What Does the Most Rightwing Country on Earth Look Like?

It looks like Colombia.

Rightwingers must wonder what a rightwing country looks like. What happens to your country when the Right takes over everything, gets almost all of the vote, controls all of the media, and the vast majority of the population would have to identify themselves as rightwingers if they were honest? You end up with Colombia!

What I find frightening about Colombia is that if they are the most rightwing country on Earth, the US must not be far behind. Does the future of America look like Colombia? I keep worrying that it does.

It is certainly possible for countries to not have much of a Left. One example is Colombia – the most rightwing country on Earth after the US. There is a spectrum down there, from “Left” to “Right.” The Left is represented by the Liberals. The Liberals claim to be a social democratic party but there is nothing socialist or democratic about them. The Conservatives apparently hate the Liberals, but they each seem to be about the same – extremely rightwing.

There are a variety of other parties. Most of them appear to be some version of the same extreme rightwing fascism of the Liberals and Conservatives. So you see, in Colombia, there is no Left, and the “Left” and the “Right” are both just the Right.

They represent the interests of a tiny group of rich Colombians who run the country like a personal fiefdom. These group is mostly made of thieves and murderers. They spend most of their time stealing land and money from the vast majority of Colombians (last I heard 8

Much of the agenda is to steal the land of the people and give it to large landowners and corporations. Armed groups, including the military and police, come onto the lands owned by the poor and demand that they vacate their land. If you don’t, the thugs, the army and the police come out and arrest, beat, torture, kidnap or kill you. Hence the poor are constantly leaving their lands at gunpoint.

The rich Colombians then come in and steal the land use it as part of their huge landholdings. Or else the stolen land is given to a large corporation, often an American one. If you go to Colombia, you will see vast areas of land that are now owned by rich landowners. All of that land was formerly owned by poor farmers. They were driven off their land, and their land was stolen by the latifundistas.

If you go through these areas, you will run into constant checkpoints manned by the military, police and rightwing death squads. They are the armies of the rich. The checkpoints are to keep the people from rising up and trying to get their land back. In cities near these areas, you will see vast slums stetching as far as you can see over the hills.

The worst slums on Earth. Guess who lives in those slums? The poor farmers who were driven off their land at gunpoint by the armies of the rich. Now landless, they were forced to move from rural to urban areas because they no longer have any land.

There’s no work in the city, so they wallow in the worst misery. These people hardly have enough food to eat. There’s no electricity, sewage, water or other amenities in the slums. The education system is poor and there’s little to no health care. There’s no work. As you might expect, crime is off the charts, much of it involving the poor preying on the rich. The poor slums are guarded by rightwing death squads to make sure that everyone keeps quiet about their condition.

Anyone rising up to complain about the state of affairs in the slums is called a “Communist.” Fullscale repression, which often includes disappearance and murder, typically results. If you go against the system down there, you can easily die. Repression is perhaps most intense against organized labor. Every year, more trade unionists are murdered in Colombia than in any other country on Earth. This is because in Colombia, if you are a trade unionist, you are a Communist. In Colombia, once you are labeled as Communist, you can be killed at any time.

In such a situation where all peaceful protest has been walled off, as you might expect, the Left has been forced to take up arms. You can either sit there and wait for the government to come out and kill you, or you can pick up a gun so you at least have a fighting chance when the government comes out to kill you.

Recently, the Democratic Pole ran in the elections. This is actually a Left party. Many of their candidates were threatened, beaten, arrested and tortured. A number of Polo candidates were out and out murdered by the government. In the last election, I believe that they got maybe 1

Colombia is probably the top 3 US ally on Earth. Colombia gets the third highest foreign aid of any US country. Colombia is the US’ favorite country in Latin America, and it’s one of the last US allies down there. Barack Obama loves Colombia. He signed a deal to put 7 US military bases down there. The purpose of those bases is to help the armies of the rich down there to repress, disappear and slaughter the people. So you can see that Obama just loves Colombian fascism.

This is pretty scary right there. What does a US ally look like? Apparently it looks like Colombia. What kind of values does America have that this country is #3 in US foreign aid, almost all of it military aid.

And yes, of course, this blog does support the FARC and the ELN, the armed Left down there. I was going to do some work for the ELN translating some of their web stuff, but I was afraid it would be illegal under the Patriot Act and I could go down for 10 years.

Wikipedia Jews Attack James Petras

Repost from the old site.

James Petras is a fine man of the Left who has long been interested in Latin America and especially revolutionary movements down there. He has long supported the FARC revolutionaries in Colombia (as does this blog) and lately he has been supporting the Movement of the Landless in Brazil.

He’s a great labor organizer who goes down to Latin America and works with the people, getting his hands dirty with the workers and peasants themselves. He’s a towering intellect, and has often criticized Left movements from a Far Left perspectives, accusing them of being sellouts. For instance, he has gone after the FMLN in El Salvador lately for pursuing a half-hearted effort at reform.

I believe he was going after Evo Morales in Bolivia lately. He’s great for tearing the masks off these Latin American Leftists who the US press is screaming Commie Bloody Murder about, showing us that many of them are not even very far to the Left and the proposals they are offering are quite moderate and unlikely to seriously shake up socioeconomic relations in these places.

It’s always great to read him on anything having to do with the Latin American Left.

Lately he has sort of gone off on a bender against US Jews and particularly the Israeli Lobby and Israel. He has received some criticism for this from the Left, especially the anarchist Left (see Three Way Fight) and Maoists. Maoists and anarchists (Three Way Fight critique here) are among those on the Left who are particularly sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism and go to great lengths to avoid such.

This despite the recent rightwing Jewish – Zionist rewriting of history that shows the entire 20th Century Left as being anti-Semitic. See Why the Jews? The Reasons for Contemporary Anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin for more on that – it’s actually an excellent read and I recommend it.

The ADL has recently weighed in against Petras, accusing him of fomenting some kind of “New Anti-Semitism” (this means an anti-Semitism focused mostly on Israel). All of this crap is a rather minor sideshow to Petras’ excellent corpus and career, but as you can see in his Wikipedia entry, most of the entry is given over his tussle with the Jews.

On the discussion page, the Wikipedia Jews have gone nuts, accusing him of being an “anti-Jewish racist” and other bullshit. There’s the usual crap about Israel Shamir on there, straight from the UK Spotlight Trotskyite antifa loonie-tunes accusations – Shamir as a Swedish neo-Nazi living in Norway.

In fact, Israel Shamir, whatever one thinks of him (and he surely has his anti-Semitic moments) is a Russian Jew, son of a famous rabbi, who immigrated to Israel, fought in the Israeli military, wrote for some Israeli papers, moved to Japan where he translated Japanese haiku books, moved back to Russia where he got involved in some dubious anti-Semitic far right Russian publications, moved back to Israel, where he currently resides in Jaffa (in fact, you can probably even visit him there – lots of folks do).

It’s really sad that this “Swedish neo-Nazi” bullshit has been allowed to gain as much traction as it has. Yes, his Wikipedia page says that too. I know what you were thinking. Chip Berlet is one of the leaders of the Israel Shamir Lynch Mob. Berlet, the strange “Marxist” who is in deep with the radical right libertarians that rule Wikipedia.

Looks like the Wikipedia Jews got pretty much thwarted on this one. Maybe someone is finally starting to reign them in over there. Note that “Humus Sapiens” is one of the most notorious Wikipedia Jews, active for years now. Still at it, I guess.

Check out the article history. Real food fight.

Links to some Wikipedia nasties.

Wikipedia Jews: Jayjg, one of the worst Jewish POV-pushers on Wikipedia. Humus Sapiens, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US. Izak, one of their sidekicks.

Slim Virgin , one of the worst ones of all. I understand that SV is not even Jewish (!); she’s just some Gentile philosemite. She’s obsessed with 1. The Jews, 2. 9-11. SV is one of the most horrible and abusive administrators on Wikipedia. She was so abusive that the Wikipedia Review undertook an investigation of her.

She was very hard to track down as she covers her tracks very well, but they eventually determined that she is a former Cambridge University graduate student named Linda Mack who was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger and John K. Cooley to investigate the Lockerbie bombing.

Two Libyans were eventually convicted of the bombing, and Ghaddafi was ordered to pay a huge fine, but there is good evidence that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing. There is also evidence that UK law enforcement knew this but went after Ghaddafi anyway because they hated him and wanted to wrap up the case.

It is still not known who was behind the bombing, but the Iranian regime was probably the author of the attack. The attack was probably a payback for the US shooting down of an Iranian airliner during the Iran-Iraq War, an act that the US said was accidental. Iran refused to accept the accidental shootdown theory.

Linda Mack was instrumental in steering Salinger and Cooley towards the Libyans. Salinger and Cooley eventually decided that Mack was a spy with the UK’s notorious MI5 intelligence agency (the British CIA). Linda Mack is now reportedly living in Alberta, Canada under the name Sarah McEwan.

Antifascist, who uses the same handle and has the same obsessions as a notorious Jewish Zionist who used to stalk anti-Zionists on Indymedia, often issuing them horrible death threats. He’s obsessed with Wendy Campbell and Gilad Atzmon.

His name is Ketlan Ossowski ( blog here) and he is described as an obsessive Jew who uses Leftism and anti-fascism as a cover to promote Zionism. I strongly suspect that he is the same guy who stalked and threatened Wendy Campbell. Zeq, long-notorious, the lone Wikipedia Jew busted in the CAMERA fiasco, now banned.

Others: Roland Rance, a Jewish Marxist (Jewish first, Marxist far distant second) from London, famous from the wars over Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo’s Peace Palestine blog, apparently active in the Socialist Workers Party and in with the Lenin’s Tomb crowd. I’m not going to comment on this guy much as he’s written me civilly via email.

Just another frothing Trot about sums it up though.

10,000 Unidentified Bodies Found in Colombia

A survey of Colombian municipalities found over 10,000 unidentified bodies reported, with only one half of Colombian municipalities reporting. I am not sure of the time period involved, whether the 10,000 unknown dead turned up in 2009 alone, or whether other years are covered.

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In addition, over 18,000 Colombians disappeared in Colombia in 2009 alone. There are over 50,000 disappeared in Colombia according to the government.

Why doesn’t NATO and the UN step in and order the Colombian regime to quit killing its people? If they don’t obey, why don’t the UN and NATO order sanctions on Colombia, freeze their bank accounts in the West (steal their money) and then bomb the country for regime change?

Alt Left: When Will US Whites Quit Drinking the Koolaid?

Commenter: It’s really not hard to understand why you hate White Americans so much. They really are some whacked out nutters.

I hear you though. I grew up in an all White suburb in Orange County. Though it was reasonable in the 1970’s, at the moment,  I would say that 10

I would add that almost all of these people were drug users, and most of them were drug dealers. Some even moved quantities of marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD. But they were Republicans at the time (Republican surfer/stoner/hippies?!), and they are Republicans now.

Later in the early 1980’s I hung out with the early Goths. Everyone smoked, drank like fish, took a lot of drugs, and hung out in nightclubs all the time acting like weirdos. Most of the chicks seemed like they were bisexual, and most all the guys seemed like they were gay or bi or at least they acted like it. There was epidemic homosexuality and bisexuality. And you know what? They were all Republicans!

It was like there was something in the water.

Later, I moved to the all White Sierra Nevada foothills, and it was the same theme all over again, this time with a huge dose of anti-abortion and fundamentalist Christianity. Same thing, all the potheads and hippies were Reaganites, Dittoheads, and Glen Beck fans. And these were working class White people!

In between, I worked all over Orange and LA Counties, and it was the same everywhere I went. I worked in San Pedro in the 1980’s, and it was the same old stuff. If you were White, Reaganism just crawled into your bloodstream. I’m now in the Central Valley, and it’s the same again, except here, most Whites are apparently mentally retarded to boot. There’s also a shocking number of Republican Hispanics around here, which strikes me as very bizarre.

I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even want to speak to most White people anymore because I am so sick and tired of this rightwing politics. I would add that your average “Centrist” White person is pretty damned rightwing themselves!

I honestly do not know WTF is the matter with White people. We have had over 40 years of this radical rightwing BS ever since Reagan started it (Don’t even compare these new ones to Nixon, Ford, or 1970’s Republicans please – we can live with them), and it’s sent the nation right down the tubes. The longer it goes on, the more wrecked we are getting. I am afraid that most Whites are ideologically invested in this Reaganite (now MAGA) crap, and they are just not willing to give it up, nor are they willing to acknowledge how it has clusterfucked our land.

They’re going to find out the hard way, but even then, will they learn?

Until very recently, Colombia has been a very rightwing country for a good 50-60 years or more, or maybe since colonization. The place is trashed, there’s a civil war going on, political murder goes on every day, there are the worst slums on Earth, crime is rampant – the murderous oligarchic politics have turned the whole country into a Hellish sewer. But every few years until just very recently, the people go to the polls, and everyone votes radical Right again.

Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity,” by James Petras

This is an excellent article by James Petras.

He shows how Hugo Chavez has turned so far to the right that he is now in some ways one of the most rightwing Presidents in Latin America. For instance, only Chavez has supported the US and Colombia in backing the Honduran coup regime. And he is becoming one of Colombia’s sole allies in the region.

Why has he done this? A few reasons. For one, he’s surrounded and threatened. Colombia keeps threatening the invade Venezuela to go after Colombian rebels that hide there, and the US under “liberal” Barack Obama has just stationed 7 new military bases in Colombia for the sole purpose of attacking the Colombian guerrillas and threatening Venezuela. Colombia built up forces on the border, repeatedly crossed the Venezuelan border, and moved Colombian death squads into Venezuela to attack the people.

The Colombian guerrillas are on the defensive and can no longer provide the buffer that they formerly provided along the border to a Colombian invasion of Venezuela.

The Obama-backed coup against Honduras, which has resulted in a wave of murders against the Honduran Left, changed things. Chavez now realized that the Obama regime was willing to use military force to get what it wanted in Latin America.

At home, the opposition has made its strongest showing in a decade, winning about 5

In other words, he’s boxed in with nowhere to turn. Under these circumstances, Chavez has decided that the Colombian guerrillas, who they used to support, are a liability. He has been cooperating with Colombia in handing over guerrillas who are in Venezuela. He signed a non-aggression agreement with Colombia in return for an agreement to help catch any Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela. However, he has gotten little in return for this other than that Colombia has stopped invading and threatening his territory.Colombia still maintains a deep alliance with Chavez enemy, the US. Colombian forces are still massed along Venezuela’s borders.

Chavez hope to keep Colombia from joining in the US in any joint US-Colombian military escapades inside Venezuela. He also hopes to keep Colombia from joining in any US propaganda-destabilization efforts in Venezuela.

However, the threats have escalated, and the US appears emboldened. Chavez’ moves to the Right have not earned him the tiniest bit of praise or space from the US – they hate him more than ever. US imperialism slapped an embargo on the Venezuelan oil company due to Venezuela trading with Iran. I am not sure what this embargo entails? Incredibly, the Venezuelan opposition supported this foreign embargo on Venezuela! What a bunch of traitors.

Following his new alliance with Colombia, Chavez became the only nation other than Colombia in Latin America which has recognized the coup regime in Honduras. He did this under pressure from Colombia.

Petras points out how Allende’s Chile, Mexico in the 1980’s, Cuba and Brazil have all harbored Latin American guerrillas (in Brazil’s case, an Italian guerrilla). They refused to extradite them. But Chavez is boxed in in a way that these regimes may not have been.

Petras shows how other Left regimes also cooperated with the Right at various times. Stalin cooperated with Hitler for a while in order to buy some time to move his industry east of the Urals and build up his military-industrial complex. He even sent some German Communists who were hiding in the USSR to Germany, where they were certainly tortured and killed. But Stalin was boxed in, and he needed to buy some time, so he made a deal with the devil.

In the early 1970’s, Mao entered into a new alliance with the US under Richard Nixon’s detente. Afterward, Mao supported Pinochet and the rightist rebels in Angola. They denounced any Left regime that head the slightest ties with the USSR and supported their enemies, no matter how rightwing they were. All for the benefits of a sunshine policy with the US.

In the event of a new confrontation with the US, can Chavez expect his new Colombian ally to be neutral? Dubious. Colombia will probably ally with its imperial master in the US. And can he expect any support for the radical Left in Latin America now that he has betrayed them? This also is dubious. He may well end up with no friends at all.

Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity

Introduction

The radical “Bolivarian Socialist” government of Hugo Chavez has arrested a number of Colombian guerrilla leaders and a radical journalist with Swedish citizenship and handed them over to the right-wing regime of President Juan Manuel Santos, earning the Colombian government’s praise and gratitude.

The close on-going collaboration between a leftist President with a regime with a notorious history of human rights violations, torture and disappearance of political prisoners has led to widespread protests among civil liberty advocates, leftists and populists throughout Latin America and Europe, while pleasing the Euro-American imperial establishment.

On April 26, 2011, Venezuelan immigration officials, relying exclusively on information from the Colombian secret police (DAS), arrested a naturalized Swedish citizen and journalist (Joaquin Perez Becerra) of Colombian descent, who had just arrived in the country. Based on Colombian secret police allegations that the Swedish citizen was a ‘FARC leader’, Perez was extradited to Colombia within 48 hours.

Despite the fact that it was in violation of international diplomatic protocols and the Venezuelan constitution, this action had the personal backing of President Chavez. A month later, the Venezuelan armed forces joined their Colombian counterparts and captured a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Guillermo Torres (with the nom de Guerra Julian Conrado) who is awaiting extradition to Colombia in a Venezuelan prison without access to an attorney.

On March 17, Venezuelan Military Intelligence (DIM) detained two alleged guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), Carlos Tirado and Carlos Perez, and turned them over to the Colombian secret police. The new public face of Chavez as a partner of the repressive Colombian regime is not so new after all.

On December 13, 2004, Rodrigo Granda, an international spokesperson for the FARC and a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, whose family resided in Caracas, was snatched by plain-clothes Venezuelan intelligence agents in downtown Caracas where he had been participating in an international conference and secretly taken to Colombia with the ‘approval’ of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Bogota.

Following several weeks of international protest, including from many conference participants, President Chavez issued a statement describing the ‘kidnapping’ as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and threatened to break relations with Colombia.

In more recent times, Venezuela has stepped up the extradition of revolutionary political opponents of Colombia’s narco-regime: In the first five months of 2009, Venezuela extradited 15 alleged members of the ELN and in November 2010, a FARC militant and two suspected members of the ELN were handed over to the Colombian police. In January 2011 Nilson Teran Ferreira, a suspected ELN leader, was delivered to the Colombian military.

The collaboration between Latin America’s most notorious authoritarian rightwing regime and the supposedly most radical ‘socialist’ government raises important issues about the meaning of political identities and how they relate to domestic and international politics and more specifically what principles and interests guide state policies.

Revolutionary Solidarity and State Interests

The recent ‘turn’ in Venezuela politics, from expressing sympathy and even support for revolutionary struggles and movements in Latin America to its present collaboration with pro-imperial rightwing regimes, has numerous historical precedents. It may help to examine the contexts and circumstances of these collaborations: The Bolshevik revolutionary government in Russia initially gave whole hearted support to revolutionary uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Finland and elsewhere.

With the defeats of these revolts and the consolidation of the capitalist regimes, Russian state and economic interests took prime of place among the Bolshevik leaders. Trade and investment agreements, peace treaties and diplomatic recognition between Communist Russia and the Western capitalist states defined the new politics of “co-existence”. With the rise of fascism, the Soviet Union under Stalin further subordinated communist policy in order to secure state-to-state alliances, first with the Western Allies and, failing that, with Nazi Germany.

The Hitler-Stalin pact was conceived by the Soviets as a way to prevent a German invasion and to secure its borders from a sworn rightwing enemy. As part of Stalin’s expression of good faith, he handed over to Hitler a number of leading exiled German communist leaders, who had sought asylum in Russia. Not surprisingly they were tortured and executed. This practice stopped only after Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin encouraged the now decimated ranks of German communists to re-join the ‘anti-Nazi’ underground resistance.

In the early 1970’s, as Mao’s China reconciled with Nixon’s United States and broke with the Soviet Union, Chinese foreign policy shifted toward supporting US-backed counter-revolutionaries, including Holden Roberts in Angola and Pinochet in Chile.

China denounced any leftist government and movement, which, however faintly, had ties with the USSR, and embraced their enemies, no matter how subservient they were to Euro-American imperial interests.

In Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, short-term ‘state interests’ trumped revolutionary solidarity. What were these ‘state interests’?

In the case of the USSR, Stalin gambled that a ‘peace pact’ with Hitler’s Germany would protect them from an imperialist Nazi invasion and partially end the encirclement of Russia.

Stalin no longer trusted in the strength of international working class solidarity to prevent war, especially in light of a series of revolutionary defeats and the generalized retreat of the Left over the previous decades (Germany, Span, Hungary and Finland) .The advance of fascism and the extreme right, unremitting Western hostility toward the USSR and the Western European policy of appeasing Hitler, convinced Stalin to seek his own peace pact with Germany.

In order to demonstrate their ‘sincerity’ toward its new ‘peace partner’, the USSR downplayed their criticism of the Nazis, urging Communist parties around the world to focus on attacking the West rather than Hitler’s Germany, and gave into Hitler’s demand to extradite German Communist “terrorists” who had found asylum in the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s pursuit of short term ‘state interests’ via pacts with the “far right” ended in a strategic catastrophe: Nazi Germany was free to first conquer Western Europe and then turned its guns on Russia, invading an unprepared USSR and occupying half the country. In the meantime the international anti-fascist solidarity movements had been weakened and temporarily disoriented by the zigzags of Stalin’s policies.

In the mid-1970’s, the Peoples Republic of China’s ‘reconciliation’ with the US, led to a turn in international policy: ‘US imperialism’ became an ally against the greater evil ‘Soviet social imperialism’.

As a result China, under Chairman Mao Tse Tung, urged its international supporters to denounce progressive regimes receiving Soviet aid (Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, etc.) and it withdrew its support for revolutionary armed resistance against pro-US client states in Southeast Asia. China’s ‘pact’ with Washington was to secure immediate ‘state interests’: Diplomatic recognition and the end of the trade embargo.

Mao’s short-term commercial and diplomatic gains were secured by sacrificing the more fundamental strategic goals of furthering socialist values at home and revolution abroad. As a result, China lost its credibility among Third World revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, in exchange for gaining the good graces of the White House and greater access to the capitalist world market.

Short-term “pragmatism’ led to long-term transformation: The Peoples Republic of China became a dynamic emerging capitalist power, with some of the greatest social inequalities in Asia and perhaps the world.

Venezuela: State Interests versus International Solidarity

The rise of radical politics in Venezuela, which is the cause and consequence of the election of President Chavez (1999), coincided with the rise of revolutionary social movements throughout Latin America from the late 1990’s to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century (1995-2005).

Neo-liberal regimes were toppled in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina; mass social movements challenging neo-liberal orthodoxy took hold everywhere; the Colombian guerrilla movements were advancing toward the major cities; and center-left politicians were elected to power in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay. The US economic crises undermined the credibility of Washington’s ‘free trade’ agenda.

The increasing Asian demand for raw materials stimulated an economy boom in Latin America, which funded social programs and nationalizations. In the case of Venezuela, a failed US-backed military coup and ‘bosses’ boycott’ in 2002-2003, forced the Chavez government to rely on the masses and turn to the Left. Chavez proceeded to “re-nationalize” petroleum and related industries and articulate a “Bolivarian Socialist” ideology.

Chavez’ radicalization found a favorable climate in Latin America and the bountiful revenues from the rising price of oil financed his social programs. Chavez maintained a plural position of embracing governing center-left governments, backing radical social movements and supporting the Colombian guerrillas’ proposals for a negotiated settlement. Chavez called for the recognition of Colombia’s guerrillas as legitimate ‘belligerents” not “terrorists’.

Venezuela’s foreign policy was geared toward isolating its main threat emanating from Washington by promoting exclusively Latin American/Caribbean organizations, strengthening regional trade and investment links and securing regional allies in opposition to US intervention, military pacts, bases and US-backed military coups. In response to US financing of Venezuelan opposition groups (electoral and extra parliamentary), Chavez has provided moral and political support to anti-imperialist groups throughout Latin America.

