On the 21st of April as he reached his house paramilitaries murdered Narciso Beleño, the leader in Southern Bolívar, Colombia, just two years after the murder of two other leaders Teo Acuña and Jorge Tafur.
I knew Narciso Beleño. Our paths crossed many times, on occasion on literal paths in the countryside as Narciso travelled the country in his struggle to defend rural communities in Colombia.
But I don’t want to talk too much about Narciso, the person, as there are others who can pay greater tribute to him in that regard, though his name always made me curious: Narciso (Narcissus).
Narcissus was a figure in Greek/Roman mythology who as a punishment from the gods fell in love with his own reflection. It is where we get the word narcissist from. But unlike the Greek/Roman figure, our Narciso was kind, caring, generous and selfless.
There are thousands of people, whole communities that can testify to his qualities as a person, a fighter and a leader.
When he was murdered the President, Gustavo Petro tweeted that “we failed Narciso”. But who failed Narciso? The communities? His comrades in Fedeagromisbol? Or were they the youths from the Front Line who are still in jail? Tell us who! A generic “We doesn’t do it, it is a lie.”
He should explain who failed him, how and why and Petro should also tell us what he intends to do prevent there being more murders of leaders.
Once upon a time we never doubted to putting a name and surname to the matter. We didn’t hesitate in naming the company, the board of directors, the landlord, the local politician. Sometimes we even ran the risk of putting a name and military rank to the affair.
A long time ago a gradual process began whereby some stopped naming them. And now under the Petro government it is not thought well to name them. Once upon a time we all named Fedegan, the cattle ranchers’ association, as backing the paramilitaries.
The Fedegan functionaries even acknowledged this. Now one of the representatives of that association, which is currently involved in refounding paramilitary structures, represents the State in the dialogues with the ELN.
Once upon a time we named the mining companies that have been trying for decades to take control of the gold in Southern Bolivar and other regions. It is worth remembering that Narciso travelled the country. More than one mining company had it in for him.
In Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, evil and magic lose their power over mortals when they are named by their real name and so the best kept secret is their real name. In real life something similar happens. Paramilitaries as something dark, shadowy and hidden defeats us.
When we name those behind this black magic with their real names, it begins to lose its power over us. They are not unknown to us. We withdraw cash from their ATMs every day, we purchase their services, we drink their products, we work in their companies and the odd eejit votes for them.
No company will say, “buy my product we are the murderers of social leaders” or “vote for me, I have murdered thousands.” They hide this for a reason and for that same reason we should expose their dark souls to the light of day.
The best tribute Petro can pay is to explain who failed and name the murderers just like he used to do before he was President. They are the usual suspects. Petro likes to say he governs but does not have power.
Well, tell us who holds that power that he don’t have, with names and surnames, economic group, foreign company. If we all failed, then nobody failed, if he was murdered by those who cannot be named, then nobody murdered him.
We usen’t to hesitate in talking about paramilitaries, the economic and political interests and reasons behind their actions. We named the business associations, the megaprojects in each region, we proved it.
Some sought justice in international tribunals, others in Russell style tribunals of opinion. We have to pay tribute to Narciso and other victims of the paramilitaries and name the murderers. Uribe tried to fool us with the Bacrim (Criminal Gang) euphemism. Neither Gulf Clan or anything else.
The same ones who disappeared Edgar Quiroga and Gildardo Fuentes in 1999 (in Southern Bolívar) murdered Narciso 25 years later. Say it loud and clear, Mr. President.
The coca zones of Colombia are in crisis. The cash crop par excellence, i.e. coca is going through an unprecedented crisis, or so we are told.
The main promotors of the idea that the coca is in crisis because fentanyl has displaced it and sooner or later it will finish off the coca were from the government. Amongst those promoting this stupidity are Colombian state functionaries from the NGOs, social organisations and of course high-ranking members of the Historic Pact. The very president of the country, Gustavo Petro stated in August that
The cocaine market in the USA has collapsed and has been replaced by an even worse one: fentanyl that kills 100,000 per year. Cocaine used to kill 4,000 due to the poisonous mixtures from the market clandestine.(1)
It is simply the case that nothing that Petro said at the time was true. Whereas Clinton exaggerated the deaths due to cocaine consumption in order to justify Plan Colombia, Petro sought to minimise them. First of all, we should be clear that fentanyl did not displace cocaine, but rather another opioid, heroin. And the most notorious aspect of fentanyl is not the increase in consumption, but rather that due to its toxicity, a dramatic increase in overdoses. Petro’s government makes statements on the drugs issue without even understanding basic concepts.
The overdue publication of its drug policy allows us to analyse properly what it aims to do, as up till now we have had to put up with a year of contradictory speeches, tweets that don’t say much and complete incoherence in the matter, without even mentioning his stated aim of handing over the Colombian Amazon region to the US military, something that not even Pastrana openly proposed when he announced Bill Clinton’s Plan Colombia.
In a US study published in May of this year, the researchers found that the deaths from fentanyl tripled between 2016 and 2021, increasing from 5.7 per 100,000 inhabitants to 21.6 in 2021. The deaths from cocaine overdoses increased in the same period from 3.5 to 7.9. At the same time there was a 40% decrease in heroin related overdoses, falling from 4.9 in 2016 to 2.9 in 2021.(2) The study just confirmed the analysis of previous research published in December 2022 that looked at increases in mortality since 2001.(3)
Fentanyl is a new problem for the USA, but neither the increase in its consumption nor deaths tell us anything about the future of coca as Petro and Roy Barreras claimed. Quite the opposite. According to the UN, coca crops reached the figure of 230,000 hectares in 2022.(4) Of course, Petro is not to blame for that, he only took over the presidency in August 2022, but it belies his statements that coca is a thing of the past due to the economic crisis in the coca regions of the country.
So, what can be said of Petro’s new drug policy? Well, the first thing is that there is at last a policy outlined in a public document. They took their time in doing it but better later than never. The document proposes with a certain amount of hyperbole Oxygen for the communities affected, through support from licit economies, environmental measures and treating the matter of consumption as a public health issue. It also proposes Asphyxiation for drug trafficking organisations. Furthermore, it proposes being the voice and leadership of “an international diplomatic strategy to change the paradigm in how the drugs phenomenon is dealt with.”(5)
The document kicks off with a correct analysis that contradicts the public declarations made by Petro and other high ranking government functionaries, a few weeks prior to its publication. It is inexplicable how the president can boast about the collapse of coca at a point when it is almost certain his drugs policy was at the printers. It must be due to mediocre functionaries, as this government has continued with the policy of Duque and the previous governments of hiring mediocre friends. But in any case, the document gets somethings right, at last.
For decades, Colombia has made an enormous investment in human and economic terms in fighting drug trafficking. Although there are no official figures on the outlay in fighting drugs, but the Drugs Observatory of Colombia calculates an annual average expenditure of 3.8 trillion pesos [885.2 million euros] ascending to an approximate investment in the last twenty years of 76 trillion pesos [17.7 billion euros]. Whilst some results have been achieved along the way, it is true that the two main goals have not been reached: reduction in the supply and demand for illicit drugs.
Even though 843,905 hectares of coca were forcibly eradicated between 2012 and 2022, the planted area in this period increased by 327%. In 2022, Colombia had 230,000 hectares of coca with a productive potential of 1,738 tonnes of cocaine. As for demand for psychoactive substances, between 1996 and 2019 an increase of 5.1% to 8.7% in the consumption of all illicit substances (marijuana, cocaine, base, extasy or heroin) was observed.(6)
The document then goes on to acknowledge that the collapse in cocaine consumption is not real but rather on the contrary there has been an increase. It states that one of the first hypotheses was a global fall in demand for cocaine.(7) They are trying to save their own skin. There was no data to sustain the supposed hypotheses: none. It was dreamed up by mediocres and no one else made the claim. The document goes on to say “However, according to the lastest Global Cocaine Report from the UNODC (2023), demand has risen.(8) At least we are having a debate about the reality of poorly written studies from the children of the lovers of their friends who they hired.
So, what do they propose? It would seem that they propose a shift in the punitive model without abandoning it completely. They accept that the fumigations have not worked and that the periods of greatest fumigation do not match those of a lesser supply of the drug.(9) But the punitive element continues to be an integral part of the policy, the supposed shift is a mirage.
The evidence has shown that a security strategy on its own is not enough [the emphasis is mine] but rather it must go hand in hand with actions to prevent crime and deal with the underlying causes.(10)
The document takes a look over the international treaties in the area, softening the real demands of the Single Convention of 1961 stating that it doesn’t prohibit anything but rather submits the plants and the drugs produced to a strict control. There is not enough space here to go into detail on that debate. But once again what the government is saying is not really the case. The Single Convention does actually allow for some coca crops for medical and industrial purposes, mainly in Peru and also opium in India. But it is not the case that Colombia has misinterpreted those treaties. And this is a major issue, as any change in the paradigm is dependent on changes in those treaties or better still their complete derogation and the drawing up of new treaties under a new paradigm.
Whilst it is true that a country can allow coca crops for licit purposes, that is done with the permission of the UN control bodies, i.e. the USA. Even traditional consumption of the coca leaf is frowned upon in the Convention. Article 26.2 states that.
The Parties shall so far as possible enforce the uprooting of all coca bushes which grow wild. [emphasis is mine] They shall destroy the coca bushes if illegally cultivated.
Although Article 49 permits chewing of coca leaf in countries where it was already legal on the 1st of January 1961 (subparagraph 2a), it does so on the condition of banning it and eradicating it once and for all by 1986 (subparagraph 2e), something which was not achieved. Whether they like it or not, this treaty has not been misinterpreted and the whole UN framework i.e. US policy in the area is the problem and not a misinterpretation of previous governments. The supposed freedom to grow and licit use of coca that Petro imagines is not real.
Some states in the US legalised the production and recreational consumption of marijuana and clashed with the federal banking system that was not willing to receive funds from the industry, forcing many producers to resort to mechanisms more suited to money laundering in illicit industries. Something similar happened in Uruguay. The country regularised the recreational production and authorised and regulated the state control of it. However, not even the Bank of the Republic of Uruguay was willing to receive money from a lawful activity in the country due to a fear of reprisals from the USA.
