[News] Imperialists Desperate to Hold Control Over Colombia, Fearing Next Wave of Socialist Revolutions

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://orinocotribune.com/imperialists-desperate-to-hold-control-over-colombia-fearing-next-wave-of-socialist-revolutions/
Imperialists
Desperate to Hold Control Over Colombia, Fearing Next Wave of Socialist
RevolutionsBy Rainer Shea – Jun 20, 2021

Many teeth have been gnashed by the reactionary media throughout this last
month or so amid the lower class uprising within Colombia, and amid the
victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru’s presidential election. The imperialists
may have succeeded at stopping an anti-IMF candidate from winning in
Ecuador this year by manufacturing
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/04/ecuador-election-us-pachakutik-lasso-yaku/>
synthetic
“leftist” factions which divided the vote in favor of the rightists. But
what’s happening in these other two countries portends to how the masses in
Ecuador — and in the rest of Washington’s neo-colonies — are going to soon
respond to the deepening impoverishment and state violence imposed upon
them by U.S.-engineered neoliberal policies.

In an op-ed
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-peru-get-on-the-marxist-path-11619986216>
vilifying
Castillo and other Latin American anti-imperialists, the *Wall Street
Journal* has written that “Castillo’s threat to freedom is so serious that
Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, whose intense dislike of the
Fujimori political machine [the campaign of Castillo’s opponent Keiko
Fujimori] is well-known, has endorsed Keiko.” Which shows that even more
independent-thinking reactionaries like Llosa are feeling compelled to take
sides in Latin American politics as the class struggle there intensifies.

Fujimori’s Trump-esque conspiracy theory about the election being stolen is
getting amplified
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/18/peru-j18.html> by the
bourgeois media, parallel to how neocons in publications like *The Daily
Wire*
<https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/05/27/far-left-groups-are-inciting-violence-across-colombia-and-the-media-is-providing-cover-with-a-disinformation-campaign/>
 and *The* *National Interest*
<https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-joe-biden-ignoring-colombia-185682>
are
propagating the conspiracy theories from Colombia’s neo-Nazi governmental
factions
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/neo-nazi-advising-colombia-police-break-national-strike/277048/>about
how the protests are the work of criminal organizations and foreign
interference. One *National Interest* piece, which has been republished
<https://www.heritage.org/americas/commentary/why-joe-biden-ignoring-colombia>
by
the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, calls for Biden to
double down on backing state terrorism in Colombia by bizarrely claiming
that “advancing human rights in Colombia” can best be accomplished by
“cooperating with regional security services, not by disengaging and
shunning them.”

Taking the nonsense a step further, the failed Colombian “libertarian”
politician Daniel Raisbeck has charged
<https://reason.com/2021/06/17/colombias-anti-imperialists-import-cancel-culture/>
that
“Colombia’s anti-imperialists import cancel culture,” and has defended
Colombia’s government even amid the recent instances where police have opened
fire
<https://colombiareports.com/police-open-fire-southwest-colombia-protest-killing-one-indigenous-land-dispute/>
on
unarmed demonstrators, the government’s imperialist backers have coordinated
<https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/colombia-protests-duque-suppression-police-paramilitary-human-rights-abuses-us-colombia-relationsh>internet
disruptions and censorship
<https://globalvoices.org/2021/05/29/colombians-save-the-evidence-as-they-denounce-social-media-censorship-of-protests/>
of
dissidents to try to cover up police violence, more than 2,000 incidents of
police brutality have been reported, more than 1,600 people have been
arbitrarily detained, human rights leaders and union activists have been
detained or deported, bounties have been offered for the murder of medical
workers working within the protests, protest leaders have been
criminalized, protesters have been disappeared by the hundreds and sexually
abused by law enforcement in the dozens, a third of Colombia’s police
departments have been newly militarized to deadly effect, government
helicopters have shot
<https://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/2021/05/they-were-shooting-at-people-from-helicopters-with-entire-neighbourhoods-put-under-siege-eyewitness-of-the-general-strike-in-cali-colombia-4th-may-2021>
civilians
in broad daylight, and state-backed paramilitaries have executed people
extrajudicially. These things are likely worse than cancel culture.

