A View From The Left-Colombia “Peace” Deal and U.S. Dirty Wars

Workers Vanguard No. 1105	10 February 2017

Colombia “Peace” Deal and U.S. Dirty Wars

On November 24, the Colombian government of President Juan Manuel Santos and that country’s largest left-wing guerrilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), signed a “peace” deal, which was subsequently approved by Colombia’s Congress. Following four years of negotiations, the deal between the government and the guerrillas is largely the outcome of the decimation of the FARC by the Colombian military and right-wing forces acting on the orders of Santos himself. Santos was defense minister under President Álvaro Uribe from 2006 to 2009 and became president himself in 2010. Under both administrations, at least 63 FARC leaders have been killed and one-third of its mid-level ranks have been killed or captured. According to government estimates, since 2002, the FARC’s membership declined by almost 60 percent to around 7,000. Santos’s decapitation of the guerrilla forces was accomplished with the help of a covert CIA program to assassinate FARC commanders using “smart bombs.” This operation was overseen by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

Colombian government forces together with right-wing militias have been trying to wipe out leftist forces in Colombia’s countryside and jungle since the 1950s. The crusade began with a war on Communist Party-influenced peasant militias and continued as left-wing guerrilla organizations proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s. But until now, the Colombian capitalist rulers have been unable to eliminate either the FARC or the Army of National Liberation (ELN). The latter also remains thousands-strong despite a steep drop in membership since the 1990s.

Billions of dollars in U.S. military aid have been dedicated to the murderous “counterinsurgency” effort, first as part of the Cold War fight against the spread of Communism, and then, following the destruction of the Soviet Union, under the cover of the “war on drugs” and “war on terror.” Colombia, the fourth-largest economy in Latin America and located close to the strategic Panama Canal, has long been maintained by Washington as a bulwark of right-wing reaction in the region. It has received more U.S. military aid than any other country in the Western hemisphere. The International Communist League demands: All U.S. forces out! Down with U.S. aid to Colombia’s murderous rulers!

Six decades of U.S.-sponsored slaughter have been directed not only at guerrilla fighters, but also at peasants and trade unionists, as well as any other perceived opponents of the interests of Colombia’s capitalists and their U.S. imperialist patrons. The 1928 massacre of striking banana workers fictionalized in Gabriel García Márquez’s acclaimed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is not too far removed from the realities of life in Colombia to this day. It is the deadliest place in the world to be a member of a trade union; according to a Human Rights Watch report, 138 trade unionists were assassinated between 2011 and August 2015 and thousands receive death threats.

“Peace” for the Capitalist Butchers

The so-called peace deal between the government and the FARC portends continued massacres of Colombia’s workers and peasants by right-wing paramilitaries, soldiers and police. The current deal includes a promise that FARC supporters can form a legal political party and participate in electoral politics. As the history of Colombia shows, previous peace talks and attempts by various guerrilla forces to become legal parties have generally ended in bloodbaths. During negotiations between the FARC and the government in 1985, FARC supporters, the Communist Party and others formed the Patriotic Union (UP) electoral party. In the years that followed, government-backed death squads killed over 4,000 of the UP’s members, including most of its presidential candidates. The party was then stripped of its legal status for failing to run a candidate for president!

Nor have killings of peasant leaders and left-wing activists abated during the recent round of peace talks. The Patriotic March movement, founded in 2012 by supporters of the Communist Party and peasant organizations, has faced over 7,000 arrests and the assassination of 112 of its members. Over 300 peasant leaders were killed in 2015 alone. The only people likely to get peace from the current deal are the Colombian exploiters and the imperialist investors, for whom the guerrilla struggles are an inconvenience to their pillaging of Colombia’s fertile land and lucrative natural resources. The U.S. has been the biggest plunderer of Colombia, most recently through the 2012 U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. As we wrote in “U.S. Hands Off Colombia!” (WV No. 737, 2 June 2000):

“Long one of Washington’s showcase Latin American ‘democracies,’ Colombia is an archetype of ‘Third World’ countries in which the weak ruling class, beholden to U.S. imperialism, relies on monstrous state repression from the U.S.-trained army and the paras [paramilitaries] to protect its privileges from the impoverished and increasingly combative workers and peasants.”

Colombia’s history is a powerful confirmation in the negative of the theory of permanent revolution advanced by Leon Trotsky, who together with V.I. Lenin led the workers of Russia to power in the October Revolution of 1917. During the bourgeois revolutions of England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries, the bourgeoisie played a historically progressive role. It placed itself at the head of the urban and rural populace to sweep away feudal-​derived fetters on capitalist development. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was based on the understanding that the national bourgeoisies of countries that came to capitalist development belatedly, in the epoch of imperialism, were incapable of playing such a role. Latin American countries, long the victims of colonial and neocolonial plunder, are societies in which modern industries coexist alongside the deepest poverty and rural backwardness. The weak national bourgeoisies of such countries are tied by a thousand strings to their imperialist masters on whom they depend for capital and are also deeply fearful of worker and peasant upsurges. For these reasons, they cannot resolve such key democratic questions as agrarian revolution and complete national liberation.