After Israel and American Zionists began attacking Venezuela, Chavez extended his support to the Palestinians and broadened ties with Iran and other Arab anti-imperialist movements and regimes. Above all, Chavez strengthened his political and economic ties with Cuba, consulting with the Cuban leadership, to form a radical axis of opposition to imperialism. Washington’s effort to strangle the Cuban revolution by an economic embargo was effectively undermined by Chavez’ large-scale, long-term economic agreements with Havana.

Up until the later part of this decade, Venezuela’s foreign policy – its ‘state interests’ – coincided with the interests of the left regimes and social movements throughout Latin America. Chavez clashed diplomatically with Washington’s client states in the hemisphere, especially Colombia, headed by narco-death squad President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). However recent years have witnessed several external and internal changes and a gradual shift toward the center.

The revolutionary upsurge in Latin America began to ebb: The mass upheavals led to the rise of center-left regimes, which, in turn, demobilized the radical movements and adopted strategies relying on agro-mineral export strategies, all the while pursuing autonomous foreign policies independent of US-control. The Colombian guerrilla movements were in retreat and on the defensive – their capacity to buffer Venezuela from a hostile Colombian client regime waned.

Chavez adapted to these ‘new realities’, becoming an uncritical supporter of the ‘social liberal’ regimes of Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Vazquez in Uruguay and Bachelet in Chile. Chavez increasingly chose immediate diplomatic support from the existing regimes over any long-term support, which might have resulted from a revival of the mass movements.

Trade ties with Brazil and Argentina and diplomatic support from its fellow Latin American states against an increasingly aggressive US became central to Venezuela’s foreign policy: The basis of Venezuelan policy was no longer the internal politics of the center-left and centrist regimes but their degree of support for an independent foreign policy. Repeated US interventions failed to generate a successful coup or to secure any electoral victories, against Chavez.

As a result Washington increasingly turned to using external threats against Chavez via its Colombian client state, the recipient of $5 billion in military aid. Colombia’s military build-up, its border crossings and infiltration of death squads into Venezuela, forced Chavez into a large-scale purchase of Russian arms and toward the formation of a regional alliance (ALBA). The US-backed military coup in Honduras precipitated a major rethink in Venezuela’s policy.

The coup had ousted a democratically elected centrist liberal, President Zelaya in Honduras, a member of ALBA and set up a repressive regime subservient to the White House. However, the coup had the effect of isolating the US throughout Latin America -not a single government supported the new regime in Tegucigalpa. Even the neo-liberal regimes of Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama voted to expel Honduras from the Organization of American States.

On the one hand, Venezuela viewed this ‘unity’ of the right and center-left as an opportunity toward mending fences with the conservative regimes; and on the other, it understood that the Obama Administration was ready to use the ‘military option’ to regain its dominance. The fear of a US military intervention was greatly heightened by the Obama-Uribe agreement establishing seven US strategic military bases near its border with Venezuela.

Chavez wavered in his response to this immediate threat: At one point he almost broke trade and diplomatic relations with Colombia, only to immediately reconcile with Uribe, although the latter had demonstrated no desire to sign on to a pact of co-existence.

Meanwhile, the 2010 Congressional elections In Venezuela led to a major increase in electoral support for the US-backed right (approximately 5

Chavez faced several options: The first was to return to the earlier policy of international solidarity with radical movements; the second was to continue working with the center-left regimes while maintaining strong criticism and firm opposition to the US backed neo-liberal regimes; and the third option was to turn toward the Right, more specifically to seek rapprochement with the newly elected President of Colombia, Santos and sign a broad political, military and economic agreement where Venezuela agreed to collaborate in eliminating Colombia’s leftist adversaries in exchange for promises of ‘non-aggression’ (Colombia limiting its cross-border narco and military incursions).

Venezuela and Chavez decided that the FARC was a liability and that support from the radical Colombian mass social movements was not as important as closer diplomatic relations with President Santos. Chavez has calculated that complying with Santos political demands would provide greater security to the Venezuelan state than relying on the support of the international solidarity movements and his own radical domestic allies among the trade unions and intellectuals.

In line with this Right turn, the Chavez regime fulfilled Santos’ requests – arresting FARC/ELN guerrillas, as well as a prominent leftist journalist, and extraditing them to a state which has had the worst human rights record in the Americas for over two decades, in terms of torture and extra-judicial assassinations. This Right turn acquires an even more ominous character when one considers that Colombia holds over 7600 political prisoners, over 7000 of whom are trade unionists, peasants, Indians, students, in other words non-combatants.

In acquiescing to Santos requests, Venezuela did not even follow the established protocols of most democratic governments: It did not demand any guaranties against torture and respect for due process. Moreover, when critics have pointed out that these summary extraditions violated Venezuela’s own constitutional procedures, Chavez launched a vicious campaign slandering his critics as agents of imperialism engaged in a plot to destabilize his regime.

Chavez’s new-found ally on the Right, President Santos has not reciprocated: Colombia still maintains close military ties with Venezuela’s prime enemy in Washington. Indeed, Santos vigorously sticks to the White House agenda: He successfully pressured Chavez to recognize the illegitimate regime of Lobos in Honduras- the product of a US-backed coup in exchange for the return of ousted ex-President Zelaya.

Chavez did what no other center-left Latin American President has dared to do: He promised to support the reinstatement of the illegitimate Honduran regime into the OAS. On the basis of the Chavez-Santos agreement, Latin American opposition to Lobos collapsed and Washington’s strategic goal was realized: a puppet regime was legitimized. Chavez agreement with Santos to recognize the murderous Lobos regime betrayed the heroic struggle of the Honduran mass movement.

Not one of the Honduran officials responsible for over a hundred murders and disappearances of peasant leaders, journalists, human rights and pro-democracy activists are subject to any judicial investigation. Chavez has given his blessings to impunity and the continuation of an entire repressive apparatus, backed by the Honduran oligarchy and the US Pentagon.

In other words, to demonstrate his willingness to uphold his ‘friendship and peace pact’ with Santos, Chavez was willing to sacrifice the struggle of one of the most promising and courageous pro-democracy movements in the Americas.

And What Does Chavez Seek in His Accommodation with the Right?

Security? Chavez has received only verbal ‘promises’, and some expressions of gratitude from Santos.

But the enormous pro-US military command and US mission remain in place. In other words, there will be no dismantling of the Colombian paramilitary-military forces massed along the Venezuelan border and the US military base agreements, which threaten Venezuelan national security, will not change. According to Venezuelan diplomats, Chavez’ tactic is to ‘win over’ Santos from US tutelage.

By befriending Santos, Chavez hopes that Bogota will not join in any joint military operation with the US or cooperate in future propaganda-destabilization campaigns. In the brief time since the Santos-Chavez pact was made, an emboldened Washington announced an embargo on the Venezuelan state oil company with the support of the Venezuelan congressional opposition. Santos, for his part, has not complied with the embargo, but then not a single country in the world has followed Washington’s lead.

Clearly, President Santos is not likely to endanger the annual $10 billion dollar trade between Colombia and Venezuela in order to humor the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s diplomatic caprices. In contrast to Chavez policy of handing over leftist and guerrilla exiles to a rightist authoritarian regime, President Allende of Chile (1970-73) joined a delegation that welcomed armed fighters fleeing persecution in Bolivia and Argentina and offered them asylum.

For many years, especially in the 1980’s, Mexico, under center-right regimes, openly recognized the rights of asylum for guerrilla and leftist refugees from Central America – El Salvador and Guatemala. Revolutionary Cuba, for decades, offered asylum and medical treatment to leftist and guerrilla refugees from Latin American dictatorships and rejected demands for their extradition.

Even as late as 2006, when the Cuban government was pursuing friendly relations with Colombia and when its then Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque expressed his deep reservations regarding the FARC in conversations with the author, Cuba refused to extradite guerrillas to their home countries where they would be tortured and abused.

One day before he left office in 2011, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denied Italy’s request to extradite Cesare Battisti, a former Italian guerrilla. As one Brazilian judge said -and Chavez should have listened: “At stake here is national sovereignty. It is as simple as that”. No one would criticize Chavez efforts to lessen border tensions by developing better diplomatic relations with Colombia and to expand trade and investment flows between the two countries.

What is unacceptable is to describe the murderous Colombian regime as a “friend” of the Venezuela people and a partner in peace and democracy, while thousands of pro-democracy political prisoners rot in TB-infested Colombian prisons for years on trumped-up charges.

Under Santos, civilian activists continue to be murdered almost every day. The most recent killing was yesterday (June 9,2011): Ana Fabricia Cordoba, a leader of community-based displaced peasants, was murdered by the Colombian armed forces.

Chavez’ embrace of the Santos narco-presidency goes beyond the requirements for maintaining proper diplomatic and trade relations. His collaboration with the Colombian intelligence, military and secret police agencies in hunting down and deporting Leftists (without due process!) smacks of complicity in dictatorial repression and serves to alienate the most consequential supporters of the Bolivarian transformation in Venezuela.

Chavez’ role in legitimizing of the Honduran coup-regime, without any consideration for the popular movements’ demands for justice, is a clear capitulation to the Santos – Obama agenda. This line of action places Venezuela’s ‘state’ interests over the rights of the popular mass movements in Honduras.

Chavez’ collaboration with Santos on policing leftists and undermining popular struggles in Honduras raises serious questions about Venezuela’s claims of revolutionary solidarity. It certainly sows deep distrust about Chavez future relations with popular movements who might be engaged in struggle with one of Chavez’s center-right diplomatic and economic partners.

What is particularly troubling is that most democratic and even center-left regimes do not sacrifice the mass social movements on the altar of “security” when they normalize relations with an adversary.

Certainly the Right, especially the US, protects its former clients, allies, exiled right-wing oligarch and even admitted terrorists from extradition requests issued by Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina. Mass murders and bombers of civilian airplanes manage to live comfortably in Florida.

Why Venezuela submits to the Right-wing demands of the Colombians, while complaining about the US protecting terrorists guilty of crimes in Venezuela, can only be explained by Chavez ideological shift to the Right, making Venezuela more vulnerable to pressure for greater concessions in the future.

Chavez is no longer interested in the support from the radical left: his definition of state policy revolves around securing the ‘stability’ of Bolivarian socialism in one country, even if it means sacrificing Colombian militants to a police state and pro-democracy movements in Honduras to an illegitimate US-imposed regime. History provides mixed lessons.

Stalin’s deals with Hitler were a strategic disaster for the Soviet people: once the Fascists got what they wanted they turned around and invaded Russia. Chavez has so far not received any ‘reciprocal’ confidence-building concession from Santos military machine. Even in terms of narrowly defined ‘state interests’, he has sacrificed loyal allies for empty promises. The US imperial state is Santos’ primary ally and military provider.

China sacrificed international solidarity for a pact with the US, a policy that led to unregulated capitalist exploitation and deep social injustices.

When and if the next confrontation between the US and Venezuela occurs, will Chavez, at least, be able to count on the “neutrality” of Colombia? If past and present relations are any indication, Colombia will side with its client-master, mega-benefactor and ideological mentor.

When a new rupture occurs, can Chavez count on the support of the militants, who have been jailed, the mass popular movements he pushed aside and the international movements and intellectuals he has slandered? As the US moves toward new confrontations with Venezuela and intensifies its economic sanctions, domestic and international solidarity will be vital for Venezuela’s defense. Who will stand up for the Bolivarian revolution, the Santos and Lobos of this “realist world”? Or the solidarity movements in the streets of Caracas and the Americas?

The US Army is the Army of the Rich

The truth is that the US military has always been the army of the rich, the army of the imperialist thieves and mass murderers. Look at how many billions America stole from Iraq – estimates are that the US imperialists stole uncounted billions from the Iraqis in the course of running their government for them after the war. The US is now planning to steal Libya’s money to help bomb Libya – that money belongs to the Libyan people, but the Western imperialists have simply stolen the Libyan people’s money to drop bombs on their heads.

The cruel truth is that the US military is the army of the rich and the corporations. The US homeland needs very little defending, and no one ever tries to invade anyway. Instead, the purpose of the Pentagon is to go around the world killing workers and poor people in order to uphold the rule of the rich and the right of US corporations to exploit the Third World.

It is interesting to look at US wars and military engagements to see how many of them really benefited working class people of the US and other countries. The imperialist wars in Cuba and the Philippines? Are you kidding?

The endless list of interventions in Latin America? They were all to benefit the rich and to kill workers and the poor. Even the invasion of Panama was because Noriega would not play ball with the US on the Sandinistas anymore. The drug dealing thing was a joke. The US, the CIA and our buddies in the rightwing governments and militaries down there have been running dope forever. We look the other way or even help them run the drugs.

Grenada? Pull the other one. The various interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic? Give it up. The 7 new US bases in Colombia? They are there to help the Colombian state kill the poor and Left of Colombia.

The intervention in Lebanon? To help Israel. The war against Iraq? A Nazi-like war or aggression that resulted in the US colonization of Iraq. The bases scattered all over the Arab World? To control the oil supply, imperialist style, so no one else can get their mitts on it. This benefits US workers how?

The bases in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus? An imperialist project to surround and threaten Russia. How does surrounding and threatening Russia benefit US workers? Someone?

Bases in South Korea? To threaten North Korea. How does threatening North Korea benefit US workers? Anyone?

I have a question for you. If you are a working class person, why would you join the army of the rich and go around the world killing poor people and workers so that the rich and the corporations can continue to rip them off and exploit them? Why join an anti-worker, anti-poor army? Why go fight for the rich? Why fight for the corporations? Because that’s what you are doing when you join the US military. Why would a working class person do that?  For the money? For the adventure?

Is the FARC Near Defeat?

This is not really the case.

The Western media would have you believe that the FARC are narcoterrorists with no support even among the peasants. This is not the case. The FARC have deep and vast support among the peasantry in the countryside. In the cities, it is more complicated.

It is true that the FARC has lost support lately. This is probably due to tactics.

The taking of prisoners was a tough one. Yes, the FARC took prisoners. Those were in general not hostages but POW’s. Colombian soldiers and police were taken as POW’s when captured. Does the FARC not have a right to take POW’s? The state does. The state arrests guerrilla suspects and imprisons them all the time. Why can’t the FARC imprison state combatants in the same way?

It’s also true that they took some Colombian legistlators prisoner. But why should they not have done this? Those legislators were voting for prosecuting the war against the FARC. By the same token, does the state not prosecute those who fund the FARC?

Several Americans, apparently spying on the FARC for the CIA or Pentagon, were also taken hostage. Many tears have been shed over this in the US. They were treated well by the FARC. If they didn’t want to be taken prisoner, why were they spying for the CIA?

In addition, the FARC has imprisoned some wealthy Colombians for tax evasion. It’s not true that these people were kidnapped for hostage money.

The FARC levies a tax on all Colombians worth more than $1 million. That is a lot of Colombians, as the Colombian elite is fabulously rich. The FARC is waging a revolution, and the rich must pay war taxes to fund the revolution. Simple, right?

Most rich Colombians have figured out that you have to pay your FARC taxes every years. They meet FARC operatives outside major cities and fork it over. It’s a very small amount of money, and they can easily pay. Some have chosen to evade their war taxes. So the FARC imprisoned them until their taxes were paid. Is this not right and proper?

We must understand that the Western line about the FARC is 10

It’s true that the Colombian guerrilla has been hit very hard lately. The guerrillas have suffered some serious losses, but they immediately replaced them. They still probably number ~18,000 fulltime guerrillas. Militia is probably many more. They are facing the heaviest offensive ever waged against a Latin American guerrilla outfit. This new offensive is all coming via US dollars and aid. The US has 7 new military bases in Colombia. The 10

Question: If the FARC is near collapse, why is it that the FARC killed more Colombian soldiers last year than 2002, which was at the very height of the war when the FARC was close to seizing power? Yes, the FARC has killed more Colombian troops than at any time in recent memory. Granted, most of that was in defensive action, but do those sky high enemy KIA counts sound like a losing army?

In addition, last year, the FARC waged about 5 offensive actions every single day. I get FARC military reports. The FARC kills Colombian troops just about every single day in Colombia. This is one kick-ass guerrilla army.

Everyone in the US seems to want the FARC to lose. But why should the Colombian regime win?

This is a regime that has decimated all of Colombian civil society.

Labor unionists, community leaders, peasant leaders and peasants, Indian leaders and Indians, women’s organizations, gay rights organizations, environmental groups, anti-free trade agreement groups, human rights groups, journalists, students, professors, anti-mining and anti-oil groups, really anyone who is anyone in Colombian civil society, has been subjected to a terror and extermination campaign.

Typically the charge is that these civilians are “members of the FARC” or “FARC sympathizers.” Usually, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are FARC members. If they are FARC sympathizers, how do you prove such a thing, and since when is such a thought crime illegal? Does the FARC have a right to slaughter anyone who is a government sympathizer?

Why should we in the West support such a vicious, venal and genocidal regime? If the FARC goes, will anything get better?  What makes anyone think that the regime is going to stop killing the people just because the FARC is gone?

The FARC, if anything, defends the people.

Here is what happens.

The state wages on “offensive against the guerrilla.” The army and death squads move into a region and start killing the local civilian leaders right away. The FARC quickly appears on the scene and starts attacking the army and death squads, trying to dive them out of the area. So you can see the FARC are really trying to protect the people from the state, to give the people a means of defense. What’s so bad about that?

The FARC want some sort of guarantees that the state will not massacre them if they lay down their arms. In the 1980’s, a faction of the FARC, the Patriotic Union, broke away, laid down arms, and tried to seek power by peaceful means. They were decimated by state terror – 5,000 of them were slaughtered like flies. Given that record, is the FARC not correct to be wary about laying down their arms?

As part of a negotiated settlement, the FARC wants a land reform. As in El Salvador, land is the key issue. A tiny fraction of the population owns almost all the farmland in Colombia. The vast majority of rural people own little or no land.

The rich are constantly stealing, with armed force, what little land the peasants have left.

This is how it works.

The army and the death squads will show up and tell the peasants to leave their land. You leave or you die. Most folks pack up. After the land is vacated, the rich move in and steal the vacated peasants’ land. This process goes on all over Latin America, especially in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and Brazil. It is source of much of the death squad run murders in the region. The same process goes on in Pakistan, India and I believe in the Philippines. Before the Salvadoran War ended, it was common in El Salvador.

A huge land reform was enacted in El Salvador as a consequence of the peace settlement. It did not solve the problems of the rural areas, but at least the peasants have their own land and can feed themselves. The major cause of the war was ended, at a cost of 70,000 lives.

As I understand it, the Colombian elite refuses to budge on land reform and demands that the FARC disarm for peace talks to start. This will not work. The Salvadoran state dropped their demand for rebel disarmament, and this enabled a peace settlement. Unilateral disarmament never makes sense.

I Thought the FARC Was “Near Defeat”?

Repost from the old site. A bit dated, but good nonetheless.Here on Robert Lindsay, we do support the FARC and the ELN unequivocally.

This is one hardass rebel army. The US corporate media says they still have 7,000 men under arms, down from 17,000, and in my opinion, their militia numbers in the 100,000’s. I strongly disagree with the 7,000 number, and I think the actual number of FARC troops is probably at least 18,000. They have a presence all over the nation and in several surrounding countries too.

It’s true that they have been dealing with the most intensive military offensive against any rebel group in the history of Latin America, and in recent days, suffered the loss of some top commanders. But they will weather these changes. As soon as a top commander dies or is killed or captured, there is someone else waiting to take his place.

James Brittain notes that the FARC has recently waged some of its most impressive attacks in a long time.

A reporter noted in 2004 that there is an unstated fear that the guerrillas could overrun Colombia’s major cities at any time. As a way of dealing with this, the venal and murderous Colombian ruling class periodically issues proclamations touting the weakness of the FARC, how they are near defeat, how they are suffering from massive defections, etc.

During Plan Colombia and Plan Patriota from 2000-2006, the Colombian regime repeatedly said that the FARC was near defeat. Analysis indicates that instead, attacks have grown over time. During 2008, the US media got into the act, crowing that the FARC was “near defeat”. But this year, the FARC attacked Colombia’s most important oil infrastructure facility and wiped out entire Colombian military battalions.

Between the 29th of April and the 6th of May, 2008, the FARC carried out repeated attacks on Colombia’s largest oil pipeline and halted the export of up to 3 million barrels of oil. At the same time, the FARC attacked various transportation routes crucial to the flow of military supplies and the movement of oil in Colombia’s north.

An essential bridge was destroyed in Cesar Province, preventing the movement of troops and paramilitaries. In Norte de Santander, the FARC attacked forces guarding the Caño-Limón Pipeline.

These last attacks were just hours after the US Ambassador visited the region and crowed about the near-defeat of the FARC. On May 3, 2008, Colombia deployed a battalion to the region to resume the flow of oil. The battalion was quickly destroyed by the FARC, which kept attacking the pipeline for another 2 days.

On May 27, 2008, the FARC attacked Colombia’s largest coal mine, derailing 40 wagons out of a 110 wagon train carrying 110 tons of coal. Further attacks hampered Colombia’s ability to engage in foreign trade by shutting down many export routes.

The North was thought to be relatively free of the FARC in recent years, as their center of operation was said to be in the South, but these attacks proved that wrong. In 2007, when the FARC was “near defeated”, somehow the number of internal refugees grew by 3

The FARC has auxiliaries in all neighboring countries, the FARE in Ecuador, the FARV in Venezuela (demobilized but ready to fight if need be), the FARB in the Dog’s Head of Brazil, and the FARP in Peru.

The FARP has expanded all the way down to central Peru lately, where they have had great success forming base communities with peasants who hate the state but are disgusted by Sendero’s brutality. Many former Senderistas in Peru, up to 1,000, have signed on with the FARP. FARP has linked up with the devastated remains of the MRTA in San Martin Province and sent the MRTA leftovers back to Colombia for armed training.

They have also linked up with what is left of Sendero, a considerably less radicalized organization. A column of Senderistas from the Huallaga Valley was also seen marching off to Colombia. In Peru, the FARC troops are uniformed, healthy, well-armed and supplied, with modern communications equipment and brimming with confidence.

They come into the villages and offer basic necessities and health care to peasants who are pleased to see them and find them impressive compared to the ragtag guerrillas they are used to. Just because Sendero has been badly hammered does not mean that the people of Peru are not in a revolutionary mood.

The FARC also operates R & R bases in Panama and operates all across northern Brazil to southern Guyana, where they tax gold mining operations. This is one way the FARC has reacted to the largest offensive ever launched against any Latin American guerrilla group – they have expanded to all of the surrounding countries.

8

When members of the FARC put down their arms to run for office in the 1980’s and formed the Patriotic Union, they were massacred like flies. Years later, 5,000 UP activists lay dead, and the party was disbanded. This is how the Colombian regime responds to challenges from the Left, even unarmed. With bullets. Until that changes, war will go on.

Colombia is currently one of the US’ top allies in the world, and the US’ top ally in Latin America. It’s unfortunate that US’ best friend in the region is such a murderous and fascist state, but it speaks volumes about the nature of the US state itself.

Do Capitalists Support Pubic Health and Education?

Repost from the old site. In a response to my post, The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation, brilliant British commenter huy suggests that capitalists nowadays are enlightened enough to see that public health and education are needed for the workforce. I argue otherwise below. Huy:

I would say that history has taught capitalism that free education and law and order run by the state is essential for capitalism to work, as without those things capitalism fails.It looks like capitalism is learning across the globe that free and equal health provided by the state is also essential for capitalism to run (from a free market economic point of view). Socialism wants national health and education for the benefit of the people, while capitalism wants national health and education for the benefit of the market and growth of the economy, An economy with higher-skilled, more versatile workers who are in good health is a more productive one. I consider myself vey leftwing and technocratic, and I’m deeply in favour of the free market, but only if the state provides good free education and health for all, minimum wage, poverty benefits, unemployment benefits and the chance for adults to get apprenticeships and qualifications for free when ever they need to or want to (within reason) so as to allow the lower-skilled workers to keep up with the fast pace of the free market and all the job cuts and creations that come with it. The free market is humanity’s best hope for destroying poverty, but only if it is galvanized by the state properly, whereby social mobility and equal opportunity and social justice and lack of social deprivation is followed through. This makes both moral and economic sense.