It would seem that the architects of the law did not foresee the problem that would arise in the banking industry, owner and lord of the commercial and financial transactions in Uruguay. Were the Uruguayan legislators aware that it was not just a matter of convincing the international system of prohibition to reclassify cannabis as a substance in the drugs conventions but that they also had to convince the banking system to accept money from cannabis transactions? Everything seems to indicate that the directives the banks implement are those that are simply related to the formality of Cannabis being a prohibited substance and the fact that the money from the cannabis market is legal, illegal, black or white has no bearing on decisions.(11)
Uruguay found itself at the mercy of the repressive whims of the US government and in practice was not autonomous nor sovereign. Any drugs policy should take as its starting point that Colombia is not sovereign in the matter and it faces a massive enemy when it comes to solving the problem: the USA. It is not a matter of a restrictive interpretation by Colombian governments, but rather the reality of imperialist domination. This was the case with Uruguay.
… according to the Uruguayan government implementing a national law [on drugs] depends on the modification of a foreign law. Note that at no stage is a modification of international drug treaties that Uruguay has ratified mentioned, but rather a federal law that internally classifies cannabis in the USA.(12)
The government has no proposals in the matter and its proposals for the peasants are remoulds of the previous policies with a slightly modified language. They no longer talk of crop substitution but rather licit alternatives or economies. And the licit alternatives for the countryside are the usual ones, exportable monocultures.
And the iron hand continues for the peasantry. They have talked a lot about distinguishing between large and small-scale coca producers, increasing the definition of small-scale producer as one that has up to 10 hectares. But the iron hand continues. They have said that they will not use forcible eradication but…
Forcible eradication will be applied to crops that: (i) do not fall into the category of “small-scale grower”, (ii) increase in area, (iii) planted after the publication of this policy (regardless of size), (iv) have infrastructure for the production of base and cocaine hydrochloride, (v) do not fulfil their commitments to substitution and other mechanisms on the path to licit economies.(13)
Many peasants have some infrastructure to produce base, an infrastructure that is not all that complicated. So, I don’t know who these peasants who will not be subjected to forcible eradication are. It is not all that different from the policies of Uribe and Pastrana and borrows policies from Plan Colombia, the Exporting Stake of Uribe and the directives of the former Social Action and of course the Peace Laboratories of the European Union and the nefarious apologist for the economic policies of Uribe and also in passing the World Bank, the priest Francisco de Roux: the so-called Productive Alliances.
Productive agreements between the public sector, private sector and grassroot economies
These consist of a tripartite collaboration between the state and the private sector as drivers of the productive reconversion, through actions such as capitalist investment, transfer of know-how and insertion into local, national and international markets. To that end the “Productive agreements for life and hope” will be implemented, in which the state will offer benefits to the businesses that commercially associate themselves with the communities. The Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism will facilitate and strengthen these type of alliances.(14)
Not that long ago in 2017, various current senators and representatives of what is now called the Historic Pact publicly denounced a proposal from Santos on the countryside. They stated:
… limits [the communities] chances of defining the productive and economic model that would allow the building of peace with social justice, by tying it to technical criteria… that give priority to the establishment of alliances and chains of production between small and large producers and the efficient use of rural land, technological innovation, technical aid, credit, irrigation and commercialisation that favour an entrepreneurial large-scale agro-industrial production.(15)
So, what about now? Ah of course, the proposal is yours, and it doesn’t matter whether it is the same proposal or not, but rather who makes it. And if the peasants do not agree with the economic model being imposed, what will happen to them? Well, “a differential treatment will be promoted that will be transitory and conditioned on their signing up to processes on a path to licit economies”.(16) In other words, they are going to jail.
As for money laundering, there is nothing new. The government is obliged by various international treaties to fight against money laundering. But the language used is telling.
This last point [laundering] is based on identifying high value financial targets, understood to be persons or legal entities, goods, assets or bodies that due to their nature, volume or characteristics may be exploited by criminal groups (emphasis is mine) to hide or channel illicit funds and thus launder money from criminal activities.(17)
HBSC Tower, Mexico (Photo source: Wikipedia)
As with other governments, including the USA, the banks are seen as another victim. More so than the peasants, exploited by criminal groups when in reality they themselves are criminal enterprises. The massive laundering of assets that HSBC carried out in Mexico cannot be understood in any other light. There are no measures taken to jail the banks’ directors, cancel their banking licence, freeze their assets, fine them to the point of leaving them naked in the street. No. The asphyxiation the government talks about is like the law, to be applied to some but not to others. They are more concerned about illegal mining in coca zones than the laundering of assets only yards from the Presidential Palace.
The document is very similar to previous policies with some small changes, a slightly distinct language and “new” proposals that are not new. Perhaps we could say that it indicates some goodwill in some aspects, but nothing more. Petro can’t fight for a new paradigm without changing the current one.
Proposing a revision of the international legal framework does not imply a conflict between prohibition or total freedom in the market for psychoactive substances. On the contrary, it means coming up with intermediate solutions such as alternatives to prison, harm reduction strategies and the responsible regulation adult use substances such as cannabis. The progress, failure and lessons learnt from international cooperation on drugs represent an opportunity for the international community to evidence based innovative strategies and policies.(18)
Harm reduction is policy in most of the world, including some parts of the USA. Alternatives to prison also, though in practice it is not always the case in all countries. What is put forward is the current state of play, not a big struggle to change the paradigm. It is a disappointing document, more so than previous policies, as this one tries to play with the language to stupefy, fool and lie to us. In the end, it is another lost opportunity. If you want to see something innovative in drug policy, you would be better off taking a drug, preferably a magic mushroom.
(2) Spencer, M.R. et al. (2023) Estimates of drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and oxycodone: United States, 2021. Vital Statistics Rapid Release; no 27. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. May 2023. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/ 10.15620/cdc:125504. P.3
(3) Spencer MR, Miniño AM, Warner M. Drug overdose deaths in the United States, 2001–2021. NCHS Data Brief, no 457. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2022. DOI: https://dx.doi. org/10.15620/cdc:122556.
News & Views No.9: Chile Coup – Twin Towers – the Legacy Bill
Diarmuid Breatnach (Reading time: 5 mins.)
September 11th is the anniversary of the al Qaeda attack on the new World Trade Center in the USA known as “the Twin Towers” and also of the Pinochet Coup in Chile. The former caused the deaths of 2,996 people and the latter of over 40,000.
These are not happy anniversaries and US Imperialism bears a major portion of the blame for both events.
How so, one might ask? The coup in Chile, probably with CIA help, sure. But the Twin Towers? That was a Muslim jihadist attack AGAINST the USA! Surely we’re not expected to believe that stupid conspiracy theory that the USA ruling class actually staged the attack?
US proxy soldiers, Special forces Afghan National Army, 2021 (Photo sourced: Internet)Osama Bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011), Saudi-born founder and first general emir of Al Qaeda from 1988 until his assassination. (Photo sourced: Internet)
That is truly a crazy conspiracy theory but the historical truth does indeed involve a conspiracy. In 1997 the government of Afghanistan was socialist which was worrying for the USA, so in partnership with Saudi elements, they funded and even founded Muslim jihadist groups there.
These groups were to be encouraged to overthrow the socialist regime and when the USSR sent troops to support the government, to defeat the Russians too. Which they did.
But forget about fantasy stories of traditional tribesmen with ancient muskets fighting a world power’s army – these were jihadists, fundamentalists, armed with modern automatic weapons and mobile missile launchers including SAMs (Surface to Air Missiles).
Forget too about Rambo-led simple hill people – since the US achieved the overthrow of the socialist regime and invaded Afghanistan alongside their British allies, those jihadist groups have been squabbling over their share of the spoils, often murderously.
In fact, US imperialism is largely responsible for the world pestilence of not only jihadism of the Al Qaeda type, but the even more virulent Islamic State variety (which indicates Mary Wollstonecraft’s story of Frankenstein’s monster to be more prediction than fiction).
Explosion in one of the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001 in Al Qaeda attack. (Photo: Sean Adair/ Reuters)Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous story; he returns to attack his creator (Image sourced: Internet)
Although US Imperialism had created Al Qaeda and although Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was totally opposed to the jihadist group (and vice versa), US politicians used the attack on the Twin Towers to ‘justify’ the US military invasion of Iraq.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity” indeed when manipulated by US Imperialism for domestic consumption and for world public opinion, also when assisted by British Imperialism’s Labour Government, in particular by lying-through-his-teeth Tony Blair.
The US-led campaign against Iraq resulted in about 1.5 million deaths through economic sanctions alone followed by over 300,000 civilians in the Western military campaign. These figures do not include deaths and injuries of Iraqi military and of the invading allies under the USA and UK.
Nor do those figures include the many deaths, military and civilian, in internal conflicts since the invasion of Iraq which continue to mount.
The deaths resulting from the coup in Chile were overwhelmingly of civilians as the coup was carried out by the Army with little opposition within the military and the civilian population were mostly unarmed.
Most of the deaths occurred in succeeding days and years as the regime rounded up communists, trade union militants and others suspected of having supported Allende’s party, to torture and execute them, including most famously the renowned musician and singer-songwriter Victor Jara.
The anniversaries of both the Pinochet coup and the Twin Towers have been commemorated in various parts of the world with, it appears, the coup being remembered in most of them, not only in Latin America but also in many countries in Europe where Chilean political exiles found refuge.
In the USA, of course, the attack on the Twin Towers was officially commemorated and probably communally too much more so than the coup in Chile.
Another imperialist-generated disaster, the anniversary of which falls only a couple of days after those two, is that of the Oslo Accords, signed on 13th September 1993 and often also known as a stage in “the Palestinian Peace Process”.
At the White House, supervised by Bill Clinton, elected chief of US Imperialism at the time, Yitzak Rabin for the Israeli Zionist state and Yasser Arafat, for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, signed an agreement, as a result of which the PLO would be permitted to run their own statelet.
Oslo Accords, 13 September 1993, Washington: Yasser Arafat of the PLO shakes hands with Yitzak Rabin of the Zionist State under the stewardship of (then) US President Bill Clinton, representing US Imperialism. (Photo: Gary Hershom/ Reuters)
Hailed as a great breakthrough by most media at the time, the PLO, dominated by Arafat’s Al Fatah, got to have limited self-government within the Zionist State, with the borders of any future Palestinian state undefined and no mention of the millions of Palestinian exiles around the world.
Although the increasing encroachment on Palestinian lands by Zionist settlers was temporarily halted, the land already taken and built upon remained in Zionist hands, that issue and others ‘to be discussed later’ but the Palestinians were to give up the armed resistance immediately.
