Secretariat of the Central General Staff, FARC-People's Army, Mountains of Colombia May 2000
On May 27, 1964, the Armed Forces of Colombia, directly advised and oriented by the United States of America, initiated the largest military operation of encirclement and extermination known up to that time. The objective: to eradicate the subversive centre that was putting their "national security" and "western democracy" in danger.
This "subversive centre" was composed of peasants who had settled in the region of Marquetalia, Tolima Department after surviving the calamities of the war between the traditional political parties. Poor liberals had fought against poor conservatives, inspired by the leaders of those parties in their power struggle. These peasants of Marquetalia were dedicated to agricultural labour for their own well being and that of the community they constituted. Of the state, they only demanded roads to transport their products, schools for the education of their children and guarantees against the activities of the "pajaros", the paramilitary gangs of that time.
This occurred during the presidency of Guillermo Leon Valencia. The institutions of state, starting with the executive, were in the hands of the liberal-conservative elite, equally shared as a result of the so-called "National Front". The parliament was composed of liberal and conservatives, under the baton of Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, the person charged with generating the conditions in the national and international environment to justify this outrage imposed by a foreign power. He declared Marquetalia to be an "Independent Republic" and described its inhabitants in McCarthyite style (bandits, extortionists, agents of international communism, etc.), and argued that they were another state within the state.
Faced with the evidence of the coming aggression, and in order to find another way out, the inhabitants made every effort to approach all institutions and organizations susceptible to being motivated, including the parliament, the church and the international community, and have them come to that region and know its situation first hand. The only response was a declaration of solidarity by French intellectuals and Father Camilo Torres' attempt to come to the zone, which was prevented by the army.
The President, representing the liberals and conservatives and following the guidance of the yankees, gave the military command a free hand. Operation Marquetalia began: 16,000 men supported by the most modern techniques, advised by Pentagon officials and supported by the big print media, initiated the "patriotic mission" to wipe out that group of Colombians in three weeks. They used every means at their disposal: aerial bombardment, strafing, parachute assaults, encirclements of extermination, bacteriological warfare, torture, summary executions, the buying of consciences and payment of bribes, as well as the jailing and abuse of those who were in solidarity with the "Resistance of Marquetalia".
48 men, poorly armed and with insufficient resources, commanded and oriented by Comrade Manuel Marulanda Velez, turned into an armed revolutionary nucleus infused by our people's tradition of struggle, by the resistance of the natives and the black slaves to the violent and bloody methods used by the Spanish when they came to these lands, by the 1780 Commoner insurrection lead by Jose Antonio Galan, by the valour, courage and dignity of those who liberated our nation from spanish colonialism between 1810 and 1819 and raised the banners of anti-imperialism, social justice and latin american unity, unfurled by the Liberator, Simon Bolivar but brought down and stained by the creole political class. This nucleus took up the echo of pain and anger of those massacred on Dec. 6, 1928 in the "Banana Region" and made the cherished aspirations of the working class and people its own.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--People's Army, FARC-EP, arose in the course of the confrontation, with a revolutionary programme calling together all the citizens who dream of a Colombia for Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth and where among us all we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty.
During these 36 years we have confronted the various military operations with their bombastic names ( Operation Colombia, Operation Extermination, Pincer, Destroyer etc.), that the official army has put in motion.
In the heat of combat thousands of guerrillas have been formed, inspired by the legacy and spirit of sacrifice of the founders of the FARC-EP, ready to give everything including their lives to realize the dreams of equality and justice that inspire our struggle.
This is an option that has been imposed upon the Colombian people by the ruling class which follows the orientation of the government of the United States of America. We do not wage war for its own sake. Faithful to the marquetalian ideals, every time the possibility to pursue different paths than those of the confrontation has appeared, everything has been put in the service of a political solution that would open the course toward reconciliation and reconstruction and establish the basis of the New Colombia. But invariably we have come up against the stubbornness and intransigence of a ruling class that only thinks of making use of these spaces to get us to submit.
In 1984, during the administration of Belisario Betancurt, after avoiding the obstacles and tricks of the militarists, we signed the "Accords of La Uribe" They were to be developed and implemented by the Congress of the Republic with its liberal and conservative majority. The members never took responsibility for what had been agreed to and preferred to continue legislating in the interests of their bosses, the possessors of economic power, and of their war machine.
Within this framework, we constituted ourselves as the base for the launching of a new political movement, the Patriotic Union (UP), an alternative distinct from the traditional parties and in pursuit of paths other than the war. Once again the state recurred to murder to remove those who opposed its interests, literally sweeping the UP from the scene with bullets. Thousands of compatriots paid with their lives for daring to pursue a distinct path in order to create conditions that would allow Colombians to again come together in a worthy and sovereign Colombia with food, housing, health and education.
In those times, where were those who today tear their clothes in hysterical and theatrical scenes denigrating and slandering us? Where were the Sabas Pretels, the Fransisco Santos' or the Pinedo Vidals of those days? For certain, they were in some cocktail party, drinking toasts to the stability of the regime at the news of each death for the Patriotic Union.
Taking up this painful experience, again we have proposed to the Colombian people the formation of the Bolivarian Movement for the New Colombia "as an organization that, under the leadership of the FARC-EP, shall bring together all those who, by means of political action and in the trenches of clandestinely that would protect them from paramilitary barbarity, are looking for the end to state terrorism, the injustices, inequalities, unemployment and the humiliation before US imperialism. "
At 36 years from our birth, we find ourselves in a process of dialogue with the government. These talks are for the purpose of creating conditions so that armed confrontation is not the only recourse possible to overcome the great economic, social, cultural, ethnic and political inequalities generated throughout the more than 150 years in which the liberals and conservatives have been in power at the service of those who hold economic hegemony obtained through the violent expropriation of the land and merciless exploitation of the workers. It is not because of the benevolence or the altruism of the ruling class that we have arrived at this process. Rather, it is the fruit of 36 years of difficult confrontation between the people and the state, in which the real Bolivarian Army has been forged in the heat combat and fertilized with the blood of its martyrs and is ever more integrated with the daily struggles of our people.