I respond: If you look at the 3rd World, the capitalist classes there do not want public education and they certainly do not want state health care. Even here in the US, the capitalist class has waged all-out war on public education and national health care through the Republican Party, although the Democratic Party also now seems to oppose national health care. In parts of the world where national health care has been put in, the capitalists and their rightwing parties quickly wage ideological warfare to get rid of it. Europe is an unusual case, probably due to circumstances discussed in my earlier post, For Justice, A River of Blood. Europe was a very rightwing place in the 1930’s. WW2 completely destroyed most of the European Right, defeated all rightwing governments, killed, wounded or imprisoned many of the rightwingers themselves, destroyed or made illegal their organizations and dissolved much of their wealth and power, and more importantly, humiliated them and completely discredited rightwing ideology. As a consequence, the Right was in disarray for decades after WW2 in Europe, and they have not yet regained their power. After the war, there was a Cold War threat from the USSR and from Left groups all over the rest of Europe. In order to co-opt the Soviet model and the West European Left, the ruling classes in Europe cut deals with workers, consumers and society in which a Social Contract was erected in the form of a socialism called variously the social market or social democracy. Due to the decimation and discrediting of the European Right, even European elites and media bought into social democratic ideology. Hence we see in France large Leftwing papers like Liberation, huge Euro-Communist parties getting 10-3 Elites in Scandinavia formed collegial relations with Communist and Leftist states and Leftist guerrillas on the basis that they were all socialists. For instance, Scandinavian governments had friendly relations with Sandinista Nicaragua, Cuba and Vietnam, along with the FMLN and FARC guerrillas in El Salvador and Colombia. Scandinavian governments gave generous aid to the Third World, often in pro-people forms with no capitalist or reactionary strings attached. This had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of West European Communists. In a relatively just social democratic society, most saw little need for revolution. In Europe, even the capitalists have gone along with national health care, although in the UK they have been whittling away at it since Thatcher. European executives love their free national health care and paid six week vacations. However, in much of the rest of the world, capitalists have rolled back national health and education. In China, national health care is apparently gone as a right. In Russia, too, it scarcely exists anymore, while education has been decimated along with educated persons and professions. In some East European states like Bulgaria, health care has been devastated. The first thing the hero of both US parties, Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro, did when the Sandinistas were voted out was to get rid of free public education and free national health care. In Canada right now, the rightwing party and the business class have declared war on the national health care system (an ongoing project for a good 15 years or so now), but it is popular, so they have to tread lightly. If the business classes in the US supported public education and national health care, we would not have a decades-long war against both of them waged by the party of business, the Republican Party, and supported by the business class in its entirety. It is true that some more enlightened US capitalists (especially big businesses) do support public education and even national health care, but they are an exception. In this sense, the US small business class is even more reactionary than US big businesses. The US small business class supported Ross Perot and Ron Paul and are often far to the Right of the corporate guys. This rightwing populism can and does lead to fascism. Small business and the petit bourgeois were the army behind fascism in Nazi Germany and have led many far-right movements in the US too. The petit bourgeois resents the plutocratic elites for screwing them, but on the other hand also resents the working classes for being unionized and making good money via union wages. They feel oppressed by both groups. Also, many petit bourgeois did not go to college, so they resent those white collar workers (seen as intellectuals and professionals) who got degrees and the resulting higher-paying jobs. The petit bourgeois work in offices, banks and stores as clerks, tellers, low-ranking managers, etc. This class sector is often equated with something like the lower middle class. They often have no class consciousness at all, which is why they are often fodder for the Far Right. What you are advocating above, huy, is not the free market at all, since the free market advocates getting rid of most to all government spending and regulation. Instead, you are advocating for socialism in one of its many forms. This form being the social market or social democracy. I am a strong supporter of social democracy along the lines of the European model. The social market is a regulated capitalism with many government programs as a safety net and considerable government involvement in and even ownership of parts of the economy. In Sweden, 9 Government involvement in the economy takes the form of industry guidance as a corporatist element. Ownership of aspects of the economy takes the form of ownership of large industries like aircraft and ship building, national airlines, vehicle manufacturing, national rail, etc. It’s worked quite well. Keep in mind that capitalists are loath to invest in industries like ship building in which it may take 100 years to make your first profit. These industries need to be state-run for a long time. Further, passenger rail is almost never profitable for the private sector, so they just don’t run passenger trains. Since it operates at a loss as its nature, it must be run by the state. This is what is so sick about the endless demands on Amtrak to make a profit – it is almost impossible for Amtrak to make a profit, because large passenger rail networks almost never do. In order to profit, they would have to charge so much money that they would hardly get any passengers. In the same way, city buses never run at a profit either, hence we never see the private sector running passenger buses inside cities. Do you see any private rail lines running passenger rail in any areas of the US? Of course not. Why? Because it’s not profitable. Passenger rail must be run by the state for it to exist at all. Demands for Amtrak to run a profit are perverse, dishonest and wrong. How many Americans think Amtrak needs to run a profit? Of those with an opinion, possibly most. This is what rightwing propaganda will do to you.

Manuel Marulanda (Sure Shot), Presente!

Repost from the old site. One of my all-time heroes, and one of the Great Men of the Latin American revolution, is dead. RIP Pedro Antonio Marin (Tiro Fijo) . New leader? Alfonso Cano, an anthropologist and the group’s chief ideologist. There were many anthropologists among Sendero Luminoso’s top ideologists too, as I pointed out in a previous post. Nothing like field work among the oppressed to turn one into a raving revolutionary. And yes, I do support the FARC, of course. Unequivocally and 10 This movement is grotesquely misunderstood. If it existed in any kind of real democracy instead of in a terrorist death squad state, they never would have had to fire a shot, or at least would have laid down their weapons long ago. As is, they’d be insane to give up the gun. For the time being in Colombia, there is no other way. In the 1980’s, a section of the FARC disarmed and formed a legal political party called the Patriotic Union. Despite unbelievable repression, they managed to gain a respectable showing in some elections. They were slaughtered like flies by the Colombian state with US military and intelligence assistance until 5,000 UP activists lay dead. The movement disbanded and scattered and has not been heard from since. The FARC is not insane. They already tried to lay down their guns. Look at what happened. At this point, the FARC is not going to lay down their guns until they get a say in running the country. There is hardly anyone on the Left running for any office anywhere in Colombia. Anyone who does can be and may well be targeted for death by US-Colombian military intelligence terror machine. Any Left organizations, including environmental groups, labor unions, peasant organizations, Indian movements, neighborhood and citizens’ groups or peace communities who have declared themselves neutral, can be and may well be routinely targeted with death by the US and Colombia. If I were a Colombian, I would either not write this blog, or, if I did, I would arm myself and join the FARC. After a while, it doesn’t make sense anymore to wait for the government to come out and kill you. If the US-Colombian military-intel death machine is going to come out and try to kill me anyway, I may as well be armed so I can fight back. As you can see in the case of the Wayuu Indians, they got tired of the US-Colombian military coming out to kill them, so large numbers of them joined the FARC, and many others formed their own guerrilla organizations. Attacks on the group dropped way down after they took up arms to defend themselves. Often, the US-Colombian military death squads will start to raid villages and stage killings and massacres of villagers. At some point, at least lately, a FARC unit will intervene and drive the attackers away, saving many lives. You can see that the FARC is the only thing keeping the US-Colombian military from staging vast massacres across the land. It is said that the FARC adds to the violence in Colombia. Far be it. The FARC had an autonomous zone carved out for it a few years back. The main city in this jungle, a town of only 25,000, had an incredible homicide rate of 1 killing/day. After the FARC came in, that was reduced to 1 killing/year. Some murderous guerrillas! The FARC has been an armed self-defense group from its origins in the peasant community of Marquetalia in 1964. The leftwing peasants of Marquetalia, tired of the mad violence that was sweeping the land in La Violencia, essentially seceded from the war and made their own private Idaho on some land they owned in Western Colombia. It’s true that they were Communists, but there were only a few hundred of them, and they were nonviolent. The US and Colombian governments became alarmed at these live Communists existing openly on Colombia’s land, and plans were made to exterminate them. The US Ambassador and US military cooperated closely in these plans. The US recommended everything be thrown at the peasants, including chemical weapons. The US-Colombian army (with US advisors on board) finally attacked the area, but the peasants of Marquetalia were not all killed. Some survived and armed themselves to fight back. This was the beginnings of the FARC, and this has been the story ever since. There was a march a while back against the US-Colombian death squads that haunt the land. A huge number of persons showed up in cities all across Colombia. Very quickly afterwards, with only a couple of weeks, the US-Colombian military killed about a dozen marchers and leaders. Just like that. This is what happens to the unarmed opposition in Colombia. If the FARC falls apart, nothing will change. Colombia will be as big of a shithole as ever, but now there will be no way for the people to fight back against the US-Colombian state and its killers. I read this article in English a while back, but now it’s disappeared into some memory hole somewhere. Here it is in Spanish if you can read Spanish. Upshot of the piece is that the FARC does not depend on dope. They tax all crops in the areas they control, which is normally about 4 This includes drug crops like coca. People grow coca because the state has not provided them the wherewithal to make a decent living growing anything else, despite the fake US-Colombian crop substitution program of recent years. During Plan Colombia in Putumayo Province, much of the land was devastated with herbicide, including perfectly legal crops, and most of the residents became ill with chemical poisoning. US-Colombian death squads quickly appeared in the area and started murdering peasants right and left. This was around 2002. After a couple years of that, about 8,000 Indians in Putumayo had signed up with the FARC. This is why people join the FARC, my doubting readers. Not because they feel like turning terrorist and destroying some glorious democracy because they are evildoers, but because the army keeps coming out to try kill them and spray poison all over them and their crops. This article (dead link) lays out what Colombia is really like. It portrays a rural region in Colombia. The US-Colombian state does not touch the coca plantations of the rich in this region. Here, the rich own all the land, and the poor live in wretched misery. It was not always this way. There used to be vast numbers of small landowners scattered through this whole region. They’re mostly gone now, part of a project by the US-Colombian military to steal the people’s land for the rich and kill anyone who resisted. Most of this area has gone over to vast cattle ranches in the hands of a few ultra-rich landowners. These landowners hire death squads to keep this sick state of affairs as it is. This is why the FARC is always kidnapping these wealthy landowner “innocent civilians”. They are not so innocent! These are the people who run the death squads. There are still peasant farmers in this region, but they are now crammed into miserable and tiny plots that are a shadow of the ones they farmed. It’s barely enough to feed oneself. The many peasants who were run off the land altogether now live crammed in teeming urban slums that never existed before. If you drive through the area, there seems to be open land everywhere – for cows. You see a few miserable peasants with tiny plots, and then you see vast and teeming slums. On the highway is a death squad and US-Colombian military checkpoint to keep the peons from rising up about this fucked-up bullshit. To accomplish the sickening state of affairs in this blighted region, the US-Colombian military killed 100’s to 1000’s of people. Now let us go to a large city – Medellin. The FARC militias were all run out a few years back, and the death squads run the show now. The poor are crammed into horrid slums on hillsides with no paved roads, no water, no sewage, no electricity, no nothing. The shit runs down the gutters, people gather rain for water, and when it rains, the hills slide down on the makeshift shanties. Down below, watching the Dickensian slums above with cold eyes, are the death squads. If any slum dweller raises a peep about their miserable situation, they may just get a bullet. The death squads are put there by the US and Colombia to make sure that that disgusting state of affairs stays just the way it is. Westerners have the temerity to ask why there is a revolution in Colombia. How could there not be one? The FARC has definitely been hit hard lately in a lot of ways. The Colombian military has doubled in size since 2000 (mostly due to an infusion of US money) and the FARC has been experiencing, since 2005, the most concerted military offensive that any Latin American revolutionary army has ever faced. They may conceivably not make it, but if they don’t, the violence will not end. The state will continue to kill the people, and it will still be impossible for the Left to organize or run for office without getting killed. If the FARC goes, there will only be successors; there will be no justice. Personally, dire as things are, I think that the FARC will pull through. One of the ways that they reacted to the offensive was to branch into other nations. The FARE is in Ecuador1, the FARV, with 1000’s of members, is in Venezuela2, the FARP is in Peru and doing very well3, and the FARB is in the Dog’s Head region of Brazil4. FARC is in Panama and Guyana, and they have activists in Bolivia helping Morales’ party. A previous post gives details on all of these FARC splinters. Great blog on Colombia. Machetera is also great and so’s People’s Movement Support Group.

Notes

1. This report from 2000 describes how both the FARC and the ELN had a growing presence across the border in Ecuador and how the FARE had just formed to protest against Plan Colombia. On May 15, 2000, the Ecuadorian military intercepted a FARE patrol in Sucumbios Province on the Peruvian border. Two FARE members were killed and five more were wounded or captured in the shootout. In early 2000, the FARE blew up an oil pipeline in Ecuador. On August 28, 2002, the FARE set off a leaflet bomb in a McDonald’s in Guayaquil that caused serious damage to the property. As of 2000, it was still a small group in the country. Whether or not the FARE still exists in not known. 2. The FARV is nothing but the name of the FARC in its rear guard zone inside Venezuela. The FARC has such zones and forces in all of the countries bordering it. 3. The FARP is nothing but the FARC inside Peru. They have penetrated deep into Peru and has recruited many former members and supporters of Sendero Luminoso. Former commanders of the MRTA have also joined the FARC’s army in Peru. For now, they are not doing much except laying down base areas, but they are very popular with rural Peruvians who got sick of Sendero’s mad violence. 4. The FARB is very little known, but it probably just the name of the FARC in its rear-guard area inside Brazil (Dog’s Head region) There is another FARB inside Brazil that has been threatening and even does not even exist and instead is merely a fake name for rightwing death squads that rampage all across Brazil.

In the Shining Path of Ann Dunham

Repost from the old site. It’s a lie that Sendero Luminoso never had much support. Simon Strong’s 1992 book gives the lie to that quite well. In the 18 months following Fujimori’s seizure of power, an unbelievable 1.5 million Peruvians were arrested on charges of being members of or collaborating with the Shining Path. Surveys done at the height of their power indicated that they had the passive support of about 5 In the American Revolution, few Americans know that only 1/3 of Americans support George Washington’s bands, another 1/3 were basically traitors supporting the English crown and another 1/3 were pragmatic fence-sitters waiting to see which side was going to win before they decided who to support. Most people don’t realize that in most civil wars you have a huge percentage of fence-sitters who are mostly just trying to stay alive. Sendero had support even in the churches and in the military. They completely blew it in a lot of ways though, and though they still operate, they are a shadow of what they formerly were. In my post, Sendero Fades and FARC Rises in Peru, I elaborate how Sendero has faded in Peru only to be replaced by the FARC of Colombia, who have been moving far down into Peru for some time now, and have been doing well with peasants fed up with Sendero’s mad violence. The remains of the MRTA (yes, they still exist also) are up in the far north of Peru in This article from La Rouche Publications (no, I do not endorse them) while a bit over the top, has an excellent roundup and analysis of the Sendero phenomenon. Particularly interesting is the huge support they had in the Peruvian diaspora in Europe, the US and Mexico, with a mind-numbing array of organizations. In the US, the support was run by the Maoists in the RCP, a large US Maoist group. RCP’s homepage is here, and they actually run some decent articles, though I don’t support Communism in the US or anywhere else in the First World at the moment – I support some variety of socialism instead, and that can even mean social democracy. El Diario International is the international paper of Sendero, or at least what remains of it. What is amazing is that this Belgium-based paper still prints a lot of issues, at least on the Net. It’s chock full of brand-new raving articles all the time. I don’t read Spanish very well, but maybe someone who does could check it out and come back and report to us in the comments. El Diario del Hoy was Sendero’s paper in Peru, but it’s long been shut down. I think it reappears clandestinely from time to time. I have read tons of Sendero propaganda and position statements. These people are completely off the deep end. All existing Communist states are “revisionist” (not real Communists but instead reformist traitors to the movement), and that includes North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and of course China. They despise both Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia. Chavez is pegged as some sort of “corporatist fascist”. Sendero does support other armed Maoists like the revolutionaries in the Philippines, Nepal and India (but their most recent editorial condemns the Nepalese Maoists for “capitulation”). The Nepalese revolutionaries have done very well, the NPA in the Philippines is a vast organization, and the Indian Maoists are expanding like mad in the east. I don’t have a problem with any of these three movements. Their position statements, and regular publications of their Red Sun Magazine (both here) are some of the rantingest, ravingest Commie stuff out there (Red Sun (Sol Rojo) 29 in Spanish, Red Sun 29 English supplement). As Peruvian society is evil and the system is a pile of garbage, Peruvian reality drove Senderistas insane. The crazier and more wicked the society, the crazier and more wicked the guerrilla reaction. The La Rouche link (forget the nonsense about how Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch support Sendero, and forget anything about the UK – LaRouchies have always been insane on the subject of the Crown) makes clear the link between Sendero and radical anthropologists and academics, in particular psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, historians, teachers and agronomists. The role of anthropologists , both Peruvian and even foreign, as essentially the brainchildren of Sendero is especially glaring. Just for the record, this blog supports the ELN and FARC in Colombia, and supported the MRTA in Peru, but cannot support the project of Sendero. The link with anthropologists is especially interesting in that Obama’s mother was an anthro, and she has been decried as an America-hater, and this America-hatred of hers can be seen supposedly in both Obama and his wife. Though I do not care about whether or not Obama and his wife hate America, I think these latest America-hating charges may well be fatal for his campaign, especially with White ethnic working class types (Reagan Democrats), independents and Republicans who were voting for Obama for some bizarre reason. This Asia Times piece by Spengler is worth reading along those lines. Though I am not a big fan of Spengler, he is definitely worth reading. He tells it like it is all right. I’m for whichever Dem, the Black or the woman, can beat the Republican clown. At this point it’s starting to look like the lady. Women all over the country are fired up and hopping mad about the sexist BS directed at Hillary all through this whole campaign. A bunch of yahoo alpha male dogs showed up at one of Hilary’s appearances in New Hampshire and yelped, “Iron my shirts!” Jeez. Good for American women for standing up to this sexist crap. Everyone should stand up for their rights, and I applaud my sisters. This blog will never attack Hilary on sexist grounds.

Alt Left: George Habash, a Revolutionary Life

Repost from the old site.

The following tribute to George Habash, leader of the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was delivered to a meeting organized by the CPGB-ML in Central London on Saturday 10 February 2008. The Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist, basically a hardline pro-Stalin group, last time I checked. This document is interesting for various reasons.

For one, it shows that hardline Communist rhetoric in the style of the former USSR is still popular. The PFLP are lauded for being a hardline Marxist-Leninist organization. It’s hard to say whether they still are or not, as they seem to be downplaying this in recent years, and no one really knows what Communism even means anymore. It is true that there was a Communist state in South Yemen, but I am not sure if they accomplished much down there. One of the biggest heroes of the Arab Left is Gamel Nasser, leader of Egypt. One great thing that he did do was to initiate a land reform. Most Arab states probably do not have feudal or semi-feudal land relations in the countryside anymore, but Egypt did in the 1950’s. 1 The vast majority of the rural population was reduced to the status of landless laborers or sharecroppers in debt peonage on the land of the landlords. Nasser was able to break up the large estates by buying them up via the government and giving the land to the sharecroppers. It was one of the great progressive events in modern Arab history. Back in the day in Yemen, you would go into the houses of the poor in South Yemen and see Nasser’s picture on the wall – they knew he was a hero to the Arab poor, and mostly for the land reform. Unfortunately, land reform was not enough. Population was exploding and Egypt desperately needed to put more farmland into production. Hence the Aswan Dam, a necessary evil. But even this did not solve the problems, as the rural poor continued to pour into the cities to look for nonexistent work. The landowners were bought off by assuring them a place in industry, which was and is heavily corrupt and tied in with the state. But the Egyptian economy was so shaky that the rich didn’t really feel like investing in it. Socialism was and is a pretty easy sell across the Arab World, in part due to Islam. Islam is a pretty socialist religion, although fundamentalists will argue the point with you and point out that the Koran says that there are those who have more and those who have less and this is ok. Nevertheless, the Koran is hardly a raging individualist tract. Nor are the deserts of the Arab World suited for individualism. In such an environment, the every man for himself libertarian is lost and probably dead quite quickly. One must form alliances or one will be destroyed. One must work cooperatively or the elements will take your life. In a world of perennial scarcity, mass hoarding by a few means death for many more. Hence, in the past century, most independent Arab states have opted for some kind of socialism. Where the states could not do it, the religious or militant groups did. There is no hatred of welfare or government as we have it in the individualist US. Socialism is simply normal and free market libertarianism is seen as a bizarre and cruel aberration. Nevertheless, in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and probably other places, the clergy did resist land reforms on the grounds that they were un-Islamic. Iraq, newly emerging from semi-feudal relations in the 1960’s, saw the Iraqi Communist Party become one of the largest parties in the country. It was particularly popular with poor Shia who flooded in from the countryside and poured into what later became Sadr City. At that time, the Shia clergy were widely regarded as corrupt. They were tied in with large landowners, often involved in money-making scams, and were noted for enticing women into sexual relationships with them. One of the few great things that the Shah of Iran did was to institute a land reform to realign the semi-feudal relations in the Iranian countryside. It went off pretty well, but some ethnic groups opposed it and hence were persecuted. The tone of the Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist in the statement below is what might be called Stalinist or anti-revisionist. Anti-revisionists hold that the problems with Communist states came from them leaving the path of true Communism and diluting their economies with capitalist relations. I do not know how much there is to that, so I can’t comment on revisionism. But even staunch Marxist sites nowadays post long pieces stating flat out that the Soviet model failed. The North Star Compass is a pretty interesting site. It’s run by former Communists from the East Bloc and the USSR, and it is dedicated to the reestablishing of the Soviet Union as a socialist state. For these folks, Gorbachev was enemy #1. There are quite a few interesting essays there, and for those who think that Putin is a Communist, these guys really hate Putin. For those who think that Russian Communists are all racists and anti-Semites, note that the North Star Compass despises the newly emerging fascist threat in the USSR. There are many Trotskyite sites on the Net. The Trotskyites used to be totally nuts on the question of “Stalinists”. Can you believe that they supported the German attack on the USSR and opposed the Soviet army’s war in Afghanistan? Trotskyites seem to have calmed down a lot lately. Many of them are supporting the Nepalese Maoists and the Colombian FARC. They even support Cuba. Usually this is measured with a tone that these states and movements would be better off if they adopted Trotskyism. Truth is that it is possible that Trotskyism has hardly even be tried anywhere, except possibly in the USSR from 1917-1922. Trotskyites have a reputation as the ultimate splitters, and in the Philippines they have, incredibly, taken up arms alongside the feudal and fascist state against the Maoist NPA. In Defense of Marxism is a good example of a Trotskyite site. It seems that many Communists nowadays in the West are Trotskyites of some sort. No one really knows what to make of them, and many Stalinists just laugh about them and regard them as irrelevant. Western Trotskyites seem to have a lot of money for some reason, and often put up nice websites. Non-Trotskyite Communist sites often have mild critiques of Trotskyism as some sort of irrelevant hairsplitting movement. Western Trotskyites were heavily Jewish in the West until 1967 or possibly earlier. World Trotskyism opposed Israel in the Six Day War and Jewish Trotskyites consequently defected en masse. Many seem to have made their way into the neoconservative movement. There are a variety of reasons for the heavy Jewish presence in Trotskyism, and that Trotsky himself was Jewish cannot be ignored. Trots have tended to oppose both Stalinism and Maoism as horribly brutal ideologies that committed atrocious human rights violations. Trotskyism has been a serious movement only in the West and it has tended to flounder in the rest of the world. One of the Trots’ main points is that a rapid buildup of urban industry is essential for the development of a modern socialist state. Trots are almost the opposite of the Maoists and their emphasis on the peasantry. There are sites that basically uphold the former USSR and even Stalin, but they are often angry at Maoists, whom they accuse of adventurism. In India, Maoists are killing traditional Communists in the state of Bengal, a state that has been run by pro-Soviet Communists for about 30 years now. Marxism-Leninism Today is an example of a pro-USSR, pro-Cuba, anti-Maoist site. They support the CPI-M (Communist Party India-Marxist) in Bengal and are not too happy with the Indian Maoists for killing their comrades. Here is a cool site by a Georgian artist who is the grandson of Joseph Stalin, showing the Stalin family tree among other things. Stalinism.ru is a site run by Russian Stalinists, but if you can’t read Russian, it’s not for you. The National Bolshevik Party is some sort of a bizarre marriage of Stalinism and racial nationalism (I don’t want to say Nazism, but I fear that is what it is). It’s Russian too, but check out the scary party image, complete with Nordic lettering, and the background on the homepage. Lots of related links at the bottom – looks like they have chapters all over the place. Another great site, coming from a somewhat different point of view, a Maoist one, is the Single Spark. Although Maoists are often described as ultra-Stalinists, Maoists and Stalinists are not necessarily the same thing. The Maoists have always been the real bomb-throwers on the Far Left. Despite Cold War rhetoric, pro-Soviet Communists often did not take up armed struggle until all peaceful avenues for change were blocked, and the Left was up against a death squad state. Otherwise, the idea was to try to gain power through parliamentary means, despite Lenin’s denouncements of “parliamentary cretinism”. If the state was reasonably democratic and not killing the Left, the pro-Soviets often argued that “an objectively revolutionary situation did not exist”. On the other hand, Maoists tend to reject all bourgeois democracy as invalid, particularly in very backward societies with mass extreme poverty and accompanying disease, hunger and premature death. Hence, Maoists have launched insurgencies against formally democratic states as Peru, Sri Lanka, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Philippines, Nepal and India in recent years. In most of these cases, the pro-Soviet Left decided to sit out armed struggle, and the Maoists were denounced as adventurists irresponsibly taking up arms in spite of a lack of an objectively revolutionary situation. In Peru, the war launched by the Shining Path led to a state that was less and less democratic and soon became just another Death Squad State. Thus in 1984, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took a vote and decided that “an objectively revolutionary situation existed” and opted to take up arms. Another difference is that despite Cold War rhetoric, Maoists are often a lot more vicious than the Castroites and pro-Soviet rebels. Maoists have no qualms about killing “class enemies” – anyone prominent advocating rightwing politics or abusive landowners – whereas the Castroites often try to take the high ground in guerrilla war. Examples in Latin America are the Castroite ELN in Colombia, URNG in Guatemala, FSLN in Nicaragua, FMLN in El Salvador, the aforementioned MRTA, and the FARC in Colombia. Despite crap from anti-Communists and the US government, all these groups have tried pretty hard to abide by the rules of war. At any rate, the overwhelming majority of grotesque human rights violations in each of these conflicts were committed by the state. On the other hand, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso was a profoundly savage and cruel guerrilla group, though they almost seized power. Communism doesn’t mean that much anymore. Cuba allows religious believers to join the party, and there are millions of liberation theology Leftist Catholics in Latin America and the Philippines. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communists have introduced major elements of capitalism into their economies, while retaining a great deal of socialism at the same time. Over the course of a few years, from 2003 to 2005 and 2006, the Nepalese Maoists underwent a sea change in politics. They went from hardline Maoists railing against revisionists and opposing anything but the dictatorship of the proletariat, to an embrace of multiparty democracy and a mixed economy and measured critiques of Mao, Lenin and Stalin as outdated for the needs and realities of today. I think this is fantastic. I care nothing about dogma. I just want results, and I don’t really care how you get there – capitalism, socialism, communism or whatever. If Marxism is indeed an ever-evolving science (which, if it is a science, it must be) then there must be no treating its elementary texts as some sort of religious books. The works of Marx, Lenin, Mao and others must be regarded as the works of men, not Gods, positing theories. These theories must be tested in praxis to see how well they test out, as in any empirical investigation. The theories of these mortals will either test out or they will not, and if not, we need to adjust them accordingly. We know what our goals are; all that is at stake is how to get there. Let us listen to top leader Prachanda and other Nepalese Maoist leaders, from the Single Spark site:

