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Homage to Manuel Marulanda<br>
<a href="http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/homage-to-manuel-marulanda/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/homage-to-manuel-marulanda/<br><br>
</a>James Petras<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Tiro Fijo presente!<br><br>
<br>
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