[News] Uribe’s Colombia is Destabilizing a New Latin America

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia273.htm
March 3, 2008

Uribe’s Colombia is Destabilizing a New Latin 
America: A Response to the Murder of FARC Commander Raúl Reyes in Ecuador

by James J. Brittain and R. James Sacouman

A few weeks after the Ecuadorian and Venezuelan 
state called on the Colombian government to 
respect the need for peace and negotiation with 
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of 
Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP), the 
administration of President Álvaro Uribe Vélez 
supported an extensive armed air and land assault 
against the insurgency movement­not within 
Colombia’s borders, but rather on the sovereign 
territory of Ecuadorian soil. On March 1, 2008, 
the Colombian state, under the leadership of 
Uribe, Vice-President Francisco Santos Calderón, 
and his cousin Defence Minister Juan Manuel 
Santos, illegally deployed a military campaign 
within Ecuador, which resulted in the deaths of 
Raúl Reyes, Julian Conrado, and fifteen other 
combatants associated with the FARC-EP. Such 
actions are a clear display of the 
US-backed-Colombian state’s open negation of 
international codes of conduct, law and social justice.

The actions of March 1 took place days before a 
major international demonstration scheduled for 
March 6. Promoted by The National Movement of 
Victims of State-Sponsored Crimes (MOVICE), the 
International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), 
and countless social justice-based organizations, 
March 6 has been set as an international day of 
protest against those tortured, murdered and 
disappeared by the Colombian state, their allies 
within the paramilitary United Self-Defence 
Forces of Colombia (AUC) and the newly-reformed 
Black Eagles. Recently, President Uribe’s top 
political adviser, José Obdulio Gaviria, 
proclaimed that the protest and protesters should 
be criminalized. In addition, paramilitaries in 
the southwestern department of Nariño­not far 
from where the illegal incursions were carried 
out in Ecuador­have threatened to attack any 
organization or person associated with the protest activities.

It is believed that the Uribe and Santos 
administration is utilizing the slaughter of 
Commander Raúl Reyes and others as a method to 
deter activists and socially conscious peoples 
within and outside Colombia from participating in 
the March 6 events. Numerous state-controlled or 
connected media outlets, such as El Tiempo­which 
has long-standing ties to the Santos family­have 
been parading photographs of the bullet-ridden 
and mutilated corpse of Raúl Reyes throughout the 
country’s communications mediums. Such propaganda 
is clearly a tool to psychologically intimidate 
those preparing to demonstrate against the 
atrocities perpetrated by the state over the past seven years.

Over the past two months, numerous researchers, 
scholars and lawyers have supported the call to 
declare the FARC-EP a legitimate force fighting 
against the corrupt Colombian state. In January 
2008, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Maria Isabel 
Salvador argued that the FARC-EP should no longer 
be depicted as a terrorist organization. 
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez also announced 
that the FARC-EP are far from a terrorist force, 
but are rather a real army, which occupies 
Colombian territory and shares in a Bolivarian 
vision for a new Latin America. Mexican deputy 
Ricardo Cantu Garza also has promoted the 
recognition of the FARC-EP as a belligerent force 
legitimately fighting against a corrupt and 
unequal socio-political system. As prominent US attorney Paul Wolf argued:
The FARC-EP are a belligerent army of national 
liberation, as evidenced by their sustained 
military campaign and sovereignty over a large 
part of Colombian territory, and their conduct of 
hostilities by organized troops kept under 
military discipline and complying with the laws 
and customs of war, at least to the same extent 
as other parties to the conflict. Members of the 
FARC-EP are therefore entitled to the rights of 
belligerents under international law 
 there is 
no rule of international law prohibiting 
revolution, and, if a revolution succeeds, there 
is nothing in international law prohibiting the 
acceptance of the outcome, even though it was achieved by force.

 From Copenhagen to Caracas, numerous state 
officials have denounced the description of the 
FARC-EP as a terrorist organization. Progressive 
officials and administrations in Mexico, Ecuador 
and Venezuela have rather opted for the status of 
belligerent or irregular forces to more 
accurately depict the FARC-EP’s domestic and 
geo-political stance. Disturbingly, in the face 
of this evidence and the FARC-EP’s consistent 
promotion of a humanitarian prisoner exchange and 
peace negotiations with the state in a 
demilitarized zone in southwestern Colombia, the 
Uribe and Santos administration has moved ever 
farther away from supporting an end to the civil 
war within Colombia by opting for systemic violence.