Since MLM is a progressive science, the people’s war calls for ideology and leadership that is capable to complete a new People’s War in the 21st century. Our Party’s CC Extended Meeting last September held that the ideologies of Lenin and Mao have become old and inadequate to lead the present international revolution. The political and organizational report passed by the meeting says, ‘The proletariat revolutionaries of the 21st century need to pay their serious attention towards that fact that in today’s ground reality, Lenin and Mao’s analysis of imperialism and various notions relation to proletariat strategies based on it have lagged behind.’ As Marxism was born in an age of competitive capitalism, the strategies and working policy formulated during the times of Marx had become old when they arrived at Lenin’s times of imperialism and proletariat revolution. Similarly, the ideologies developed by Lenin and Mao at the initial phase of international imperialism and proletariat revolution have become inadequate and lagged behind at the present imperialistic phase. Therefore, ‘the main issue is to develop MLM in the 21st century and to determine a new proletariat strategy.1 The second [wrong trend] …is not to concentrate on how revolutionary struggle can be developed in one’s country by developing correct strategy and tactics, but to talk more of world revolution, enjoy classical debate, eulogize strategy and tactic of the past successful revolutions, teach other fraternal parties as if they know everything about the concrete situation in that country and stick to what Lenin and Mao had said before. This trend represents dogmatism.2 What we think is that situation has undergone a considerable change, so the communist revolutionaries must not stick to what Lenin had said about insurrection and what Mao had said on Protracted People’s War.3 Q. You have envisioned a people’s republic, no? Prachanda: Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic cannot fulfill the needs of today’s world. It cannot address today’s political awareness appropriately. Mao said cooperative party theory; we called it competitive party theory. We have said let’s move ahead from the conventional People’s Republic and develop it as per the specialties of the 21st century. Q. You do not follow the old concept of communism? Prachanda: Definitely not. What happened without competition? In the USSR, Stalin gave no place to competition and went ahead in a monolithic way. What was the result?4 Does Communism make sense today? P: It’s a big question, starting with Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, who wanted to apply the Marxist teachings in semi colonial countries. Now, we still need Marxism, but in accordance to the needs of the 21st century. We have to apply Marxist science in a very new context, understanding social, economic and also technological changes, without dogmatism and without sectarianism. We are trying to develop a completely new concept, different from what happened in the past century. When we are in the government, our experiment will surprise everybody. This will happen only if foreign investors trust a communist government… P: Yes, I know. We cannot ignore the whole process of liberalization in the world. So, we will apply mixed economics to this country. Right now, we are not saying that we plan a total socialist economy, though we will not blindly follow western liberalism. We have some national priorities and we will welcome foreign investors, using capital from abroad for the well being of Nepal.5 Though Mao made some bold experiments to revive and develop socialist democracy, his efforts did not result in any qualitative advance. Why did socialist democracy ultimately fail? Why did it have to bear the stigma of ‘totalitarianism’ from its adversaries? If the revolutionary communists of the 21st century have ‘to win the battle for democracy’, as Marx and Engels had declared in the famous Communist Manifesto, we must dare to question the past practice in socialist democracy and take some bold initiatives.6. All selections from this document7.

CPGB-ML Tribute to Habash

In his 1944 speech, “Serve the People”, Comrade Mao Zedong said these famous words:

All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said: ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’ To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.

Today, the heroic Palestinian people are continuing to resist, whether in the breaking of the barrier with Egypt to alleviate the genocidal siege of Gaza, or in the martyrdom operation at Dimona, the nuclear site where imperialism and its stooges do not demand inspections, to express a sense of grief at the loss of Al-Hakim, Dr George Habash, one of the greatest leaders of the Palestinian people, and, more importantly, to celebrate his glorious life and give real political vitality and clarity to the essential work of building solidarity with the Palestinian people in the British working class and in the anti-war and other progressive movements.

Nice memorial poster of PFLP leader George Habash. In all of the obits in the US news, few detailed the reason for the radicalization of Habash. At university in Lebanon, he was apolitical and preferred to play guitar. He raced home during the “Israeli War of Independence” to his home in Lydda. Jewish militias attacked the town and forced 9 Most were Palestinian Christians. His sister died of typhoid fever during the siege of the town and Habash buried her in the backyard. He blamed the Jews for blocking access to the hospital that could have saved her. There were some notorious massacres of Palestinians during the attack on Lydda, including the execution of many young men in a mosque. The Jews forced Habash and others to line up and leave their homes and all of their possessions. One man asked if he could return to get the keys to his house and for making this request, he was shot dead in front of Habash’s eyes. From that point on, the apolitical future doctor was transformed into a revolutionary.

Comrade George Habash, who has passed away at the age of 82, gave more than six decades of his life to the revolution. He was born into a prosperous Greek Orthodox family in the Palestinian city of Lydda. At that time, the Palestinian people were under the rule of the British colonial mandate, which was systematically preparing the way for the creation of a Zionist settler colonial state, which, in the words of Sir Roland Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem in the 1920s, would form “for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. In the summer of 1948, whilst studying medicine in Beirut, George went back home to help organise resistance to the Zionist catastrophe that was sweeping over the Palestinian people, driving them from their ancestral homes and lands into exile and dispossession. At this time, he and his whole family, along with 95 percent of the inhabitants of his native city, were forced out at gunpoint by the Zionist terrorists and ethnic cleansers commanded by Yitzhak Rabin. Years later, Habash was to observe:

It is a sight I shall never forget. Thousands of human beings expelled from their homes, running, crying, shouting in terror. After seeing such a thing, you cannot but become a revolutionary.

During al-Nakba, the catastrophe, more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and lands, made stateless and refugees. Graduating as the first in his class, Dr Habash eschewed the chance to pursue a lucrative career, opting instead to open a people’s clinic offering free treatment and a school for refugees in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Around this same time, he and his comrades founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), the first pan-Arab movement to take up armed struggle against colonialism and to win back the lost lands. The significance of the ANM should not be underestimated. Not only was it to be the root of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); from its ranks also came revolutionary forces in many parts of the Arab homeland, including the National Liberation Front in Aden and South Yemen, which not only defeated British imperialism in a revolutionary armed struggle to win national liberation, but, later as the Yemen Socialist Party, leading the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, stood in the vanguard of to date the only real attempt to build an Arab socialist state on the basis of the scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the 1960s, Comrade Habash, like many other anti-imperialist fighters then, before and since, came to accept that the liberation struggle of the oppressed people, if it was to be crowned with success and carried through to the end, needed to be based on Marxism-Leninism. Lamis Andoni, an analyst for al-Jazeera, who knew Comrade Habash well, expressed matters this way in his tribute to his friend:

He belonged to a generation influenced by Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap and later by Che Guevara. In their views, colonialism epitomised systematic, institutional violence and subjugation of people under its control … In the early 1960s, George Habash, already a paediatrician in Amman known for treating the poor for free, endorsed Marxism as he grew convinced that the national struggle should not be separate from the struggle for social justice.

After the founding of the PFLP in December 1967, following the Arabs’ bitter defeat in the June 1967 war, Habash declared that the struggle was “not merely to free Palestine from the Zionists but also to free the Arab world from remnants” of Western colonial rule. All Arab revolutionaries, he said, “must be Marxist, because Marxism is the expression of the aspirations of the working class”. In a 1969 interview, he declared:

By 1967, we had understood the undeniable truth, that to liberate Palestine we have to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese examples.

Indeed, Comrade Habash paid close attention not only to the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, but to the experience of all the socialist countries and the revolutionary movement in all parts of the world. Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were also two countries close to his heart and with which he and the PFLP forged tight bonds of active solidarity. In the memorial hall for Comrade Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, the Korean comrades proudly display the several awards and medals presented to their great leader by the PFLP over the years. Under Habash’s leadership, the PFLP forged close and active ties of combat solidarity with national liberation movements in all parts of the world – the ANC in South Africa, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Irish Republican Movement, to name but a few, embracing training, material assistance, joint operations and moral encouragement. In the September 1970 hijackings that gave the PFLP worldwide fame, Leila Khaled was joined by Patrick Arguello Ryan, a militant of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the only martyr of those operations. In 1983, after the Nicaraguan revolution, the Sandinistas commemorated Arguello by renaming the Geothermal Plant at Momotombo in his honour. A poster still available on the PFLP website describes Arguello as the “symbol of common Nicaraguan/Palestinian struggle”. Comrade Habash sought to translate into reality, and himself embodied, these inspiring words of Che Guevara, which go to the very essence of proletarian internationalism:

Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity so that to die under the colours of Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, an Asian, an African and even a European.

Comrades, The Palestinian revolution is a complex and difficult one, throwing up many challenges and inevitably differences of view. Equally inevitably, Comrade Habash often found himself embroiled in internal controversy, particularly in terms of the sometimes painful compromises, concessions and retreats that have been forced on the Palestinian people at various times. But what shines out is the fact that he never lost sight of the importance of unity in the national liberation movement. In their own tribute to their leader, the PFLP put matters this way:

In 1987, with the outbreak of the great Intifada, Dr. Habash called for upholding Palestinian national unity, and convening the Palestinian National Congress in Algeria in 1988. Comrade Al-Hakim always understood national unity as a necessary condition for the continuation of the struggle and the national liberation movement, whether in Beirut during internal fighting among Palestinians and after as well, recognising that the internal contradictions among Palestinians could not be solved through military mechanisms, but rather through the democratic processes of the liberation movement.

Lamis Andoni, to whom we have already referred, wrote:

‘His message to the Palestinians was to restore our unity,’ Issam Al Taher, a senior aide, who saw him a day before his death said.‘Unity, unity, unity — that was his only message,’ said Al Taher.

Andoni notes of the relationship between George Habash and Yasser Arafat:

The two men never severed ties and continued a complex relationship of camaraderie and rivalry until the end.

Andoni continued:

Tall and handsome, Habash exuded a certain charisma that disarmed his distracters who admired his persistence but criticised what they saw as rigidity. A stroke that partially paralysed half of his body changed his appearance later but did not affect his ardour for the cause.It was that Habash that I saw and met for the first time in Tunis in 1983. The PLO was expelled from Beirut too and most its leaders moved to this northern Mediterranean capital of Tunisia. Habash moved to Damascus, Syria instead. On that day the PLO was holding a meeting. Most of the leaders had arrived and then there was a stir and silence. Habash entered slowly on crutches, hampered and subdued by his physical disability. The hall, filled with hardened fighters, stood on their feet while Arafat hugged Habash and escorted him to his seat.

Of the final period of Habash’s life, Andoni notes:

He would get so distressed during conversations discussing the events in Palestine and most recently in Iraq, that his wife, and closest friend Hilda, would interfere to stop it.When Israel besieged Arafat in 2002 in his compound in Ramallah, Habash stood by his rival. When Arafat died, amid Palestinian suspicion that Israel may have been involved, Habash deeply mourned him. The few times I was able to see him over the last three years, he never stopped monitoring and learning every detail about Palestinian life. His physical ailment deepened the sense of soulful pain he internalised. Those who were with him during his last days recall how disturbed he was by the rift between Fatah and Hamas. He opposed the strategy of Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian president, of accommodating US and Israeli demands but did not endorse Hamas’ military take over of Gaza. His main concern was the damage brought upon the Palestinians by the most serious internal rift in their history.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the mourning for Comrade Habash has transcended the differences in the Palestinian ranks. President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning, noting that Habash had dedicated his life to struggling for his people. Hamas leader Ismail Haneya said, “Dr. George Habash spent all his life struggling for the cause of the Palestinian people.” Islamic Jihad described him as a “real leader” and other Palestinian organisations paying their tributes included the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, who said that his path was and is one of liberation for the Palestinian and Arab people. In its December 1967 Founding Statement, the PFLP declared:

The masses are the authority, the guide, and the resistance leadership from which victory will be achieved in the end. It is necessary to recruit the popular masses and mobilise them as active participants and leaders … The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence … The slogan of our masses must be resistance until victory, rooted in the heart with our feet planted on the ground in deep commitment to our land. Today, the Popular Front is hailing our masses with this call. This is the appeal. We must repeat it every day, through every breakthrough bullet and the fall of each martyr, that the land of Palestine today belongs to all the masses. Every area of our land belongs to our masses who have defended it against the presence of the usurper, every piece of land, every rock and stone, our masses will not abandon one inch of them because they belong to the legions of the poor and hungry and displaced persons … The struggle of the Palestinian people is linked with the struggle of the forces of revolution and progress in the world, the format of the coalition that we face requires a corresponding … coalition including all the forces of anti-imperialism in every part of the world.

Much more can be said on the life, work and legacy of Comrade Habash, but in summary these are some of the things he advocated and taught: • That the fundamental way to liberation lies through armed struggle and people’s war based on the masses. • That for the struggle to be successful and carried through to the end it needs to be based on Marxism-Leninism, the scientific world outlook of the working class. • That the oppressed peoples must uphold proletarian internationalism in their struggle for liberation, based on militant unity within and between the three major currents of the world revolutionary process, the socialist countries, the national liberation movements, and the working-class movement in the imperialist heartlands. • That the liberation of the nation necessitated the principled and democratic unity of all the forces of the nation, even though major differences will also exist and must be struggled over. Clearly, all these are not just lessons for the Palestinian people alone. In June 2000, age and ill health led Comrade Habash to step back from the day-to-day leadership of the PFLP. Giving an inspiring speech on that occasion, in many respects he wrote his own epitaph. He told his comrades:

What I have lived through over the course of these militant decades, and the rich experience I have acquired, is not a matter to be taken for granted. It is your right, and the right of coming generations to review the content and lessons of this experience with all of its many successes and failures.

As befits a man who gave all of his own life and strength to the revolution, Comrade Habash said of the martyrs, the prisoners and his comrades, and it is with Comrade Habash’s own words, from his farewell address, Palestine Between Dreams and Reality, that we conclude this tribute:

I remember each of the martyrs, one by one, and without exception – those martyrs to whom we are indebted, for whom we must continue the struggle, holding fast to the dream and holding fast to hope, and protecting the rights of the people for whom they shed their blood. Their children and their families have a right to be honoured and cared for. This is the least we can do for those blazing stars in the skies of our homeland.I also remember now the heroic prisoners in the jails of the occupation and the prisons of the Palestinian Authority – those militants who remind us morning and night of our patriotic duty by the fact that they are still there behind bars and by the fact that the occupation still squats on our chests. Each prisoner deserves the noblest signs of respect … Now permit me to express my gratitude to all the comrades who have worked with me and helped me, whether in the Arab Nationalist Movement or in the Popular Front. They stood beside me during the hardest conditions and the darkest of times, and they were a great help and support for me. Without them I would not have been able to carry out my responsibilities. They have been true comrades, in all that the word implies. Those comrades helped to create a congenial atmosphere, an environment of political, theoretical, and intellectual interaction that enabled me to do all that was required. Those comrades have a big place in my heart and mind. I offer all my thanks and appreciation to each one of them by name. In addition, to the comrades who vigilantly guarded me, looking out for my safety, all these long years, I offer my gratitude … As a last word, I feel it necessary to say that I know well that the goals for which I worked and struggled have not yet been attained. And I cannot say how or when they will be attained. But on the other hand, I know in light of my study of the march of history in general, and of Arab and Palestinian history in particular, that they will be attained. In spite of this bitter truth, I leave my task as General Secretary of the Front with a contented mind and conscience. My conscience is content because I did my duty and worked with the greatest possible effort and with complete and deep sincerity. My mind is content because throughout my working years, I continually based myself on the practice of self-criticism. It is important to say also that I will pay close attention to all your observations and assessments of the course taken by the Popular Front while I was its General Secretary. I must emphasise that with the same close attention, if not with greater attention, I will follow and take to heart the observations and assessments of the Palestinian and Arab people on this course and my role in it. My aim in this closing speech has been to say to you – and not only to you, but to all the detainees, or those who experienced detention, to the families of the martyrs, to the children of the martyrs, to those who were wounded, to all who sacrificed and gave for the cause – that your sacrifice has not been in vain. The just goals and legitimate rights which they have struggled and given their lives for will be attained, sooner or later. I say again that I don’t know when, but they will be attained. And my aim, again and again, is to emphasise the need for you to persist in the struggle to serve our people, for the good of all Palestinians and Arabs – the good that lies in a just and legitimate cause, as it does in the realisation of the good for all those who are oppressed and wronged. You must always be of calm mind, and of contented conscience, with a strong resolve and a steel will, for you have been and still are in the camp of justice and progress, the camp whose just goals will be attained and which will inevitably attain its legitimate rights. For these are the lessons of history and reality, and no right is lost as long as there is someone fighting for it.

Notes

1. Ashok. (May 2006). Our Experiences of Ten Tumultuous Years of People’s War, The Worker#10, pp. 68-73. On Lenin and Mao, p. 71. 2. Basanta. (May 2006). International Dimension of Prachanda Path. The Worker #10, pp. 82-90. 3. Ibid. On Models: Page 87. 4. Kishor Nepal. (June 2006). Prachanda Interview. Maoist Revolution Digest. 5. Alessandro Gilioli. (Early November 2006). Prachanda: Our Revolution Won . L’espresso, Italy. Excerpts. 6. Prachanda. (November 18, 2006). Democracy: The Forbidden Fruit or Nectar for Progress? Speech at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi. 7. MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. (Dec. 21, 2006). Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century.

