5-11-05, 5:46pm

The Governments’ diatribe attempting to de-legitimize the insurgency, labeling it as a terrorist threat, would not merit the slightest response were it not for the opportunity it provides to deepen the analysis of the Colombian conflict’s causes and characteristics.

The governmental argument disseminated at various national and international venues according to which in Colombia there is no conflict but instead, a terrorist threat, is so ridiculous that it has given rise to a real avalanche of contradictors from many areas on the part of all sectors of Colombian society and of prestigious organizations and personalities of other countries.

Today no one is unaware that what exists here is a severe conflict, which we of the FARC-EP have characterized as social and political in order to underline the causes that have given rise to it and the forms it has taken in the course of its complex historical development.

Why is the characterization made of the Colombian conflict so important? Simply because if the physician makes an erroneous diagnosis, it is only logical that he/she will also be mistaken about the treatment and as a consequence the patient will get worse instead of improving. This is a problem of common sense.

So, how can one deny that at the roots of the Colombian conflict lie the contradictions fundamental to a country whose ruling class in power, so attached to its narrow interests, refuses to resolve the problems vital to our economic development and the building a more just, sovereign and democratic society?

At present in Colombia, the big landowners, less than 1% of the population own 55% of the arable land. 7,000 families monopolize 29 million hectares while on the other hand, one million campesinos do not have even one square meter of land and another 700,000 campesinos have only one or two hectares to cultivate.

Obviously such inequity can only be maintained by means of the violence and terror that has been systematically unleashed by the big landowning bourgeoisie relying on the official army and its paramilitary gangs. This likewise explains from where the three million displaced compatriots have come and who has taken the lands robbed from them.

Titles to more than six million hectares are in the process of being legalized at the new land registry office in Santa Fe de Rialto. Do they say something about terrorism?

How is possible to claim the conflict has nothing to do with the more than 3.5 million Colombians without work and the 8.4 million who survive with their families from things like leftovers and sifting through trash?

Or the 4 million who suffer the heartless exploitation of big capital forced by necessity to work for less than the monthly minimum wage? And what is to be said about their counterparts, the bosses who are barely 8% of the population but have in their hands 87% of the production and sales of the country’s goods and services?

What must these same workers think about the 8 trillion pesos that have been robbed from them and have gone to fatten the fortunes of their bosses thanks to the Uribista labour reform that put an end to overtime pay and extended the legal day of exploitation to 10 pm? Just who is to blame for terror here?

Are not the 800,000 families who are victims of the financial system’s vampires and in danger of loosing their homes or are forced to pay ten times the real cost, also victims of the Colombian conflict? Why shouldn’t we ask them what they think of the usurers of the financial system that dominates this country? Who are the terrorists in this case?

How is it possible for them to try to talk to us about the beauties of the Colombian system when here in the 21st century we have 16 million compatriots without health care, while public hospitals are being systematically closed. And what about the planned bankruptcy of the institution of Social Security for the purpose of creating conditions for its privatization?

Does the figure of 5.6 million inhabitants without potable water not produce terror? What impression about development must the 3.5 million illiterate youth currently in Colombia have?

In what truly democratic country is it possible to auction off for a song the main and most important enterprises for strategic development built with everyone’s resources, all without consulting the people about these decisions?

Would not the democratic course be to ascertain the will of the sovereign people concerning fundamental decisions like, for example, the rate of exploitation of natural resources and the “negotiation” of a “free trade accord”?

What sovereign and democratic nation would consider extraditing its nationals and signing an “accord” giving up the right to judge US civilian and military functionaries implicated in crimes like torture of the kind the gringos are shamelessly practicing in Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistán?

And what sort of a model of democracy is this wherein mafia money finances electoral campaigns, the paramilitary chiefs boast of controlling the “honourable” Congress that has approved the law guaranteeing them impunity for their crimes and where only 51% of the potential electors participate in the elections, including the votes deposited at the more than 5,600 tables disputed in the last vote for the Congress of the Republic?

Is not the existence of only one nationally circulating daily newspaper, of the monopoly over the local press, the radio networks, television channels and the principal magazines all held by the same families and economic conglomerates that control industry, commerce, the banks and the top positions of State and Government, something more illustrative than any harangue by a paisa flatterer looking for support for his militarist delirium?

Can a regime guilty by action or by omission for the murder of more than 100 labour unionists every year be called democratic? Are not more than 5,000 leaders and militants of the Patriotic Union and the Communist Party shot full of bullets in the back at the hands of the regime’s psychopathic killers sufficient to strip naked the terrorist nature of the Colombian State?

Without being complete, is not this sketch of the country more than sufficient to provide legitimacy for an insurgency forged by the people itself over more than 40 years of heroic resistance until it has become the alternative and certainty of the New Colombia that is arising?

The intense military confrontation that extends all around the country with the participation of the armed forces of the State, gringo mercenaries and paramilitary gangs trying to break the heroic resistance of the people and its revolutionary army, and which in the east of the country alone last year caused 4,700 casualties, dead and wounded, in the official forces and 521 in the insurgent ranks, is surely one expression more of the social and political conflict that involves the whole of Colombian society and threatens to send us into the abyss if we do not in time halt the fire spitting lunatic who by means of a media coup has been imposed upon us as ruler?

Thus, whatever is said to attempt to diminish this hard reality is utter babble!