[News] Columbia - Homage to Manuel Marulanda

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Homage to Manuel Marulanda
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/homage-to-manuel-marulanda/

James Petras

             Pedro Antonio Marin, better know as Manuel Marulanda and 
'Tiro Fijo (Sure Shot)', was the leader of the Revolutionary Armed 
Forces of Colombia-Peoples Army (FARC-EP).  He was without a doubt 
the greatest revolutionary peasant leader in the history of the 
Americas.  Over a period of 60 years he organized peasant movements, 
rural communities and, when all legal democratic channels were 
effectively (and brutally) closed, he built the most powerful 
sustained guerrilla army and supporting underground militias in Latin 
America.  The FARC at its peak between 1999-2005 numbered nearly 
20,000 fighters, several hundred thousand peasant-activists, hundreds 
of village and urban militia units.  Even today despite the regime's 
forced displacement of 3 million peasants resulting from scorched 
earth policies and scores of massacres, the FARC has between 
10,000-15,000 guerrillas in its numerous 'fronts distributed 
throughout the country.

             What make Marulanda's achievements so significant are 
his organizational abilities, strategic acuity and his intransigent 
and principled programmatic positions consisting of support of 
popular demands.  Marulanda, more than any other guerrilla leader, 
had unmatched rapport with the rural poor, the landless, the 
subsistence cultivators and the rural refugees over three generations.

             Beginning in 1964 with two-dozen peasants fleeing 
villages devastated by a US directed military offensive Marulanda 
methodically built a revolutionary guerrilla army without either 
foreign financial or material contributions.  Marulanda, more than 
any other guerrilla leader, was a great rural political 
teacher.  Marulanda's superb organizing skills were honed on the 
basis of his intimate ties with peasants - he grew up in a poor 
peasant family, lived among them cultivating and organizing, and 
spoke their language addressing their most basic daily needs and 
future hopes.  Conceptually and through daily trial and error, 
Marulanda worked out a series of strategic political -military 
operations based on his brilliant understanding of the geographic and 
human terrain.  Between 1964 to his recent death, Marulanda defeated 
or evaded at least seven major military offensives financed by over 
$7 billion dollars in US military aid, involving thousands of US 
'Green Berets', Special Forces, mercenaries, over 250,000 Colombians 
Armed Forces and 35,000 member paramilitary death squads.

             Unlike Cuba or Nicarangua, Marulanda built an organized 
mass base and trained a largely rural leadership; he openly declared 
his socialist program and never received political or material 
support from so-called 'progressive capitalists'.  Colombia's armed 
forces were a formidable, highly trained and disciplined repressive 
apparatus, bolstered by murderous death squads, unlike Batista's and 
Somoza's corrupt and rapacious gangsters, who plundered and retreated 
under pressure.  Marulanda, unlike many better-known 'poster-boy' 
guerrillas, was a virtual unknown among the elegant leftist editors 
in London, the nostalgic Parisian sixty-eighters and the New York 
Socialist scholars.  Marulanda spent his time exclusively in 
'Colombia profunda', the deep Colombia, preferring to converse and 
teach peasants and learn their grievances, rather than giving 
interviews to adventure-seeking Western journalists.  Instead of 
writing grandiloquent 'manifestos' and striking photogenic poses, he 
preferred the steady, unromantic but eminently effective grass roots 
pedagogy of the disinherited.  Marulanda traveled from virtually 
inaccessible valleys to mountain ranges, from jungles to plains, 
organizing, fighting.recruiting and training new leaders.  He 
eschewed tripping off to 'World Forums' or following the route of 
international leftist tourists.  He never visited a foreign capital 
and, it is said, never set foot in the nation's capital, Bogota.  But 
he had a vast and profound knowledge of the demands of the 
Afro-Colombians of the Coast, the Indio-Colombians of the mountains 
and jungles, the land claims of millions of displaced peasants, the 
names and addresses of abusive landlords who brutalized and raped 
peasants and their kin.