Over the past several years, different aspects of 
the FARC-EP’s real social, political and cultural 
activities for progressive social change have 
been censored or marginalized by the private 
press or governments in support of the Colombian 
state. Nevertheless, after researching the 
FARC-EP and the country of Colombia for years, 
independent journalist Garry Leech argued that, 
“while there is little doubt regarding the global 
reach of terrorist organizations such as 
al-Qaeda, there is no evidence that the FARC is 
anything but one of the armed actors in 
Colombia’s long and tragic domestic conflict.”

In actuality, the FARC-EP is an actor within the 
strategic confines of Colombian society that aims 
its directives at domestic social change. In 
light of such realities, how can this insurgency 
be a terrorist threat to external nation-states? 
Coletta A. Youngers, of the Washington Office on 
Latin America (WOLA), responds to this question by describing how:
The U.S. government now views the Latin American 
region almost exclusively through the 
counterterrorist lens, though the region poses no 
serious national security threat to the United 
States 
 little evidence has been put forward to 
substantiate such claims, and whatever activity 
is taking place there appears to be minimal.

While Youngers does not trivialize its 
revolutionary tactics, she clearly argues that 
the FARC-EP cannot be correctly framed within the 
concept and rhetoric of global terrorism. 
Youngers argues that the insurgency is not a 
direct political threat to administrations within 
the United States, Canada, the European Union and 
any other foreign nation-state in the fact that 
the FARC-EP’s activities “are targeted inward, 
not outward,” hence, “applying the terrorism 
concept to these groups negates their political projects.”

Characterizing the FARC-EP as a foreign terrorist 
organization dramatically alters the dynamics of 
the peace process in favour of a killer state. 
Stipulating that the FARC-EP is terrorist results 
in the inability for legal peace negotiations to 
take place between the FARC-EP and any government 
that subscribes to the categorization. According 
to James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, promoting 
the FARC-EP­and its supporters­as terrorists 
“puts them on the list of targets to be assaulted 
by the US military machine” and “thus subject to total war.”

The terminology of terrorism is perfect for 
imperialist ideology and expansionism. It is a 
very open-ended reference that “allows maximum 
intervention in all regions against any 
opposition” and “that any group engaged in 
opposing militarism, imperialism (so-called 
‘globalization’) or local authoritarian regimes 
could be labelled ‘terrorist’ and targeted,” thus 
legitimizing external invasion or attack, say Petras and Veltmeyer.

Internal and external condemnation of the 
Colombian state has fallen upon the deaf ears of 
the Uribe and Santos administration. After years 
of increased violations of civilian human rights, 
the ongoing suppression of trade-unionism, 
assassinations of left-of-centre activists and 
politicians, and a political reality that has 
witnessed 75 governors, mayors and Congressional 
politicians alleged or found guilty of having 
direct links to the paramilitaries­including 
Vice-President Francisco Santos Calderón and his 
cousin Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos and 
President Uribe’s brother Santiago and their 
cousin Senator Mario Uribe­now the Colombian 
state has deemed it necessary to illegally 
encroach upon those nations that deviate from 
their ideological model of political and economic centralization.

Not only has the Uribe administration criticized 
its neighbours, but after the actions realized on 
March 1 it is clear that the Colombian state, 
with the full backing of the United States, will 
impose its own ideological goals and values 
through force, regardless of the democratic 
rights and privileges of conventional electoral 
law and procedure. While the neighbouring states 
of Ecuador and Venezuela struggle for peace and 
try to assist the people of Colombia in the quest 
for an end to the civil war, the Uribe and Santos 
administration has bypassed judicial realities 
and governance to impose its own objectives.

Careful analysts of the Colombian situation 
continue to debate whether the Colombian state is 
pre-fascist or actually fascist. It is certainly 
neither humane nor actually democratic. The 
current Colombian state must be transformed, 
sooner rather than later. Those fighting for 
peace must condemn the action of this regime. In 
solidarity, we must protest the policies of the 
Colombian state and raise our voices in support 
for a New Colombia that stands for peace with social justice.

James J. Brittain is an assistant professor of 
sociology and James Sacouman a professor of 
sociology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada.




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