The South African pacification process had begun earlier and, though enfranchisement of non-white South Africans was not to come until 1994, it was clearly on the way. The ANC promoted pacification processes to Al Fatah and both parties promoted them to Provisional Sinn Féin.1
The Palestinian ‘Process’ was controversial among their people from the start and grew more so as it became clear how little the Palestinian cause had gained and how much had been set aside, along with the growing official corruption and nepotism growing among the Al Fatah organisation.
Though the pacification process was widely rejected in Palestine and failed to install a widely-recognised ‘official’ collusive leadership, it did achieve the fragmentation of the Palestinian leadership and helped to ‘justify’ the demonisation of Hamas, winner of the 2006 elections.
ALTERNATIVES
The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (sic) is quoted in the media as saying that there is no alternative to the UK’s legacy legislation, which proposes to prevent recourse in law for any crimes committed by its soldiers, colonial police, proxies or Government Ministers.
Secretary of State for the Northern Ireland (sic) colony, Chris Heaton Harris (Photo cred: PA)
The legislation in question is titled The Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill.
All political parties in Ireland on both sides of the British Border have vigorously opposed this legislation and THERE CLEARLY IS AN ALTERNATIVE, which is to abandon it. What the UK’s ‘colonial governor’ of the Six Counties means is: no alternative acceptable to the ruling class.
While we’re on alternatives, all liberation movements had and have the alternatives to embracing pacification processes, which is to maintain the path of resistance upon which they embarked until the day they win that for which their people and fighters have sacrificed their liberty and lives.
Allende and the communists in Chile had the alternative of arming the people and purging the Army but instead chose to put their faith in the ‘loyalty’ of Pinochet, ‘democracy’ and the opinion of the Western powers.
“The people armed cannot be harmed”, perhaps, rather than “The people united can never be defeated”.2 Allende’s error cost him his life but also the lives of hundreds of thousands of others.
Women on 11th September hold a candlelit commemoration at La Moneda, Santiago, Chile for the victims – in particular of sexual violence – of the Pinochet coup and dictatorship. (Photo: Adriana Thomasa / EFE)
Imperialists have the alternative of respecting the right to self-determination of the peoples of the world and to cease from exploiting, oppressing and repressing them.
But if they did that, they wouldn’t be imperialists, would they? And since they cannot change their nature, they have to be overthrown.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1Provisional Sinn Féin signed up to the Irish Pacification Process in 1998 and they and the ANC then moved on to promote a pacification process to the leadership of the Basque movement for independence, which also finally signed up to it without even obtaining release of the political prisoners. By that time the Palestinian Process had shown its empty promise and the Second Intifada (2000-2005) demonstrated its rejection by most Palestinian youth and the elections to the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council were won convincingly by Hamas.
2An alternative slogan to “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” was even then being promoted by a smaller communist group: “El pueblo armado jamás será aplastado!”, i.e ‘The armed people will never be crushed’.
The Petro government has reached the end of its first year in which it promised a lot, came through on some things and changed a lot of other things, particularly its position on certain issues.
Before taking a look at it, it should be pointed out that the Historic Pact (PH) is not the first left-wing government in Colombia. The country is still waiting for that. It is a remould of liberalism in the style of Ernesto Samper.
Even so, it is worth looking at its proposals and what it did in this year, as unlike Samper, it did give a lot of hope to the people.
It is generally accepted that Petro would not have been elected President if it were not for the big popular revolt that began on April 28th 2021, an uprising that cost the life of over 80 youths.
We don’t know the exact number of dead and disappeared and less still of the number of young women who were raped and sexually abused by the Police as part of the repression. Even the number of political prisoners is a matter of dispute.
Not due to the absence of the number of people detained but because the amongst Prosecutor’s Office, the press and sections of the PH there are those who seek to divest the detained youths of any political motivations.
They simply paint them as criminals and vandals, the last of these words having been covered in glory during those protests.1
The heroic ‘vandals’:Demonstrators clash with riot police during a protest against a tax reform bill launched by Colombian President Ivan Duque, in Bogota, on April 28, 2021. (Photo cred: Juan Barreto/ AFP). (Photo choice and caption by Rebel Breeze)
So, it comes as no surprise that Petro, like Boric in Chile, did not free the political prisoners from the revolt. He made a few lukewarm attempts to get a handful of them out, but a long way from all of them.
They are still in prison, despite his electoral victory being thanks to their struggle and actions that led them to prison.
It is perhaps the most symbolic transgression as it says sacrifice yourselves but don’t expect anything from me, not even when I owe you everything. Petro has defended himself by saying that it is not his decision to free or imprison anyone.
Recently he stated:
There are still many youths in prison and I get blamed, as if it were up to me to imprison or free them. State bodies and people inside them have decided that these youths should not be freed.
Not because they are terrorists, who would think protesting is terrorism? If not a dictator or Fascist. No, but because they want to punish the youths who rebel.2
Some may feel that he is right in a technical sense, i.e. that it is the Prosecution and the judges who imprison them. But that is to ignore reality.
He himself denigrated them when he referred to them as ‘vandals’ during the protests and since taking office, neither Petro nor the PH have been the visible heads of any initiative to free the prisoners. They washed their hands of the issue.
He didn’t even disband the specialised riot squad, the ESMAD. Unlike other proposals he didn’t even try to.
He changed its name and promised a couple of human rights courses for its members, as if the problem was their lack of attendance at a course or two given by some NGO and not a deep-rooted problem. The ESMAD is a unit that murdered many youths.
It is a body whose name is synonymous with violence, torture, sexual abuse and murder. A name change won’t wash away the blood.
… the promise to put an end to the ESMD was just lip service during the presidential campaign.It wasn’t carried out and the government will fail to carry through on its commitment to the youths who brought the president to power, through the existence of a repressive violent force like this one.
The temptations to infiltrate the marches in order to justify confrontations with the kids will continue to be part of the landscape.3
Petro gives his voters a clenched fist on his inauguration as President in August last year but many remain in jail and the rest get little or nothing. (Photo sourced: Internet) (Photo choice and caption by Rebel Breeze)
In economic terms the government promised a lot during the campaign, but once in power, it quickly softened its proposals and in some other cases they didn’t get a majority of votes in Congress.
The lack of votes in Congress is not a simple one of not coming through, nor is it due to betrayals by the PH nor manoeuvres by other forces that Petro can’t control.
The PH is a coalition of sectors of the right with sectors of what passes for social democracy in Colombia. It was not inevitable, but rather Petro actively advocated that it be like that.
It is worth recalling that at first, he wasn’t going to choose Francia Márquez as his vice-president but rather a right winger like Roy Barreras.
However there are economic aspects that are under his control, but for the moment they remain as just proposals, rather than real policies that have gone through Congress. On the land question, Petro proposes monocultures and agribusiness.
This was clearly to be seen in the proposal to buy three million hectares from the cattle ranchers.
Petro’s vision of the countryside is one of it being at the service of big money and the promotion of cash crops, despite some references to the production of foodstuffs for internal consumption and the so-called bio-economy.
Something similar can be seen with his proposals for clean energy. He spoke a great deal about it during the electoral campaign and some of his proposals, or outlines as they stand, look good.
That Colombia no longer depend on oil and coal is not a bad idea and that it be replaced with alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power looks good, until we actually examine the details.
One of his first stumbles, in that sense, was with the Indigenous people, as La Guajira is a poor area that has suffered the consequences of coal mining.
He did not take them into account and they reminded him that what is proposed for their territory should have their support, though legally it is not quite the case, and that it should also benefit them.
He partially rectified the case, but the big question is, if he wants an energy transition why does he have to seek out French and other foreign capital to finance it. Does he want to hand over the wind and solar power as they are still doing with oil and coal?
It would seem so. According to Petro:
We need investments that help us carry this out: we would have a matrix of foreign investment centred on the construction of clean energies in South America, with a guaranteed market, if we have direct link to the United States and by sea with the rest of the world.4
If you substitute oil and coal for clean energy, you begin to see the problem: the resources of Colombia in the service of big money and the countries of the North.
If we are to have a real change and energy transition, we must end the idea of Northern energy consumption regardless of where it comes from as sustainable and that countries such as Colombia must supply energy for a planet-destroying consumption model.
Neither have there been great advances on the issue of peace. He did reactivate the dialogue with the ELN, but stumbled with something that is still an integral part of his policy, the so-called Total Peace.
In his proposal he compared the insurgent group, the ELN to the drug gangs and paramilitary groups such as the Clan de Golfo. It was not a mistake, Petro really does see the ELN as a criminal gang.
He made it clear in his speech to the military and he reaffirmed it when he named the blood thirsty Mafia boss and former Murderer-in-Chief of the paramilitaries, Salvatore Mancuso as a Peace Promoter.
With that he placed the ELN leadership on the same plane as the paramilitaries. And they have implicitly accepted it for the moment.
In Petro’s discourse Colombia is a violent country and there is no way to understand it and peace has to be made with everyone as they are all the same, the insurgency and the narcos. Not even Santos was that creative in delegitimising the guerrillas.
Mancuso took on his role and once again spoke of the land they had stolen, the disappeared etc. He has been telling us for two decades now that tomorrow he will reveal all, but tomorrow never comes.
When Uribe invited Mancuso to the Congress of the Republic, Petro had a different attitude.
His response was blunt and he described Uribe as a president that was captured by the paramilitaries and that Mancuso manipulated the Congress stating that “if under this flag of peace, dirtied by cocaine what is essentially being proposed is an alliance with genocidal drug traffickers and political leaders… then we are not contributing to any sort of peace.”5
And we end the year with a scandal. I have on many occasions compared Petro and the PH to Samper and the Liberal Party of the 90s. But not in my most fertile delirium could I imagine that Petro and his son would give us another Process 8000.
Samper managed to reinvent himself as a statesman and human rights defender, despite his government’s dreadful record, following the outcry over drug money in his election campaign. He has publicly supported Petro and the PH.
Now he can advise them on how to deny what is as plain as day. Illicit funds went into the PH’s campaign as has happened with all election campaigns.
Petro finds himself in the eye of the storm due to the manoeuvres of his son in asking for and receiving money. His ambassador in Caracas has boasted about obtaining 15,000 million pesos [3.3 million euros] that were not reported to the authorities.
Those on the “left” who gave Petro unconditional support defend him, saying that it all happened behind his back.