Sendero Fades and FARC Rises in Peru

Repost from the old site. Web Archive is your friend. What wonderful dead Internet things it has managed to preserve for us, little snapshots long expired, such as Argentine Jewish journalist Uki Goni’s interview with Nicholas Shakespeare, author of the novel The Dancer Upstairs, based on the Shining Path* insurgency. The novel was later made into a Chuschi, Ayacucho, on May 17, 1980, almost exactly 200 years after the last Inca rebel, Tupac Amaru, on May 17, 1781, was drawn and quartered by Spaniards, the four pieces then buried at far corners of Peru. The Chuschi ballots burning was an inauspicious affair. At 2 AM, five masked youths and one adult entered the office of the registrar, tied him up, burned the ballots and registry and retreated into the night. The attack had been led by a schoolteacher. The incident was scarcely even noted in the press. But the single spark to light the prairie fire had been lit. The correlation with the execution of Tupac Amaru was not accidental, yet this little-noted fact has hardly been noticed by anyone who studied the insurgency. But it has profound implications for understanding the movement. Best’s son was the Edith Lagos, a fighter killed in 1982, drew over 30,000 (in a city of 70,000 people) – mostly Indians – to her funeral in Ayacucho, the capital of the province where it all began. The huge crowd had defied a ban on her funeral. Furthermore, Lagos (rare photos of the strikingly beautiful Lagos here and here) had recently graduated from a Catholic high school run by nuns in Ayacucho. She had been a model student at the high school. Earlier, her parents had sent her to Lima to study to be an attorney. She often skipped school to watch movies from India, because, she said, she liked to cry. When she was not doing that, she was meeting with trade union workers in the city and talking revolution. She was rapidly recruited into the Shining Path and her rousing speeches electrified Indians throughout the Southern Sierra. At age 17, she was already a guerrilla commander. Lagos was captured several times by government forces. There is a photo of her in government custody in 1981, face swollen by beatings, 18 year old eyes already hard with determination. By now, Sendero held the northern third of Ayacucho. On May 2, 1982, in one of Sendero’s most impressive actions, 500 Senderistas raided and took over the university city of Huamanga, a city of 80,000 people. They blew up the local jail and raped, tortured and finally bayoneted to death by government forces. She was all of 19 years old. This was pretty typical behavior by government forces. In contrast, Sendero often tended to wounded government soldiers’ wounds, took them prisoner, and asked them to defect from the security forces or join Sendero. Her father was asked to come to Andahualyas to identify the body. He came, picked up the body and took it back to Ayacucho. All along the way, the procession was repeatedly stopped as throngs of peasants poured into the road to mourn their dead heroine. Her funeral and mass were held in the main Catholic (Lagos was a Catholic, as were most of rank and file Senderistas and even some of the leadership – Abimael Guzman himself is said to be Catholic) cathedral in Ayacucho, where her coffin was draped with a hammer and sickle flag inside church, an odd sight. There is a rare videotape of the funeral. The chapel is packed with peasants, storeowners, government workers, all dressed in Indian garb. As her coffin is borne out of the church, a rousing, clapping chant rises from the crowd as it presses forward and drapes a hammer and sickle flag over her coffin: “Commandante Edith presente! The people will never forget your spilled blood!” The crowd circled the square three times, each time swelling the crowd as more and more people poured out of their homes to join the march. Marching into the cemetery was a solid wall of humanity. The Shining Path banner rode on the outstretched arms of the crowd. There are those who swear that Maria Elena Moyano, “Mother Courage”, in 1991, is without merit. Further, Moyano was killed, albeit brutally, for organizing counterinsurgency patrols and turning in supporters and members of Sendero to the police. As such, she was no longer a civilian. The very name of the group was the Peruvian Communist Party en el Sendero Luminoso de (in the shining path of) this fascinating web page. One cannot really understand Sendero without knowing about Mariategui. So from the start, Sendero raised feminism and the liberation of the Indians as two of their banners. Simon Strong’s Shining Path (1992) is the finest book ever written on the movement. He spent a lot of time in Peru and concluded that at the time, the movement had a huge amount of support, even among the military, the Catholic church, teachers, students, workers, peasants, the urban poor and exiles. They also had massive support among the Ashaninka Indians in the Amazon, and also with some other tribes. The notions that Sendero held 1000’s of Indians “prisoner“, or that they massacred scores of unarmed jungle Indians, are total nonsense. At the time Strong wrote his book, the movement was at the peak of their popularity. Later that year, Guzman was captured, and it has been all downhill ever since. But the general assessment of anti-Sendero authors, that Sendero either had no understanding of, or was hostile to, infuriating Peruvians with her Maoist “Serve the People” purse (the rightwing blogosphere has had an idiotic field day with this, but I seriously doubt that Diaz supports or supported Sendero, so the whole affair is just the usual rightwing character assassination), the Peruvians they refer to are elite, the only ones the media ever talks to. No one else in Peru matters or has a voice. At the moment, Sendero is fairly unpopular, even among those who formerly supported them. These same people also despise the government, the system, and the White elite who exploit them. But Sendero was so vicious and crazy, killing so many people, including the masses and other Leftists, that they left a bad taste in the mouths of many. These people have not given up on revolution by any means. After all, the Peruvian system is worthless, insane and evil, and it should be destroyed. It is only reasonable that such an insane and evil system should produce an insane and evil insurgency – Sendero. Now, Guzman and his fellow leaders sue for peace in prison, while a few holdouts under Comrade Artemio wage armed struggle, mostly in Ayacucho, the Huallaga Valley, the Satipo River area and Huanuco. A few years back, they were recruiting in the squalid slums of Lima once again. These days, a more intelligent group of guerrillas is in Peru – the FARC* of Colombia. A massive, wealthy movement with deep roots in the Colombian poor, especially the rural poor, FARC has been spreading out lately down into the Ucayali River area in the jungle. They are primarily in the area of Yurimangas and north. They have been spotted as far south as the Apurimac River near Ayacucho (where Sendero is still active) and even in Lima. They are very well-supplied, upbeat, loaded with cell phones and radios, very well-disciplined and are making deep inroads in Peru. They give medical care, food, cooking utensils and field tools to the people and don’t bother a soul. They are quite popular with the masses they are interacting with, who see them as better than Sendero. Many former supporters and members of Sendero have lined up with the FARC in Peru. Earlier this year, a column of Senderistas went back to Colombia, probably for training. FARC has been urging Sendero to join with FARC and modify their line. Another column of the remaining leadership of the MRTA* (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) from around Tarapoto and Moyobamba in San Martin Province (their longtime headquarters – photo here) also left for Colombia around the same time – FARC is trying to join together remnants of both Sendero and MRTA with FARC in Peru – a very interesting and possibly fruitful plan. For a great webpage on Tarapoto, complete with awesome pics, by an American woman who spent some time there, see here. The notion that the MRTA was finished after the hostage raid in 1998 is not true – as the century turned, they continued to build the movement in every province of Peru. One of the problems with the MRTA is that they never had much money. Even around Taratopo, where they had a lot of support, they were a sorry sight, often sickly, pale, thin, and broke, wearing ragged clothes. Compared to that impotent picture, and Sendero’s madness and brutality, many of Peru’s peasants think that the FARC are just dandy. Even in Colombia, the FARC has been much more sane and less brutal towards the masses than Sendero was. As such, you can now go into areas of Colombia where everyone for miles around is in the FARC in one way or another, every villager in every town, every ragged farmer in every field with a gun hidden in his clothes, every woman in apron cooking in her kitchen. And it has been this way for decades in Colombia in these areas. This is the reality of FARC’s roots in rural Colombia. The interview with Shakespeare, who is hostile to revolution, nevertheless makes clear that Peru is one nasty place. It is the most racist country he has ever been to, Shakespeare opines. Sure it is. If someone from a lower class (or caste, really) asks a white elite for the time of day in Lima, the rich man will not even speak to the lower-class person. In fact, he won’t speak to him virtually no matter what he wants. The Indians have been killed, enslaved, raped, abused, ignored and basically slaughtered with hunger, disease and out and out murder since Pizarro stepped ashore in 1521. Shakespeare went to Ayacucho, where a white man had been murdered by Indians a week before. Everywhere he goes, the Indians whisper pistaco – the name for a mysterious white giant that murders Indians for their fat which he uses to run Western industry. Pistaco does not exist, but the Indians think he does. Shakespeare said that Sendero started a myth that Tupac Amaru’s body, quartered and buried over 200 years before, was slowly growing underground and would regenerate as he rose with Sendero’s victory. The materialist Sendero would never make up such a story. The story could only come from the Indians themselves, and I am sure they believed it. And in many ways, Peru today is the same as at any time in the decades and centuries after Pizarro waded ashore 500 years ago. Until that changes, Peru will always be in a revolutionary situation. Peru created Sendero; it could not have grown in any sane or decent society. If Best was evil, so was the land that made him. The crimes of the Sendero Frankenstein rest in large part with its creator, the horror called Peruvian society itself. Sendero carried out 96 actions last year, about 2 a week; clearly, it is still alive, though nowadays they are fighting to get their leaders and cadres released and negotiate and end to the war – reasonable demands that no Peruvian state will cotton to. A few years back, they were recruiting again in Lima’s horrid shantytowns (photo here). Meanwhile, FARC expands with great success across Peru. They combine this success with a group in Venezuela, FARV – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Venezuela – (which has 2,000-3,000 members but has not engaged in many actions yet) and another group in Ecuador called FARE – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador – mostly in the border area with Putamayo and just building a movement now. FARB – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Brazil – exists in the Dog’s Head region of Brazil where Peru, Brazil and Colombia all come together, building a movement once again. FARC also uses the border areas in Panama as an R and R area. The local Cuna Indians of the Darien are quite cooperative, but the Panamanian state has murdered some of them for allowing FARC to stay with them, though FARC has never done a thing in Panama. Recently, FARC has been spotted all the way over in far northern Guyana, where they are trying to tax the gold mining operations. This sighting implies that FARC also has a presence all across far northern Brazil. US media reports place FARC operatives recently in Bolivia, where they were giving political advice to groups associated with the new president Enrique Morales before his election. Despite recent offensives by the Colombian state, FARC is alive and well and expanding across much of Latin America. This as the radical version of Sendero peters out. Revolution is a bloody thing. If states don’t want 12 year old kids carrying AK-47’s professing revolution while roaming their slums*, they need only create a semblance of a decent society. There is no end of history, and you can only push a man so far before he rises up to strike you back. *A Salvadoran man I met in a San Mateo, California restaurant in 2001 told me he saw a 12 yr old boy in the San Salvador slums carrying an automatic weapon and chanting revolutionary slogans in 1969. He went home and told his family, and his parents resolved to sent him out of the country, saying that revolution was surely on its way. Their omniscience was keen. 11 years later, it exploded in full force via the FMLN*. *This blog strongly supported the FMLN in El Salvador to the point of contributing money to their weapons fund. We also strongly support the FARC in Colombia, all of its regional split-offs and the MRTA in Peru. We do not support the project of Sendero Luminoso as they kill people who are completely innocent. All support for groups is with certain reservations.

"Latin America’s Twenty First Century Capitalism and the US Empire," by Dr. James Petras

An excellent analysis of the current scene in Latin America by Marxist James Petras. We often wonder what exactly is going on here or there in the world. For the answer in Latin America, Petras answers a number of important questions. What’s amazing is I can’t find one single area in which he’s wrong in his analysis below. Hence, this analysis is immaculate. If any of you can find anywhere below where he is wrong, let us know. A good tutorial on the Latin American politico-economic scene. Warning: Runs 45 pages.

Political Power and the World Market

The twin nemesis of Latin America’s quest for more equitable and dynamic development, US imperial and local oligarchic power have been subject to profound changes over the past decade. New capitalist classes both at home and abroad have redefined Latin America’s relation to world markets, seized opportunities to stimulate growth and forged cross class coalitions linking overseas investors, agro-mineral exporters, national industrialists with a broad array of trade unions, and in some countries peasant and Indian social movements. Parallel to these changes in Latin America, a new militarist and financial political configuration engaged in prolonged wars, colonial occupations and widespread speculation has weakened the structural economic links – dominance – between US imperial economic interests and Latin America’s dynamic socio-economic classes. In the present conjuncture, these basic changes in the respective class structures – in the US and Latin America – define the contours, constraints and ‘reach’ of the imperial classes as well as the potential autonomy of action of Latin America’s leading socio-economic classes. Notions which freeze Latin America in a time warp such as “500 years of exploitation” or which conflate earlier decades of US political-economic dominance with the present, have failed to take account of recent class dynamics, including popular insurrections, mass electoral mobilizations and failed imperial-centered economic models which have redefined the power equation between the US and Latin America. Equally important, fundamental changes in market relations and market competition has lessened US influence in the world market and opened major growth opportunities for new and established sectors of Latin America’s capitalist class, especially its dynamic export sectors. Understanding imperialism, especially the US variant, requires focusing on class relations, within and between countries and regions, the changing balance of power as well as the impact of fundamental changes in world market relations. Equally important the private economic institutions of imperialism (banks, multi-national corporations, investors) are contingent on the composition and policies of the imperial state. Insofar as the state defines its priorities in military and ideological terms and acts accordingly, by channeling resources in prolonged wars, the imperial policymakers weakens their capacity to sustain, finance and promote overseas private economic interests. As we shall analyze and discuss in the following sections, the US has suffered a relative loss of political and economic power over key Latin American regimes and markets as its military commitments have widened and deepened over time. The result is a Latin American political configuration which has changed dramatically over the past two decades.

Latin American Political-Economic Configurations and US Imperialism

The upsurge of social movements, the subsequent ascent of center-left political regimes,the dynamic economic growth of Asian economies and the consequent sharp increase in prices of commodities in the world market has changed the configuration of political power in Latin America and between the latter and the US between 2000-2010. While the US exercised almost absolute hegemony during the period 1980-1999, the rise of a militarist caste promoting prolonged imperial wars in the Middle East and South Asia and the rise of relatively independent national-popular and social-liberal regimes in Latin America has produced a broad spectrum of governments with greater autonomy of action. Depending on the criteria we use, Latin American countries have moved beyond the orbit of US hegemony. For example, if we examine trade and investment, all the major countries, independent of ideology, have to a greater or lesser degree diversified their markets, trading and investment partners. If we examine political alignments, we find that all the major countries have joined UNASUR, a regional political organization that excludes the US. If we examine policy divergences from the US on major regional issues, such as the US embargo on Cuba, its efforts to isolate Venezuela, its proposed military bases in Colombia, Washington remains in splendid isolation, to the point that the new Colombian President Santos, chooses to “postpone” implementation in favor of maximizing billion dollar trade and diplomatic ties with Venezuela. If we focus on ideological divergence between the US and Latin America, particularly on global issues of free trade, military coups and intervention, we find a variety of positions. For example, Brazil opposes US sanctions against Iran and supports the latter’s program of uranium enrichment for peaceful uses. If we focus on joint US-Latin American military exercises and support for the Haitian occupation, most Latin countries – with the exception of Venezuela – participate. If we examine the issue of bilateral trade and regional trade agreements, the US proposals on the latter were voted down, while several countries pursue (so far with little success) the former. On a rather fluid measure of ‘affinity for neo-liberal’ ideology, in which a mixture of elements of statism, deregulated markets and social welfare co-exist in varying degrees, we can draw up a tentative 4 fold division between “left”, “center left”, “center right” and “right”. On the “left” we can include Venezuela and Bolivia which have expanded the public sector, economic regulations and social spending.   On the “center-left” we can include Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador which have increased social spending, public investment and increased employment, wages and reduced poverty, while vastly increasing private national and foreign investment in agro-mineral export sectors. On the center-right we can include Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay, which embrace free market doctrines, with mild poverty programs and an open door to foreign investment. On the right we find Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, all of whom line up with Washington on most ideological issues, even as they may be diversifying trade ties with Asia and Venezuela. Internal shifts in class power within Latin America and the US have spurred divergences. Latin America has witnessed greater policy influence by a more ‘globalist elite’ less tied to the US, and an emerging ‘nationalist bourgeoisie’, and greater pressure from reformist working class and public employees trade union. In contrast within the US industrial capital has lost influence to the financial sector and exerts little influence in shaping economic policy toward Latin America, beyond rearguard ‘protectionist’ measures and state subsidies. The US ruling political elite, highly militarized and Zionized, shows little capacity to engage in launching any major new initiatives toward recapturing markets in Latin America, preferring massive military expenditures on wars and paying tribute to their Israeli mentors. As a result of major socio-political shifts within the US and Latin America and the singular importance of dynamic changes in the world market, there are four axis of power operating in the Western Hemisphere. The emerging economic power of Brazil and the growth of intra-regional trade within and between Latin American economies. The dynamic expansion of Asian trade, investment and markets leading to a long term, large scale shift toward greater economic diversification. The substantial financial flows from the US to Latin America in the form of “hot money” with destabilizing effects, as well as continued substantial investment, trade and military ties. The European Union, Russia and the Middle East as real and potential influences in particular settings, depending on the countries and time frame. Of these 4 ‘vectors of power’, the most significant in recent times in reshaping Latin America’s relation to the US and more importantly in opening up prospects for 21st century capitalist growth, is the boom in commodity prices and demand – the dynamic of the world market. On the ‘negative side’, the prolonged US-EU economic crises has limited trade and investment growth and encouraged greater Latin American integration and expansion of regional markets. A serious threat to Latin America’s growth, autonomy and stability is found in the US currency devaluation and subsequent overvaluing of Latin currencies (especially Brazil) imposing constraints on industrial exports and prejudicing the manufacturing sector. Equally important US and EU manipulation of interest rates – downward – has driven speculative capital toward higher interest rates in Latin America, creating destabilizing “bubbles” which can derail the economies.

US Empire Strikes Back: Protectionism, Devaluation and Unilateralism

By the middle of 2010 it was clear that the US economy was losing the competitive battle for markets around the world and was unable to reduce its trade and fiscal deficit within the existing global free trade regime. The Obama regime, led by Federal Reserve head Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner unilaterally launched a thinly disguised trade war, effectively devaluing the dollar and lowering interest rates on bonds in order to increase exports and in effect ‘overvalue’ the currency of their competitors. In other words the Obama regime resorted to a virile “bugger your neighbor policies”, which outraged world economic leaders, provoking Brazilian economic leaders to speak of a “currency war”. Contrary to Washington’s rhetoric of “greater co-operation”, the Obama regime was resorting to protectionist policies designed to alienate the leading economic powers in the region. No longer in a position to impose non-reciprocal trade agreements to US advantage, Washington is engaged in currency manipulation in order to increase market shares at the expense of the highly competitive emerging economies of Latin America and Asia, as well as Germany. Equally prejudicial to Latin America, the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates leads to heavy borrowing in the US in order to speculate in high interest countries like Brazil. The consequences are disastrous, as a flood of “hot money”, speculative funds flow into Latin America, especially Brazil, overvaluing the currency and provoking a speculative bubble in bonds and real estate, while encouraging excess liquidity and public and private consumer debt. Equally damaging the overvalued currencies price industrial and manufacturing out of world market competition, threatening to “de-industrialize” the economies and further their dependency on agro-mineral exports. US resort to unilateral protectionism tells us that the decline in US economic power has reached a point where it struggles to compete with Latin America rather than to reassert its former dominant position. Protectionism is a defense mechanism of an empire in decline. While Washington can pretend otherwise, the weapons it chooses to arrest its loss of competitiveness in the short run, sets in motion a process of growing Latin America integration and increased trade with Asian economies, which will deepen Latin America’s economic independence from US control.

Latin America’s Center-Left and the US: Economic Ties Trump Geopolitical Strategies

The consolidation of Latin America’s center-left regimes has had major consequences for US policy, namely a reconciliation between arch-adversary Venezuela and Washington’s foremost ally, Colombia. The power of the market, in this case over $4 billion in Colombian exports to Venezuela, has trumped the dubious advantage (if any) of being Washington’s military launching pad in Latin America. The election of Lula’s chosen candidate Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil, the likely re-election of Chavez in Venezuela and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, means that Washington has little leverage to reverse the dynamic diversification and greater autonomy of Latin America’s leading economies. Moreover, as the political rapprochement between Venezuela and Colombia, including the mutual extradition of Colombian guerrillas and drug traffickers demonstrates, closer economic relations are accompanied by warmer political relations, including a tacit pact in which Colombia abjures from supporting the rightwing opposition in Venezuela, while the latter does likewise toward the Left opposition to Santos. The larger meaning of this obscuring of ideological boundaries is that Latin America’s economic integration advances at the expense of US prompted ideological divisions. The net result will be the further exclusion and diminution of the US as the dominant actor in the Southern Hemisphere. At the same time it should be remembered that we are writing about greater capitalist integration, which means the continued marginalization of class based trade unions and social movements from strategic economic policy making positions. In other words, the decline of US hegemony is not matched by an increase in working class or popular power. As both decline, the big winner is the rising business class, mostly, but not exclusively the agro-mineral, financial and manufacturing elites linked to the Latin American and Asian markets. The prime destabilization danger now includes US currency wars, the growing potentially volatile extractive exports and the high levels of dependence on China’s (and Asian) appetite for raw materials. Imperial Wars, Free Trade and the Lumpen Legacy of 1990’s One of the paradoxes leading to the current eclipse of US hegemony in Latin America is found in the very military and economic successes in the 1990’s. A broad swathe of North and Central American and the Andean countries has witnessed the rise of what we call “lumpen political-economic power” which has devastated the formal economy and legitimate political authority. The concept of “lumpen” is derived from ‘lupus’ or Latin for ‘wolf’ a metaphor for a ‘predatory’ actor, or in our context, the rise of a political and economic class which preys upon the public and private resources and institutions of an economy and society. The lumpen power elites are based on the creation of a dual system of legitimate and illegitimate political authority backed by the instruments of coercion and violence. The emergence and formation of a powerful lumpen class of predatory capitalists and their accompanying military entourage is what we refer to in writing of the “process of lumpenization”. Today “lumpenization” no longer merely entails the overt violent organizers of illicit production, processing and distribution of drugs but an entire array of ‘offspring’ economic activity (kidnapping, immigrant smugglers, etc.) as well as large scale long term interaction with ‘legitimate’ economic institutions and sectors, including banking, real estate, agriculture, retail shopping centers, tourist complexes, to name a few. Money laundering of illicit funds is an important growth sector, especially providing important flows of capital to and from major US and Latin American financial institutions. Today over three-quarters of Mexico’s territory and governance is contested by over 30,000 organized armed lumpen led by centralized political-economic formations. Central America is a major transit point, production center and terrain for bloody lumpen struggles for power and revenue collection. Colombia is the major center for ‘raw material production’of drugs, marketing,and import and export center under the leadership of powerful lumpen capitalists with long standing ties to the governing political, military and economic elite. The lumpen economy has supply chains further south in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay and distribution networks through Venezuela and Brazil as well as multi-billion dollar money laundering and financial links in the Caribbean, the US, Uruguay and Argentina. Several important issues to keep in mind in discussing the lumpen political economy.These include: (1)the growth in size, scope and significance over the past 20 years (2) the increasing economic importance as the ‘legitimate’ economy goes into crises (both cause and consequence) (3) the increasing public cynicism as previously thought of “legitimate” economic and political actors (capitalists) engage in multi-billion dollar financial swindles and are “bailed” out by political leaders. The ‘boom’ in lumpen political-economic growth can be dated to the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, coinciding with several major historical events in the region. These include: the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement; the US-oligarchy defeat of the revolutionary movements in Central America and the demobilization but not disarmament of the paramilitary and armed militia; the total militarization and paramilitarization of Colombia especially with the advent of Plan Colombia (2001) and the end of peace negotiations; the deregulation of the US financial system in the mid 1990’s and the growth of a financial bubble economy. What is striking about all the countries and regions experiencing ‘deep lumpenization’, is the profound disarticulation of their economies and smashing of their social fabric due to free trade agreements with the US (Mexico and Central America) and the large scale US military intervention during their civil wars (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia). The US politico-military intervention left millions without work and worse, destroyed the possibility of reformist or revolutionary political alliances coming to power and carrying out meaningful structural changes. The restoration of US backed neo-liberal-militarist collaborator regimes left the young unemployed peasants and workers with three choices: (1)submit to degradation and poverty (2) emigrate to North America or Europe (3) join one or another of the narco-trafficking organizations, as a risky but lucrative route out of poverty. The timing of the rise and dynamic growth of lumpen power coincides with the imposition of US free trade and political victories in the aforementioned regions. From the early 1990’s forward lumpen power spreads across the region fueled by NAFTA decimating the Mexican small producers and the US imposed Central American “peace accords” which effectively destroyed the chances of socio-economic change and dismantled but did not disarm the militias and paramilitary gunmen.

Case Studies of Lumpen Dual Power: Mexico

Mexico, unlike the other major economies of Latin America did not experience any popular upheavals or center-left electoral outcomes during the late 1990’s or early 2000. Unlike Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, in which new center-left regimes came to power imposing regulatory controls on financial speculation, Mexico witnessed electoral fraud and signed off on NAFTA, deepening its ties to Wall Street. As a result it experienced a series of financial shocks, undermining its capacity to launch a more diversified trading and investment model. Unlike Argentina which launched state directed employment generating investment policies, Mexico, under US tutelage, relied on emigration and overseas remittances to compensate for the loss of millions of jobs in agriculture , small and medium manufacturing activity and retail sales. While popular uprisings and mobilization in Latin America led to the rise of center-left regimes capable of securing greater independence in economic policy from the US and the IMF, the Mexican elite literally stole elections in 1988 and 2006, blocking the possibility of an alternative model. It successfully repressed alternative peasant movements in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero unlike the successes in Bolivia and Ecuador. While the center-left regimes captured the economic surplus from the agro-mineral sectors and increased public and private investment in production and social spending, Mexico witnessed massive illegal and legal outflows of investments into speculative ventures in the US: an outflow of over $55 billion between 2006-2010. Regional migration within Latin America fueled by high growth, led to rising income; overseas immigration depleted Mexico of skilled and unskilled labor; in some cases ‘return migration’ from the US of deported gang members, with arms and drug networks fueled the growth of lumpen power . With the severe recession, US immigration policy led to the closing of the border, the massive deportation of Mexican immigrants and the decline of the major source of foreign earnings: remittances. Pervasive and deep corruption throughout the cupula of the Mexican political and economic system, combined with the decline of the legitimate economy, the absence of channels for popular redress and Washington’s insistence that militarization and not social investments was the solution to rising crime, led to the huge influx of young recruits to the growing network of lumpen-capitalist directed narco enterprises. With almost all US and Mexican financial institutions and arms vendors as willing partners and an unlimited pool of young recruits with a ‘lean and hungry look’, Mexico evolved into a fiercely contested terrain between a half dozen rival lumpen organizations,and the Mexican military, with nearly 30,000 deaths between 2006-2010.