But, just as it was at Casa Verde, Caracas and Tlaxcala, this exclusive minority that usurps political and economic power, wants to make use of the occasion by means of fraud, imprecision and falsehood to position us as if we were the enemies of peace and discredit us before the national and international community. When combats take place, "it is evidence of the lack of desire for peace"; if there is no confrontation, "it is a sign of weakness". They scream to high heaven when we inform the public of the criteria we have collectively elaborated for the collection of resources, at the same time forgetting about their applause for the measures of total war together with the war tax implemented during the disastrous four years of Cesar Gaviria and perfected by his successors.
Until a little while ago, they dismissed us with the story that we were agents of foreign ideas and financed by Moscow gold. The socialist camp having fallen, leaving them with no pretext to continue sustaining such a fallacy, with an overdose of shamelessness and cynicism they are trying to explain the growth and strength of the guerrilla movement as the fruit of the narcotics traffic. Basing themselves on the information media they have at their service, they practise the fascist principal that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth: "If there were no narcotics traffic, the guerrilla movement would not exist."
"The narcotics traffic is a phenomenon of globalized capitalism and of the yankees above all. It is not the FARC's problem. We reject it. But since the US government uses the narcotics traffic's existence as the pretext for its criminal action against the Colombian people, we call upon it to legalize narcotics consumption. Thus the high profits produced by the illegality of this trade would be suppressed at the roots, consumption controlled, those dependant on narcotics treated clinically and this cancer would be eliminated definitively. For great illnesses, great remedies."
36 years ago, on May 28, 1984, for the first time in the recent history of Colombia a bilateral cease-fire between the government and the FARC-EP was initiated as a result of the Accords of La Uribe and it lead to a truce. Immediately the top commands of the official armed forces, incited by the militarists, started sending circulars to all their units warning them that for no reason could they fail to carry out their "constitutional duty to defend the honour and property of the citizens". The multiple denunciations we presented concerning the systematic violations on the part of the state security forces, including the murder of 22 guerrillas of the FARC-EP in the Uraba region, the famous Condor Plan and the capture and disappearance of more than a hundred activists of the political movement, must be filed in the archives of the commission of verification designed to watch over the implementation of what had been agreed to in that period.
At this time, when the theme of a cease-fire is being discussed within the present dialogue process, it is quite worthwhile to recover that experience. Likewise, we must define very clearly the meaning of and difference between a cease-fire and peace. If this is not done, it is most certain that the present process will be taken to a dead end that could lead us to one more frustration.
Peace cannot be understood as just the silencing of the guns while the guarantees are maintained for the powerful to continue exploiting the workers and increasing unemployment, while the cost of living continues rising without let up as wages loose more purchasing power, while the concentration of land ownership grows as hundreds of thousands of displaced persons from the countryside arrive in the cities and one's dreams of having housing remain just a dream. Simultaneously they close public hospitals and make health care a profitable business wherein the illness of a poor person has no place. Education is ever more elitist and the enterprises in the strategic sectors of the economy are being privatized. Bank accounts swell for those who, from positions of executive, legislative and judicial power, consent, authorize and vote in favour as fast as they modernize, retrain and specialize the repressive apparatus, begging for resources (read: Plan Colombia) at the cost of national sovereignty.
Paramilitarism merits special mention, being the cruel and bloody tool the state uses in its haste to liquidate any manifestation of inconformity. Paramilitarism began to be implemented in its contemporary form from the 1980's and grew when the Accords of La Uribe were formalized. Financed by narcotics traffickers, ranchers and big landowners, trained by Israeli mercenaries and with total security, logistic and intelligence support from the high command of the armed forces and political support of the ruling and business class, it used the Middle Magdalena region as the centre of experimentation. Its aim was to wipe out all expression of popular struggle existing in the region, in less than ten years.
Although they going on to 20 years and in the Middle Magdalena they have not eradicated the guerrilla movement nor intimidated the inhabitants, the governing class continues playing this card, in spite of Andres Pastrana's promise to deploy all the instruments at his disposal to eliminate paramilitarism as state policy. He committed to this during the two interviews he had with our commandant, Manuel Marulanda Velez.
In order to raise a smokescreen to marginalize the table of dialogue and distract the attention of the masses not conforming in the face of the sharpening of the present crisis that is eating away at all the structures of state, Pastrana has called a dishonest and deceitful referendum, supporting himself on the indignation generated by the exposure of one of the many fraudulent schemes cooking in the institutions of state. Corruption is an essential phenomenon of the capitalist system and without its existence, it could not survive. When the positions in administration of public power are awarded for merit and not from nepotism, when contracts are given to enterprises due to their suitability and not for the kickbacks paid out and when the communities have autonomy and democratic mechanisms to affect the allocation of resources, we shall be building a new country.
We call upon all the Colombians to continue redoubling their efforts so that through mobilization and struggle we consolidate the current process of dialogue that will permit us to together chart the course of the Colombia of the 21st century.
For our part, we will continue loyal to the marquetalian ideals, keeping alive the thinking of our commandant Jacobo Arenas and of the comrades who have given their lives and freedom "constructing the paths toward the New Colombia".