The only thing left to say about that is, a little bit of respect for Samper please! He established his copyright, authorship of that expression in relation to dirty money. They will have to come up with another one.
For the moment Petro says, I didn’t raise him, which is true. But his son is the beneficiary of a type of political nepotism. As was the case with Samper, the only doubt is whether Petro knew or not.
That a government which is supposedly progressive has found itself entangled in such a storm is revealing of a government in which politics is a family business.
Something similar happened to the FARC commander Iván Márquez with his nephew who turned out to be a DEA informant.
On the drugs issue it is clear that the discourse and reality do not match at any point. Petro went to the UN to announce a new drugs policy. He put forward various aims for his government and criticised the war on drugs.6
It seems like a bad joke that the said policy has not yet been published. What we have seen is that the fumigations continue, the Yanks smile on and occasionally there is talk of going after the big fish, without saying who they are.
We know that he is not talking about the banks, and less still of the European companies that supply the precursor chemicals. The big fish will turn out to be middle ranking thugs in the cities of Colombia, at best.
So, it has been a year that wasn’t that different to others. Yes, there were changes, some proposal or other that was half interesting, but even the right wing does that occasionally.
The vote of confidence cast in the ballot box is still waiting to see the promised changes. But we increasingly see a government without a clear aim and reinventing old policies as new ones, with the same results as before.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1 See Ó Loingsigh’s article Long Live the Vandals – R.B.
A heart-breaking story with courage and a heart-warming ending.
Report by Luciana Bertoia from Pagina 12 published through arrangement with Publico.es Translation by D.Breatnach
The last time Julio Santucho saw his wife, Cristina Navajas, was on June 14, 1976. Appointed as head of international policy for the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores), he had to leave Argentina for six months.
They had been married for almost five years then and had two children: Camilo, three years old, and Miguel, who had not yet turned one. The three accompanied him to the Retiro terminal, where he took a bus to Sao Paulo and then arrived in Rome.
In the terminal, Cristina had Miguel in her arms and Camilo by the hand. When saying goodbye to him, she insisted on a promise:
– I only ask you one thing. If something happens to me, you have to take the boys with you. They shouldn’t stay with your mom, with my mom, or with other comrades. They have to stay with you.
– But, Cris, we’ve been living in hiding for a long time, and nothing has ever happened to us.
“Now it’s different,” she cut him off.
One day before a month had passed since Julio’s departure, Cristina was kidnapped by the Dictatorship. She was in the apartment at 735 Warnes Avenue, where her sister-in-law Manuela Santucho lived.
Another comrade from the PRT-ERP, Alicia D’Ambra, also lived with them. All three were kidnapped that day. The oppressors left Cristina’s two sons, Camilo and Miguel, and Manuela’s son, Diego, in the apartment.
Cristina managed to ask a neighbour to call her mother, Nélida Navajas. When the phone rang, Nélida had to ask where the boys were. For security reasons, she did not know their address.
When she arrived, she heard the screams of the two youngest, Miguel and Diego, from the street. Camilo was asleep.
Nélida found her daughter’s bag on the ground. Inside was a series of letters that she had written to Julio, waiting to receive an address to to which to send them. She had started writing the last one on Saturday, July 10, but had finished it the next day:
“Miguel is much better, he hardly coughs anymore, but he is more of a bandit and wilder every day. Cami is calmer and doesn’t give me work, the only thing is that he is getting clingy to me. He asked again which house we are going to, which house is this, etc.
Now the one who is not well is me, I do not know if I am pregnant,” she told her husband.
Julio found out about the kidnappings the next day, when he called to greet his brother-in-law on his birthday.
Refugee from Argentinian Dictatorship accompanied by a son as he attends a press conference about his reunion with another son, abducted by the regime, 43 years ago. (Photo: Enrique Garcia Medina/ EFE)
That day he spoke ten times with his mother-in-law. He would not hesitate to return to Buenos Aires to collect his children, but the PRT sent two comrades who, pretending to be a couple , took the children out and abroad to their father.
Forty-six years later, Julio managed to meet his third child, the baby that Cristina had while she was kidnapped in the Pozo de Banfield, after having gone through Coordinación Federal and Orletti Automotive (places of detention of the fascist regime – Trans.).
He is the 133rd grandchild found by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (group of women who began the campaign to trace those made missing by the fascist regime – Trans.)
In an interview with Página 12, Julio Santucho relates how he was reunited with his youngest son, now a 47-year-old adult.
How was the search?
The main heroine in this story is Cristina, who for eight or nine months was pregnant in the most inhumane conditions: mistreatment, torture, bad food. She put up with all of this with willpower and finally gave birth to our son.
My son began to question his (new family – Trans.) relationship based on references from those close to the family. A sister who lived with him for 20 years told him “these are not your parents.”
From the way he was treated by the appropriator who raised him, he came to realise that he was not his father.
In 2019, he began to search, although stopped during the pandemic and then resumed. He had a birth certificate from another province. Finally this year he managed to have his DNA tested.
We searched but we had no approximation or probability of discovering my son. It was an exceptional case: he was born in the Pozo de Banfield, but police doctor Jorge Bergés did not sign the certificate. He surprised us.
What is it like to meet a son who is 46 years old?
It is good. The bad thing is that they took 46 years from us. It is a victory for the human rights organizations that have fought for this and it is a defeat for the dictatorship. They wanted to steal my son but I, later than ever, got him back.
My mother-in-law, Nélida Navajas, joined the Abuelas (Grandmothers’ group – Trans.) to look for her grandson. Abuelas is an irreplaceable institution, it is an enormous benefit to society because it is precisely the place where people who have doubts can recover their identity.
In July 1976, you lost much of your family and now, another July but 47 years later, you have your son back.
You strike a chord. On July 13, Cristina, Manuela and Alicia were kidnapped. She was a comrade that I also knew because she worked in the party schools.
On the 19th, six days later, they killed my brother “Roby” (Mario Roberto Santucho, leader of the PRT-ERP), and later my brother Carlos.
It was a tragic week for the family. We are not better-off than others. All the 30,000 disappeared were brave, generous and devoted themselves to a fight for the well-being of society and humanity.
What could he know about Cristina during her captivity?
There are testimonies like that of Adriana Calvo. The Santuchos were visited by all the mothers that were in the Pozo de Banfield. Adriana asked to spend a day with them.
She had her baby in her arms and so as not to worry her Cristina did not tell her that she had had a child and that it had been taken from her.
Adriana, afterwards, spoke at the trial of Cristina’s tremendous generosity in not telling her anything so she wouldn’t worry about her because they could take the baby away from her. Do you realise how far thinking about the welfare of others went?
They were screwed. But they told her: “We are Santucho, we don’t have any possibility of leaving, but they are going to release you.”
And then there is that scene that Adriana recounts: when the officers arrived, all the women made a human wall – led by Manuela, Cristina and Alicia – and the men had to leave without being able to take their baby from her.
They were in a concentration camp. They knew they could shoot them all at that moment.
And now how is the reunion going?
Some ask me about the appropriator of my son, all I say is that I hope that Justice intervenes. For now, this is all like walking on clouds. We talk to my son every day, we see each other often. Now we have the commitment to make a video call to my granddaughters. Let’s go little by little.
Joy is infinite. Besides, we have time. I am 78 years old. My father died at 89. I have a brother in Santiago del Estero who is 101, another who is 96. If they don’t kill us Santucho, we live a long time. So I look forward to enjoying my son for a few more years.
End.
ADDITIONAL NOTESby D. Breatnach
The Argentinian dictatorship lasted from 1976 to 1983 and apart from banning dissenting newspapers and organisations, detained, tortured and killed thousands.
But not only that, very young children and babies were abducted and given to couples who supported the regime to raise as their own. This was also done by other dictatorships, including the Spanish Franco regime of four decades.
In a time when a week-old military coup in Niger is threatened with invasion by France and by some western-allied African states, it is well to remember how other military dictatorships have been viewed by western states.
The lack of democratic elections and opposition parties did not matter to the western states who in fact fully supported the Argentinian and many other coups and dictatorships.
The military dictatorship of Argentina only became a problem to the UK’s ruling class when Argentina’s military invaded the British colony of the Malvinas/ Falkland Islands in 1982, the same year that the USA stopped supporting the junta for the first time.
Gearóid Ó Loingsigh 12 April 2023 (first published in Socialist Democracy)
(Reading time: 5 mins.)
The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, announced in a National Peace, Reconciliation and Harmony Council (CNPRC) meeting that the state didn’t have sufficient funds to fulfil the Havana Accord signed with the FARC.(1)
The situation seems to be so serious that according to the President it will take 125 years to fulfil it. There are some points in which he is right, but only if we ignore the most obvious things: the nature of the Accord itself.
He alludes to this and asks some rhetorical questions, ones which he should really ask as proper questions, not as some gesture in his oratory, but rather as questions to the FARC, Santos and all those who promoted the Accord nationally and internationally.
Among guarantors of the Colombian conflict pacification deal signed by, at the time, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, left, and leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Timoleón Jiménez, known as “Timochenko,” during a news conference announcing an agreement between the two parts in Havana on Sept. 23, 2015. Among those applauding, Cuban President Raul Castro at far right of picture. (Source photo: Internet)
Petro asks “was that Accord signed with the aim of applying it, or with the aim of disarming the FARC and later, Colombian style reworking everything?(2)
Well of course it was sonny boy. That much was clear. At the time you were told so and those of us who criticised the Accord were accused of wanting more war, ignoring that many of us had never participated in or supported the war. It was a debate they didn’t want to have.
During the not very open process negotiated behind closed doors, it was said, in the midst of the euphoria of the signing and the parties in public squares with huge screens in the streets so one would miss it, that criticisms were not welcome.
They were, as an old friend used to say, as welcome as a fart in a space suit.
Petro continued and stated something he certainly believes is very important.
I want to implement the Peace Accord, but it costs 30.5 billion Euros. If the Santos government signed this in the name of the state and society is represented in this, then, tell me where am I to get this 30.5 billion?(3)
There is an easy answer to that question. The money can be got from the same place that they, and in that I include Petro, thought it was when they signed the Accord in 2016. Don’t ask where they are going to get the money, but rather tell us where you expected to get it in 2016.
Petros giving a clenched fist salute after his inauguration as President of Colombia. (Source photo: Internet)
Senators such as Iván Cepeda who played an important role in the process can point to where. The cost of the Accord was obvious from day one, this problem is not new and it is just not credible thatPetro and his Congress benches have just realized how much money was needed.