As Trotsky explained, in such countries, nothing short of a socialist revolution to expropriate the bourgeoisie and establish a workers and peasants government can liberate the oppressed peasantry and end the nation’s subjugation to the imperialists. Proletarian socialist revolution would put an end to the system of capitalist exploitation of the workers, who in Colombia produce huge profits for the bourgeoisie by toiling in factories, oil fields, mines and on large plantations, and thereby open the road to socialist reconstruction of society. The U.S. and other imperialist powers would certainly move to crush such a revolutionary regime. Key to the survival of a workers revolution in Colombia and its development toward socialism would be its international extension to the rest of Latin America and to the more advanced capitalist countries that dominate the global economy, above all the U.S.

Bourgeois Divisions and the Land Question

The final 310-page “peace” deal is a revised version of the one rejected by a narrow margin in a nationwide referendum on October 2, in which 63 percent of the electorate did not even vote. Right-wing critics of both versions of the deal say that the transitional judicial process proposed for prosecution of the FARC’s “crimes” is too lenient, and they oppose allowing the FARC to become a legal political party with deputies in Congress. A concession to opponents of the first deal was to add the requirement that, in addition to disarming, the FARC turn over all its financial assets and reveal any involvement with drug trafficking. But this has not appeased the critics. Former president Uribe, who led the campaign against any deal with the FARC, argued in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal: “The so-called peace agreement will serve as a thick mantle of impunity” (“Narco-Terror Is Being Rewarded in Colombia,” 7 July 2016).

The man accusing the FARC of “narco-terrorism” was himself described in a 1991 U.S. military intelligence report as “a close personal friend” of infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar (“U.S. Intelligence Tied Colombia’s Uribe to Drug Trade in ’91 Report,” Los Angeles Times, 2 August 2004). As for “impunity,” Uribe’s 2005 “Justice and Peace Law” that supposedly demobilized right-wing paramilitary death squads was characterized by even the editorial board of the U.S. imperialist mouthpiece the New York Times as the “Impunity for Mass Murderers, Terrorists and Major Cocaine Traffickers Law” (4 July 2005). Uribe and his closest associates have been implicated by paramilitary leaders in organizing death squads. While president, Uribe silenced those making such accusations by having some 40 paramilitaries extradited to the U.S. for drug trafficking; they got on average less than ten years in prison.

The divisions between Santos and Uribe over the deal with the FARC reflect tactical differences within the bourgeoisie. Uribe’s base is in the staunchly Catholic heartland of big landowners and ranchers in the state of Antioquia, also notorious for its cocaine cartels, as depicted in the popular Netflix series Narcos. Operations against peasants and leftist guerrillas have served as a convenient cover for the landowners within Colombia’s ruling class to send death squads to drive out peasants, clearing the way for mining, logging and agribusiness plantations, such as the booming palm oil industry. Indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian communities have been viciously displaced in enormous numbers by this land theft. Between 2002 and 2008, the Colombian military executed up to 3,000 civilians who it falsely claimed were guerrillas.

Once one of Uribe’s closest allies, Santos has adopted an approach more in keeping with that of the finance and mercantile bourgeoisie (and former president Obama), who see the “peace” deal as an opportunity to lure foreign investors previously scared off by violence and instability. Petroleum is Colombia’s biggest export. Imperialist oil and mining companies, who have paid protection money to paramilitary forces, want to put an end to sabotage and extortion demands by guerrillas. To this end, the government has also entered negotiations with the ELN guerrillas.

One of the revisions to the peace deal was a vow to protect the rights of existing landowners against expropriation. This change was intended to address opposition by Uribe and his supporters to the deal’s vague promises of government investment in rural development to help small farmers in impoverished areas. These promises are a far cry from the democratic land reform long demanded by the FARC to give “land to the tiller.” Just over 1 percent of Colombia’s landholders own more than 50 percent of the agricultural land. Poor peasants make up more than 75 percent of landowners—but hold only about 10 percent of the land. The rural poverty rate is a staggering 57.5 percent. The rural poor voted overwhelmingly in favor of the “peace” deal—no doubt hoping that the government’s paltry promises of rural subsidies, credits and infrastructure would come to fruition.

