The Illegality of 'Legal Opposition' in Colombia

phpEUEIlZ.jpg

4-22-06, 9:22 am



Statement by the Revolutionary Armed Froces ofColombvia – People's Army


Colombia boasts its status as one of the countries on the continent with the most democratic stability in the last century. This statement is based on the long tradition of civilian government elected by popular vote, interrupted only by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla's military coup (1953 - 1957), and the installation of a Governing Military Junta (1957 - 1958). At the beginning, the coup was supported by the population and enjoyed the acquiescence of the country's political and economic elites, granting a new nature to authoritarianism, very different from that the Southern Cone experienced years later with their military dictatorships.

Notwithstanding this 'democratic' image, in practice political opposition in Colombia has traditionally had very limited margins for legal activity, and has constantly been pushed toward non-institutional forms of action.

Systematic repression, electoral fraud, and mechanisms for exclusion - these are some of the methods used again and again by bipartisan liberal-conservative political elites to confront political movements outside their ideological boundaries. Popular memory holds dear the figures of Rafael Uribe Uribe, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Jaime Pardo Leal, Bernardo Jaramillo, Carlos Pizarro, Manuel Cepeda, and many other leaders who have been assassinated with impunity for defending their democratic convictions in the public sphere.

Today, when the world's intellectual circles are discussing the fact that we are now seeing the 'end of ideologies,' in Colombia the persecution of popular organizations has not let up, popular protest is still criminalized, and legal political opposition remains a target for official bullets. As we shall attempt to demonstrate in this brief article, this is not a new phenomenon, but rather a situation which has been present within very different historical contexts throughout the country's political life span.

The Persecution of Gaitanismo

Without a doubt one of the most important popular experiments, by virtue of its reach and projections in national political history, is gaitanismo. The leader, Liberal lawyer Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, founded the Unión Nacional de Izquierda Revolucionaria (UNIR) in 1933. It marked an important effort to unite blue collar and peasant sectors, and very quickly acquired great influence in Cundinamarca, Tolima, and other areas in the midst of agrarian conflicts.

Under UNIR, the peasantry carried out important actions revindicating their rights, such as the take-over and dividing up of the 'El Choco' hacienda, and other invasions in various parts of the country, all led by the slogan: 'land is for those who work it.'

The landowners' reaction was not long in coming. The Movement rapidly became a target of attack for the so-called 'departmental guards,' or armed groups led by the landowners to defend their interests. In early 1934 these official corps baptized the new movement by blood with the assassinations of several peasants demonstrating peacefully in Fusagasugá (Cundinamarca).

More massacres followed, including the 'Tolima' hacienda massacre six months later, which left a hundred wounded and cost the lives of a dozen peasants. Gaitán soon understood the difficulties of political work outside the traditional Liberal and Conservative collectivities, and opted to dissolve UNIR, thereby displacing the class confrontation to the very columns of the Liberal party.

His anti-oligarchy discourse and beyond-the-party preaching would make Gaitán a true popular hero. In the 1946 presidential elections he competed with the official representative of his party, supported only by his bases, and won 44% of the Liberal votes. In the following elections, his arrival to the executive office seemed imminent. But the Colombian oligarchy, fearing the popular tone his candidacy was taking, cut his path - and his life - short on April 9, 1948.

After the assassination of the popular Liberal leader official violence was generalized throughout the country: labor and popular organizations were for all intents and purposes annihilated, and massacres of civilians belonging to liberal and communist parties multiplied. This was the first page in a new chapter of armed peasant resistance.

Throughout this entire period, and in the decades to follow, the Communist Party begun in the 1930s played a larger role in mobilizing worker and peasant masses. Members of the Party, constantly victims of bipartisan violence, undertook clandestine political activity, or at most, a 'legality' that curbed their political rights.

Opposition to the Frente Nacional

With the beginning of the Frente Nacional (1958 - 1974), a sort of 'Restricted Democracy' was implemented, which combined elements of formal democracy with mechanisms of authoritarian regimes, to exercise strict control over the opposition and popular movements.

The Frente Nacional pact constitutionally consecrated the political monopoly of bipartisanship, and denied the participation of other political forces outside its boundaries. This marginalizing manipulation of power was complemented by restricting democratic freedoms with a permanent state of seige, to contain social struggles.

Meanwhile, the role of the armed forces was re-directed. It now began to carry out repressive functions against opposition political movements. Following this orientation, known as the 'Doctrine of National Security,' the armed forces slowly assumed greater participation in social conflicts, developing punitive actions against zones of peasant self-defense and worker and student demonstrations for rights. Differrent currents of opposition arose within the framework of this model of domination. Some of them adopted partisan dissidence, such as the Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (MRL), which brought together important popular forces and obtained more than 35% of the total vote in the 1962 presidential elections. In its brief life span, the MRL was met with relentless persecution of its bases and leaders, which cost the lives of many members in the countryside and the cities, as well as some of its representatives in public corporations.