But the truth is Petro, Cepeda wanted to bring the FARC to an end and rework things later. All of them without exceptions. Of if this is not the case, maybe they can tell us where they thought they would get the money.
The former FARC commander, Timochenko said that war against the FARC (he excludes all of the other guerrilla groups that have existed) cost 83.7 billion Euros and the 30.5 of Petro is a minimal cost for the chance of a country in peace.
He is partially right, except that the problem is not about money or amounts, but rather the Accord itself and their perspective that what is needed is money and not political changes. The Havana Accord reads like shopping list, like a list of demands and a not very precise list at that.
A Land Bank would be set up with three million hectares, but it doesn’t say where and left it to the whim of whichever government.
So Petro announced that he would fulfil that part by buying land off cattle ranchers. The same ranchers whose spokesperson José Felix Lafaurie accepted that Fedegan’s affiliates, rice growers and various multinationals financed the right-wing paramilitaries.(4)
Nothing happened to him, nor to the 10,000 cattle ranchers who had signed an open letter where they acknowledged their crime.(5) At the time it was argued that the Prosecutor was not in a position to process that many people.
It wasn’t true, the crime had been publicly vindicated and they also said that there was nowhere to put 10,000 criminals. This wasn’t true either.
According to the prison service’s own figures and the calculations of the Corporación Excelencia en Justicia, in 2006 the Colombian prison system had a capacity for 52,414 prisoners with 60,021 actually held in them.
In 2011, that figure had risen to a capacity of 75,260 with 100,451 people in them i.e. they managed to put 40,000 poor prisoners in overcrowded conditions, but they had no room for 10,000 paramilitaries and their lackies.
In 2006 there were 19,353 prisoners on remand.(6) A little bit of creativity with the judicial abuse of remand and they could have put the paramilitary funders in jail without any problems.
The prison population eventually reached the figure of 125,000 prisoners in overcrowded conditions whilst others rambled around their lands despite having acknowledged their crime.
What was missing was the will. But instead of spending money buying land from paramilitaries and their backers, Petro could confiscate the land of those 10,000, amongst others. It wouldn’t cost that much.
There are other measures he could take with a view to peace, justice and truth. Petro could ask for the extradition of the Board of Chiquita who paid a 25 million dollar fine in the US having accepted their responsibility in the crime of financing paramilitary groups.
It wouldn’t cost more than the price of posting the request. There are other measures that have some bureaucratic costs, like forcing public bodies to comply with land restitution findings, something which does not happen. It also only requires the will to do so.
Petro’s focus is the same one as the FARC and the Santos’ government and other peaceniks, who are now Congress reps: it is a question of money. But this is not the case. It is a question of returning stolen land, reviving organisations, guaranteeing the right to exercise one’s rights.
It is also the disbandment of the specialised riot squad, ESMAD. It is more expensive to change its name and give it a makeover, as Petro proposes, than abolishing it.
He wanted to buy fighter jets at a cost of 3,150 million dollars. Due to public reaction, he backtracked but he did buy the Barak MX air defence system from Israel at a cost of 131.2 million dollars.(7) He also bought 18 Howitzers from Israel at a cost of 101.7 million dollars.(8)
Such systems are for conventional wars between countries, they are of no use against insurgents, i.e. they are toys for the military. Maybe they will be used in the Coup that Petro’s followers announce all the time. It is what happened in Chile.
So, is there any money or not? And what will be done with the things that don’t cost much? Why don’t they reduce the extravagant salaries of the magistrates in the Special Jurisdiction for Peace who to date have produced little?
But then, at least he partly accepts what was always the case, that the peace process and the Havana Accord were a mockery of the victims of the Colombian conflict. Their only purpose was to remove the FARC from the field, particularly in areas with oil and other natural resources.
No one sought to solve any deep-seated problems in the country and here we are with the tale that there is a lack of money, when really what was lacking throughout the entire process were clear political positions.
(3) Ibíd., Euro figures were calculated at 4906 pesos to the Euro and the original figure of 150 billion in the article was taken using the Spanish definition of billion, which is a million, million.
(4) El Cambio No 704 diciembre 2006/enero 2007 Diez Preguntas (Entrevista con José Félix Lafaurie p. 48)
(5) El Espectador (17/12/2006) La hora de los ganaderos, p. 2A
Gearóid Ó Loingsigh (with kind donation of photos)
(Reading time: 7 mins.)
08 March 2023
Photo Coca Plants Northern Colombia: G.O.L.
The drugs issue in Colombia supposedly occupies the time of and is a concern to the government.
It has been an important issue for all the governments and as was to be expected it is one that has come up again in the dialogues with the ELN, despite this organisation denying any links to the drugs trade.
The author (left) and Pablo Beltran, the ELN negotiator (centre) and representative of social movement in Ecuador (right) in 2017 conference in University of Simon Bolivar, Quito, Ecuador. (Photo: GOL)
In the peace process with the FARC, agreement was reached on the issue. What was agreed to in Point 4 of the Havana Accord was abysmal and showed that the FARC did not understand the problem nor the possible solutions.
Of course, there could be a difference between what the FARC understood and what it agreed to, as at the end of the day the state won the war and imposed the greater part of what the FARC signed up to.
Following the agreement in the declarations of the main FARC commanders there is nothing to be seen that indicates that they really understood the problem. Will it be any different with the ELN?
One of the main concerns of the ELN has been to put a distance between themselves and the drugs trade.
Whilst it is true that the ELN is not the FARC, it is also true that in their areas of influence or those contiguous there are coca and poppy crops and the USA is not going to believe them that they have nothing to with it, whether they like it or not. The ELN accepts that it places taxes on economic activities and for the USA that is drug trafficking.
So, some time ago, the ELN issued a statement where they restated that they have nothing to do with drugs and invited an international commission to visit the country to see the reality for itself.(1) They ask that a UN delegate take part in the delegation. They also make a series of proposals in relation to the issue as such.
On the first point, the ELN feels sure of itself regarding its ability to show in practice that they are not drug traffickers. The ELN correctly states that:
When the Colombian government and the USA accuse the ELN of having an active role in the trade, they are lying, but above all they are covering up for those really responsible and the deep-seated problems, which indicate their unwillingness to take real and effective measures.(2)
ELN guerrilla camp, Colombia (Photo: GOL)
But for the USA, it is not about whether they are guilty or not, it is a political tool and weapon and to give them a voice and vote in the affair is extremely dangerous. When the USA accuses the ELN of being drug traffickers, it is not making a mistake.
A mistake on their part would be to say something they believe and be wrong about it, but they accuse the ELN for political reasons on the basis of their strategic needs and the legal basis to their accusations is the least of it: it is just propaganda. By inviting them into the country, the ELN falls into their trap.
The UN participated in the commissions of investigation for supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The lack of evidence of such weapons wasn’t of much use.
The USA played around with supposed or real non-compliance by Saddam and did what they always wanted to do: invade Iraq. In this they counted on the explicit support of Great Britain and the tacit support of others.
There is a myth in Colombia that the only baddies are the USA and that other imperialist powers such as Canada (a country that is not seen as imperialist by many sections of the “Colombian left”), and other countries of the European Union are good, or at least not really that bad to the point they are friends of the Colombian people.
In the case of Colombia, the EU competes with the US in almost everything. The EU is Colombia’s second commercial partner and its companies are dominant in sectors such as mining, health and oil, amongst others.
The ELN also asks for the legalization of drugs. The demand is justified and quite opportune, but their counterparts i.e. the Colombian state is not sovereign in the matter and furthermore there is a need to clarify what is understood by legalization.
If by legalization they mean legalizing production for medical purposes, the bad news is that medical production is already legal. The thing is, that it is controlled. In fact, in many jurisdictions they don’t talk of illegal drugs but rather controlled substances.
Cocaine is a controlled substance. Its production for medical reasons is authorized by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) and production is almost exclusively carried out in Peru. And the market is quite small, not even reaching 400 kilos per year as I pointed out in an earlier article.(3) It solves nothing in relation to Colombia.
If on the other hand, they are talking about legalizing recreational use, something which could positively impact the Colombian countryside, then it is a matter of international jurisdiction. Colombia cannot legalise it on its own.
Colombia is a signatory to the Single Convention of 1961 that holds sway in the matter and in addition there are power relationships at play.
It doesn’t matter whether it legalises production for recreational use, it will never be able to legally export it, not only without the consent of the other country, but also the whole setup of the UN and its bodies such as the INCB i.e. at the end of the day, the USA.
Even if it is legalized for internal consumption, there are other problems that have already arisen in countries such as Uruguay which legalised recreational use of marijuana or some of the states in the USA.
The banking system dare not receive funds from those legalised markets and the producers resort to old methods more akin to money laundering to deposit legal funds in legal accounts in a legal banking system.
Even in the hypothetical case of the USA and the EU agreeing, the legalisation of cocaine would go far beyond Colombian cocaine and would include other drugs such as opium and its derivatives such as heroin. It is worth looking at the drugs market and its production.
According to the UN, cocaine is produced directly or indirectly in eight Latin American countries (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia account for almost all of it), whilst 57 countries produce opium, the Asian countries being the largest producers (Afghanistan, Myanmar and Mexico dominate the market).
A bucket of opium poppy seed (Photo: GOL)
Cannabis, which is the most widely consumed drug in the world is produced in 154 countries.
For 2020, the UN calculated that there were 246,800 hectares of opium and 234,000 of coca.(4) They also calculate a production of 7,930 tonnes in 2021(5) and 1,982 tonnes of cocaine in 2020.(6) We are not talking about small quantities of production or land. Almost half a million hectares between these two drugs and 64 countries.
Any proposal of legalisation has to include these countries and their peasantry.
The number of drug users is also large. The UN calculates that in 2020 there were 209 million cannabis consumers, 61 million people who had consumed opiates, 24 million amphetamine users, 21 million cocaine consumers and 20 million users of ecstasy.(7)
They say that in 2020, they had calculated that 284 million people between the ages of 15-64 years used drugs, i.e. one in every 18 people in this cohort.(8)
There are consequences to this, in economic but also cultural terms regarding the use and abuse of substances. But there also consequences in terms of health. Some 600,000 people received some treatment for drug problems.(9)
So when the ELN says that “Drug addicts are ill and should be cared for by the states and not pursued as delinquents”(10) their idea is correct, however, the size of the problem is greater than the real capacity of the health systems in the countries that have large numbers of users.
