy.” He mentions a series of meetings, 
events and actions planned for the upcoming week: 
a Permanent People’s Tribunal organized by many 
sectors of society in Bogota and dealing with the 
multinational corporate control of the country, 
massive mobilizations of indigenous people around 
a whole set of issues, including the liberation 
of the earth from the production of “biofuels” which Jorge calls “necrofuels.”

“The problem with such media spectacles [as the 
July 20th Independence Day mobilization] is that 
they make the actions of civil society 
invisible.” He points out that the indigenous 
movement’s land seizures, sacred rituals 
undertaken to rename and reclaim ancestral lands, 
large mobilizations, what Jorge calls “permanent 
mobilizations” of the social movements throughout 
the country, like the gathering this past weekend 
in nearby Silvia, to oppose the privatization of 
water, will all be eclipsed by the July 20th media event.

“The nationwide actions of Colombia’s vital 
social movements will also be eclipsed by the 
“War on Terror” between a military of 500,000 and 
a guerrilla of 30,000 and those in the social 
movement who push too hard will be included by 
the government in the list of the “terrorist.” 
“Capitalism is in crisis: it’s no longer turning 
a profit. Where there’s no crisis, there’s no 
profit. So it always needs a crisis, doesn’t it? 
And so it has conveniently concocted “terrorism” 
as the new crisis, and it attempts to link the 
social movements to this enemy,” Jorge says.

Jorge’s views are consistent with statements by 
Professor Mario Morales, interviewed in the 
current issue of the Colombian weekly, “Polo.” He 
says that, in the absence of a real ideology, 
those supporting Uribe today can only make the 
argument that “ ‘now we can go out to our place 
in the country, and before, we couldn’t,’ as if 
all the country could travel or had country homes 
and vehicles
 It’s so powerful, this 
orchestration and simplification,” he says, “that 
it’s a rule of political propaganda: simplification and the single enemy.”

Nevertheless, the current crisis may be 
unmanageable, even by such an astute and crafty 
master of propaganda as President 
Uribe,  especially given the mobilizations of the 
social movements in Colombia and throughout Latin 
America. “Indigenous people everywhere are rising 
up,” Jorge says. “In Chile, the Mapuches are 
demanding their land. Look at Bolivia, Mexico, 
Ecuador. In Venezuela indigenous rights are 
finally being recognized. All over Latin America, 
there’s real possibility for change. We don’t 
always have to be in crisis. People are beginning 
to wake up. The desperate cry of the original 
people (originarios) is awakening people to the 
authoritarian aspirations of the governments of 
the world. There’s hope. This is what the 
indigenous movement of Cauca offers: the 
recomposition of authority, the recomposition of 
social participation, the recomposition of seeds, 
the recomposition of markets based on an exchange 
of values and not of prices,” referring in the 
last instance to the new markets developed in 
Cauca based on trade without the use of money.

In particular, the social movements of Colombia 
have distinct contributions to offer the 
continent in the wake of the 1991 constitution 
when a space was opened in Colombian society to 
the indigenous people, thanks in large part to 
demobilized guerrillas of the M-19 (April 19th 
Movement) like Navarro Wolf and others who 
contributed to the writing of the document. 
“Unlike other countries in Latin America which 
are still copying the European model of building 
party structures, Colombia, starting with the 
indigenous movement, is building a movement at 
the base, by means of the power of community, 
political projects build from the community in 
which the decision of the community will be the 
decision of the government. You find this same 
thing in the Zapatista writings, as well as the 
Landless Movement (MST) in Brazil.”

“You might not hear much about Cauca because most 
of what is happening here isn’t visible.” Jorge 
pauses and smiles. “But our movement is very much alive.”

Clifton Ross, translator and co-editor with Ben 
Clarke of "Voice of Fire: Communiques and 
Interviews from the Zapatista National Liberation 
Army," is the writer and director of "Venezuela: 
Revolution from the Inside Out," a feature-length 
documentary released May 20 of this year and 
available from PM Press 
(<http://www.pmpress.org/>www.pmpress.org). He 
can be reached at <mailto:clifross1 at yahoo.com>clifross1 at yahoo.com




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