2021 sees the continued bloody assault on all and any representatives of the poor, both rural and urban, by the hired assassins of the Colombian ruling class. The removal of the FARC military resistance to imperialism in Colombia in 2016 has given further rein to the fearful and vicious instincts of the exploiting class. Alvaro Michael reports.
2021 began as brutally as 2020, with the daily assassination of social leaders and ex-FARC combatants. Yolanda Zabala Mazo, a signatory to the 2016 Peace Accord, was the first ex-guerrilla to be murdered in 2021, while Gerardo Leon was the first social leader and human rights defender to be assassinated. On 15 January, Fredman Herazo, a Palenque cultural activist and defender of African-descendants’ rights, was murdered in Córdoba. By 23 January, a horrifying total of 22 social and political activists had been murdered in the first weeks of 2021 alone. In 2020 there had been 91 massacres with more than 375 victims; more than 310 social leaders were murdered (1,107 since 2016), and 64 ex-FARC combatants were assassinated (249 since they signed the Accord). They have been hunted down by paramilitary death squads, who are given lists by state sources. ‘In 2020, nearly 30% of all targeted killings have taken place near reincorporation zones (disarmament collection points), which are mostly located in rural and isolated areas,’ a UN report concluded.
President Ivan Duque has all but abandoned a counter narcotics policy agreed with the FARC, the UN and farming communities in the 2016 Peace Accord, allowing the cocaine trade to flourish and fund the death squads. His right-wing Democratic Centre party was a vociferous opponent of the peace deal and fewer than a quarter of the agreement’s nearly 600 provisions have been fully implemented,
A shameful history continued
The 2016 Peace Accord between the FARC-EP and Colombian government was opposed by about a sixth of FARC members, from a profound distrust of the state after a previous disarmament disaster. In 1985, the FARC, after over 20 years of fighting, had agreed with President Belisario Betancur to disarm in order to enter peaceful political contest and elections. FARC formed The Patriotic Union (UP) in May 1985, which received much popular support. In an act of historic treachery, Colombia’s next president Virgilio Barco, ex-Director of the World Bank, secretly asked the former-Israeli intelligence chief Rafi Eitan, then selling people-tracking software called PROMIS to foreign intelligence agencies, for advice on preventing the electoral success of the UP. Eitan proposed a local holocaust – the physical liquidation of the UP’s campaigning leaders across the country. Barco had considered putting Eitan in charge of the extermination, diverting funds from Ecopetrol, the state oil company. However, Colombian Chief of Staff German Montoya and his military command considered that scheme less effective, and dangerous diplomatically, so they proudly undertook the butchery themselves.
‘By 2002, more than 3,000 UP members and leaders, including two presidential candidates and eight congressmen, had been assassinated. Another 3,000 had fallen victim to torture, and other forms of violence or were forced into exile and the party lost its right to take part in elections.’[1] In 1986-7, UP members constituted 60% of Colombia’s conflict victims. For 18 consecutive years, every month saw the assassination or forced disappearance of UP members by the military, their Medellin Cartel associates and paramilitary groups. In parallel, over the last 20 years, 2,500 trade unionists have been murdered by private sector interests, more than in the rest of world combined.
The Association of Retired Military Officials has fiercely opposed Colombia’s chequered peace process. The whole ghastly story has yet to be told, but it confirms that a state run for private property interests is irreparably a machine of oppressors.
Imperialism’s obedient President
Colombia’s ex-presidents Alvaro Uribe and Andres Pastrana campaigned for Donald Trump in the US elections, and President Duque was forced to deny his own partisanship. Snake-like, he quickly adapted to Biden’s US presidential victory, praising him in November 2020 for his support ‘over the last two decades’ for ‘Plan Colombia’. This massive military injection, started by President Clinton, gave Bogotá cutting-edge technology to wage war against FARC-EP, boosted reaction and blocked social progress in Colombia. Duque expects consistency from Biden. Duque’s hollow declarations against drug trafficking contrast with Colombia’s exploding cocaine exports, now 70% of global supplies.
Key members of the ruling class remain protected. In October 2020, Duque’s patron, the neo-fascist ex-president Uribe, resigned his Senate seat to avoid trial there, after it ordered his house arrest to prevent flight or witness tampering, while he is investigated for threatening former paramilitaries into retracting damaging statements against him. He is accused of helping to establish a paramilitary group in the mid-1990s. Now subject to civil courts and with no charges yet brought, he was released in October from house arrest. Murders of witnesses are common in Colombia.
The protests of September and after
From 9 September 2020, there were two days of huge protests in Bogotá against the condition of the working class and poor peasantry, triggered by the police killing by taser of Javier Ordóñez, a local attorney. Thousands of demonstrators were involved. Sixty police stations were attacked and damaged, 17 of which were burned down; 13 people were killed, 209 civilians were wounded, and 194 officers injured. Dozens of city buses were wrecked, 13 of them burnt. Protests also took place in Soacha, Medellín and Pereira. To calm matters, Defence Minister Carlos Trujillo Holmes announced: ‘The National Police ask for forgiveness.’ Seven officers were suspended pending an enquiry. This uprising so worried the state prosecutor that he is searching for evidence for links between ‘urban militias’, and the National Liberation Army (ELN). The Camilo Torres Restrepo National Urban War Front of ELN is said to have a presence in the country’s main cities, such as Medellín and Bogotá.