RELATED CONTENT: Colombia, Between Extermination and Emancipation
<https://orinocotribune.com/colombia-between-extermination-and-emancipation/>

Continuing his screed, Raisbeck complains that:

*The country’s hard left, led by former guerrilla member and now-Senator
Gustavo Petro, wants the world to believe that Colombia is under an
illegitimate, authoritarian regime that systematically abuses human rights.
Colombia, however, is still a liberal democracy, imperfect and now
beleaguered, that is fighting to preserve the republican institutions that
its neighbors have either lost — as in the case of Venezuela — or may be
about to lose, as in the case of Peru…”In the modern state,” wrote
Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, “the classes with opposed
interests are not the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but rather the class
that pays taxes and the one that lives off them.”*

This assertion that the logic of neoliberal austerity is right, and that
Colombia’s government must be defended even by “libertarians” in order to
preserve this austerity paradigm, is intended by Raisbeck to be a
rhetorical shutting of the door on those who seek to end neo-colonialism in
his country and elsewhere. As Raisbeck declares, “the rent-seekers’
rebellion has achieved little beyond dispelling the Marxist notion of class
struggle.” Imperialism has won, he insists, and the very notion of class
struggle isn’t even worth thinking about. Under this reasoning, Latin
America’s neo-colonial regimes should be unquestioningly supported no
matter how horrific their actions are; Raisbeck has even lamented last
year’s throwing out of the Pinochet constitution in Chile, calling
<https://reason.com/2021/04/20/in-peru-another-near-miss-for-latin-american-liberty/>
this
measure that effectively extended Pinochet’s murderous rule “the most
successful by far in Latin America as measured by the economic results of
its protections for private property.” Human rights are irrelevant to the
defenders of Colombia’s regime. All that matters is protecting capital.

Yet the Pinochet-esque methods that Colombia’s regime has used to try to
crush the protests and the national strike have worked to accelerate a
deeper-running class revolt, one which could replicate Cuba’s socialist
revolution within the country.

Following the 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a faction of the FARC called
Segunda Marquetalia has returned to waging guerrilla warfare throughout the
last couple years. The conditions surrounding Segunda Marquetalia’s efforts
and the success they’ve so far had at garnering support show that this
renewed insurgency hasn’t been a fruitless act of revolutionary
adventurism. Their decision to fight has come in the midst of the forced
displacement
<https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/return-war-and-rise-farc> of
millions of Colombian peasants over the last five years by the country’s
capitalist class, which has filled the power vacuum left in the wake of the
old FARC’s defeat by mining, logging, poaching, drilling for oil,
privatizing water, and proliferating narco-trafficking within the lands the
FARC used to protect from this type of brutal exploitation. Amid the
state’s successful marginalization of the FARC in its new electoral form,
those within Segunda Marquetalia have had no choice but to restart the
guerrilla struggle.

This context in which guerrilla warfare has been revamped in Colombia,
where the guerrillas have been proportionately responding to atrocities
from the capitalist state, is what creates such great potential for a
proletarian revolution to occur in the aftermath of the protests. And these
transgressions from the government go far beyond its refusal to follow
along the terms of its own peace agreement. As journalist covering
Colombia’s civil war Oliver Dodd assessed
<https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/return-war-and-rise-farc> this
March: “For the government this is a situation of its own making. Unable or
unwilling to guarantee the safety of either demobilised fighters or social
movement figures who played no role in the civil war, it has provoked
exactly this reaction.”

