Vol. 80/No. 27 July 25, 2016
Colombia: Gov’t, guerrillas sign peace accord
in Havana
The war between the government and various guerrilla armies, as well as attacks by government-backed rightist paramilitary groups, has claimed more than 220,000 lives and displaced 5 million people since the conflict began.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces, known by its Spanish acronym as the FARC, launched its guerrilla struggle in response to massacres of peasants carried out by capitalist landowners in the 1960s. The FARC became the largest of several guerrilla groups.
Using the guerrilla war as a pretext along with charges that guerrilla groups were involved in drug trafficking, Washington deepened its military involvement in Colombia and used Colombia as a base for intervening in the internal affairs of other Latin American nations.
The FARC, which took its political lead from the Colombian Communist Party, “never planned to conquer power through the armed struggle,” Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro has explained. “The guerrilla was a resistance front and not the essential instrument for conquering revolutionary power.”
This was the opposite of the course followed by the revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro in Cuba, who led working people there to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. From the time of the Cuban revolutionaries’ first encounter with the dictatorship’s troops in 1956, it took little more than two years for the revolutionary struggle to triumph.
Castro has also criticized the FARC’s taking of hostages, both civilian and military, during the war.
“Civilians should have never been kidnapped, nor should the soldiers have been kept as prisoners in jungle conditions,” he said in 2008. “These were objectively cruel actions. No revolutionary aim could justify them.”
“We won our revolutionary war in Cuba by immediately releasing every prisoner absolutely unconditionally,” Castro pointed out. “The soldiers and officers captured in every battle were released to the International Red Cross; we kept only their weapons.”
The agreement states that the FARC’s estimated 7,000 fighters will go to “concentration zones” in areas under FARC control to hand over their weapons to United Nations officials.
Under an earlier agreement, FARC soldiers who admit to “crimes” during the war will receive reduced sentences, often amounting to community service, the New York Times reported.
The agreement stipulates that paramilitary groups will not be tolerated, nor will attacks on human rights organizations, demobilized FARC members, and their right to engage in legal political activity.
In April Nidia Quintero, general secretary of the farmworkers and peasants union FENSUAGRO in Colombia, spoke at meetings in the U.S.
The Colombian government has used the ongoing war as a cover for violence and repression aimed at workers fighting to organize into unions and small farmers resisting being driven off their land, she said at a meeting at the AFL-CIO hall in Miami.
Quintero explained how Plan Colombia — the name given to the U.S. program of assisting the Colombian government in combating “terrorism and the illicit narcotics trade” — was a disaster for workers and peasants, destroying their crops with herbicides and facilitating the theft of their land by the big landowners.
Ending the war will remove some obstacles to fighting for agrarian reform and organizing with less fear of paramilitary attack, she said.
Chuck Guerra contributed to this article.
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