Photo Opium Poppy Nariño Colombia: G.O.L.
The total number of people injecting drugs is 5,190,000 in Asia, 2,600,000 in Europe and 2,350,000 in the Americas (almost 75% of which is in north America).(11)
Of those who inject, 5.5 million have Hepatitis C, 1.4 million are HIV positive and 1.2 million are HIV positive and also have Hepatitis C.(12) These are not minor problems and are high-cost illnesses.
Of course, these figures do not include the unlawful abuse of legal pharmaceuticals. In the USA almost 80% of the overdoses are from the consumption of legal opiates such as fentanyl, which caused 78,238 deaths in 2021 in that country.
But the issue does require legalisation and not other means that the FARC aimed for. The peasants of Colombia did not make a mistake in choice of crop when they planted coca. Coca was and continues to be a very profitable crop, despite all the difficulties that it generates.
There is no need to substitute it with another crop such as cocoa or African palm etc. It is not about the crop but rather the production model and the political and economic context.
The increase in coca production in Colombia, is not due to subjective factors such as the decisions of peasants, not even of the drug barons and less still of the insurgencies but rather objective economic factors.
This is a key point. It was the decisions of northern countries that impacted the countryside and pushed thousands of peasants around the world to grow opium poppy and coca. The neoliberal cutback policies in the north also contributed to the dramatic rise in problem drug use due to the increase in misery in those countries.
Bedding, equipment and reading material in an ELN guerrilla camp, Colombia (Photo: GOL)
In any discussion we should distance ourselves from the idea that the drugs problem can be solved in a negotiation with the ELN, although they could negotiate some points that would contribute positively to a solution.
But the problem is political and the free trade agreements and other measures that had a negative impact on the countryside have to be looked at again.
Also, they have to reach an agreement with the Colombian government, not for some perks for peasants nor corrupt projects and budgets such as those the FARC agreed to, but rather a political agreement where the government argues and campaigns for the derogation of the Single Convention of 1961.
For the moment, and only for the moment the purchase of warplanes with which Petro and Márquez hoped to cuddle up to the military, leaving aside the basic needs of the Colombians has collapsed.
But Petro and Márquez have not given up the ghost. So, they bought the Barak MX air defence system.(1) It is a system for defence against aerial and missile attacks. We don’t know who the enemies that the country has are, nor who they hope to use this system against, but they bought it.
To cap it all, they manufacturer is Israel, as if the country hadn’t had enough of the Zionist state’s interference.
It is worth remembering that it was Israeli mercenaries at the request of the then Colombian government who trained paramilitary groups in the Magdalena Medio region in the 1980s.
Though really, if you wanted to buy death, there are no angels in the market. The main suppliers of weapons to Colombia are the USA and the European Union, i.e. the butchers of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and other recent wars.
Colombia’s military expenditure is significant, accounting for around 3.4% of GDP in 2021, i.e. 10.006 million dollars (constant prices of 2020).(2)
Colombia military parade (Image sourced: Internet)
We have to go back as far as 1995 to find a year in which military expenditure was less than 3% of GDP, though in that year it represented 14.8% of the national budget. It was almost always above 10% of the total budget.
Israeli sales to Colombia are not new. All governments have bought arms from Israel, except Duque’s. The purchase by Petro and Márquez is another sign that they have no intention of breaking with the past, with the military or any sector the bourgeoisie.
A progressive government would not buy an air defence system to protect against an imaginary enemy. The country needs more pencils, stethoscopes and less missiles. But Petro and Márquez are determined to please the military.
In all their press conferences the military turn up, Petro and Márquez have not broken with that practice, more suited to a military dictatorship, that not even the Biden government does.
Gabriela Marquez & Gustavo Petro, partnership in charge of Colombia. (Image sourced: Internet)
The military pose as statues or caricatures of The Simpsons in press conferences, regardless of the topic, but Petro and Márquez want them by their side.
They talk a lot about total peace, and a change, but a civil government feels the need to put the military besides them at every turn and never misses a chance to waste the health and education budget etc. on weapons.
Text by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh (images and video chosen by Rebel Breeze)
29 July 2022 (first published in English in Socialist Democracy)
The Colombian Truth Commission’s (CEV) report Findings and Recommendations aims to be a text that reveals a truth, that up to now was hidden or partially hidden from Colombian society.
It is true that in Colombia, after decades of a conflict that began before many of those actually alive were born, along with propaganda from the media, the churches and political parties, there are many aspects that are not well known to everyone.
That is not to say that it is a document that reveals or uncovers these truths. If we look at the issue of paramilitaries and how the CEV treats it, various problems with this commission are evident.
It comes out with some truths about the paramilitaries that initially give one hope about the content of the Report.
Paramilitarism is not just an armed actor – understood as private armies with terror strategies aimed at the civilian population – but rather a network of interests and alliances also associated with economic, social and political projects that managed to impose an armed territorial control through terror and violence and also through mechanisms to legitimate it, the establishment of rules and norms.(1)
It is true that the paramilitaries are about more than just massacres, but the CEV not only fails to explain what the interests at stake are, but it gets it back to front about who is in charge and who serves.
It inverts the roles many times and though it acknowledges the role the State played, or still plays, the State is presented almost as just another victim of the paramilitaries.
The CEV accepts that the USA played a role in the 1960s.
The recommendations of US missions that visited the country during the administration of Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958-1962) led to Decree 1381 of 1963, Decree 3398 of 1965 and National Defence Law 48 of 1968, through which the involvement of civilians in the armed conflict was institutionalised.(2)
But it doesn’t explore this role that much further, it would seem as if various north American governments played no further role than that, that they have not been the one constant factor in the history of the conflict, as if their support to all the Colombian governments, the training of the Colombian military in the School of the Americas did not count for anything, and of course there is Plan Colombia which is dealt with by the report.
Neither do they explore the role of the state that passed those laws. It would seem as if the laws appeared through magic. They accept that paramilitaries enjoyed legal status for a long time, but they put no names to the matter, nor who benefitted from those laws or what were the interests of the presidents and congresspeople involved in passing those laws and decrees.
We are told of how Virgilio Barco suspended the legality of the paramilitaries in 1989, but according to the CEV it was revived in practice through the rural security cooperatives known as the Convivir.(3)
It is dubious to say that the Convivir were the paramilitaries in practice and not paramilitaries de jure, as it is not the case that these cooperatives were corrupted.
It was always the intention to legalise the paramilitaries through this figure and in that, President Cesar Gaviria and his Minister for Defence, Rafael Pardo both of whom signed the degree that brought them to life, played an important role as did President Samper who implemented the decree during his government.
These people are not spoken of as promotors of paramilitaries.
To the CEV the paramilitaries are a type of loose cannon, independent of the State, with a life of their own. The ills of the country are the result of the actions of this loose cannon and how it infiltrates the state, the institutions, including the military and how it co-opts spaces.(4)
Thus, the institutionalisation – through various governments – of armed groups legally at the service of private interests, as well as their legitimation from the 1960s show not only the tolerance but also the promotion by state of the outsourcing of public security (bold not in the original). The legal cover and political legitimation have allowed for the maintenance and expansion of the paramilitaries, structures that were co-opted by paramilitary bosses.(5)
To the CEV, the paramilitaries were an outsourcing of security to private bodies that went wrong. Dr. Frankenstein thought he was creating life and his creation turned into a monster despite his wishes.
Paramilitaries are referred to in this manner throughout the document, they exist and act with the approval of named sectors, but the responsibility does not lie with any known person. They are incapable of saying that Samper and Gaviria legalised the paramilitaries.
Samper was fully aware of what the Convivir were and defended them tooth and nail during his government, and lashed out at those who denounced the Convivir as paramilitary structures.
Ernesto Samper, President of Colombia from 1994 to 1998, representing the Liberal Party. Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) 2014-2017. He defended the Convivir and later pretended the paramilitary terrorism had been done behind his back. (Photo sourced: Internet)
Samper never put an end to the Convivir, rather it was the Constitutional Court that declared that they couldn’t use arms reserved for the State’s military, so the paramilitaries had no need to use this cover any more if they couldn’t obtain arms legally.
The paramilitaries were a state policy as can be seen from the laws and decrees enacted, in the promotions of military officers involved in massacres and also in the persecution of social actors, human rights organisations and in a number of cases the systematic murder of witnesses.
The CEV talks about these things but does not connect them together as a state policy. It shamelessly accepts the excuses of Uribe that everyone lied to him, the face Santos put on of it wasn’t me, or the “it was all done behind my back” of Samper.
A real truth commission would try to tell us not only what happened but who did it (with full names) and also why.
The same complacent attitude it takes with the State is extended to the business people. It talks of interests but does not put a name to them. But thanks to the decades long work of social organisations we can put a name to many of the cases.
The CEV doesn’t do that and goes on with its tale of some sectors. But these same sectors have been more honest than the CEV. The CEV names the cattle rancher’s association in Puerto Boyacá, Acdegam, as a key player in the founding of the paramilitary groups.(6)
But it does not mention the role played by Texaco. Carlos Medina Gallego in his book Autodefensas, Paramilitares y Narcotráfico in Colombia describes the birth of this group.
The USA-based petroleum company was present in the meeting that set up the paramilitary murder group. (Image sourced: Internet)
The process in the region began with the creation of a private army or paramilitary group alongside the army to jointly combat the subversives.
This group was set up during the military mayorship of Captain Oscar Echandía, in a meeting which, in addition to the Mayor, was attended by representatives of the Texas Petroleum Company, members of the Cattle Ranchers Committee, political leaders, the Civil Defence, members of the armed forces and other special guests.(7)
Neither does it mention the National Federation of Cattle Ranchers, Fedegan. The president of Fedegan, however did acknowledge the role they played. In 2006, in an interview given to Cambio magazine, he said that they had paid paramilitaries, as had others such as flower and rice growers amongst others.(8)
National Federation of Cattle Ranchers in Colombia — part of the group that set up the paramilitary murder group — their president admitted in 2006 that they had paid paramilitaries, as had some large agricultural interests. (Image sourced: Internet)
Around the same time, 10,000 cattle ranchers, traders and industrialists signed a letter acknowledging and justifying their financing of the paramilitaries.(9)
The CEV describes paramilitarism as something unstable and changeable in nature and that “it has had diverse actors, motives and modus operandi, which leads to difficulties when it comes to trying to come up with a static definition.”(10)
Yes, it is true that the paramilitaries have changed over time, as has the army, the state, the political parties, the guerrillas and even society. Nothing stands still, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come up with an approximation of what it is, taking into account the variables.