RELATED CONTENT: Colombia: “The Government Murders with Impunity Because
the US Empire is Behind it.”
<https://orinocotribune.com/colombia-the-government-murders-with-impunity-because-the-us-empire-is-behind-it/>

Dodd has also reported that the new guerrilla insurgency is gaining popular
support and direct involvement from the masses due to the dire conditions
it seeks to overcome, quoting guerrilla comandante Villa Vazquez as saying
that “all our hopes were in the agreement, but the agreement was betrayed
by the government and other dominant class forces. That is why we had to
return to arms. But it is not the Farc who has returned to arms — it is the
people themselves. Today, we can say that 60 per cent of [Segunda
Marquetalia’s] fighters are new, they are not ex-members.”

Another indication that Segunda Marquetalia has the credibility among the
masses to carry forth a revolution is the fact that by the nature of its
versatile design, it’s able to properly represent all the classes in
Colombia with revolutionary potential, and therefore to continue growing
rather than staying limited to a societal niche. “Vazquez baulked at their
characterisation as a peasant rebellion,” continued Dodd. “The three
organisational components — guerilla, militia and communist party, he said,
reflect the peculiar historical conditions of the class struggle in
Colombia. ‘Where does the revolutionary struggle develop?’ he asked me. ‘It
is developed where the people are, not in the isolation of the jungle but
where the masses of people are — and most people today are based in the
cities and that is where the revolutionary and guerilla struggle is going
to be developed.’”

Another point in their favor is that they can take advantage of the
resources and training left for them by the decades of preexisting
guerrilla struggle, and by the resources that the government has
unintentionally provided them. “New militants are entering the ranks and
committing themselves to the organisation for life, serving under a highly
experienced political leadership with decades of struggle behind each of
them,” continues Dodd. “The taxation of multinational corporations and
extractive industries exploiting natural resources, as well as the black
market, enable them to feed combatants three meals a day, clothe and arm
them with modern weaponry and transport. They have the money and resources
to allow all of their members to dedicate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
to the cause.” Even the criminal and extractive enterprises that Colombia’s
narco government has cultivated are helping the revolutionaries by giving
them greater access to resources.

These factors, concluded Dodd, combined with the refusal by the government
to reverse its extreme neoliberal policies that keep driving down living
standards, make it assured that Segunda Marquetalia is going to gradually
expand in the coming years. This is what’s made the corporate elites and
neo-Nazis behind Colombia’s repressive campaign so desperate to suppress
the uprising, especially the strike; in past revolutions from Russian to
Cuba, it’s been a combination of strikes on behalf of the masses and the
presence of a well-trained Marxist-Leninist vanguard which has brought
about the overthrow of the capitalist state and the construction of a
proletarian democracy in its place. If the government fails to suppress the
perhaps even bigger uprisings that are going to occur in the coming years,
Segunda Marquetalia or a larger revolutionary coalition that it builds is
quite likely going to fill the role as the vanguard which overthrows
Colombian neo-colonialism.

When this revolution happens, it’s going to be apparent to the imperialists
and the local Colombian neo-colonists that they’ve dug their own grave.
This is even something that’s been preemptively acknowledged by Raisbeck,
who lamented
<https://reason.com/2021/04/20/in-peru-another-near-miss-for-latin-american-liberty/>
this
April that “Costly mistakes have allowed socialism to rise again in the
21st century.” Pointing to the failure of Washington’s 2019 coup attempt in
Venezuela, the reversal of the 2019 CIA coup in Bolivia, the success of
Chile’s movement to abandon the dictatorship-era constitution, and the
imminent inauguration of Castillo, Raisbeck concludes that these losses for
capital wouldn’t have occurred if not for the weaknesses and capitulations
of the Latin American right. But the imperialists shouldn’t be so hard on
themselves; their attempts to keep control over the region isn’t the fault
of strategic mistakes on their part, so much as the inevitable rise of
liberation movements.

*Featured image: File Photo*


Rainer Shea

Rainer Shea exposes the lies of capitalism and imperialism while
encouraging people to fight for a socialist revolution. Go to my Patreon
here: patreon.com <https://t.co/d0wE7iHfS5?amp=1>
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