After the death of “Tirofijo”: perspectives for the FARC and the class struggle in Colombia

The death of Manuel Marulanda, the legendary leader of the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), reopens a debate over the
perspectives for the FARC and for the class struggle in Colombia. In
recent months the FARC has received hard blows with the assassination of two of
its principal leaders, Raul Reyes and Ivan Rios, numbers 2 and 4 respectively
in the leadership of the organisation. Nevertheless, the FARC still control a
good part of Colombian territory (mainly in the jungles) and maintain an active
presence with more than 15,000 combatants.

Manuel Marulanda

The persistence of the FARC over four decades is rooted in
very profound social and economic causes: the backwardness of the country, the
concentration of the land in the hands of the landowners, the oppression of the
poor peasants and the workers and the ills generated by a decadent capitalism:
drugs, poverty, misery, etc.

Colombia
has become the principal bulwark of US
imperialism in South America. At the head of
the country is a reactionary psychopath Álvaro Uribe, firmly supported by the
landowning and industrial oligarchy and with strong ties to paramilitary groups
which in the last 15 years have assassinated more than 4,000 trade unionists and
popular leaders.

The origin of the
armed conflict in Colombia

The FARC was born in 1964, but its history goes back to 1948
when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Presidential candidate and leader of the left wing
of the Liberal Party was assassinated. This assassination provoked an
insurrectionary outburst of the peasant masses and lead to the emergence of the
first Colombian guerrillas.

The FARC has historic ties with the Communist Party of
Colombia. Under Stalinist influence, the PCC defended reformist and nationalist
positions, substituting the struggle for socialism with an impossible accord
with a non-existent "progressive" bourgeois. This way lead to a dead end. Hence
the FARC in its 45 years of existence has not set the objective of socialism,
but "to pressure" the Colombian bourgeois to sit down to negotiate and accept
an agrarian reform and other democratic demands. But the expropriation of the
landowners is indissolubly linked to the expropriation of the capitalists and
bankers in the cities, because all of these form one and the same class. You
can’t separate agrarian reform from the struggle for Socialism.

Therefore, all of the negotiations between the FARC and
successive governments have ended in failure. Thus when in the 1980s the FARC
declared a ceasefire and organised a legal party, the Unión Patriótica, to
explore the parliamentary road, the ruling class responded by assassinating
more than 3,000 militants including three presidential candidates using the
police and the paramilitaries.

The Tactic of Uribe

It may come as a surprise that a reactionary rabble-rouser
like Uribe could win two consecutive presidential elections. However, on the
last occasion in 2006, 60% abstained. Colombia
has a semi dictatorial regime and functions as a military camp for the USA with the
excuse of the "war against drug traffic". Hence electoral fraud is present in
many areas. What was really striking was the great performance of the left
coalition, the Democratic Pole (based on the old Communist Party), that came
second with 22% of the votes and that has held the Mayor’s office in Bogotá
since 2003.

Nor can the great tirdeness in the population be ignored,
after decades of guerrilla struggle which have not lead to a decisive result.
To this must be added that in their desperation to achieve practical results
the FARC resorted to indiscriminate attacks and to tactics of mass kidnappings
that have been used by the bourgeois and by imperialism to win the support of
the middle classes and politically backward sections of the workers and
peasants for their policy of the "strong hand".

Álvaro Uribe

In spite of everything in recent years a revitalisation of
the workers and popular struggle in Colombia can be clearly seen. There
have been several general strikes, as well as massive mobilisations against the
signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the USA. Also, there have been marches
of the indigenous people and peasants and student struggles in the university.
The working class, in spite of all the blows it has received has demonstrated a
great level of combativity and organisation.

Uribe, under the pressure of the USA, has boycotted one or
more times the offer to surrender the hostages of the FARC and has dynamited
every possibility of a peace accord as has also been demonstrated with the
assassination of Raul Reyes in Ecuadorian territory.

Faced with a workers’ movement on the rise and the emergence
of a political alternative on the left, the Colombian bourgeois has an interest
in keeping alive "the guerrilla problem" to justify before the population the
restriction of their democratic rights, indiscriminate detentions and the
assassination of popular leaders.

What’s more, the maintenance of an internal "war front" has
permitted Colombia and the USA to justify the increasing militarization of
Colombia with the perspective of launching a war against Venezuela as the last
card, with the intent of defeating the government of Chavez, destroying the
Venezuelan revolution and stopping it from spreading to the rest of Latin
America.

The revolutionary
centre must be in the cities

The limits of the guerrilla struggle are clear in Colombia. Over
40 years the battlefront has remained relatively stable and another 40 years
could pass without any fundamental change. Even in a country with a numerous
peasantry like Colombia,
the vital hubs of society are not anchored in the countryside, but in the
cities. It’s here that the economic and political centres and the principle
transport hubs of the country can be found.

No regime would be able to stay on its feet in the face of a
revolutionary general strike which would paralyse the country, starting in the
cities, not for a month, but even just for a single week and where the masses
of workers occupied the countryside and the factories, the offices and the
official centres and organised their own organs of power. It is towards this
perspective that the main energies of the revolutionary cadres should be
orientated.

Should they then dissolve the FARC? Not at all! The FARC can
and must play a very useful role, but acting to complement the struggle in the
cities, making itself available to workers and peasant communities, to help
train and arm the committees of workers and peasants who have the task of
confronting the hired assassins of the employers and the paramilitaries.

The Colombian revolution must combine the armed struggle in
the countryside with an insurrectionary movement of the masses in the cities,
lead by the working class and by a revolutionary party rooted in the masses.
But we insist, the FARC must act as
an element of support and not as the central pivot of the revolutionary
struggle.

The adjustment policies of Uribe and the signing of the Free
Trade Agreement with the US that further weaken the Colombian economy, as the
general crisis of capitalism develops, will result in a stormy awakening of the
class struggle in Colombia, which cannot be stopped by the actions of the
paramilitaries or the army.

On the basis of the experience and the effects of the
revolutionary movements just across the border in Venezuela
and Ecuador,
the working class and the poor peasants will rise to their historic tasks in
the struggle for socialism.

Read the original in Spanish.