That is what the study of history, politics and also any branch of knowledge is about. So, the CEV doesn’t describe the paramilitaries as a state policy, not because it is a changing phenomenon, but rather because it doesn’t want to.
It deals with various paramilitary forms and leaves out one very clear telling example: the AAA (American Anti-Communist Alliance).
One of the founders of the Triple A (American Anti-communist Alliance) paramilitary terrorists, at the time Lt-Col. Harold Bedoya of the Charry Solano Battalion, later Commander of the Colombian Armed Forces. (Photo sourced: Internet)
The AAA was a paramilitary structure founded by the commanders of the Charry Solano Battalion, amongst them Lieutenant Colonel Harold Bedoya, who would later become the Commander of the armed forces.
The existence of such a paramilitary structure operating within the battalion was public knowledge as five soldiers reported it to the presidency, the Procurator, the Organisation of American States and the news was even published in the Mexican press. This structure is not mentioned in the CEV report.
Another paramilitary structure that is dealt with partially in the Report is the 07 Naval Intelligence Network. However, it does not delve into the reality of the Network and the significance of its activity as a state policy.
The case of the 07 Naval Intelligence Network based in Barrancabermeja that operated in part of Bolívar and Cesar stands out due to the seriousness of it. According to the ordinary criminal justice system, the network functioned as a powerful “death squad” with logistical means, personnel trained to kill and was responsible for dozens of murders, forced disappearances and massacres whose victims were mainly trade unionists, politicians, community leaders and activists. The network financed paramilitaries using secret funds.(11)
But the network was the paramilitary structure par excellence. Despite the CEV’s quote, they do not go into great detail as the issue cannot be dealt with and conclude that it was just some functionaries and not the military unit as such.
The Network murdered at least 68 people, though some estimates put the figure of 430. The soldiers implicated were exonerated by the commander in chief of the official armed forces of the state, General Fernando Tapias. To the CEV this is just another case of rotten apples.
But, can 60 years of violence be explained as the result of the actions of some soldiers, some politicians, some business people? We are talking about tens of thousands of dead, tortured, disappeared and the outcome follows from the actions of some… and not from a state policy?
…the paramilitary phenomenon has maintained a role in components of the state such as the armed forces, security and intelligence agencies, collegiate state bodies (Congress, assemblies and councils), judicial institutions and oversight bodies, as well as economic sectors such agri-industrial, extractive industries, public servants and candidates in elections. It has also permeated sectors of the church and the media. Without the close link between this body of sectors and the armed paramilitaries, this phenomenon would not have unleashed the deep wounds that it inflicted nor would it have lasted as long.(12)
Colombian paramilitaries working with the army and paid by big growers, these in “the Banana Bloc” in Colombia (Photo: Huffington Post)
There are no policies here, no state-backed dirty war but rather a compendium of massacres carried out by blood thirsty types that co-opted everyone else, i.e. Colombia is an open-air lunatic asylum.
Politicians and functionaries were another sector that was widely implicated in the paramilitary plan to “penetrate all political power: mayors, councillors, deputies, governors, congress people from the zones that we managed […] ultimately, regional powers that together guaranteed a national power for the self defence groups”. The relationship between politics and paramilitaries went in both directions as many politicians and functionaries in turn sought out the commanders of the paramilitary groups to benefit from their armed power.(13)
In this repugnant discourse, the paramilitaries are the ones who penetrate the state and some politicians seek them out, the paramilitaries are not a counter-insurgency strategy of the state nor a policy to implement “development” projects they want, but rather the excuse is “the paramilitaries made us do it”.
It comes across like crying children trying to blame the other for breaking the window, but they are not broken windows, rather tens of thousands of broken bodies. And the CEV does not want to blame who it should. It accepts that the State played a role, but limits it to individual behaviour and private interests but not part of a strategy.
Not even the genocide committed against the Patriotic Union (UP) is seen as a state policy, once again the State is a victim of the paramilitaries. The CEV describes it in the following terms.
It was during the attempts at a democratic aperture and the peace policies of the government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986). It is in this context the paramilitary network from Puerto Boyacá sought to contain the democratic and peace initiatives through systematic violence (persecution, extermination and displacement) against members of left wing political groups such as the Patriotic Union and the Communist Party, trade unionists and social leaders.(14)
The reality is that no one expected the UP to be successful and the oligarchy took fright and responded as it always does: with violence. The extermination of the UP was not an attempt to contain supposed democratic measures from President Betancur, but rather an attempt to suppress a left-wing political group.
The CEV forgets that Betancur allowed the military to attack and burn the Palace of Justice in 1985, which was only a few metres from the Presidential Palace. He was not a just man whose peace initiatives were undermined by the unjust.
Lastly, we should look at how they describe the business people.
The economic agents were a key part of the paramilitary web. Some national and international business people, local and regional economic powers and productive sectors supported them in different ways because they had interests in the war.(15)
We shouldn’t be surprised that the CEV, led by the favourite child of the bourgeoisie reaches such conclusions. De Roux wrote an executive summary of the report before he even formally took up the job of President of the CEV.
In March 2017, shortly before he began working for the CEV he wrote a column in the El Tiempo newspaper with a simple headline I ask for forgiveness.(16) The column makes various assertions, amongst which the following stand out:
I incur in a generalisation when I write that the paramilitaries were financed by businesspeople. When, in truth, some paramilitary groups were financed by businesses, whilst the majority of women and men to whom we owe the production of goods and services in this country did not finance the paramilitaries.(17)
That is to say, as the CEV report does, that it was only some of them. He continues with another assertion that some of them did it as a response to guerrilla violence, repeating one of the great lies of the business associations and the State about the nature of paramilitarism.
Gustavo Petro, newly-elected President of Colombia (R) shaking hands with Francisco de Roux (L), who outlined the executive summary of the Truth Commission’s Report in his column before the latter was even published. (Image sourced: Internet)
Others out of rage, following the kidnapping and payment of the ransom, supported the AUC to attack the kidnappers. Others did so because they didn’t trust the state’s security forces.(18)
And lastly, this little gem which reduces the dirty war to the behaviour of just some.
I must also acknowledge that I have been unfair when I have generalised about soldiers and police officers in Colombia. I admit that I have an intellectual and emotive abhorrence of weapons on all sides. I am a follower of Jesus who once and for all separated God from all wars and preached efficient non-violence. But I know there have been many and increasing numbers of men and women in the Armed Forces who see service to the homeland as a service to the dignity and rights of every human being and the collective good of peace.(19)
A question arises. Given that De Roux through his column outlined an executive summary of the future report of the CEV, why did he not save us time, money and the effort by writing, on his own, a report 100% to his liking? It would have had the advantage of not selling false hopes to the victims of the conflict.
End.
Notes
(1) CEV (2022) Hallazgos y Propuestas. CEV p.296
(2) Ibíd., p.303
(3) Ibíd., pp 304 y 305
(4) Ibíd., p.299
(5) Ibíd., p.305
(6) Ibíd., p.310
(7) Medina Gallego, C. (1990) Autodefensas, Paramilitares y Narcotráfico en Colombia. Editorial Documentos Periodisticos. Bogotá p.173
(8) El Cambio No 704 diciembre 2006/enero 2007 Diez Preguntas (Entrevista con José Félix Lafaurie) p.48
(9) El Espectador (17/12/2006) La hora de los ganaderos, p. 2A
The Truth Commission (CEV) in Colombia has just published its report on the Colombian conflict. As was to be expected it is a very detailed report and deals with many aspects of the conflict and therefore it is impossible to carry out a detailed criticism in just one article.
This article aims to deal with the document entitled Call for Peace and in later articles I will deal with some points in greater detail such as the regions, the business class and drug trafficking.
Of course, there are very positive aspects, such as the statistics compiled, some proposals that they make and also the stories of the victims that they included.
However, there are also some very problematic aspects on the ideological plane and how they present the conflict, the actors, motives and there is an underlying idea in the document that we should advance towards a new society — with changes — but a society that continues to be the same with regard the economy.
They discount any class struggle as not only as anachronistic but also as something which is undesirable, regardless of the methods used.
The document is full of adjectives, some of them emotive, something which is not a criticism as such, emotions have a place in this setting, but it is imbued with Christian references and the Catholic faith as such.
That is not that surprising given that the boss is a Jesuit priest, Francisco de Roux, s.j. But due to this, its starting point is based on suppositions not shared by everyone and that are very questionable.
President-elect of Colombia Gustavo Petro shakes hands with Francisco de Roux at the launch of the Report.
OH BROTHER!
They start off with the statement and question “We started off from the issue that has dogged humanity from the beginning: where is your brother?”
I don’t know whether this first part is true or not, but the question about the brother presumes we know and share this concept of brother. In the Catholic faith we are all theoretically brothers, though not in practice.
But the idea informs a concept taken from family therapy that the Colombian conflict is between siblings that love each other or at least can love each other, just as a woman can love the man who abuses her in their relationship or the man who can stop abusing her and love her as she deserves.
It is a deservedly highly questioned concept, but it is applied in many countries that have gone through peace processes and truth commissions. But it is not the case, this conflict is not between siblings, but rather between interests.
The conflict has names and surnames and moreover surnames of the great and good and its victims are everyone else. There are power relationships. There are also economic interests.
It is an insult to say that the powerful, such as Luís Carlos Sarmiento and the Santos family are the brothers of their employees, or that associations such as the cattle ranchers of FEDEGAN represent people that are the brothers of the displaced peasants.
Though the report does acknowledge the role of some business people in the conflict.
…what has been grievous for the pain and injustice for the victims is the finding that leading business initiatives paid paramilitary groups in order to displace and steal the land and territories from the communities and implant mining or agribusinesses, or within their enterprises they stigmatised the workers and are complicit in the murder of hundreds of trade unionists.1
Such people, responsible for the murder of hundreds of trade unionists are nobody’s brothers, other than their shareholders’. They killed them as part of a strategy to accumulate wealth, the most base reason for doing so.