Lumpenization: Central America

Drug gangs dominate the streets of the major cities and countryside of all the countries which were militarized during the US backed counter-revolutionary wars between the 1960’s to early 1990’s. US proxy military dictators and their civilian clients, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras decimated civil society and particularly the mass popular organizations. In El Salvador over 75,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were uprooted, driven across borders or into urban shanty towns. In Guatemala over 200,000 mostly Mayan Indians were murdered by the US trained “special forces” and over 450 villages were obliterated in the course of a scorched earth policy. In Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship and the subsequent US financed and trained counter-revolutionary (“contra”) mercenary army killed and maimed close to 100,000 people and devastated the economy. In Honduras, the US embassy promoted and financed in-country and cross-border counter-insurgency operations which killed, uprooted and forced thousands of Honduran peasants into exile. Highly militarized Central American societies, in which US funded and armed death squads murdered with impunity, in which the economy of small producers was shattered and ‘normal’ market activity was subject to military assaults, led to the growth of illegal crops, drug and people smuggling. With the so-called “peace agreements”, the leaders of the insurgents became “institutionalized”in elite electoral politics,while large numbers of unemployed ex-guerrillas and demobilized death squad militia members found no place in the status quo. The neo-liberal order imposed by the US client rulers with its free market ideology built “fortress neighborhoods”, hired an army of private “security” guards, while the productive bases of small scale agriculture was destroyed. Millions of Central Americans faced the familiar “routes out of poverty”: outmigration, forming or joining criminal gangs, or attempting to find an economic niche in an unpromising environment. Outmigration for semi-educated former members of armed bands led to their early entrée into armed groups, deportation back to Central America, swelling the ranks of narco traffickers in their “home country”. Highly repressive immigration policies implemented in the new millennium closed the escape valve for most Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty. Former guerrilla fighters and their families, abandoned by their former leaders embedded in electoral parties, turned their military experience toward carving a new living, as security guards for the rich, or as armed traffickers competing for ‘market shares’ with and against the discharged deathsquad militia members. Between 2000-2010, the annual number of homicides exceeded the number of deaths suffered during the worst period of the civil wars of the 1980s. US imposed peace agreements and the neo-liberal order which resulted, led to the total lumpenization of the economy and polity throughout the region, the practice of electoral politics and even the election of “center-left” politicos in El Salvador and Nicaragua notwithstanding. Lumpenization was a direct consequence of the ‘scorched earth’ and ‘mass uprooting’ counter-insurgency policies which were central to US re-establishing dominance in the region. Economic and personal insecurity and social misery were the price paid by imperial Washington to prevent a popular revolution.

Case Study: Colombia

The ties between the world centers of finance and the most degenerate and blood curdling ruler in the Western Hemisphere were most evident in the slavishly laudatory puff-pieces published in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal in praise of President Alvaro Uribe, while over 3 million Colombians were driven off their lands, several thousands were murdered, over a thousand trade unionists, journalists and human rights activists were killed. Two thirds of his Congressional backers were financed by narco-traffickers. Incarcerated deathsquad leaders identified top military officials as their primary supporters. All of Colombia’s Presidents collaborated closely with US military missions and all were financed and associated with the multi-billion dollar drug cartels, even as the Pentagon claimed to be engaged in a “war against drug trafficking”. Landlords and their financial and real estate backers organized private militias, which terrorized, uprooted and killed hundreds of thousands of peasants, others fled to the urban slums, or across the border to neighboring countries. Others joined the guerrillas, and still others were recruited by the death squads and military. With the advance of the guerrilla armies and then President Pastrana’s opening to peace negotiations, President Clinton launched a $5 billion dollar military scheme, “Plan Colombia” to quadruple Colombia’s air and ground forces and deathsquads. With Washington’s backing, Alvaro Uribe, a notorious narco-deathsquad politico, so identified by US officials, took power and launched a massive scorched earth policy, murdering and displacing millions of peasants and urban slum dwellers in an effort to undermine the vast network of community organizations sympathetic to the agrarian reform, public investment and anti-military program of the guerrilla movements. Mass terror and population flight emptied whole swathes of the countryside; livelihoods were destroyed and landlords in alliance with drug cartel bosses and Generals seized millions of acres of land. For the financial and respectable mass media, the massification of terror mattered not: the insurgents were ‘contained’, driven back, put on the defensive. They trumpeted the killing of key guerrilla leaders: foreign corporate property was secure. Rule by Uribe, the military and the narco-death squads secured US power and influence and created an ideal “jumping off” location for destabilizing the democratically elected Venezuelan President Chavez. The latter was especially important by the mid 2000’s when Washington’s internal assets attempted coup and lockout were resoundingly defeated in 2002-03. Having gained strategic territorial advantage over the guerrillas, Washington in collaboration with Uribe moved to shift the balance of power between the narco-deathsquads and the state: a disarmament and demobilization and amnesty was proclaimed. The result was detailed revelations of the deep structural links between narco-deathsquads and the Uribe police state regime, up to and including family members and cabinet ministers. While ‘nominally’ the cartels are in retreat, in fact, they have become decentralized .Equally important top politicos and military officials continue to collaborate in the production, processing and shipping of billion dollar cocaine exports … with major US banks laundering illicit funds.

Rule of Lumpen-Capitalism in the Imperial System

Drug trafficking has deep roots in the economies of North and South America and has profound ramifications throughout their societies. One cannot understand the tremendous growth of US banking and financial centers if not for the $25 to $50 billion dollar yearly income and transfers from laundering drug funds and double that amount from illegal money transfers by business and political leaders directly and indirectly benefiting from the drug trade. Lumpen capitalists, their collaborators, facilitators paramilitary mercenaries and military partners play a major political role in sustaining the imperial system. Washington’s major influence and principle area of dominance resides in those countries where lumpen power and deathsquad operations are most prevalent, namely Central America, Colombia and Mexico. Both phenomena are derived from US designed ‘scorched earth’ counter-insurgency strategies that prevented alterations, modifications or reforms of the neo-liberal order and blocked the successful emergence of social movements and center-left regimes as took place in most of Latin America. The contemporary imperial system relies on lumpen capitalists, their economic networks and military formations in practically every major area of conflict even as these collaborators are constant areas of friction. As in Afghanistan and Iraq today and in Central America in the recent past and in Latin America under the military dictatorships, the US relies on drug traffickers, military gangsters engaged in extortion, kidnapping, property seizures and the pillage of public property and treasury to destroy popular movements, to divide and conquer communities and above all to terrorize the general public and civil society. The singular growth of the financial sector especially in the US is in part the result of its being the massive recipient of large scale sustained flows of ‘plunder capital’ by lumpen rulers and their economic partners via ‘political crony’ privatizations, foreign loans which never entered the local economy and other such forms of pillage characteristic of ‘predator’ classes. The deep structural affinities between Wall Street speculators and Latin lumpen-capitalists provided the backdrop for the ascendancy of a new class of lumpen financiers in the imperial financial centers: bogus bonds, mortgage swindles, falsified assessments by stock ratings agencies, trillion dollar raids on state treasuries define the heart and soul of contemporary imperialism. If it is true that the promotion and financing of lumpen warlord capitalists was an essential defense mechanism at the periphery of the empire to contain popular insurgencies, it is also true that the growth of lumpen capitalism severely weakened the very core of the imperial economy, namely its productive and export sectors leading to uncontrollable deficits, out of control speculative bubbles and massive and sustained reductions of living standards and incomes. Lumpen classes were both the agencies for consolidating the empire and its undoing: tactical gains at the periphery led to strategic losses in the imperial centers. Imperial policymakers resort to terrorist formations resulted from their incapacity to resolve internal contradictions within a legal, electoral framework. The high domestic political cost of long term warfare led inevitably to the recruitment of mercenary lumpen armies who extracted an economic tribute for questionable loyalty. Lacking any popular constituency, mercenary armies rely on terror to secure circumstantial submission. Having secured control, local warlords preside over the rapid and massive growth of drugs and other lumpen economic practices. The alliance of empire and lumpen capitalists against modern secular and traditional insurgencies, brings together high technology weaponry and primitive clan based religious-ethnic racists in Iraq and Afghanistan and deracinated psychopaths in the case of Colombia, Mexico and Central America. For Washington military and political supremacy and territorial conquests take priority over economic gain. In the case of Colombia the scorched earth policy undermined production and lucrative trade with Venezuela. Imperial ascendancy had similar consequences in Asia, the Middle East and Central America.

When Lumpen Power becomes a Problem for the Imperial State

Lumpen capitalism develops a dynamic of its own, independent of its role as an imperial instrument for destroying popular insurgency. It challenges imperial collaborator regimes. It displaces, threatens, or cajoles foreign and domestic capitalists. In the extreme, it establishes a private army, seizes territorial control, recruits and trains networks of intelligence agents within the armed forces and police, undermining imperial influence. In a word lumpen organized military capitalism threatens the security of imperial hegemony: newly emerging predators threaten the established collaborators. The imperial attempts to use and dispose of lumpen counterinsurgency forces has failed; the demobilized paras become the professional gunmen of a “third force” – neither imperial nor insurgent. The decimation of the reformist center-left option, which took hold in Latin America, precludes a socio-economic alternative capable of integrating the young combative unemployed, stimulating the productive economy, diversifying markets and escaping the pitfalls of a US centered neo-liberal order. The divergence of priorities and strategies between Latin America’s center-left and Washington has as much to do with economic and class interests as it has with ideological agendas. For the US security means defeating the rising power of lumpen military economic formations in their remaining ‘power bases’. For Latin America, security concerns are secondary to diversifying and boosting market shares within Latin America and overseas. Lumpen power is currently under the political control of domestic rulers in Latin America; it is out of control in US clients. The US solution is military; the Latin approach is greater growth; social expenditures and police repression especially in Brazil. The Latin solution has greater attraction, evident in Colombia’s break with the US military base and encirclement strategy toward Venezuela. Colombia’s new President opted for $8 billion dollar trade deals with Venezuela’s Chavez over and against costly million dollar military base agreements with the US. Clearly the US economic decline in Latin America as a direct result of its reliance on military and lumpen power, is in full force. The driving force of accelerated decline is not popular insurgency but the attraction and lucrative opportunities of the economic marketplace within Latin America and beyond for the local ruling classes. Insofar as militarism defines the policies and strategies of the US Empire there is no remedy for the challenges of lumpen power in its ‘backyard’. And Washington has nothing on offer to recapture a dominant presence in Latin America. The world market is defeating the empire. Latin America’s twenty-first century capitalists are leading the way to further decline in imperial power.

Manuel Marulanda

Repost from the old site.

Great photo of Manuel Marulanda (seated) from the early days. The more classic view that people are a lot more familiar with – the veteran revolutionary and guerrilla. In the background are uniformed FARC troops.

I’ve already been over on this blog why the Colombian revolutionaries really have no alternative but to fight. When they tried to lay down their weapons, they were slaughtered like flies. As long as there is no open space for peaceful dissent in Colombia, armed struggle will be a sensible option. Via a couple of articles out of People’s Movement Support Group, we now learn a lot more about Sure Shot – Manuel Marulanda. The essential moment in the Colombian struggle and the one that actually gave rise to the FARC 16 years later was the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the presidential candidate that the people had pinned their hopes on. Colombia has always been ruled by two ruling class parties – the Liberals and the Conservatives. Although they hated each other, there was never much difference between the two. Gaitán was a new kind of Liberal – a leftwing populist that was actually going to work for the people and not the oligarchy for once. Even his own Liberal party condemned him, and he was quickly assassinated by unknown parties. The killing set off La Violencia, a conflict between the Conservatives and Liberals that killed 200,000 people in a small country over the next 16 years. The peasants in the countryside split off to form militias to slaughter each other. The Conservatives represented the older oligarchy, and the Liberals represented some nouveau riche up and coming members of the oligarchy who wanted in. However, the Liberals were joined by many peasants and Communists. The two parties finally signed a peace treaty in 1963 and decided to declare war on the Communists. Pedro Antonio Marín Marín, later Manuel Marulanda, was born into a poor peasant family around 1930. At age 13, he was forced to leave home to find work. Great system! At some time after 1948, Marín was attacked in his home by a Conservative militia. This led him to join the Liberals. He took the name Manuel Marulanda after an Afro-Colombian union leader who was tortured to death in 1953. In the late 1950’s, he joined forces with Jacobo Arenas to form a Marxist guerrilla group modeled on the Fidelistas fighting in the mountains of Cuba. It was as a guerrilla that he earned the name Tiro Fijo or Sure Shot. The Colombian ruling class and US imperialism are overjoyed that Marulanda died. He died at age 77 in the arms of his lover, surrounded by his guerrilla comrades. The imperialists and their lackeys have made up a lie that he was killed by a bomb from a Colombian jet. This is not true. It is little known that there is a fierce guerrilla war raging in Colombia. You don’t read about much in the news, but the FARC, while conducting an orderly retreat under a severe offensive, is counterattacking against the Colombian military, and there are many small battles taking place every week. The FARC is quite popular in Colombia, especially amongst the rural poor. If you go out into some areas of the countryside, all adults that you see will be members of the FARC. The peasant farmer in the countryside with his cows will have a sidearm. The woman cooking in her kitchen cooks food for guerrillas. This is the FARC’s rural militia, and it numbers up to 200,000-300,000. This is much more than the 15-20,000 full-time soldiers of the FARC. These peasants have been part of the FARC’s support base for decades. That’s just the way it is in a lot of places. FARC has had a much harder time organizing in the cities, but they do have urban militias. The kidnappings that the US media screams about all the time are usually just arrests for not paying revolutionary taxes. Every Colombian with an income of over $1 million/year (that’s a lot of people) has to pay revolutionary taxes every year (usually 1 Some wealthy Colombians have not been paying taxes lately, so they have been arrested by the FARC for tax evasion. They will be released when they pay their taxes. So it’s not really the “kidnapping and ransom payments” scenario that the media wants you to believe. The FARC is even very popular across the border in Ecuador, especially in the rural areas. The notion that this group has no support is a lie propagated by its enemies. Another lie is that these guerrillas live in luxury because they are narco-traffickers. They do tax drug crops in their regions of control, including cocaine. However, all of the money goes towards the war. No FARC guerrillas or leaders live in luxury.

Socialism Rules the Planet

Uncle Milton, as typical of his contrary nature, disputes my contention that most nations on Earth are run by social democratic parties or are social democracies.

The US, the Baltics, Colombia, the Philippines, the UK and Chile are exceptions. May I ask how do you define Social Democracy…? Almost every Latin America country (Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela for example..) has a higher (worse – less egalitarian) Gini index than not only the US and UK but also the Philippines. Nicaragua (43.1) is the exception but is quite close to the PI (44.5). The UK’s Gini index is better than New Zealand’s and matches Italy while it only a smidgen about Australia and Ireland. As for the Baltics, Latvia and Estonia are at the same level as Italy. (By the way I do understand these figures are subject to question..in the examples above I am using the UN’s estimates.. the CIA estimates place the UK at the same level as Switzerland) I would think that income equality would be a pretty important (but not the solely import…) measure of a Social Democracy.

I said most countries on Earth are run by socialist or populist parties. I only list those countries – The US, the Baltics, the UK, Colombia, Chile, the Philippines and Somalia – that are run by parties that are explicitly hostile to socialism and are open advocates of neoclassical economics. If you can find anymore, let me know. Liberal, socialist, Communist, progressive and populist parties run the planet! Rightwing parties hostile to socialism which promote neoclassical economics are a tiny minority. Socialism rules the Earth! Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua are run by socialist parties. They have made efforts to reduce the Gini coefficient of course, but their efforts are attacked in the US, and there are usually assassination attempts and coup attempts against them in their countries. I don’t give a fuck about Gini coefficient. The US’ social democracy is anemic compared to that of the New Zealand and Italy. What matters are the benefits afforded to the people. They are excellent in New Zealand and Italy and anemic in the US. Income distribution ain’t everything. Gini coefficient is not that important in a state that provides no benefits. The Baltic states are some of the few states on Earth run by conservatives that are openly hostile to all forms of socialism and are open advocates of neoclassical economics.

In This World, Socialism is the Norm

Fred is a new rightwing ruling class commenter with an excellent class consciousness, which is intelligent and appropriate for his class. Nevertheless, Fred represents the class enemy that must be fought:

I’m not a socialist because socialism doesn’t work. If it did then I’d be all over it.

But Fred. Various forms of socialism, including forms of social democracy, are the norm in almost every state on Earth. Even the US has quite a bit of socialism – not enough though. Every state on Earth has quite a few socialist or social democratic programs and institutions. The pure capitalist state does not exist. Of the 13 wealthiest states, 12 are clear social democracies. I left the US out because we can’t really be called a social democracy even though we have some socialist programs. Most states on Earth are run by socialist or social democratic parties. The US, the Baltics, Colombia, the Philippines, the UK and Chile are exceptions. Socialism is the norm! Guys like Fred don’t get it. Fred opposes socialism because he’s always looking for a way to lower his taxes, and he doesn’t gets his money worth from the government for the taxes he pays.

Another Neoclassical Lie: Neoliberal Economics is the Best Way To Help the Poor

Also, the poor are poor for a reason. If you follow your liberation theology and gather resources for the poor through redistribution you’re shrinking the area of the pie from which everyone draws resources. Capitalists lose, some of the poor who become powerful in the new redistribution (i.e. community organizers and feminists) gain power, the majority of the masses lose as well because they aren’t smart enough to create jobs for themselves or make their own way without someone providing a job and capital for them to work with. You want egalitarianism, but that comes at the expense of quality of life. So that everyone is equal you are willing to accept that everyone is equally poor. This becomes an epistemological battle in that we are pitting the idea of socialism or social democracy against a relatively free economic model. People can choose for themselves what they want, and it seems that they usually choose economic freedom over egalitarianism.

In many social democracies, people are certainly not equally poor, and most Communist countries wiped out poverty, even if they only were able to provide a relatively low standard of living and the model bogs down and collapses over a period of some decades. Surveys the world over show that most people want some kind of socialism. There are few exceptions, though the US may be one of them. Socialist, populist, progressive or Left parties rule almost the entire globe. Rightwing parties are in the minority or out of power in most places. The few places where they have power (the US, Chile, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand, the Baltics) they are busy destroying the country, just like they always do. That’s one of your neoclassical lies. I just showed earlier how 12 of the 13 richest countries on Earth are all social democracies. Also many wealthy countries have low to very low Gini coefficients. Go to a place like Sweden, and you will be amazed at how many small businesses there are. Literally one on every corner. The masses don’t lose. When you redistribute wealth, as long as you do not do so too radically, the masses gain tremendously in wealth, power, resources, benefits and rights. All neoclassical economics ever does is shift wealth from the bottom 70-8 The economies that are really kicking ass now are heavily socialist economies like Russia and China (state capitalist, corporatist or mixed economies). The economies that weathered the latest Capitalist Depression best used stimulus spending to come out of it and had heavy state intervention in the banking system. The ones that got fucked worst of all had followed neoclassical economics in their banks to the greatest extent (Iceland) or following neoclassical economics, used austerity instead of stimulus to deal with the slump (Baltics and Ireland) got fucked worst of all. Laissez faire is refuted. Neoclassical economics doesn’t work. It causes wild booms and busts and leads to regular economic recessions and depressions. It’s only good for rich people because the purpose of it is class war and wealth transfer.

Is Conservatism Always Bad?

Yes. In my opinion, conservatism is always bad. Conservatism is always and everywhere at all times elite rule and only elite rule. Some support elite rule. I don’t. I support popular rule. I say elite rule is bad. Since elite rule is always bad, conservatism is always bad. Real simple. In addition, conservatism is almost always dishonest. As an elite philosophy, you can either be honest about your goals and say you are working to better the elite and harm everyone else – say, the top 2 But this continuous lying results in a destruction of Politics. There’s not much of a democracy left when almost the entire media is lying their fool heads off day and night. The population is bewildered at best or brainwashed at worst. This is the sort of “democracy” we have here in America. It’s hardly a democracy at all! Erranter asks if we should not be bashing conservatives.

Doesn’t a conservative just mean someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo? There are places where the status quo is democracy and none of those above things. I don’t think it’s fair to attach “bad” to the very definition of conservative and “good” to progressive. That’s changing the definitions which people use to communicate and permanently attaching a moral judgment. It’s also unequivocal that conservatives are bad, because a part of this new definition is that they are bad.

Someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo – No, that is not what conservatism means. Conservatism is elite rule. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. Some things never change. Elites hate democracy. The Republican Party hates democracy. Notice how they are always trying to repress voter turnout. Heavy turnout is always bad for the elite Republicans. Given half a chance, sane electorates generally vote for popular rule (the Left) and against elite rule (the Right). Why would any electorate voluntarily vote against popular rule and for elite rule? They would have to be out of their minds (like the US electorate). It’s hard to vote in elite rule. People don’t like it too much. So conservatives usually need to rule by dictatorship in one form or another. Once Latin America got rid of the dictatorships, the first thing the people did was vote in the Left. There are only a few places on Earth where US style hard rightwing conservatives are actually voted into power, and those elections are problematic because the popular, anti-elite candidates of the Left are typically murdered. The US Guatemala El Salvador (though the Left is starting to win now) Colombia Chile Turkey The Philippines That’s about it. The conservatives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Turkey and the Philippines all rule by terror. They all run death squads and slaughter the Left. In the Philippines, conservatives run as populists who will fight and get rid of poverty, so that’s not really US conservatism. In Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador, conservatives usually run on a platform of “kill the Communists (the Left).” Everywhere else on Earth, people generally vote in some sort of a liberal to socialist type government. All of Africa has generally been run by popular Leftwing parties, with a few exceptions in Zaire and Kenya. They haven’t done a very good job of popular rule, but US style conservatism simply does not exist there. In North Africa, most of the governments are socialist. Morocco was always the outlier, as it was ruled by a rightwing king, but he’s a dictator. All of the Arab World is generally run by some type of socialist party or other. US style conservatism never takes power there. All of the former Soviet Republics are now run by some type of socialist government or other. All of Europe is being run by some type of socialist government or other, with the possible exception of Great Britain. The UK was always the outlier. US style conservatism ruled under Thatcher, but she was probably the most hated ruler in the 20th Century UK, and she couldn’t get much done. Russia is run by a socialist regime under Putin. The Iranian religious government has always been socialist in nature. It’s hard to characterize the Karzai regime, but it is not US conservatism. The Pakistani government is very hard to characterize, but it is not US style conservatism. The recently assassinated leader, Benazir Bhutto, was a socialist. The President, her widower, is also a socialist. Since Independence, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have generally been run by socialist regimes of one type or another. Myanmar is run by a regime that calls itself socialist. Singapore has a social democracy. SE Asia has been run by socialists since 1975. Thailand typically had rightwing military government. Recently, a progressive, Thaksin, was elected. He was extremely popular, but the conservative elite threw him out in a coup like they often do. At any rate, US style conservatism does not exist in Thailand. China is run by a socialist party. Mongolia is run by socialists. Japan has been a social democracy since 1945. True, South Korea was always a rightwing regime, but recently they elected a leftwinger. Taiwan was always ruled by a rightwing dictatorship, but I am not sure who is in power since independence. They have had a social democracy for a while now. Indonesia was always run by a rightwing dictatorship, but they recently went to democracy. The present leader has begun a number of socialist programs.

“You Can’t Be a Maoist and a Clintonite Democrat!”

I keep hearing this over and over from some of my friends. I just had a talk with a friend of mine about this. He’s like me. Basically a liberal Democrat on the left wing of the Democratic Party. However, he has long called himself a Communist. He now calls himself a democratic socialist. He has long supported Communism overseas, especially in the USSR. According to my critics, this guy can’t possibly exist. Neither can I.

And yet we do.

My critics are badly mistaken. My friend says they don’t understand politics in the US. For instance, in many countries, it makes sense to join a small Left party and vote for them. In a parliamentary system, you might just elect a deputy or two, and you won’t hurt the rest of the Left at all. In the UK, you can reliably vote Green and elect some folks here or there. In Abiezer Coppe’s town, nearly 5

That’s not possible in the US. The Green Party never goes anywhere and can barely elect a soul to any office in the land. There’s no point voting Green.

Here in the US, voting Left third party is just throwing your vote away. At worst, you’re helping to elect Republicans. At best, you’re masturbating in a voting booth. There’s no point even getting involved in Left Third Party politics here in the US. Why bother? I could go join some kooky Commie sect, but why bother? I would spend the remaining 30 years of my life whacking off politically and not accomplishing a damn thing.

The truth is that in the US, the only action on the Left is in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is truly a big tent party. It has everyone from rightwing unreconstructed racist Southern Democrats all the way to out and out socialists and Communists. I’ve known many socialists and Communists in the US who typically vote Democrat. Some were even active in Democratic Party politics.

So, our rightwing critics are right in a sense. A fair number of liberals are anywhere from soft on Communism to out and out Com symps and fellow travelers.