The intractable nature of the land question under capitalism in Colombia is underscored by a recent UN report that at the end of 2015, the country had 6.9 million internally displaced people—the largest number anywhere in the world. Most of these are smallholders driven off their land through the collusion of the state, big landowners and imperialist agribusiness. More often than not, they have fled paramilitary terror. The fraud of bourgeois land reform is further demonstrated by the fact that a 1994 law supposedly intended to provide subsidized land to peasants was used in 2010-12 by the U.S. agribusiness behemoth Cargill to acquire 130,000 acres of public land through shell companies.

The End of the Guerrilla Road

The FARC was formed in 1964 out of Communist Party peasant defense leagues established as early as the 1930s to protect peasant land claims against big landowners. Both the FARC and ELN were founded in the wake of the period known as la Violencia, during which supporters of the historic rival bourgeois parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, wantonly massacred each other as well as leftists. Over a period of more than a decade, between 200,000 and 300,000 people were killed. The 1958 pact between the Liberals and Conservatives consolidated the bourgeoisie’s political forces as a reactionary bloc in opposition to the workers and peasants.

As peasants were driven off their lands over the decades—and the government waged war on the left—peasants and leftist guerrillas colonized parts of Colombia’s vast swaths of remote, uninhabited territory. By the 1990s, the FARC had come to control huge areas farmed by impoverished peasants, who in increasing numbers turned to the cultivation of coca to make a living. The FARC acted as a de facto government in these areas, taxing the coca trade, providing what little infrastructure there was and, by many accounts, protecting the cocaleros from the worst of the cocaine cartel violence.

The ICL opposes state repression against the FARC and other leftist guerrillas. But our revolutionary program is fundamentally counterposed to that of such nationalist, peasant-based forces. The FARC’s goal has always been to use the armed struggle to pressure a section of the bourgeoisie to give poor peasants and others a say in making capitalist Colombia more fair and democratic. As the late, longtime FARC leader Manuel Marulanda Vélez, known as Tirofijo (“Sureshot”), said in a 1998 interview: “The FARC wants a Government that is pluralist (that all parties and social sectors be represented), democratic and patriotic” (América Libre, No. 13). But the terror and land theft inflicted on Colombia’s peasantry and the brutal exploitation of the agricultural proletariat on the big coffee, banana and flower farms cannot be resolved within the framework of such class collaboration. There can be no solution to the exploitation, oppression and dispossession of millions of people short of a socialist revolution. The illusion that the workers and peasants can have a common interest with a more “radical” wing of their own exploiters has proven deadly time and time again.

Colombia’s working class, from the oil workers and miners to the agricultural proletariat and factory and port workers, has the power to shut down the means of production and stop the flow of profits. The proletariat can end its exploitation only by destroying private ownership of the means of production, that is, by expropriating the bourgeoisie and collectivizing the banks, land and factories under the ownership of society as a whole. The proletariat uniquely has a historic class interest in carrying out a socialist revolution.

In contrast, the peasantry is part of the petty bourgeoisie, a heterogeneous social layer without its own independent class interests. As small or aspiring landowners, peasants compete among themselves to sell their produce on the market. The objective interests of the peasantry as a social stratum lie in private ownership of land, not the overthrow of capitalism. However, capitalism inflicts brutal oppression on the lower ranks of the peasantry, including the large number of landless peasants, as well as those who eke out a miserable existence on their own small holdings. In order to successfully carry out a socialist revolution in countries such as Colombia, the working class must win the poor peasants to its side by championing their struggles against big landowners and the bourgeoisie.

The proletariat needs the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party, like the Bolshevik Party built by Lenin in tsarist Russia. As a tribune of the oppressed, such a party would fight the racist abuse suffered by Colombia’s indigenous peoples and the Afro-Colombian population. Descended from slaves, Afro-Colombians make up a quarter of the country’s population, but three-quarters of its poor. They also represent an important section of the working class, including in Colombia’s ports. A Leninist vanguard party would also fight against the brutal oppression of women, which is reinforced by the reactionary forces of the Catholic and evangelical churches. Such a party would aim not to share power with the national bourgeoisie, but to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, ripping the land, mines and factories out of the hands of the exploiters, and putting them into the hands of the workers.

In 2000, the FARC formed the “Bolivarian Movement for a New Colombia,” which looks to bourgeois populist regimes like those of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. In the guise of “anti-imperialism,” such nationalist populism subordinates the workers and oppressed to their domestic exploiters. In fact, the only way for the proletariat to fight in its own interests is to be organized in complete political independence from all bourgeois forces. In the U.S., workers must reject the lies, pushed by the pro-capitalist union misleaders and the Democrats, that they share a common “national interest” with their imperialist exploiters and instead raise the banner of proletarian internationalism. The workers of Latin America should ally themselves with their working-class brothers and sisters in countries like the U.S., where workers have the social power to fight imperialism from within the belly of the beast.

