War Averted, People Still Dying

The above picture is from a rally held two weeks ago in Bogota in protest of paramilitary violence during the week when it seemed that Colombia and Venezuela were definitely going to go to war. This was a tacit anti-war, anti-Uribe protest. Since the rally where this picture was taken, four of the rally's organizers have been murdered by paramilitaries.

In a previous post, I briefly explained the on-going Chavez/Uribe conflict. Since I wrote that post, many things have happened: the Colombian military bombed the Ecuador-Colombia border to kill a FARC leader encamped there, Chavez denounced this bombing as a violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, Colombia was on the brink of war with Venzuela and Ecuador, and then all parties retreated from their war-mongering and decided that no one has the resources or the energy to fight a war, at least for now. What was curiously absent from the coverage of the Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela conflict was any mention of the huge role that paramilitary violence plays in the narco-trafficking/guerilla situation in Colombia, how paramilitarism perpetuates violence and guerilla terrorism. In Colombia, the paramilitary purports to combat the FARC. Paramilitaries are often ex-servicemen from the legit military that act as the government's covert anti-terrorism arm but they have more leeway for violence–they kidnap, torture, and murder the opposition (which includes non-FARC affiliated leftists, journalists, and civilians) without being held accountable because they are not officially connected to the state, only secretly sanctioned and supported by the state. The paramilitary is partially funded and armed by the government (therefore indirectly by the American government) and by various wealthy right wing Colombians.

Paramilitarism is not a uniquely Colombian problem, it's a Latin American problem: paramilitarism arises as a reactionary force against guerilla activity (which tends to be Marxist in flavor). Alberto Fujimori, ex-president of Peru has recently been extradited back to Peru from Japan on charges that he used paramilitary death squads during the 1990's to crush Marxist guerilla groups, the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru. The left in Colombia argues that paramilitary violence is just as bad as guerilla violence, that in fact paramilitaries often mask their crimes as guerilla crimes. In the great morass that constitutes the constant Colombian civil war, the paramilitary has played the role of blurring the boundaries between right wing Catholic ideology, state-sponsored terror, and narco-trafficking by partaking in all three and playing one side against the other. The left in Colombia recognizes that there can be no peace until not only the FARC and narco-trafficking is eradicated but until the paramilitaries are eradicated, yet the Colombian government and the media can barely admit that the paramilitary exists.

El Siniestro Horror del Fascismo

The poster above says, "they also marched and they thought that they were doing it for their Country and they didn't know that they were supporting the sinister horror of fascism. I won't march on February 4th."

This poster was made in counter-protest to a multi-country demonstration organized by the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe against the FARC. (Being Colombian) I got e-mails from several Colombians urging me to join this absurd event in New York, outside the United Nations on the February 4th. The thoughts running through my head were, "An international protest against a terrorist group that carries out its terrorism only in Colombia? What are people in Switzerland gonna do about the FARC, who kidnap and harass the Colombian gentry? What the fuck do they hope to achieve, anyway? The Swiss really taking a stand against terrorism in Colombia? Or are Colombians just engaged in the national pass time of keeping up appearances–Believe us we hate terrorists!–except on an international scale?" The protest was not openly announced as being organized by the Colombian government and and it all seemed so poorly conceived and illogical that in retrospect, I should have known.

So many days after all these questions ran through my head, my cousin sent me this article from the Colombian indymedia site. Since it's in Spanish and there was no English counterpart on the American indymedia site, I'll give you a run down of what the article is about. As it turns out, a few counter-protesters did show up at the anti-FARC rally in New York and were basically attacked and called terrorists by the Uribe-organized gathering.

A very tiny bit of background (because to give the full story would be to recount a fifty year civil war in Colombia) of what has sparked this recent public relations campaign by the Colombian government: recently, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez agreed to negotiate the release of few FARC kidnapped journalists and politicians. The negotiations were apparently successful as two hostages were let go, but then Uribe inexplicably pulled out of the negotiations. Colombia is one of the few Latin American countries that fully backs the U.S. foreign policy and is receiving tidy sums of money to keep up the war on drugs. The U.S. has been leaning heavily on Latin American presidencies to not support or form any alliances with the socialist government of Chavez. So it comes as no surprise that just as progress is being made in the release of these hostages, Uribe would punk out of the negotiations. This way, Uribe can keep the money coming in from the U.S. for the war on drugs, the money coming in from narcotrafficking, and the military support of the right wing paramilitaries (the sworn enemies of the left wing FARC). The February 4th protests were simply a way of keeping up appearances without having to actually do the work to achieve peace in Colombia.