In this same time period the Frente Unido emerged; a pluralist movement, it succeeded in joining different sectors of society from the most diverse political backgrounds in its rank and file. Its primary leader, Father Camilo Torres, eventually opted for the armed struggle.

The Movimiento Alianza Nacional Popular (ANAPO) canalized a great percentage of inconformity with respect to Frente Nacional policies and denounced the April 19, 1970 presidential electoral fraud favoring the official candidate. Faced with this situation several ANAPO leaders chose the path of armed struggle, thereby beginning a new guerrilla organization, the Movimiento 19 de abril (M-19), which would play an important part in the national political arena in the following years.

Toward the end of the 80s, the M-19 went from armed struggle to legal political struggle. This, however, did not protect its highest leader and presidential candidate for the Alianza Democrática M-19 (AD-M-19), Carlos Pizarro, from being assasinated shortly after having condemned the armed struggle as a political option.

The Genocide of the Unión Patriótica

Still, one of the opposition movements most affected by the terrorist policies in the history of the Colombian state has been the Unión Patriótica (UP), born of the Cease Fire, Truce and Peace Accords (The Uribe Accords) signed between the FARC-EP and the administration of President Belisario Betancur (1982 - 1986) on March 28, 1984.

Since its inception the UP has sought power with and for the people by uniting the actions of the countryside and the city, and building bridges among the different, fundamental forms of struggle of our people. Peasant marches and civil protest find in the UP an interpreter of the people's needs and aspirations, contributing to their struggle, to opening political spaces and achieving, via denunciations, a meaningful presence in the media.

The UP's ascent was overwhelming; it flooded squares and streets in the cities and its message of peace reached all corners of the nation. The March and May 1986 elections, the first in which the new political movement participated, demonstrated the enormous welcome its programs and men and women enjoyed throughout the country. The UP elected 14 congress members to the Senate and the House (among them Iván Márquez, current member of the FARC-EP Central Command), 18 deputies in 11 departmental assemblies, and 335 counselors in 187 councils, tripling the vote the Left traditionally received.

Two months later, UP presidential candidate, ex-magistrate and union leader Jaime Pardo Leal broke the previous voting record for public corporations and quadrupled the results obtained by the Left in previous presidential elections.

Faced with the UP's significant advances, the oligarchy responded with the most savage of 'dirty wars' ever loosed against a movement. More than three hundred dead shed their heroic blood over its brief, young history. During the 1986 electoral campaign, the climate of terror increased with paramilitary activity and the generalization of assassination attempts on the lives of members of the Left, in an attempt to nip the peace process and its principal experiment, the UP, in the bud.

According to data from the media and Human Rights bulletins, as 1986 came to a close, the list of assassinations of UP members was: three members of Congress, one deputy to the Meta Departmental Assembly, and eleven council members. In the same period, one magistrate from Santander, two candidates to public corporations, sixty-one leaders and activists in patriotic groups, sixty-nine members of the bases, twenty-four guerrillas in truce, and thirty-four UP supporters were murdered.

Later, before the perspectives of the 1988 mayoral elections in which the UP participated for the first time, reactionary sectors regarded the UP's prospects for victory in wide regions of the country with apprehension. From 1986 up to the 1988 elections, militarism concentrated its attackes on UP leaders; approximately 30% of its candidates were assassinated before elections.

In October 1987 UP presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal was assassinated. Later, in March 1990, his successor Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa met the same fate. More recently, at the beginning of the Samper administration (1990), the only UP senator, Manuel Cepeda Vargas, was assassinated; 1½ years later, its highest national leader, Aida Abella, fled the country after an attempt on her life. Yet the UP is hanging on amidst so much genocide in some regions of the country.

The crimes against the UP, as those against many other Colombians who have fought in the rank and files of the opposition, have largely remained unpunished, and the bloodied hands of the murderers are still shaken vigorously by the alternating presidents.

The lesson these experiences through history leave us in this new century, is the need for a broad movement to join the banners of popular struggle and act secretly throughout the country, until new political conditions make it possible to participate equally, with guarantees from the traditional parties, in public squares, and to elect in popular assemblies, in cities and in the countryside, the authentic representatives of the people to the posts of Mayor, Municipal Councils, Parliament, and the Presidency.

This is the aim of the Movimiento Bolivariano which, under the leadership of the FARC-EP, joins Colombians seeking a political end to State terrorism and indignity before the U.S. empire.

From FARC-EP