My father was an anti-Communist liberal Democrat all his life. He was furious at my politics and nearly regarded me as a deadly enemy politically. That’s because I was just too “Village Voice Left,” as he put it, for his tastes. Nevertheless, towards the end of his life, he was sympathetic towards the late USSR, East Bloc and Cuba. He was still an anti-Commie liberal, but he got more socialist in his old age.

My mother was similar. An anti-Communist Republican, she once told me philosophically that in many 3rd World countries they were probably better off Communist, as capitalism had largely failed there anyway. She’s lately moved to the Democratic Party. Comments like hers are fairly common among fairly liberal middle class Whites.

My point is, I am simply on the Left. Sure I support the Democratic Party. They aren’t exactly peaches and cream, but the US is a deeply reactionary country, and Democrats are the only vehicle for progressive change.

I also support socialists of all types, including social democrats. I have a soft spot for Communists and Chavez types, though I’ve never lived under a Communist regime, so I don’t know if I would actually like it or not. Perhaps given that experience, I might take a different stand on Communism.

People question how I can support Maoists in Nepal, India and other places.

Easy. All of the rest of Left politics in these places has failed. The Indian Congress Party is a socialist party. So is it’s evil twin in Nepal, the Nepalese Congress Party. Worse, revisionist Communism has even failed in India, looking at the experience of the CPI-M in West Bengal. Revisionist Communism has badly failed in Nepal, with a Marxist-Leninist party in bed with the worst of the Right in the present government.

There’s never been an effective Left party of any type in the Philippines. There probably never will be.

What’s the alternative in Colombia? The Left can’t even organize without getting massacred. Obviously, the Left needs to take up guns to defend themselves.

While I’m not a Maoist, it’s clear that rest of Left politics in the places above has failed, so it’s time to give the Maoists a chance. Let’s see what they can do. What the heck, nothing else has worked.

Why America Sucks

All the voters are White. Of course the country is a reactionary nightmare.

As you can see, the overwhelming majority of US voters are White. It is US White voters and only US White voters who have sent America down the conservative and reactionary sewer pipe in the last 30 years. An operation that is yet ongoing, and that seems to be gaining quite a bit of steam. In the 2006 election, it was even worse. 7

The electorate also is overwhelmingly White.

The voter pool is also overwhelmingly White. So the argument that Blacks and Hispanics don’t turn out to vote is washed up. Even if they all turned out to vote, it wouldn’t matter much. It would only shift the electorate maybe -

As long as America is overwhelmingly White, it will be a terrifyingly reactionary and backwards place, the laughingstock of the Western World. There is nothing inherently reactionary about White people. In Europe, they are reliably socialist. Someone show me a reactionary and non-socialist country in Europe please? In New Zealand and Australia, Whites are quite socialist, whatever their limitations in recent days with the horror specter of Mr. Howard.

In Latin America, it is true, Whites are reactionary, extremely so. Even in Uruguay and Argentina, they are reactionary. But these countries also have a revolutionary White Left that in the past has given the White elites the bullets and bombs they so richly deserve.

Argentina today, though a reactionary and Third World mess like the rest of the continent, at least has a Leftist President. A real Leftist, not an Obama rightwinger. The Argentine elite is alarmed about the Communist takeover of Argentina, Commies being coded as “fascists,” and are openly calling for the return of the fascist dictatorship. Fascist Argentines bashing Left opponents as fascists while calling for the return of Argentine fascism. Typical fascist obfuscation and mind-warping.

They claim that Kirchner had Commie “brownshirts” in the streets who have taken over entire zones. The Commie Kirchner is supposedly trying to “censor the media” by breaking up the reactionary media monopolies that own nearly the entire media of the land. But why should the Right own 9

Media should be delineated democratically according to predilection. If 3

Uruguay elected a former Left wing guerrilla, but I’m not sure how much will change, as he is dedicated to following the neoliberal suicide model. Is Uruguay a more socialist state than the USA? An interesting question.

Costa Rica is a pretty socialist place, which is interesting since anti-Communist fools and liars always uphold Costa Rica on their social figures, comparing it to Cuba on the grounds that Cuba is not so hot. What these congenital liars don’t realize (Or maybe they do!) is that all of Costa Rica’s great figures are attributable to Costa Rican social democracy.

Those are the countries in which Whites are a majority.

In the rest of Latin America, Whites are a minority, and they are frighteningly conservative to reactionary. They have generally stayed in power through repression, fraud, imprisoning, assaulting, kidnapping, torturing and murdering the opposition. White elites have done this in most countries in the region: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico.

The implication is that Whites will only support any kind of socialism where they are a good, solid majority. They are only 6

The entire rightwing movement in the US for the last 30 years has been coming from Whites. Has it been coming from Hispanics? Of course not. Has it been coming from Blacks? Please. Has it been coming from Jews? Pull the other one. Has it been coming from Asians? Forget it.

So when you read that “the voters” are furious with Obama and support all sorts of reactionary monstrosities in opposition to him, it’s US Whites, and only US Whites, who are leading this Tea Party opposition wave to Obama. And much of it is undoubtedly racist, no matter how much they scream that it’s not.

US Whites, as a

The other day, my mother (smartest women on Earth) told me that in the lifetime of my brother and I, we will live to see the US become a more progressive country. If all goes according to plan, I will take off around 2035 or so. The reason for this, she said, is the decline of Whites.

White nationalists have told me that a declining White America will lead to a more progressive place. Their reasoning for this is curious, and doesn’t make much sense. One guy told me that as Whites decline further and further, they will get more and more radical. As they dip below 4

Will Hispanics, Blacks, Jews and Asians continue to be reliably progressive into the future? It’s an interesting question. Majority-Indian, mulatto and mestizo places like Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama are quite backwards and rightwing. A White minority in all places continues to rule to the detriment of everyone else. Usually they enforce their rule at gunpoint and often with deadly force. But they get the votes of mestizos, Indians and mulattos to do this.

In the Caribbean, Black and mulatto elites have treated their own people horribly. This is particularly the case in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most of the Black Caribbean is not very socialist, with the exception of Cuba. But Dominica is an equitable country, and Trinidad and Tobago has a decent amount of socialism. Socialism was arrested in Jamaica with the US assault on Manley, a White socialist.

The record in Black Africa is not good in terms of socialism. North African Arab states are much more socialist than Black Africa. True, there is not much to divide in the first place, but still. Even Black African countries that have fallen into some money are still horribly rightwing. Gabon, a wealthy African country, has nightmarish levels of poverty, malnutrition, maternal mortality, child and infant mortality. Apparently, as has always been the case in Africa, a tiny Black elite has grabbed control over the economy for themselves and possibly their tribe and is locking out everyone else.

Given that mestizos, mulattos and Blacks have a poor record of setting up socialist systems in their own lands, one wonders just how socialist they will be here in the US as they grow in numbers. So far, they have been realiably socialist, but what will the future bring.

The model in mulatto, mestizo and Black countries is typically astounding gaps between the rich and the poor, horrifying levels of poverty, and often an enraged, militant and sometimes armed but cash-starved Left minority battling the elite for power. In these countries, poverty is a big deal, the opposite of the US. So there, all parties, from Right to Left, run on reducing poverty and fighting for the poor, with a few overtly fascist exceptions in Guatemala, El Salvador, (Honduras?) and Colombia and a strange overtly rightwing government in Chile, increasingly a US model state in Latin America.

The Right has the entire media spectrum. In Honduras, a 9

The ignorant mestizo, mulatto and Black electorate tends to vote for parties that often have progressive sounding names. In many cases, these parties are said to be overtly socialist parties. This is especially the case in the Caribbean, where almost every party has a socialist-sounding name. So down there, the Right calls themselves socialists, progressives and populists fighting for the poor while they implement reaction.

A similar dynamic is seen in Africa, where most parties have socialist-sounding names.

In other words, the US model of reactionary parties having open reactionary images, programs and politics is nonexistent in most of Latin America and Africa. No one would vote for it. In fact, it’s anathema in most of the world! It’s nearly nonexistent also in Arabia, South Asia, Europe, SE Asia and NE Asia. Turkey does have an overtly rightwing government.

Other than Turkey, show me one overtly reactionary party along the lines of the US Republican Party in power in any of these places.

One wonders if the model of the US reactionaries will change in the future with White decline. Will we see the rise of a backwards mestizo, mulatto or Black elite looking for votes possibly on an ethnic basis. Will we see the rise of fake populism and fake socialism, where the Right will operate rightwing parties with socialist and progressive sounding names campaigning on poverty reduction and helping the have-nots, to get the non-White vote? Will the Republican Party model of an openly and brazenly reactionary party become nonviable as non-Whites refuse to support it, according the model in the rest of the world?

The New York Lies, the Nation’s Liespaper of Record, Bashes Chavez with the Crime Stick Again

This article is a crock of lies. Just the US capitalist dogs, lying like they always do. This time they have the Venezuelan capitalist worms as a backup chorus.

First of all, crime is pretty much the same as pre-Chavez. Only homicide has gone up. And there are several nations in the Americas, all strong allies of the US, that have homicide rates as high as Venezuela’s. Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala…

Caribbean? Africa? Let’s not go there.

There is tons of crime in Latin America, and tons of homicide. Been that way forever, or at least for my lifetime.

What has increased under Chavez is not crime overall, but homicide. No one knows why, but the drug trade is usually suggested as the major culprit. Due to regional conditions, the drug trade has expanded into Venezuela a great deal under Chavez.

Nations with wild crime statistics are almost always Washington allies. Hence, Simon Romero and his rag, the New York Lies, never discuss that. I’ve never heard the US press blame a high crime rate on an existing government in my life.

Until Hugo Chavez showed up.

Chavez has the misfortune of being a leftwinger in a nation that is undergoing a crime wave, so the US media has decided, for the first time ever, to blame a government for crime.

The New York Lies bashes the government for not closing the gap between the rich and the poor. Yet the NYL is dedicated towards an agenda around the world to expand the rich-poor gap. Any nation that tries to reduce it gets pounded incessantly by the rats at the Lies. Chavez has made this the raison d etre of his government since he got in. This is the whole reason for the Lies‘ propaganda war against him.

The article mentions that Venezuela is experiencing an economic downturn in the past couple of years. It’s true, after years of explosive growth under Chavez. Last time I checked, the economies of most of the world were underwater, right? All because of the NY Lies’ buddies on Wall Street, who blew up the world economy. Ever hear the NY Lies blame any other country for the local effects of the downturn? Course not. It’s not their fault. But when the global Depression hits Venezuela, it’s all Chavez’ fault.

The article mentions inflation in Venezuela, said to be the highest in the region. Venezuela has had high inflation for decades. It was actually much higher when the opposition was in office. It’s dropped quite a bit under Chavez.

All of the opposition clowns quoted in the piece are well-known opposition losers and jokers. Nearly every thing they say is dishonest on some level.

Contrary to the piece, Venezuela has had a horrendous crime rate for decades, as far back as anyone can remember. The rich don’t even care about crime, and they never did in the past, because almost all of the crime and homicide is in the horrible slums that Chavez is trying to get rid of.

Chavez did not cause the murder rate to go up, and out of control crime rates are not so easy to solve. Ask governments in parts of the world where crime has been terrible for decades whether it’s their fault and what they can do about it. It’s not their fault, and no one knows how to fix it.

Really, it’s just the poor massacring each other, so the rich don’t even care. This is just another club to beat Chavez with.

Chavez has been trying to deal with the problem. He’s hired a lot more cops, and he is retraining a lot of the police force. He also boosted their wages significantly.

One major problem is that the police and the criminals are all too often the same folks. So no one trust the cops, and the cops commit tons of crime themselves. In part, this is why crimes are not solved. People don’t cooperate with the cops.

Oh, and about that figure: 9

The opposition has no plan, repeat no plan, to deal with crime. Crime was insane and out of control the whole time the opposition was in office, and they were never able to get a handle on it.

The main agenda of the opposition is to stop closing the gap between the rich and poor and to start widening it again, zero out all the social spending, and start reshifting income from the bottom to the top again, the way it was in Venezuela from 1823-1989. Impoverish the working people to enrich the wealthy. Declare war on labor (the working people). Great agenda. Ought to do wonders for that crime rate.

Wink.

It’s also a lie that Chavez has not reduced the rich-poor gap. He’s done a better job of it than nearly anyone else in Latin America. The poverty rate was near 8

What will the opposition liars scum do about the rich-poor gap they bash Chavez with? Nothing. No wait, a lot. They will make it much worse. The NY Lies forgot to tell you that.

I will add that the government’s attempts at censorship are lamentable though.

FARC Attacks Eliminate 17 Colombian Security Forces

A FARC roadside bomb and automatic weapons fire ambush in Caqueta killed 14 Colombian police in Caqueta. A number of cops were trapped inside a burning vehicle. They were hit with roadside bombs, then attacked with automatic weapons, then doused with gasoline and set on fire. Another 7 police were wounded. There is a government offensive going on in Caqueta right now, and the FARC is resisting it.

Those aren’t really cops. They are “state police,” and their mission is counterinsurgency.

Earlier, there were two other FARC attacks near the borders with Venezuela and Ecuador that left 3 soldiers dead, 7 more wounded and 1 missing.

Altogether, 17 security forces were killed in three attacks, 14 more were wounded and 1 is missing in two days of fighting

In Colombia, anyone having any opinions whatsoever on the Left is fair game to be killed by the state. The military, state or death squads will often denounce you as a “FARC member” or a “FARC supporter.” The first case is almost never true, as the FARC usually wear uniforms. Anyway, FARC members can easily be arrested if there is any evidence against them.

Most people so named are just trade unions, people on the Left, members of political parties, community workers, organizers, etc., members of campesino and human rights organizations, on and on. The second charge is much harder to prove. What in the Hell is a “FARC supporter” anyway, and how does one go about proving such a thing? Most folks so named are probably not even vocal FARC supporters, but even if they were, is that illegal? If it’s ok to kill “FARC supporters,” then why doesn’t the FARC have the right to exterminate every single “government supporter.” Fair’s fair, right?

In addition, there is a long-term process going on of removing peasants from their land by the military, death squads and the state. The land is often taken by force. The military or death squads come out and order you off your land. If you say no, they threaten to kill you. If you don’t leave, they attack you. If you leave, they steal your land. This process of theft of peasant and Indian land for large landowners has been going on for at least 200 years in Colombia. It’s very similar to the fencing of the commons in England which some commenters on this site waxed ecstatic about.

Isn’t it clear that capitalism requires the removal of small farmers from their land, by deadly force if necessary? This has been the process of consolidation of capitalism in most nations in the world, including the US. Why is this something to support?

Notice that the entire world press supports the fascist Colombian state in their war against the people. In the latest election, the Defense Minister was elected President. He’s a true fascist and a mass murderer. The US government, public and the world media can’t get enough of him.

The world fascist press (if it supports fascists, it’s fascist, right?) has been saying that a massive offensive under the genocidal Uribe has reduced the FARC’s strength by 5

The haters of the FARC on this site are asked exactly what it is that the FARC are supposed to do. You don’t support them, so what do you think this organization should do? You have no answers, do you?

Update on the Guerilla Movement in Peru

There is a lot of lying about the new Sendero, and next to nothing about the smaller MRTA in Peru. The MRTA is said to be defunct, but actually about one person is arrested every three weeks on charges of being an MRTA member. Why the group is still illegal is not known, since they have not waged any attacks in 14 years. However,  the state refuses to negotiate a peace treaty with them, so members are still on the run.

Recently, the remains of the MRTA in San Martin Region took off for Colombia with a column of FARC guerrillas. A column of Shining Path guerrillas also took off for Colombia with the FARC. In the past, Sendero hated both the FARC and MRTA as revisionists. The new Sendero is much more moderate and reasonable, and they are working with both organizaitons.

FARC also now has a large presence in Peru, though they are not waging any attacks. Instead, they are just building a movement in rural areas. There are about 1,200 FARC members in Peru, members of FARP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Peru). There are also FARC branches in Venezuela (FARV – 2,000 members), Ecuador – FARE, and Brazil, FARB, where they operate in the Dog’s Head region.

In Peru, FARP is mostly in the northeast, but they have been spotted all the way down to Pucallpa. In contrast to often poorly equipped MRTA members, FARC members in Peru are extremely well-equipped, dazzling peasants with their gear.

Sendero’s numbers are vastly underreported. First of all, there is a huge network of the old Sendero, mostly gone to ground for many years now, often over a decade. They have not carried out attacks since 1993, but the government is still arresting them as members of an illegal organization. This is Abimael Guzman’s old group who are still loyal to Guzman. They seek a peace treaty with the state and to form a legal political party for the time being.

The other groups are mostly centered around the VRAE and the Upper Huallaga Valley to the north. The state usually says that there are 300 fighters total in these groups, but there are more than that. Recently they upped it to 600. There must be more than that even. In recent years, one person is arrested per day on charges of being members of Sendero Luminoso. So 350 Senderistas are arrested every year for several years now. In one year, the entire 350 man group would be arrested.

In recent years, Sendero has started coming back to some of their old hideouts. In 2003, they were recruiting again in Villa El Salvador, a huge slum in Lima. They are returning to many of their old haunts in Ayacucho. They recently made an appearance in Chuschi, where the revolution started in June 1980. They have also shown up in Cangallo. There have recently been arrests at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho, where Guzman was a professor and where the revolution began. A huge march in the city demanded the release of several students arrested for being Senderistas.

Sendero has a presence once again in the Cuzco Region, mostly in the jungle in the west near Vilcabamba. They have shown up recently in Sicuani in the south of Cuzco in the high Andes. They once again have a presence in Huancayo, the mining village in Junin. They have been seen recently in eastern Ancash, where they had not been seen in years. This is probably a movement west from the Huallaga. Similarly, there have been a couple of sightings in eastern La Libertad near Tayabamba.

They have moved all through the Amazon to the area where Peru, Colombia and Brazil come together. These reports indicate that Sendero may even be present in the Dog’s Head in Brazil and in far southern Colombia.

The new Sendero has refused Guzman’s orders to surrender, lay down arms and seek peace. Since the state offers them nothing but arrests until they die, they may as well fight on. Why not? The VRAE and Huallaga factions are both now working very heavily with local cocaine traffickers. For this sin they have been heavily critiqued by the old Sendero as mercenaries. However, they are making a lot of money. They have brand new uniforms, new weaponry and have excellent gear.

Reports indicate that in the old days, Sendero was very brutal. Villagers said they killed people “for no reason.” Others say that they entered villages, stole whatever they wanted, and then shoot up the village if they refused to join the insurgency. Sendero’s brutal tactics were quite successful, but they also horribly alienated the poor peasants. Many are still angry to this day.

However, the new Sendero leaves the people alone, or, if they deal with them at all, is good to them. When they come into towns, they buy whatever they want, leave pamphlets, ask if anyone wants to join, and then leave. Most villagers have a positive opinion of them these days. Even the local rondas that Peru set up to fight Sendero (local village militias) refuse to fight them anymore. Sendero is now allied with other regional guerrillas and they have issued positive statements on the New Left movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and elsewhere. Previously, such folks were condemned as revisionists.

Bottom line is this is a much more reasonable organization. Whereas I used to hate them, now I support them 10

Here it is 30 years after Sendero started its war in Peru, and I hardly think Peru is any better off now than then. Peruvian capitalist society is just crap, and it seems to be unreformable. Let’s just get rid of it altogether and start anew.

It would be nice if a Peruvian Chavez would come along, but that’s not in the stars.

Recent List of Attacks by the Defeated FARC

I received this list of attacks from a pro-FARC website. It was written in Spanish and I had to translate it all into English, so it took a little while. The MSM all over the world is crowing that the FARC is near defeat and total collapse. They are said to be at their lowest level since 1964, when they only had a few dozen fighters. That’s an interesting assessment considering that the FARC has about 18,000 forces under arms and probably another 55,000 militia.

All I can say is these guys fight pretty good for a force that is nearly defeated.

There are those on this site who support the Colombian government. I ask them what the Left in Colombia is supposed to do. Everyone on the Left in Colombia is automatically accused of either being a member of the FARC (dubious, and if it’s true, just arrest them) or being FARC supporters. How can you tell if someone is a FARC supporter? Is it illegal to be a FARC supporter, and anyway, how could such a law ever be enforced?

The truth is that if you are on the Left in Colombia, you are automatically accused of a relationship with the FARC, no matter how you feel about them. At some time, you may well be at first denounced by the army and/or the paramilitaries. At this point, if you have not gone into hiding, you can be attacked at any time. Keep in mind that even legal politicians who have no relationship with the FARC at all are liable to be murdered in Colombia.

Colombia is ruled by a genocidal oligarchy that stays in power by threatening and often killing those who oppose them. As such, it’s no democracy at all.

The truth is that the attacks on the Left in Colombia have little to do with the FARC. After all, those slaughtered are unarmed activists. It’s just, identify the Commies (the Left), and then, kill the Commies (the Left). It matters not whether you pick up a gun or not, if you’re on the Left in Colombia, you’re a target.

Some argue that the FARC should disarm. But why should they do that? The last time they tried to do that, they formed a party called the Patriotic Union and 5,000 of them were murdered over a period of several years. Given that, why would the FARC lay down their arms again (keep in mind they have made cease-fires with the state in the past). The supporters of the Colombian state on this site do not seem to have any arguments. If you do, please speak up. Violent revolution isn’t exactly ideal, but what’s the alternative?

January 1

Eastern Bloc: Mine attack on the army, Santana, Colombia, Huila. 1 soldier killed, 4 wounded.

Government arial bombing killed 31 FARC, wounded 14, 9 taken prisoner, 2 deserted.

January 2

Eastern Bloc: Air Assault in on the FARC in Sinai. 6 FARC killed.

January 3

Eastern Bloc: 2 attacks on the army in San Jose Macuare, Guaviare. 1 soldier killed, 3 wounded, 1 damaged helicopter.

January 4

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Attack on the marines and the army in Citadel, Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca.

January 5

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Attack on the army at a farm in Jamundi, Valle del Cauca. 1 FARC wounded.

Eastern Bloc: 3 attacks on the army in the village of Uribe Tierra, Adentro, Meta. 2 soldiers killed, 10 wounded. 1 FARC wounded.

Attack on the army in the village of Buenos Aires, Miraflores, Guaviare. 2 soldiers wounded.

January 6

Eastern Bloc: Arial bombing attack on the Guayabero unit of the FARC, Guaviare. 4 FARC killed.

January 7

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Land mine attack on an army patrol in the village of San Antonio, Tetuancito, Tolima.

Eastern Bloc: Heavy fighting in the village of Brisas del Palmar, Guaviare. 2 planes damaged.

Two attacks on the army in Uribe Tierra, Adentro, Meta. 2 soldiers wounded.

January 8

Eastern Bloc: Attack on the army in Arauca. 1 soldier killed, 2 injured.

Harassment attack on the army in the urban area of Tame, Arauca. 2 soldiers killed, 2 injured.

Land mine attack on the army in Inirida River region, Guainía.

January 9

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Land mine attack on the army in Filo, Policarpa, Nariño.

Eastern Bloc: Attack on the army in Galaxia, Tame, Arauca. 2 soldiers killed, 3 wounded.

January 10

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Land mine attack on the army in the village of San Luis, Corinth, Cauca. 2 soldiers killed, 3 wounded.

Eastern Bloc: Land mine attack on the army in Esperanza, Arauca. 1 soldier killed, 2 injured.

January 11

Eastern Bloc: Land mine attack on the army in the urban area of of Uribe, Adentro, Meta. 2 soldiers wounded.

Ambush on an army patrol in Laguna San José, Barajas, Guaviare. 8 soldiers killed, 7 wounded. 3 FARC wounded.

Attack on the army in the village of Mitar, Mapiripan, Meta.

January 12

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Sniper attack on a police checkpoint in Mallama, Andalucia, Nariño.

Attack on a fleet of helicopters in the Mira River region. 2 helicopters damaged. 1 made an emergency landing on the streets in Azucar, Tumaco, Nariño.

Attack on an army patrol in Quebrada la Junta, Maguí, Roberto Payán, Nariño.

Eastern Bloc: Land mine attack on the army in the village of Esperanza, Tame, Arauca. 1 soldier killed.