The decline in popularity of the “guerrilla road” of struggle in Latin America reflects the impact of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which was a massive defeat for working people internationally. Despite its degeneration under the nationalist bureaucratic caste that usurped political power from the proletariat beginning in 1923-24 under J.V. Stalin, the Soviet Union remained a workers state until capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. It was the elementary duty of revolutionaries to stand for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, while fighting for political revolution to bring the working class to power.

The same Trotskyist program applies today to the remaining deformed workers states created in the Stalinist image following World War II—China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos. The Soviet Union’s military might and economic aid were powerful counterweights to the Western imperialists, and generations of Latin American radicals looked to the USSR for inspiration. The FARC’s international political isolation and physical decimation are ultimately by-products of the destruction of the homeland of the October Revolution.

For Workers Revolution in the Belly of the Imperialist Beast!

The “dirty war” techniques pioneered by the U.S. in its anti-Communist wars in Korea and Vietnam were directly transplanted to Colombia. Colombian troops who fought alongside the U.S. in the Korean War of 1950-53 were trained in the use of torture camps and napalm, which they used against the peasants back home. In the 1960s, U.S. military advisers who had overseen the killings of Vietnamese workers and peasants instructed the Colombian military in counterinsurgency and set up local death squads. As described by Forrest Hylton in Evil Hour in Colombia (2006):

“Perversely, right-wing state and parastate terror helped stimulate armed mobilizations on the Left in the 1960s and 1970s, by creating migration in two directions: first, to the urban frontiers of Colombia’s rapidly growing cities, and second, to the agrarian frontier, especially in the jungles of the south and the plains of the east. In those spaces, state power, even in its repressive aspect, was too weak to govern. Such areas proved to be fertile terrain for the growth of insurgencies until military-paramilitary counterinsurgency operations accelerated after 2000, under US-financed Plan Colombia.”

Notwithstanding the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the U.S. dirty war in Colombia has continued under both Democratic and Republican Party administrations. Since 2000, the U.S. has spent $10 billion on “Plan Colombia”; the bulk of the funds have gone to the Colombian military and police. Plan Colombia was initially packaged by Democratic president Bill Clinton as a counter-narcotics initiative, part of the “war on drugs.” This “war” has served as a cover for U.S. military intervention in Latin America and for increasing the repressive forces of the state in the U.S. itself, criminalizing whole generations of black people and Latinos.

The Spartacist League has always opposed the racist “war on drugs” and stood for the decriminalization of drugs. Aside from the question of personal freedom, decriminalization would take the huge profits and much of the violence out of the drug trade.

Military operations under Plan Colombia were aimed overwhelmingly at areas controlled by leftist guerrillas and did not target areas in the north where the notorious paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia oversaw cocaine production. U.S.-supplied aircraft have sprayed large areas with carcinogenic defoliants to supposedly destroy coca crops, recalling the use of Agent Orange against insurgent-controlled areas in the Vietnam War. While the FARC has long been vilified as nothing more than a criminal drug cartel, Plan Colombia has strengthened the real cartels, which have moved in where the FARC has been defeated. Not surprisingly, more than 15 years after the start of Plan Colombia, the country remains the world’s biggest producer of cocaine.

Following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the war against Colombia’s guerrilla forces became included in the “war on terror.” In 2003, the largest U.S. embassy in the world was in the Colombian capital Bogotá. In 2013, the Washington Post revealed the CIA’s covert assassination program in Colombia, which began in the early 2000s and continued under President Obama. The White House claimed that, as with Al Qaeda, killing a leader of the FARC was not legally tantamount to assassination because the organization posed an ongoing terror threat.

The CIA provided the Colombian military with GPS-based technology that enabled 500-pound bombs to target an individual in an exact location in triple-canopy jungle. It also set up an intelligence “bunker” to track down FARC leaders. One of the U.S.-designed “smart bombs” was used to kill FARC leader Raul Reyes and 21 others, including four Mexican university students, in Ecuador in March 2008.

The crimes of the U.S. imperialists in Colombia underscore why revolutionaries must have an internationalist perspective. Working people in the United States and in Colombia have a common enemy in the U.S. imperialist rulers, who enforce a system of brutal exploitation and oppression at home as well. It is the American working class that has the social power and objective interest to establish proletarian rule in the U.S. through socialist revolution. This is the perspective of the Spartacist League.

Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party understood that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on the revolution being extended to the advanced capitalist countries. Writing in 1939, Trotsky summarized how, armed with the theory of permanent revolution, he had viewed the approaching Russian Revolution in 1917:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat, which will inescapably place on the order of the day not only democratic but also socialist tasks, will at the same time provide a mighty impulse to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West will shield Russia from bourgeois restoration and secure for her the possibility of bringing the socialist construction to its conclusion.”

— “Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution”

The International Communist League fights to build Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout the Americas, national sections of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.