The U.S. rulers are concerned that the Colombian government is politically too weak to defeat the decades-long guerrilla insurgency in the countryside as well as impose the economic austerity measures on working people that foreign capitalist investors demand. The guerrilla forces, which control large swaths of territory, have not prevailed either.

The army, rightist death squads tied to the military, and private armies of drug-trafficking capitalists have terrorized peasants in the countryside and targeted urban supporters of left-wing organizations.

The impasse has led to a social breakdown, with permanent instability and violence that pervades Colombian society.  
 

Escalating U.S. intervention

Washington has funneled $309 million in military aid to the Colombian government this year, more than tripling the previous year's "aid" package and making Colombia the fourth-largest recipient of U.S. military funding after the regimes of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.

On top of this, the U.S. Congress is considering a $1.5 billion aid proposal for the Colombian government over the next three years, the bulk of it for the military. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the White House "drug czar," has been campaigning for a sharp hike in aid to the Colombian army and police, citing a "drug-related emergency."

Washington has built radar and electronic-surveillance stations in Colombia staffed by U.S. personnel, and U.S. special forces have begun training a new elite "antidrug" battalion of 950 soldiers and 200 police officers. Plans are under way to train further units. U.S. military "trainers" are operating in combat zones. Between 100 and 150 members of the U.S. military, including members of the Seventh Special Forces Group based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, train an Anti-Narcotics Battalion of the Colombian army.  
 

Worst depression in decades

Colombia is reeling from the effects of the worldwide deflation in commodity prices, which has plunged the country into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The economy shrank by 7.6 percent in the second quarter of 1999, and production plummeted by more than 16 percent compared to the same period in 1998.

Colombia depends on exports of raw materials and semi-finished goods, and is dominated by U.S. and other imperialist interests. Its main exports are oil, coffee, gold, and coal, as well as cocaine.

Fueled by falling commodity prices, Colombia's foreign debt to international banks rose last year to $20.8 billion, nearly 30 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Unemployment has skyrocketed to nearly 20 percent. After two devaluations in one year, the Pastrana government let the peso float freely against the U.S. dollar September 26. The day before, it announced a loan of up to $3 billion from the International Monetary Fund. Following IMF dictates, Pastrana is seeking to place the burden of the economic crisis on the backs of working people.

In July the government presented what it called the "Truth Budget," slashing state spending on pensions and other social programs. Antiunion laws accompanied the budget. On August 31 the three national trade union federations responded with a nationwide strike. Workers protested the antiunion laws, austerity measures, and the sell-off of state-owned companies. They also called for a moratorium on payment of the foreign and domestic debt. In response, the government mobilized police and army units in working-class neighborhoods and along highways throughout the country, arresting 187 people.

On October 15, some 600,000 teachers, hospital workers, and other public employees walked off the job to protest wage freezes proposed by the government — the fourth nationwide strike since Pastrana came to power last year.  
 

Drugs: a capitalist business

In depicting the social crisis in Colombia, the big-business media paints that country as a center of the international narcotics trade. In so doing, they smear Colombian working people as well as the antigovernment guerrillas as the source of the problem.

What they fail to point out is that the production and trade of narcotics is a capitalist business run by billionaires — both in Colombia and in the United States.

In June, the Colombian government announced it had begun to include income earned from drugs in the official statistics on the economy. Drug exports from Colombia total around $4 billion a year. Colombia's Gross National Product is nearly $80 billion. Cocaine-processing plants run by wealthy drug cartels in Colombia supply the majority of the cocaine sold on the U.S. and European markets. The vast bulk of the superprofits generated by the sale of narcotics in the United States ends up in the bank accounts of U.S. capitalists – both the "illegal" mafia type and those of a more "reputable" stripe.

The nouveau riche drug billionaires are a powerful section of the capitalist class in Colombia. The profits reaped in the drug trade, and the illegal character of this arm of big business, give it a particularly cutthroat character. This rise of vastly wealthy narco-capitalists has further destabilized Colombian ruling circles, fueling conflict within a class that is no stranger to resolving its differences by violent means.

