The following statement by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP), the largest Marxist-Leninist organization in Colombia, is being reposted here from the website Resistencia Colombia:
MANUEL LIVES!
Written by: SECRETARIAT OF THE CENTRAL STAFF OF THE FARC-EP
From the Colombian Mountains
May, 2009
“The political circumstances are suitable to improve the Armed Movement and the Bolivarian Movement.” Manuel Marulanda Vélez
The FARC’s soul as a flag waving in the wind is mentioned in this Manuel’s saying. 45 years ago we began the fight to look for peace, justice and dignity for Colombia in the Marquetalia heights which is the people’s resistance mountain. Since then we are the armed response of the poor and the righteous people against various types of state violence.
The peace is our strategy. And wind of the armed movement, waving the flag of the political alternative is the tactic to succeed in strategy. We can say it as well with Bolivar’s feverish words: “The insurrection promises to be with the peace spirit. It resists against despotism because despotism destroys peace, and the insurrection takes the weapon to force its enemies to the peace”. They dedicated their lives for peace; Manuel Marulanda Vélez, Jacobo Arenas, Efraín Guzmán, Raúl Reyes, Iván Ríos and all these invincible legion of commanders and combatants whom today we remind with worship. To all of them, honor and glory in this anniversary of the FARC.
“The person who assures his honor – was saying the Liberator – dedicating his life to the service of the humanity, to the defense of the justice and to the extermination of the tyranny-, acquires an immortality life on having left the frame of the matter that the man receives from the nature. A glorious death triumphs over the time and prolongs the sublime existence up to the most remote posterity” … This is what happens with all of them; in spite of being apart, they are still alive in the rifles and the political project of the FARC, shoulder to shoulder with people and their guerrillas, with Bolivar fighting for a New Colombia, the Big Homeland and the Socialism.
We long for a country that is determined in the FARC’s Manifest and the Bolivarian Platform for a New Colombia. We want it to be accepted with a Great National Agreement towards the Peace signed by all the forces without exclusions that are ready to lead the change of the unjust and anachronistic structures. That comes with a social agreement surrounded by the people who arrange the coordination of a political alternative with a view to shape a new democratic national, patriotic and bolivarian government, towards socialism. Yes, towards socialism, which is justice and redemption of the people, the Noah’s Ark of the humanity against the subsidence of the world capitalist system.
The dignity of Colombia and the feeling of homeland liberation claim a new leadership that privileges the union and socialism to advance the future horizon. A new independence scream gathers us showing the XXI. Century Ayacucho battlefield where the certainty of the continental revolution, our worthies’ and Bolivar’s victory was lit.
It is time to overcome the national shame that means an illegitimate and illegal government that generates death and poverty to all of us. A government supported by Washington, only acts to perpetuate the war and discord and it guarantees its violence policy for the investment safety to the transnational companies that plunder our resources. In spite of the high number of North American troops that intervene in the Colombian internal conflict, this stateless regime allows our sacred land to be trodden by more foreign troops, which are expelled from Manta and allows the United States to operate in this land as an aggression base for the assault to the continental brother nations. This is a shameless, paramilitary drug trafficker government, which is not affected by the forceful confessions of paramilitary bosses like “Don Berna “who assures to have financed the presidential campaigns of Álvaro Uribe Vélez with cocaine dollars. The government and the President turned the Nariño Palace into a dark conspiracy cavern full of gangsters to destabilize the Court, to obstruct justice and to leave the public powers independence without any effect. They extradited the paramilitary leaders to the United States when they began linking with the close relations of Uribe, the generals, the businessmen and the stockbreeders. This is a part of the state paramilitary strategy that still bleeds Colombia.
The whole country does not surprise about the autism of the Attorney General who prefers to hide his head in the sand not to tackle any action of penal responsibility against the companies like Chiquita Brand – the same company of the banana workers massacre in 1928 – Drummond, Postobón, Brasilia, Caribbean Carbons…, which were denounced by the paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso as paramilitary financiers. The same paramilitary leader has revealed that the Gabarra massacre which was perversely attributed to the guerrillas to discredit the guerilla movement was really executed by the paramilitary forces, the army and the police, in which 40 peasants were murdered.
