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<font size="1"><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/imperialists-desperate-to-hold-control-over-colombia-fearing-next-wave-of-socialist-revolutions/">https://orinocotribune.com/imperialists-desperate-to-hold-control-over-colombia-fearing-next-wave-of-socialist-revolutions/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Imperialists Desperate to Hold Control Over Colombia, Fearing Next Wave of Socialist Revolutions</h1>By Rainer Shea – Jun 20, 2021</div><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<p id="gmail-387d">Many teeth have been gnashed by the reactionary media throughout this last month or so amid the lowe<span id="gmail-rmm">r</span> 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 <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/04/ecuador-election-us-pachakutik-lasso-yaku/" rel="noopener nofollow">manufacturing</a> 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.</p>
<p id="eccf">In an <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-peru-get-on-the-marxist-path-11619986216" rel="noopener nofollow">op-ed</a> vilifying Castillo and other Latin American anti-imperialists, the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> 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.</p>
<p id="gmail-df17">Fujimori’s Trump-esque conspiracy theory about the election being stolen is getting <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/18/peru-j18.html" rel="noopener nofollow">amplified</a> by the bourgeois media, parallel to how neocons in publications like <a href="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/" rel="noopener nofollow"><em>The Daily Wire</em></a> and <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-joe-biden-ignoring-colombia-185682" rel="noopener nofollow"><em>The</em> <em>National Interest</em></a> are propagating the conspiracy theories from Colombia’s <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/neo-nazi-advising-colombia-police-break-national-strike/277048/" rel="noopener nofollow">neo-Nazi governmental factions</a>about how the protests are the work of criminal organizations and foreign interference. One <em>National Interest</em> piece, which has been <a href="https://www.heritage.org/americas/commentary/why-joe-biden-ignoring-colombia" rel="noopener nofollow">republished</a> 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.”</p>
<p id="e0a3">Taking the nonsense a step further, the failed Colombian “libertarian” politician Daniel Raisbeck has <a href="https://reason.com/2021/06/17/colombias-anti-imperialists-import-cancel-culture/" rel="noopener nofollow">charged</a> that
“Colombia’s anti-imperialists import cancel culture,” and has defended
Colombia’s government even amid the recent instances where police have <a href="https://colombiareports.com/police-open-fire-southwest-colombia-protest-killing-one-indigenous-land-dispute/" rel="noopener nofollow">opened fire</a> on unarmed demonstrators, the government’s imperialist backers have <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/colombia-protests-duque-suppression-police-paramilitary-human-rights-abuses-us-colombia-relationsh" rel="noopener nofollow">coordinated</a>internet disruptions and <a href="https://globalvoices.org/2021/05/29/colombians-save-the-evidence-as-they-denounce-social-media-censorship-of-protests/" rel="noopener nofollow">censorship</a> 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 <a href="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" rel="noopener nofollow">shot</a> civilians
in broad daylight, and state-backed paramilitaries have executed people
extrajudicially. These things are likely worse than cancel culture.</p>
<p><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/colombia-between-extermination-and-emancipation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED CONTENT: Colombia, Between Extermination and Emancipation</a></p>
<p id="gmail-4e86">Continuing his screed, Raisbeck complains that:</p>
<p id="gmail-4cdb"><em>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.”</em></p>
<p id="gmail-8ca1">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, <a href="https://reason.com/2021/04/20/in-peru-another-near-miss-for-latin-american-liberty/" rel="noopener nofollow">calling</a> 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.</p>
<p id="gmail-5a43">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.</p>
<p id="gmail-f6e8">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 <a href="https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/return-war-and-rise-farc" rel="noopener nofollow">forced displacement</a> 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.</p>
<p id="gmail-a0bd">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 <a href="https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/return-war-and-rise-farc" rel="noopener nofollow">assessed</a> 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.”</p>
<p><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/colombia-the-government-murders-with-impunity-because-the-us-empire-is-behind-it/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED CONTENT: Colombia: “The Government Murders with Impunity Because the US Empire is Behind it.”</a></p>
<p id="gmail-abb5">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.”</p>
<p id="gmail-3b35">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.’”</p>
<p id="gmail-78d4">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.</p>
<p id="gmail-459e">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.</p>
<p id="gmail-f5c3">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 <a href="https://reason.com/2021/04/20/in-peru-another-near-miss-for-latin-american-liberty/" rel="noopener nofollow">lamented</a> 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.</p>
<p><em>Featured image: File Photo</em></p>
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Rainer Shea </span>
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<p><span>Rainer Shea exposes the lies of capitalism and imperialism
while encouraging people to fight for a socialist revolution. Go to my
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