Thousands of small farmers in Colombia grow coca because they cannot make a living by growing food crops or other staples. They are exploited by the drug cartels, and their crops are the targets of government anti-drug operations. Cocaine barons have become major landowners, pushing thousands of peasants off the land.  
 

Military and rightist terror

Drug capitalists have created private armies, which unleash terror against peasants and combat the guerrilla organizations. The army and paramilitary groups have also carried out repression against rural toilers and working-class activists in the cities. Paramilitary gangs, often with ties to narco-landowners, function as an extension of the army in carrying out the regime's dirty war. There were 3,832 documented political killings in Colombia in 1998.

The United Workers Confederation (CUT) reports that 2,300 union members have been assassinated since it was founded in 1986. Some 300,000 Colombians were forced to flee their homes in 1998 alone, bringing the internal refugee population to one million.  
 

Crisis fuels guerrilla struggle

The economic and social crisis unfolding in Colombia has fueled the 30-year guerrilla insurgency waged by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN). Today the FARC fields an estimated 20,000 combatants and controls up to 40 percent of the country.

The FARC emerged in the early 1960s from guerrilla columns led by the pro-Moscow Communist Party during Colombia's 10-year civil war, which lasted from 1947 to 1957. That war, known as La Violencia, began in a bloody struggle between the Conservative and Liberal Party wings of the ruling class. Conservative and Liberal leaders finally sank their differences and united behind the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1953. The two ruling parties established a "National Front" accord, agreeing to alternate administrations every four years.

Meanwhile, a state of siege was in effect in Colombia almost continuously from 1948 to 1983.

By the mid-1960s, peasant-based guerrilla forces controlled large sections of the countryside. The FARC was founded in 1964 in response to a brutal army offensive in the Marquetalia region of Tolima Province.

As a result of massive worker and peasant protests that culminated in a 1977 general strike, the Colombian rulers were forced to lift some of the most sweeping restrictions on democratic rights. In 1982 President Belisario Betancur initiated a process of negotiations and amnesty with various guerrilla groups, which led to several of them laying down their arms, including the April 19 Movement (M-19), which had been prominent in the 1970s. M-19 began to function as a regular political party; some of its leaders were coopted into the government, and the organization has since dissolved.  
 

Goals of the FARC

In 1985 the FARC founded the Patriotic Union (UP), a legal organization that ran candidates in the elections. But it was decimated by repression by rightist death squads, which over a decade assassinated 3,000 of its leaders and followers.

The FARC has historically been politically associated with the Communist Party of Colombia, although it is organizationally independent. At its eighth national conference in 1993, the FARC proposed a "Government of Reconstruction and National Reconciliation." Its program calls for an end to repression, land reform, and democratic reforms of the government and judiciary together with an economic program combining state-owned enterprises and private business. It calls for renegotiation of the national debt.

The FARC defines the government of national reconciliation as "pluralistic, patriotic, and democratic." It advocates an alliance of peasants, workers, small businessmen, and "the national bourgeoisie that is willing to fight imperialism."

Prior to taking office last November, Colombian president Pastrana initiated a process of "peace talks" with the FARC in the hope of stabilizing the government's position. Shortly after taking office, Pastrana pulled the Colombian army out of a large "de-militarized zone" in the south of the country, leaving it under the undisputed control of the FARC.

Since then the talks have stalled and Washington has prompted the Bogotá regime to step up its military offensive against the guerrillas. Gen. Charles Wilhelm, chief of U.S. military forces in Latin America, told a congressional commission, "I'm convinced that the [Colombian] government must strengthen its negotiating position, and I believe that increased leverage at the negotiating table can only be gained on Colombia's battlefields"

A senior U.S. official quoted in the New York Times offers a more sober assessment. "It is going to be a very dangerous mess, and we are going to be right in the middle of that mess," he declared.

Andy Buchanan is a member of the Union of Needletrades, Textile and Industrial Employees in Paterson, New Jersey.  
 
 
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