The mask has fallen down. Uribe is insistently surrounded with the phantom of Fujimori who is condemned to 25 years of prison because of the crimes against humanity in Peru. He foresees that his coward murderers are stimulated by the insanity of showing his fascist politics of safety with blood of the civil people not the blood of combatants at any cost, and they will not stay in the impunity. The obligatory displacement of more than 4 million peasants, the dispossession of their lands, the thousands of common graves, and the link of the president with the massacres of defenseless citizens cry out for justice. The paramilitary chief who denounced the direct responsibility of Uribe in the frightful massacre of The Aro, Antioquia, has just been murdered for the satisfaction of the Nariño Palace tyrant. He knows that sooner or later he will have to pay for his crimes.
The command of a president who has imposed the dishonorable record of having more than 90 % of his parliamentary group linked to the process of the drug trafficker – parapolítics; who supports the ministers of the State bribery delinquents; who uses the power to enrich his children, who turns the diplomatic service into killers refuge like general Montoya so many times denounced, and who promotes unconstitutional referendum to go on ruling in the power like a protection mechanism from the justice must be revoked. Uribe is a real bandit protected by the presidential band.
His absurd pretension, the fascist safety politics have generated a lot of international problems. The Colombian government believes that it is its right to violate the other countries territory and, trample on the sovereignty of the nations and destabilize the region, in order to develop its particular vision and its counterinsurgent strategy that is always supported by the Washington government.
He wants to set fire the country indefinitely with a military victory, the war fire and the violation of human rights. He denies the existence of the political and social conflict inconsistently, but puts his sickly illusion in the Patriot Plan of the United States Army South Command, believing uselessly that the social dissension can be knocked down with the shots and last generation military technology.
To increase the military force to more than 450 thousand effectives due to the biggest military help of the Yankees in the hemisphere will not support the government in the power, because the historical experience and the good sense tells us like that “the people that have fought for the freedom have exterminated finally their tyrants”. But also a government which is discredited, tied up strongly to the illegitimacy and damaged by the crisis of the world capitalism, is a government condemned to the defeat.
Today’s Colombia does not want this governmental war. She wants solutions to the increasing unemployment and the poverty. She claims for the social investment that is sacrificed for the sake of the war. She asks for education, housing, health-care, drinkable water, labor laws, land, highways, electricity, telephone and communications, marketing of products, renationalization of the companies that were privatized, punishment to the corruption, sovereignty of the nation, protection of the environment, real democracy, freedom of speech, liberation of the political prisoners, stop the irrational extradition that takes the juridical sovereignty onto the knees, real information, international relations due to mutual respect between the nations, integration and Big Homeland, social justice and peace.
Uribe is afraid of the holy water like the devil, the increasing clamor of those who ask for peace, punishment to the State crimes, and a new government. That’s why he needs anxiously that the peace should be outlawed before the electoral debate that will take place. It is madness and the absurdity transfigured by a chief who wants to chain the country to his hates and resentments. Nobody will be able to separate from a new society and a government project, the peace for majority of the nation. It is the flag that will join the Colombians against the tyranny, the war and the injustice.
All of us must be alert to prevent Uribe’s trick changing the current National Inspector with one of his servants. The only hope of the governmental hirsute struggle against the majority’s wish is the fraud. And this is the thing what we must prevent now, since he was an owner and master of the 2002 and of 2006 elections. Uribe’s reelection is a disgusting monument to the fraud and to the swindle built by the DAS’s ex-director Jorge Noguera, and the paramilitary drug trafficker boss Jorge 40. 4 million signatures gathered by the Uribe supporters in favor of the referendum with the help of DMG’s money, are stamped by the signatures of one million and a half dead people. This is a fraud and theft.