Attack on the army in Ciare, Mapiripan, Meta.

Attack on the army in Puerto Príncipe, Vichada.

January 13

ARTURO RUIZ COMPANY: 30 minute battle with the army and the Arturo Ruiz XXIII Brigade at 11:15 AM in Platanal, Teorama, Norte de Santander. 5 soldiers killed, 1 Captain, 1 Sergeant and 3 troops, and several more injured. 1 rifle, 5 magazines, money and intelligence material seized. 1 FARC slightly wounded.

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Attack on a helicopter fleet in the village of the municipality Agupí, Tumaco, Nariño.

Land mine attack on the army in Filo el Zorro, Maguí, Roberto Payán, Nariño.

Eastern Bloc: Attack on the army in the village of the Turpial, Macarena, Meta. 2 soldiers killed, 4 wounded.

Attack on the army in the village of Victoria, Arauquita, Arauca.

January 14

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Land mine attack on a Marine brigade in Buenaventura, Cundinamarca. 4 DEA agents wounded.

Eastern Bloc: Land mine attack on the army at the mouth of the Chigüiro River, Uribe, Adentro, Meta. 1 soldier wounded.

Attack on a helicopter in Mocuare, San Jose del Guaviare, Guaviare damaged 1 helicopter.

Attack on the army in the urban area of Oasis, Macarena, Meta. 1 soldier killed, 1 wounded.

January 15

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Battle with the army in Filo Fox, Magui, Roberto Payan, Nariño. 1 soldier dead.

4 land mine attacks on the army.

Attack on national police in the urban area of San José, Nariño.

Ambush on a national police patrol in Íquira, Huila. 1 policeman killed, 1 wounded.

Eastern Bloc: Attack on an Air Force plane in the village of Patio Bonito, Guaviare damaged 1 aircraft.

Mine attack on the army in Paradiso, Uribe, Adentro, Meta. 1 soldier wounded.

Army harassed in the village of Siriza, Miraflores, Guaviare. 1 soldier dead.

Harassment attack on the army in Normandy, Tame, Arauca. 1 soldier dead, 4 wounded.

January 16

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Harassment attack on an army patrol in Jamundi, Valle de Cauca. 1 soldier killed, 1 wounded.

Motorcycle bomb detonated outside the national police station in the town of Palermo, Huila. 2 policemen killed, 1 wounded.

Eastern Bloc: Harassment attack on the army in the village of Puerto Rondon, Progresivo, Arauca. 3 soldiers injured.

January 17

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Land mine attack on the army in the village of Cominera, Corinto, Cauca. 6 soldiers killed.

Attack on Colombian Air Force aviation in the Pumal municipality of Saint Joseph Roberto, Roberto Payan, Nariño.

Eastern Bloc: Battle in Centro, Mapiripan, Meta. 1 soldier killed, 2 injured. 1 wounded guerrilla.

January 18

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Harassment attack on an army patrol in the village of Tarsus, Caldono, Cauca. 1 soldier wounded.

Sniper attack on a police patrol in town of San Joaquin, Florida, Valle de Cauca. 1 policeman killed, 1 wounded.

Harassment attack on an army patrol in Caldono, Cauca. 1 wounded soldier.

Eastern Bloc: Harassment attack on a plane spraying coca fields in the village of Puerto Cubarro, Calamari, Guaviare.

Harassment attack on the army in in Naples, Puerto Inírida, Guainía.

January 19

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: army were harassed in the village of Pueblo Nuevo Valle, municipality of Florida, Valle de Cauca. 3 soldiers injured.

It clashed with army troops in the village of Santander de Quilichao, Paramillo, Cauca. The same day, three times harassed the same patrol. 2 soldiers killed, 5 wounded. 1 guerrilla killed.

Eastern Bloc: Harassment attack on the army in Ciara, Limones, Guaviare. 1 soldier wounded.

Grenade attack on a police checkpoint in Mesetas, Meta. 3 policemen injured.

FARC Propaganda distributed.

January 20

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Attack on two policemen riding on a motorcycle on the Panamerican Highway. Harassment attack on Air Force aviation in site Tardan, San José de Cúcuta, Cúcuta.

Land mine attack on an army patrol in Inguapil, Policarpa, Nariño.

Eastern Bloc: Land mine attack on the army in Uribe, Gaviotas, Meta. 1 soldier wounded.

Attack on an Air Force plane in the urban area of of Rojo, San José del Guaviare, Guaviare.

Harassment on the army in the village of Locacion, Arauca. 3 soldiers injured.

Harassment attack on the army in the village of Puerto Cordoba, Miraflores, Guaviare. 2 soldiers wounded.

Heavy fighting in San Antonio, Alto de Macarena, Meta. 2 soldiers killed, 3 wounded.

January 21

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Ambush on a checkpoint in La Calera, Buenaventura, Cundinamarca.

Eastern Bloc: Mine and booby trap attack on the army in Mangos de Ciara, Mapiripan, Meta. 5 soldiers killed, 7 wounded.

Mine attack on the army in Azul, Arauca. 1 soldier killed, 1 wounded.

Harassment attack on the army in the urban area of Darien, Colombia, Huila.

Harassment attack on the army in Cruces Perico, Arauca. 2 soldiers killed, 3 wounded.

Heavy fighting in Santa Ana, Arauquita, Arauca. 2 soldiers killed, 2 injured.

January 22

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Harassment attack on an army patrol at Prado, Magui, Roberto Payan, Nariño.

Eastern Bloc: 2 mine attacks on the army in the village of Playa de Cabrera, Cundinamarca. 2 soldiers wounded.

Results: Battle with army in Uva, Guerima, Vichada. 1 soldier killed, 3 wounded.

January 23

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Harassment attack on an army patrol in the town of López de Micay, Cauca.

January 24

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Three way ambush attack on the army’s piranhas forces in Coquito, Guayabal, Buenaventura, Cundinamarca. 1 wounded soldier.

Guerrillas harassed army troops at the mouth of the Sunica River, Copom, Chocó.

Attack on the army in the district of Siberia, Caldono, Cauca.

Eastern Bloc: Harassment attack on the army in Darien Alto, Colombia, Huila.

Mine attack on the army in the urban area of Nubes, Tame, Arauca. 1 soldier dead.

January 25

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Ambush on an army patrol in Buenos Aires, Cauca. 3 soldiers killed, 7 wounded. One MGL with 60 grenades, 1 Galil rifle, 525 cartridges, nine teams, 2 MK-1 machine guns and a cartridge belt, 6 60mm grenades and various materials containing military and intelligence documents were recovered. Own without incident.

Eastern Bloc: Harassment attack on a helicopter in the village of Mitar, Mapiripan, Meta.

Attack on police in the Julio 20 Barrio of Tame, Arauca. 1 policeman killed, 1 wounded.

Land mine attack on a helicopter launching pad in Mitar, Mapiripan, Meta. 9 soldiers killed, 1 captain, 1 corporal and 7 soldiers.

January 26

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Sniper attack on an army patrol in the village of Santa Lucia, Santander de Quilichao, Cauca. Harassment attack on the army at the mouth of the Sunica River, Copom, Chocó.

Eastern Bloc: Harassment attack on the army in the village of Rompida, Guaviare. 2 soldiers killed, 1 wounded.

Harassment attack on the army in Mocuare, Guaviare.

January 27

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Mine attack on the army in La Victoria, Cisneros, Valle. 6 soldiers killed, an undetermined number wounded. No FARC casualties.

Harassment attack on the police in Yaco, San José, Nariño.

January 28

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Battle with an army patrol in the upper regions of Policarpa, Nariño.

Eastern Bloc: Harassment attack on the army in the village of Paradiso, Arauca.

January 29

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Battle with the army in Manso, Iscuandé municipality, Nariño. Afterward, there was another firefight with the same patrol. 1 dead soldier. 1 wounded guerrilla.

Eastern Bloc: Sniper attack in El Milagro, Arauca killed 1 soldier.

January 30

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Attack on the national police between Pulví and Negrital, Tumaco, Nariño. There were police casualties.

Eastern Bloc: Attack on an army patrol in the village of Nuevo Colombia. 1 soldier killed, 1 wounded.

A combined army-national police patrol was annihilated in the urban area of Puerto Rondón Corosito, Tame, Arauca. 8 soldiers were killed. 7 2.23 rifles, 440 bullets, 1 revolver and other items were seized other things.

January 31

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: A national police checkpoint was cornered and destroyed at EMCAR Andalucía in the municipality Mallama Via Pasto, Tumaco, Nariño. The battle lasted 20 minutes. 8 policemen killed, 3 injured. 23 Febrero 11 Galil rifles with 1265 cartridges, 1 MGL with 25 grenades and other material were seized. No FARC casualties.

Harassment attack on police in the urban area of Negrital, Tumaco, Nariño.

3 harassment attacks on an army patrol in the village of Bethany, Caldono, Cauca. Landmine attack on the same patrol in the same village. 1 soldier dead.

Harassment attack on the army in Silvia, Cauca. 2 soldiers wounded.

Eastern Bloc: An exploratory patrol ran into an army force and a 4 hour battle ensued.

There was a 1 hour battle with the army in Charras, Mapiripan, Meta. 4 soldiers killed, 6 wounded. 2 guerrillas wounded.

February 1

WESTERN AND CENTRAL COMMAND: Land mine attack on a Piranha convoy in the municipality of Buenaventura, Pital, Huila. 2 piranhas destroyed, 5 soldiers killed, 3 wounded.

ARTURO RUIZ COMPANY: At 4 PM, guerrillas harassed the army command on the edge Torcoroma, Aguachica, Cesar for 20 minutes.

Video of the FARC Overrunning Mitu, Vaupes

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeZgy8rgWYs&feature=related]

Mitu is a city in Vaupes, Colombia on the Brazilian border in the middle of the Amazon. The FARC overran the small police detachment there on November 1, 1998.

The attack begins at 4:58 AM, and the town is overrun later in the day, the remains of the police detachment all surrendering. The prisoners will be treated pretty well. They won’t be tortured or murdered, although some were killed when the Colombian army tried to liberate some of these prisoners.

You can see the use of the some of the FARC’s homemade mortars here. The last part includes a battle against the reinforcements that were sent in by the army to retake the town. This battle takes place outside of town, in jungles and plains.

You can also see that the FARC is a huge army, with bases, full uniforms, huge detachments that march in formation, chains of command, etc. The war in Colombia is really a war between two gigantic armies, not between a single army and a band of ragged guerrillas.

This video is by the FARC.

Overall, it’s a pretty amazing video of urban warfare, shot in the midst of a huge and savage battle with some cool jungle and plains warfare at the end.

Those opposed to the FARC are asked what the Left in Colombia should do instead. Now that Uribe is committed to military defeat with no negotiations, the prospects for the FARC are bleaker than ever. They can’t negotiate an end to the conflict, so they must fight. They can’t really surrender either. Even if they disarm and try to seek power peacefully, they are going to be massacred anyway like the rest of the Left. So it’s fight or die for the FARC.

The model of the Colombian state is based on capital formation by way of violence, similar to the US model in the 1800’s. Land is stolen from peasants and the indigenous at gunpoint, and they are killed or attacked if they resist. Then their land is given to large landowners who already have almost all of the land, or else given to large multinational corporations for various land exploitation development projects.

It’s development by violence, with the paramilitaries and army clearing the way. Communities, organizations and peoples who resist multinational development projects or the theft of their land are attacked by the Colombian military or the paramilitaries and often killed. Labor unions that try to organize in multinational or any other enterprises are also attacked by the army and the paramilitaries.

Refugees flood into urban slums with few amenities, no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing, and few jobs. These slums are now policed by paramilitaries, the enemies of the people. If these slum-dwellers protest conditions in their shantytowns, they are likely to be attacked and killed by the paramilitaries who patrol them. Women’s, human rights, campesino, indigenous and Afro-Colombian organizations are all attacked as agents of the Left.

Most of those attacked by the army and paramilitaries are first vilified as supporters or members of the FARC. In most if not all cases, it’s not true. They are definitely not members of the FARC in most if not all cases. Are they supporters? Who knows? Probably not openly. Keep in mind that anyone and everyone on the Left is automatically accused of being a “FARC supporter,” so you don’t need to support them to get killed. It’s a pretty hard accusation to prove anyway. How do you prove if someone is a “FARC supporter” anyway?

In this way, the Colombian military serves the interests of the Colombian oligarchy, especially the large landowners, and the multinationals. and wages war on their own people.

This is the model that the Colombian urban middle class, both US political parties, the Obama Administration and the entire US mass media support to the hilt. There’s nothing to support here for any progressive person.

A new political party has sprung up recently called the Democratic Pole. The Polo varies from social democrats to Communists, but they have little to no relationship with the FARC. Nevertheless, there is a huge vilification campaign going on against the Polo and its candidates, and the military and paramilitaries are starting to kill Polo figures on a regular basis.

That’s some background on the Colombian conflict and on the Colombian government, the US’ biggest ally in Latin America and one the top recipients of US aid in the world.

Defeated Armies Can Still Fight Pretty Well!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HshxcZBxcuQ&feature=related]

This is an attack on the Colombian military base in Miraflores in Guaviare Province. Guaviare has always been overrun by FARC, and it still is. Even today, when they are on the verge of defeat and collapse, they still control the province. Funny how that works.

This attack took place in August 2008. At this point, the capitalist world media was already saying that the FARC were on the edge of collapse, and “at their lowest point in 44 years.”

That’s manifestly untrue. That means that they are at their lowest point since 1964, when they were founded with a few dozen ragged forces. Forget it. Even in the late 1970’s, they only had 2,000 fighters or so. In 1998 they easily had 18,000 fighters. I figure a good 55,000 “militia” too. Militia are just peasant farmers and whatnot in the daytime, but at nighttime they may well be armed fighters.

The attack starts at 4:30 AM and utilizes a force of 500 troops. By 9 AM, they have seriously overrun the base and are carting away supplies. The battle continues all through the day, and by 4 PM, the military has finally sent in helicopter air support, but they can’t seem to do much. By this time, the remaining troops at the base have all been taken prisoner.

It’s not so bad to be taken prisoner by the FARC. Better than being killed. They keep you alive, don’t torture you, give you medical care, etc. If you try to escape, you get punished, but that’s how it goes. The majority of the “hostages” who have been “kidnapped” by the FARC are just POW’s like the guys seized in this video. They would not have to be held long if Colombia would agree to a POW swap, but they’ve never done that in 46 years, and they never will. Amazing, even the Israelis agree to such things.

There is nothing lower than a bourgeois Latin American, I am quite sure of that. Very uncompromising folks, if even the Zionists in Palestine have softer hearts.

This conflict is all about class, and a lot of it is about race. Notice that every time they interview a Colombian military guy on the media, he’s a White guy. A spokesman for the Colombian state is always a White person. But videos of the FARC are very interesting. Many mestizos, often dark mestizos, and many who look very Indian. And many mulattos or even Black FARC troops. Fact is that racism is endemic in the Colombian military, as is extreme and overt class hatred by the light-skinned officer class towards the darker-skinned conscripts.

Here it is two years later, and the FARC are supposedly even more collapsed than when they epic failed and captured this military base two years before. I suppose now they can only overrun half a base and take half the force POW.

Although reports of their demise seem to be premature.

I’ve gotten reports out of Colombia recently (I forget which region) but there is a government-death squad offensive in the area that has long been held by the FARC. Reports indicate that in this region, “many young people are joining the FARC every day.” Not that that matters, since they are defeated, right?

What Good Is the FARC?

In the comments section, James Schipper asks pointedly:

The FARC may not be near defeat, but it isn’t anywhere near victory either. The FARC has been active for decades now. Has it accomplished anything positive for the Columbian masses?

That is a good question.

Considering the murderous nature of the Colombian state, why should the FARC lay down its arms? Recall that it was the murderous nature of the Colombian state that started this whole mess by forcing the Left to take up arms in the first place, since they were getting massacred while they were unarmed.

The History of the Colombian Civil War

A little background. This conflict actually started in 1928 with the Banana Massacre in the Far North. There was a banana workers strike and the state sent the army in there to break it up. They massacred something like 60-70 workers to break up the strike.

Then in 1948, Gaitan, a very progressive Liberal, was elected President on a platform of land reform and other reforms. He was quickly murdered by the Conservatives. The people rose up in rage and rebellion all over Colombia. This degenerated into general conflict between the Liberals and the Conservatives, basically over the issue of land reform and the fact that the Liberals had many progressives with them.

This led to the decade of violence called La Violencia, in which 200,000 Colombians were slaughtered. La Violencia was caused by an attempt by the Conservatives and the oligarchy to wipe out the Left. La Violencia continued into the 1960’s.

Some Communists were so sick and tired of all the fighting that they lay down their arms and formed a commune on some land called La Marquetalia. They all moved there and set up farms and whatnot. The Colombian oligarchy started agitating about “Communism in Colombia.” The CIA and the US military went down there to advise the Colombians.

As it turned out, the Colombian military waged a huge armed attack on La Marquetalia, including the use of chemical weapons, in an attempt to exterminate them. The people of Marquetalia tried to fight back, but they had few weapons. They were effectively slaughtered, but a few survived. The survivors of La Marquetalia went on the become the FARC! So that is how the FARC got its start in 1964.

What Good is the FARC?

Actually the FARC does defend the people a lot. When the death squads and army come out to murder and abduct the people, rampaging through the communities, the FARC often wages an offensive to clear them out. The FARC plays a role in defending the people from the murderous state. If the FARC gave up their guns, the people would be defenseless. I’m opposed to that.

Also, look what happened the last time the FARC laid down their guns They were slaughtered like flies. Why should they do it again?

The FARC should only disarm if they can negotiate a solution with the state such as the FMLN did in El Salvador. The FMLN negotiated an integration of the two militaries, getting rid of some notorious security forces, major changes in the corrupt judicial process, and a huge land reform. Via these changes, many of the reasons for the armed struggle went away and the FMLN was able to compete peacefully.

As is, the death squads are tremendously reduced, but still active. They kill about 6 Salvadorans a year. But the FMLN opened up enough space to compete peacefully, and they just won the Presidency. And the land reform produced lasting changes in the countryside. The FARC is only going to give up its guns if it can negotiate some major changes in the system and defang the state enough so that they can compete peacefully in elections.

If you study Latin America, you will see that rightwing death squads rampage through the region, killing progressives. Often the conflict is over land and the death squads are often run by large landowners. Also the police and military operate in the interests of the wealthy, killing progressive people. They kill peasants to steal their land or they kill peasants involved in land disputes and land takeovers.

200 have been killed in Venezuela.

1 person every day is being killed in Honduras.

About 6 a year are killed in El Salvador.

Death squads operate regularly in Guatemala, even after the war.

In Brazil, death squads in the countryside have killed 2-3,000 people in recent years.

As you can see, the Right in Latin America is murderous, whether the people are armed or not. Even if you’re not armed, they come out and kill you anyway. If you arm yourself, at least you get to fight back.

For the record, the Democratic Pole favors a negotiated solution to the war.

Is The FARC Near Defeat?

There is a lot of propaganda in the media that the FARC is near defeat in Colombia. True, Death Squad Leader President Uribe has led a huge offensive against the FARC, the biggest in the history of Latin America, and the FARC has been hit hard. But the figures of 9,000 rebels and loss of 5

The truth is that the Colombian state is a Terror State. Anyone and anyone protesting against the state or the military in any way from the Left is denounced as a “FARC member” or FARC supporter.” Typically, there is no evidence for any association with the armed group, it’s just that FARC association is a way to denounce anyone on the Left or pursuing any kind of popular projects.

Often, death squads or the military then threaten, arrest, abduct, torture, and most commonly just murder the civilians that get denounced. People who are denounced this way are peasant, rural, women’s, human rights, small farmers, anti-mining, Afro-Colombian rights, union members, Indian, and community activists of any shape and form.

All are seen as “terrorists,” though as a general rule, they have nothing to do with the armed FARC, since the FARC is an armed group and doesn’t have much to do with the civilian Left, keeping a strong wall between them.

Much of the war involves clearing peasants, Indians and Afro-Caribbeans off their land and just flat out stealing it. Then the land is given to large landowners or foreign corporations to be exploited. The military and death squads are used to clear the poor off the land under the charge that all the poor getting their land stolen are “FARC members.” Probably none of them are.

The entire Colombian state has always been run by a small group of rich people who have long used terror and mass murder to stay in power. This is the reality of the “War Against the FARC,” and this is why the FARC took up weapons in the first place in 1964.

At the moment, a Left party, the Democratic Pole, has formed, consisting of moderate liberals all the way to Communists. This party polls about 2

Previously, a section of the FARC broke off, laid down their weapons and decided to compete for power peacefully in elections as the Patriotic Union. They quickly started getting killed like flies. The FARC saw the danger and pulled all their people out of the UP, but the killings went on, though the new UP had nothing to do with the FARC anymore. After several years, 5,000 UP members had been slowly slaughtered by the government, and the UP was decimated.

So there is no peaceful route to power for the Left in Colombia. The government is likely to kill you one way or the other if you oppose them, either peacefully or with a gun. I guess you can either wait for the state to come out and kill you, or you can take up arms to try to defend yourself when they come out to kill you, which is essentially what the FARC has done.

FARC Branches in Other Parts of Latin America

FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a very powerful guerrilla group, also has branches in other nations.

FARE (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador) operates in Ecuador, mostly in Sucumbios. See my other post for more on them.

FARB (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Brazil) operates in the Dog’s Head of Brazil on the Colombian border. They don’t do much there militarily as it is just a rear base. Mostly they resupply there from Brazilian merchants. The area is sparsely populated jungle. FARC also ranges across the northern part of Brazil all the way to the border of Brazil and Guyana, where they tax the gold mining businesses.

FARV (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Venezuela) is just the FARC in Venezuela. They have about 2,000-3,000 people under arms. It’s hard to say what they do there. It seems Venezuela is mostly a rear guard base, and Hugo Chavez definitely supports the FARC and leaves them alone in Venezuela.

Colombian paramilitaries are now starting to operate in the border area too, and things are getting messy. Also, about 200 peasants have been murdered by Venezuelan death squads in the past decade. The death squads are run by wealthy landowners, usually cattle ranchers, and opposition politicians. It’s really the Opposition who are the killers in Venezuela, not Chavez.

The killings stem from land conflicts, as most of the land in that part of Venezuela is owned by a tiny group of big landowners and most of the population are rural peasants. Peasants stage land takeovers in the typical Latin American style. Chavez has started to buy out some landowners and give land to peasant and Indian communities, but the process is slow.

FARV are mostly Venezuelans, a militia that is armed and pro-Chavez. They do little, but are mostly there in case of a rightwing coup or anti-Chavez invasion, in which case they will take up arms to defend Chavez.

FARP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Peru): This is the FARC in Peru. They have been active down there for a few years now, mostly in the north around Loreto Province, but they have been active all the way down to Pucallpa in Ucayali. They use it as a rearguard base, but are also forming deep relations with the peasants. They buy stuff from peasants and give them things that the peasants need. They are quite popular in the area, whereas Sendero Luminoso were widely hated for their brutality against the poor.

In addition, FARP has recruited 1,200 new members all across Peru in the last few years. Many of these people are former Shining Path members who quit the group or were released from prison. They’ve soured on Sendero due to the brutal tactics and have taken up with FARP instead. FARP carries out no armed activities in Peru, though they are said to be very well equipped and supplied. They are also taxing coca crops being grown in the part of Peru right across the border from Colombia. This area is a wild jungle.

FARC in Panama: FARC has long used the Darien Gap region of Panama as a rear base. There are occasional shootouts with Panamanian security forces. There are now death squads in Panama murdering Indians for “cooperating with the FARC.” The FARC just stay in Indian villages and buy stuff from the Indians, that’s all. It’s just an R & R area.

FARC in Bolivia: There are rumors that the FARC has been in Bolivia training militias aligned with President Evo Morales, but there is no hard evidence that this is true.

FARC in Paraguay: There are allegations that FARC has helped train the EPP, a new Paraguayan guerrilla group, though there is no hard evidence.

FARC in Nicaragua: The FARC has a long relationship with the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Large stashes of FARC money and guns have been seized there, but the FARC carries out no armed activities. Nicaragua is just used as a place to buy guns and amass funds.

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