The CEV’s position turns the businessman into our brother, though it does acknowledge that
… we did not carry out any specific study on the armed conflict and the economy, following four years of listening to the drama of the war, the Commission takes as given that if no major changes are made to the economic model of development in the country it will be impossible to prevent the repetition of the armed conflict which will reappear and evolve in an unpredictable manner.
But despite not carrying out any specific analysis of the conflict and the economy the CEV calls on businesses to avoid a resurgence in the armed conflict.
The state, society and in particular the business people behind the large industrial and financial projects should prioritise guaranteeing the welfare and dignified life of the people and communities without any exclusions, with a shared vision of the future to overcome the structural inequality that makes this country one of the most unequal countries in the world in terms of the concentration of income, wealth and land.2
It is part of the discourse that we are all brothers. Instead of criticising the call they make for a society where the welfare of the people is a priority for the businesses, we only have to ask a question. Where does this happen? In what countries does this occur?
They usually make clumsy references to Switzerland or Sweden, ignoring that it is not quite the case and the welfare programmes in Europe (those that are left) are the result of social struggles and are largely financed by the super-exploitation of the Global South.
It is an illusion and part of liberal mythology, that is usually sold during elections every four or more years depending on the country, but is not to be found anywhere in reality and couldn’t be — legally a company looks out for the welfare of its shareholders and nobody else.
The lack of an analysis of the economic model as a factor in the conflict is a serious weakness, something I will deal with in another article.
But in a conflict for land, where the landlords and business people murder peasants and trade unionists3, failing to analyse the context of the economic model is disingenuous.
AN OLD VERY BAD JOKE
The CEV, however, engages in another great act of untruthfulness when it repeats the old refrain of the business class and the state that paramilitaries are reactive i.e. they react to the presence of guerrillas.
It seems like a bad joke that at this stage a commission that supposedly seeks the truth repeats such a lie: a lie challenged at the time by many of the organisations that now praise the CEV, in the days when they didn’t receive as many cheques from USAID and the European Union.
It has also been shown that companies paid armed groups large amounts of money as indispensable operational costs to keep their projects active.
And the reality of economic actors that in despair at the guerrillas and in the face of insecurity, contributed to the creation of the Convivir [rural security cooperatives] and on other occasions sought out the paramilitaries to bring their security of terror.
Following that there were those who took advantage of the land abandoned in midst of the terror to buy land through frontmen and set up projects. And there were those who used money to place members of the armed forces at their disposal.4
When the bloodthirsty Carlos Castaño called his paramilitary organisation United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, he did so for a reason: the need to present his barbarous acts as a necessary evil, that of self-defence.
Javier Giraldo, s.j. also a Jesuit has spent his entire life fighting against just such a lie. He has documented how the paramilitaries existed before the foundation of the guerrillas and they were not reactive, but rather they were a state policy.5
The problem with the focus that ignores the state and its role and says that we are brothers is that it asks for reconciliation on that basis, that we are brothers. De Roux in his presentation asked more than once “how did we do” and asked for reconciliation.
But this “We” doesn’t exist. As Javier Giraldo points out.
A similar effort must be made in order to translate the value of Christian reconciliation to the judicial/political arena. There must be a public clarification and admission of guilt, an explicit condemnation of the mechanisms, structures and doctrines which facilitate crimes, the implementation of corrective measures to stop them from being repeated and reparation to victims and society. These must all be dealt with head-on and unequivocally. The very nature of a political community makes this imperative: unless there is an explicit and profound social sanction of crimes, internalized by society’s members and engraved in society’s “collective memory,” such crimes are not truly delegitimated. Without these conditions, the Christian value of forgiveness becomes a perverse expression of its real essence: from a fraternal and creative act to an act which covers up the institutionalization of crime(bold not in original) and destroys the barriers which protect human dignity.6
THE GERMAN EXAMPLE – AN OLD ILLUSION
The CEV points to the case of Germany following the Second World War as an example to follow. It is usually a sign of the poverty of the arguments when someone refers to the Nazis in order speak ill of someone, like saying some such a leader is the new Hitler.
But it is also a sign of argument povery to a degree when they refer to the topic to speak of reconciliation and so forth in post-War Germany. However, that is what the CEV did.
Our German friends who accompany us in the Commission’s process have shown us how its people recovered its dignity and pride when, even decades after the genocide of Jews and the war crimes committed, took on board the suffering of the victims, the wound as part of the national psyche and accepted its collective responsibility.7
What they claim just isn’t true. First of all, the post-Nazi Germany was not a denazified country.
Various later personalities from that period held high positions of responsibility, amongst them Kurt Waldheim, an officer in the Nazi army who became Secretary General of the United Nations and also President of Austria; war criminal Adolf Heusinger who became President of the Military Committee of NATO8 and Johannes Steinhoff who was in charge of the Luftwaffe after the War.
Kurt Georg Kiesinger was a member of the Nazi party, and worked side by side with Nazi propagandist Goebbels and later between 1966 and 1969 he was the German Chancellor.
Another Nazi, Wernher von Braun, who designed the Nazis’ bombs and rockets earned a good wage in the USA in order to put one of the rockets on the Moon. None of them confessed or accepted their responsibility.
And let’s not forget that young member of the Hitler Youth, one Joseph Ratzinger who became head of the Catholic Church. Of course, being a young man, he bore a lesser responsibility than the others.
The Nazis’ anti-gay legislation was applied up to 1969 and between 1946 and 1969 50,000 people were tried under that law. And whilst the Nazis had high-ranking posts the Communists were banned from working in the public administration and they and other dissidents, such as pacifists, were pursued.
Even under the “Communist Clause” victims of the Nazis who were Communists were not compensated.9 They chose a very bad example — or perhaps De Roux is conscious of the example he chose.
However, what it is about is blending one myth with another. It is surprising that they don’t mention South Africa, maybe because it is easier to see the reality of its Truth Commission and it is a more realistic comparison than Germany after the War.
What they aim to say is that if the Germans could accept their collective guilt, why can’t Colombia do so? But such collective guilt does not exist, or at least not in the way De Roux and company mean.
Many Germans lost their lives in the struggle against the Nazis, it has been calculated that the Nazis murdered 288,000 members of the opposition, including before Hitler came to power.
It wasn’t all Germans who did it but amongst those who did, there are familiar household names, Siemens and Krupps, just to name two companies — both used slave labour in their factories and had close relations with the Nazi Party.
Or there is Hugo Boss, the Nazi Party member who made his fortune manufacturing the uniforms of the Nazi Party, later of the Wehrmacht and of course of the SS, which is why they looked so good.
Hugo Boss menswear shop in Dublin. The company founder was a close supporter of the Nazi regime and produced uniforms for the Nazi Party, Wermacht and SS. (Image sourced: Internet)
And of course, Bayer, the company that made Zkylon-B, the gas they used, still exists and is still rich. Following the war, 13 directors from the company were convicted of war crimes but were freed without serving their full sentences and took up their posts in the company.
The murderers continued in power with the tale of “collective guilt”. The Nazis were a political project of a sector of the German bourgeoisie to stop the rise of the Communists, any similarity to cattle ranchers declaring Puerto Boyacá the anti-capitalist capital10 is a mere coincidence, I suppose.
The reference to Germany as an example of reconciliation is a cheap tale. If Colombia goes down the same road, the surnames Mancuso, Uribe, Santo Domingo, Samper and Santos and the others will be the dominant surnames in the future, with their economic and social power intact.
Protest about the army murders of civilians claimed as “positive” FARC guerrillas by relatives portraying the victims, Bogotá in 2009
THE “FALSE POSITIVES”
The CEV also deals with the issue of the “False Positives” and states something about the issue which is absolutely true that “If there had been ten, it would be very serious. If there had been one hundred, it would enough to demand a change of army. But there were thousands and it was monstrous.”11
But almost immediately it states that:
There was no law or written instructions that ordered it, but the soldiers who fired felt that they were doing what the institution wanted, due to the incentives and pressure that demanded immediate results with corpses, the publicity that they gave to those “killed in combat” and the protection given to the perpetrators.12
Yes, it is true that there was no law or written order that instructed them to do so. But we can’t expect criminals to leave us easy proof. There was no law, but there were incentives as they pointed out.
There were directives and a system for bonuses that encouraged the murder of civilians. Who authorised the payments? The then minister of Defence, Juan Manuel Santos. What does the document say about Santos?
The former president Santos – who was Minister for Defence from the end of 2006 to the end of 2008 – came to the Commission to contribute to the truth with his testimony, as ex-President and public servant, and he centred his intervention on the rigorous analysis of the False Positives to conclude asking for forgiveness from all the families and Colombia and invited the Armed Forces to ask the national and international community for forgiveness.13
It is not true, his intervention was not very rigorous and he ended by asking for forgiveness, as the CEV says, but at the same time he said he wasn’t to blame.
He took up Samper’s excuse regarding drug trafficking and said that it all happened behind his back and he lied on various occasions in his declaration to the CEV.14
Juan Manuel Santos, them President of Colombia shaking hands with Donald Trump, then President of the USA, in the White House 18 May 2017 (Image sourced: Internet).
IN CONCLUSION
Without a doubt the CEV will contribute to the knowledge of the conflict with its data, interviews and in some parts, its analysis. But the report as a whole will not be the truth about the conflict.
The CEV stated that “we don’t share the position, according to which, there are many truths that are equally valid regarding the same matter.”15
Yes, not all “truths” are equal, you have to analyse them, discuss them, contrast them with the facts and even look at who is enunciating them to see which perspective is closer to the truth, but in this case, it is not the “truth” of the CEV that is true.
Neither do I share the idea that any truth is of equal value no matter how powerful or well thought-of those who write that truth are.
3 “The Human Rights Information System of the National Trade Union School (ENS) recorded 15,430 violations of trade unionists’ rights to life, freedom and integrity in Colombia between 1 January 1971 and 29 September 2021. Around a fifth of the cases reported were murders: 3,288 trade unionists have been assassinated over the last five decades in Colombia.” https://www.equaltimes.org/colombia-has-signed-a-peace?lang=en#.YtXwJuzMI6E
9 Creuzberger, S. ‘Make life for communists as difficult as possible’ State-run anticommunism and ‘psychological warfare’ in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany. Asian j. Ger. Eur. stud.2, 9 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40856-017-0020-7
10 The location was the birth place of the paramilitary model that arose in the 1980s and was avowedly right wing. There was a sign on the way in to it, that said “Welcome to Puerto Boyacá, Anti-Communist Capital of Colombia.”
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