On 1 October 2020, the Colombia Humana movement activist Elias Galindo, a harsh critic of the Duque administration, and once a member of the Alternative Democratic Pole, was found murdered in his apartment in Medellin. The attackers stole his computer and cell phone, with information about the Colombia Humana movement.
On 21 October, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, a national strike took place in the country’s main cities, as tens of thousands defended life and democracy, protesting against violence and demanding the negotiation of the national emergency document. The president of the Central Workers Union, Diógenes Orjuela, explained that the strike absolutely rejected the massacres, murders and repression carried out by the police, and condemned President Duque’s management and the emergency decrees issued during the Covid-19 pandemic, the disregard for social organisations, and judicial sector rulings. The participating indigenous communities demand an end to the violence, and an intensification of the fight against poverty.
On 4 November, following weeks of protests condemning the unlawful killings of ex-combatants and marches for ‘Life and Peace’, which displayed banners reading, ‘We are fulfilling (the peace process) but they are killing (us)’, representatives from the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force (FARC) – the legalised party representing the demobilised FARC-EP guerrilla political programme – and Colombian authorities met to address violations of the Peace Accord. For the previous five months the government had not condemned these assassinations. The two sides announced that six commitments were reached in order to complete the Accord of 2016. ‘Understandings’ were also reached on the national and subnational peace councils, the enhancement of protection schemes for local elections scheduled in 2022, and efforts made to counteract the stigmatisation of the peace process. The same day, Katherin Álvarez and her partner Jainer Córdoba Paz, a FARC former guerrilla, were murdered. He was, by then, the 237th victim of the ongoing political massacre since 2016. The government claims that 77% of these assassinations were conducted by ‘organised criminal organisations’ – as indeed these hired assassins are.
National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN)
The ELN was never part of the 2016 Accord and has continued its war against the state. It has most of its influence in the poorest areas of the country. It declared a ceasefire on 30 March 2020 to ensure any steps taken against Covid-19 would be unaffected by their military actions in defence of the poor, and to promote dialogue with the government. The government did not respond and the ceasefire was suspended at the end of April 2020. The media constantly and falsely equates the ELN with the Clan de Golfo right-wing neo-paramilitary group who are drug producers and traffickers. In fact, the ELNs successful fight against the latest defensive alliance between previous enemies, the Urabeños and Rastrojos drug gangs in Choco, is an attack on the ruling class’s spider-like control of the trade.
The ELN attacks on the drugs gangs reduce the influx of cocaine into Venezuela. This infuriated the Trump government which, contrary to all the evidence, claimed that Venezuela is the key player in the cocaine routes to the US. Thus, Pompeo’s malicious 11 January 2021 announcement of new sanctions on Cuba was justified by him, in part, by Cuba’s refusal to extradite ELN peace negotiators to Colombia. They had remained in Cuba after Duque froze all peace talks with the ELN in January 2019.
In October, a senior ELN fighter, Andres Vanegas Londoño, or ‘Uriel’, a well-known popular public relations figure, was killed by state special forces. There was a reward of 500 million pesos (around $130,000) for his capture.
FARC-EP
In August 2019, Ivan Márquez and other long-time leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) and architects of the group’s now frustrated 2016 peace deal with the state, returned to the guerrilla struggle.2 Some 2,000 FARC-EP members refused the peace deal. In parts of Colombia FARC-EP members joined the ELN. In June 2020, rearmed FARC dissidents in northern Antioquia using their ‘Special Anti-paramilitary commando’, attacked the criminal Clan del Golfo in Operation Mil. Other rearmed guerrillas work with the Southwestern Bloc of ‘Ivan Mordizco’, the first commander to abandon the peace process, and ‘Gentil Duarte’, or operate independently. In 2018, the dissenting FARC had a presence in 55 municipalities, today it is 100. The ELN had a presence in 90, now it is 175.
Political assassinations are bound up with criminal land clearance. In September 2020, illegal armed groups killed five members of the Awa Indigenous community and kidnapped another 40 members after it broke into the Awa people’s Inda Sabaleta reservation, in the Narino Department. In July 2020, Colombia’s Peasant Association of Catatumbo reported a massacre of eight farmers by ‘Los Rastrojos’, which forced at least 120 people to leave their communities in the municipality of Cucuta. The Ombudsman’s Office reported that overall, 28,500 Colombians were forced from their homes in 2020 due to violence, 14,000 people were displaced from Nariño, and 21 massive mobilisations involving over 9,200 people were recorded in Choco.
With a ruling class dependent upon the most vindictive agents of US imperialism, a ruling class desperate to maintain its direct and personal control of the country’s resources, a ruling class riddled with compromise and collusion with the region’s drug barons, Duque represents the practical abandonment of the 2016 Peace Agreement. Only the immense struggles and sacrifice of the Colombian working class, armed where necessary to defend itself from the slaughter being brought down upon it, can resolve the continuing and bloody crisis in the interests of the mass of Colombians.
[1] 11 January 2021 tinyurl.com/1640gsh2