             Throughout the 1960's, 70's and 80's numerous guerrilla 
movements raised arms, fought with greater or lesser capacity and 
disappeared - killed, surrended (some even turned collaborator) or 
became immersed in electoral wheeling and dealing.  Few in number, 
they fought in the name of non-existent 'peoples armies'; most were 
intellectuals who were more familiar with European narratives than 
the micro-history and popular culture and legends of the people they 
tried to organize.  They were isolated, encircled and obliterated, 
perhaps leaving a well-publicized legacy of exemplary sacrifice, but 
changing nothing on the ground.

             In contrast, Marulanda took the best punches thrown by 
the counter-insurgency Presidents in Bogota and Washington and 
returned them in spades.  For every village that was razed, Marulanda 
recruited dozens of angry and destitute peasant fighters and 
patiently trained them to be cadres and commanders.  More than any 
guerrilla army, the FARC became an army of the whole 
people:  one-third of the commanders were women, over seventy percent 
were peasants although intellectuals and professionals joined and 
were trained by movement-led cadres.  Marulanda was revered for his 
singularly simple life style: he shared the drenching rain under 
plastic canopies.  He was deeply respected by millions of peasants, 
but he never in any way cultivated a personality cult-figure:  He was 
too irreverent and modest, preferring to delegate important tasks to 
a collective leadership, with a good deal of regional autonomy and 
tactical flexibility.  He accepted a diversity of views on tactics, 
even when he profoundly disagreed.  In the early 1980's, many cadre 
and leaders decided to try the electoral route, signed a 'peace 
agreement' with the Colombian President, formed an electoral party - 
the Patriotic Union - and successfully elected numerous mayors and 
representatives.  They even gained a substantial vote in Presidential 
elections.  Marulanda did not publicly oppose the accord but he did 
not lay down his arms and 'go down from the mountains to the 
city'.  Much better than the professionals and trade unionists who 
ran for office, Marulanda understood the profoundly authoritarian and 
brutal character of the oligarchy and its politicians.  He clearly 
knew that Colombia's rulers would never accept any land reform just 
because a 'few illiterate peasants voted them out of office.'  By 
1987 over 5,000 members of the Patriotic Union had been slaughtered 
by the oligarchy's death squads, including three presidential 
candidates, a dozen elected congressmen and women and scores of 
mayors and city councilors.  Those who survived fled to the jungles 
and rejoined the armed struggle or fled into exile.

             Marulanda was a master in evading many encirclement and 
annihilation campaigns, especially those designed by the best and the 
brightest from the US Fort Bragg Special Forces counter-insurgency 
center and the School of the Americas.  By the end of the 1990's the 
FARC had extended its control to over half the country and was 
blocking highways and attacking military bases only 40 miles from the 
capital.  Severely weakened, the then President Pastrana finally 
agreed to serious peace negotiations in which the FARC demanded a 
de-militarized zone and an agenda that included basic structural 
changes in the state, economy and society.

             Unlike the Central American guerrillas who traded arms 
for elected office, Marulanda insisted on land redistribution, 
dismantling of the death squads and dismissal of Colombian generals 
involved in massacres, a mixed economy largely based on public 
ownership of strategic economic sectors and large-scale funding for 
peasants to develop alternative crops to coca, prior to laying down arms.

In Washington President Clinton was hysterical and at first opposed 
the peace negotiations - especially the reform agenda as well as the 
open public debates and forums widely attended by Colombian civil 
society and organized by the FARC in the de-militarized 
zone.  Marulanda's embrace of democratic debate, demilitarization and 
structural changes puts the lie to the charge by Western and Latin 
American social democrats and center-left academics that he was a 
'militarist'.  Washington probed to see if they could repeat the 
Central American peace process - co-opt the FARC leaders with the 
promise of electoral office and privilege in exchange for selling out 
the peasants and poor Colombians.  At the same time Clinton, with 
bi-partisan support, pushed through a massive $2 billion dollar 
appropriation bill to fund the biggest and bloodiest 
counter-insurgency program since the war in Indochina, dubbed 'Plan 
Colombia'.  Abruptly ending the peace process, President Pastrana 
rushed troops into the demilitarized zone to capture the FARC 
secretariat, but Marulanda and his comrades were long gone.