Fraud to the opinion is also the outlandish fable of the guerrilla’s military defeat, fallacious argument, relation of the “false positives”, used at the background to justify the terrible State excesses against the civil population. Just like how they always wanted against Manuel Marulanda Vélez or to kill the FARC with the rifles of the desire and the deafening clatter of the newspapers. Not any guerrilla can be exterminated by ink shots. There is not the post-conflict period but there is the delirious dream of the struggle without future of a declining regime.
From the mountains of the resistance, how we have been doing for 45 years, we gather the Colombians to mobilize resolutely for the peace, which the Santander supporters and the Washington Empire refused when they killed Bolivar and the Colombian peoples union in 1830. The past counts in the future society construction. Nobody can change our way from the destination determined by the Liberator in the origins of the Republic. The incitement of Senator Álvaro Gómez Hurtado to subjugate the country with the violence policy at the beginning of the 60s, with consideration of “Independent Republic of Marquetalia”, has not been sufficient to understand that the national problems cannot be solved with the State violence. It is necessary to build a New Colombia on the solid foundation of the compound peace.
The Big National Agreement towards the Peace must be like a goal strategy, the formation of a new government that guarantees the people “the biggest sum of possible happiness, the biggest sum of social guarantees and the biggest sum of political stability”, how it was demanded by the Liberator. A patriotic, democratic and Bolivarian government towards socialism, how it is recorded in the Bolivarian Platform for a New Colombia.
As a peace and a guarantee of national sovereignty we must build a new Armed forces working well with the Bolivarian military doctrine that inculcates the love to the people and the hate towards the tyranny. We must not forget that the patriotic army was the creator of Colombia and the Republic in the shining victories of Boyacá and of Carabobo, and that its commander Bolívar defined it as “defender of the freedom”, adding that “its glories must make a difference with those of the republic, and its ambition must remain satisfied to succeed the happiness of its country”. The new Armed forces have to be like this and we are sure that many of the current officials dream to play their roles.
We send our regards to the fair struggle of the regular soldiers’ families who claim it as soldiers’ right not to be forced to take part in mortal combats with guerrillas. The war that the government denies in order not to recognize the political character of the rebellion that fights to take the power produced 297 dead military men and injured 340 only in March. We tell the soldiers not to allow to be used any more like cannon flesh defending a few interests that are not their interests but interests of a rotten, criminal and unsupportive oligarchy, which does very little for them if they are captured as prisoners or injured in the war. We are sure that their relatives also want to shout to the government, like teacher Moncayo, whose children were not given birth for the oligarchy’s war.
To achieve the intention of New Colombia it is necessary to reorganize the State on the base of the people’s sovereignty, as the Liberator conceived it in Angostura. We must add the moral and electoral powers to three branches of the public power, instituting the recall of the mandates in all the instances of popular election. Not any more copies of foreign laws to solve our internal matters. Not any more accusatory penal system. We need a new government that punishes the corruption as an example and closes spaces to the impunity; that proscribes the neoliberal politics which cause to our economic and social misfortunes. The country and the government we dream must assure the control of the strategic branches, stimulate the production in its diverse forms, make to respect our sovereignty on the natural resources. To make the free education real in all the levels, put into practice the justice to the field with a real agrarian reform that generates employment and food sovereignty, and to sow the infrastructure of the national progress. The contracts with the transnational companies that are harmful for Colombia must be checked, as well as the military agreements, the agreements that stain our sovereignty, all these have to be annulled. In the same sense the country does not have to pay the foreign debt to those which we pay fraud loans of corruption in any of its phases. Neither a military nor a repressive solution to the social problem of the drug trafficking production. Our international politics must reorient towards the people’s united integration of Our America in the Big Bolivarian Homeland, and the Socialism.
The definitive stage of the struggle for the peace has started. The Colombian people cannot slacken until not seeing this specified right.
With Bolivar and Manuel, with the people to the power! Manuel lives in the struggle of the Colombian people.
We have sworn to win, and we will win.
Secretariat of the Central staff of the FARC-EP
Mountains of Colombia, May 2009
The Marxist-Leninist 