Between 2002 to the present the FARC alternated from offensive 
attacks and defensive retreats - mostly the latter since 2006.  With 
an unprecedented degree of US financing and advanced technological 
support, the newly elected narco-partner and death squad organizer, 
President Alvaro Uribe took charge of a scorched earth policy to 
savage the Colombian countryside.  Between his election in 2002 and 
re-election in 2006, over 15,000 peasants, trade unionists, human 
rights workers, journalists and other critics were murdered.  Entire 
regions of the countryside were emptied - like the US Operation 
Phoenix in Viet Nam, farmland was poisoned by toxic herbicides.  Over 
250,000 armed forces and their partners in the paramilitary death 
squads decimated vast stretches of the Colombian countryside where 
the FARC exercised hegemony.  Scores of US-supplied helicopter 
gun-ships blasted the jungles in vast search and destroy missions - 
(which had nothing to do with coca production or the shipment of 
cocaine to the United States).  By destroying all popular opposition 
and organizations throughout the countryside and displacing millions 
Uribe was able to push the FARC back toward more defensible remote 
regions.  Marulanda, as in the past, adopted a strategy of defensive 
tactical retreat, giving up territory in order to safeguard the 
guerrillas' capacity to fight another day.

Unlike other guerrilla movements, the FARC did not receive any 
material support form the outside:  Fidel Castro publicly repudiated 
armed struggle and looked to diplomatic and trade ties with 
center-left administrations and even better relations with the brutal 
Uribe.  After 2001, the Bush White House labeled the FARC a 
'terrorist organization' putting pressure on Ecuador and Venezuela to 
tighten cross-border movements of the FARC in search of supply 
chains.  The 'center-left' in Colombia was totally divided between 
those who gave 'critical support' to Uribe's total war against the 
FARC and those who ineffectively protested the repression.

It is hard to imagine any guerrilla movement surviving under 
conditions of massive US financed counter-insurgency, quarter million 
US-armed soldiers, millions displaced from its mass base and a 
psychopathic President allied directly to a 35,000 member chain-saw 
death squads.  However Marulanda, cool and determined, directed the 
tactical retreat; the idea of negotiating a capitulation never 
entered his mind nor that of the FARC secretariat.

The FARC does not have contiguous frontiers with a supporting country 
like Vietnam had with China; nor the arms supply from a USSR, nor the 
international mass support of Western solidarity groups like the 
Sandinistas.  We live in times where supporting peasant-led national 
liberation movements is not 'fashionable', where recognizing the 
genius of peasant revolutionary leaders who build and sustain 
authentic mass peoples armies is taboo in the pretentious, loquacious 
and impotent World Social Formus - which 'world' routinely excludes 
peasant militants and for whom 'social' means the perpetual exchange 
of e-mails between foundations funded by NGO.

It is in this hardly auspicious environment facing US and Colombian 
Presidents intent on pyrrhic victories, that we can appreciate the 
political genius and personal integrity of Latin America's greatest 
peasant revolutionary, Manuel Marulanda.  His death will not generate 
posters or tee shirts for middle class college students, but he will 
live forever in the hearts and minds of millions of peasants in 
Colombia.  He will be remembered forever as 'Tiro Fijo': the legend 
who was killed a dozen times and yet returned to the villages to 
share their simple lives.  The only leader who was truly 'one of 
them', the one who confronted the Yankee military and mercenary 
machine for a half-century and was never captured or defeated.

He defied them all - those in their mansions, presidential palaces, 
military bases, torture chambers, and bourgeois editorial offices: He 
died at after 60 years of struggle of natural causes in the arms of 
his beloved peasant comrades.

Tiro Fijo presente!



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20080528/3604fabe/attachment.htm>