Colombian guerrillas.
Colombia has about 17,000,000 inhabitants, sixty percent of whom are peasants. The typical peasant family lives in a hut with a palm-thatched roof and a bare earthen floor, with no latrine, no running water, no electricity.
The peasant and his children work for the landlord from sunrise to sunset, six days a week, for ten or fifteen cents (U.S. cents) a day. The children cannot go to school because there is no school to attend, and because their families need their labor to carry on.
Due to the hopeless perspective in the countryside, many peasants have moved to the cities where they settle in those belts of abysmal poverty that surround the cities in Latin America. The lucky ones find jobs in the factories, but the great majority make a living by begging, stealing, prostitution, or digging for refuse in the city dumps.
In the cities there is a small middle class, politically inarticulate and completely dependent on the upper class for jobs.
The upper class constitutes a very small sector of the population. It owns and controls the means of production --~ the land and the factories. The state operates as nothing but a machine to protect and defend their interests.
The upper class maintains its grip through violence. Our armies have no other reason for existence. Relations with neighboring countries have been friendly for a long, long time; nevertheless our armed forces keep piling up tanks, jet planes and all sorts of heavy equipment whose guns are aimed at our own people. The army is. used to crush any workers' strike, any student demonstration, any hunger march sometimes engaged in out of sheer’ desperation. The Colombian people have traditionally paid. allegiance to two political ‘parties: the-Liberals and the Conservatives. Both parties include elements of all social classes; and both parties are controlled by the upper class. People join one or the other, not out of. reasoned conviction but out of tradition: "I will be a Conservative because my parents and my grandparents were Conservatives."
Outside of this two-party setup, no other significant political party exists. The Colombian Communist party has never gained wide acceptance among the Colombian masses in its thirty-odd years of existence. In Medellin, an industrial city of more than 700,000 inhabitants, for instance, the CP does not have more than 200 militants. Rather than a real party it is a Moscow-oriented organization of bureaucrats given to a yearly trip to the USSR.
By the early 1940's a brilliant lawyer named Jorge Eliécer Gait&n had become a popular political figure. Because of his strong leftist ideology, he gained immense support among the Colombian masses. Gait&én worked within the Liberal party, but he was for socialism; and when one reads his speeches there is no doubt that he meant business.
The Liberal party, which was in power, refused to support Gait&n as a candidate for the presidential elections of 1946. But Gait&an's following was so strong that he decided to run on his own. This caused a split in the Liberal party. The Conservative party took advantage of the opening to run a wealthy candidate, Mariano Ospina Pérez. Thanks to the divided opposition, Ospina Pérez won the presidential elections in 1946; but the masses rallied behind Gaitaén. The upper class became frightened.
In order to stop Gait4n in the next elections, Ospina Pérez unleashed a wave of violence against the rural population. This witch-hunt brought death to more than 300,000 peasants over-a period of ten years, becoming known in Colombia as "La Violencia"; one of the darkest periods in our history.
One year after the terror started, Gait&n was denouncing it in the main cities with such effectiveness that the government engineered his assassination on April 9, 1948. Gait4n's death touched off a violent reaction among the masses. Street fighting flared throughout the country. For several days virtual civil war raged in Bogota. The stores and buildings in the main streets were completely destroyed.
Unfortunately the rage of the masses was a blind force hitting here and there but lacking leadership; and the uprising ran its course. The Conservative
party was able to retain power.
New presidential elections were to be held in 1950. The Conservative party, conscious of its minority position, kept up the terror, and its candidate, Laureano Gémez, was elected with the abstention of the Liberal party.
Gémez increased the repression. The peasants were forced to flee and seek refuge in the jungles. The victims were always peasants, whether Liberals or Conservatives. They organized into armed bands and fought each other with a cruelty beyond belief. People were slaughtered by the hundreds in a single area; their bodies cut to pieces, women raped in the presence of their relatives and then murdered. The rivers of Colombia ran with human blood and bodies.
Things became so bad that the government lost all support save the support of brute force, and brute force turned against it. Gémez was deposed on June 13, 1953. The new dictator, a general by the name of Rojas Pinilla, was regarded hopefully by the people, who thought that peace might come at last. Most of the peasants gave up their arms, thinking that Pinilla was an honest man.
They were mistaken; he proved to be a corrupt military figure interested only in enriching himself and his cronies. Violence erupted all over again.
During this period the Communist party played its only important role. It organized some peasant guerrillas, who gained strength in the southern part of the country, an area that later came to be known as the peasant republics (Marquetalia, Guayabero, El Pato, Rio Chiquito, etc. ). But these guerrillas were not organized as the embryo of a future popular army aiming at taking power, but as units of self-defense kept in isolation. This strategy proved to be disastrous and the peasant republics were liquidated.
Pinilla's government became so corrupt that the upper classes had to get rid of him; and in 1957 they organized a nationwide protest by keeping all banks, factories and stores closed. Pinilla, a man without principles, fled the country; and Colombia has been ruled, or rather misruled ever since by a coalition of the two traditional parties.
This coalition, called the "Frente Nacional" (National Front), represents and defends the interests of the upper classes and American investors. As such its interests are not those of the majority of the Colombian populace. They have tried everything from the Peace Corps to the Alliance for Progress and “industrialization" programs, all to no avail. The Colombian masses are hungrier and poorer than ever. The economy is unable to expand as fast as the population.
Declining prices for coffee (our main export) have decreased the income, from abroad. Our natural resources like gold, oil, platinum, are in the hands of American companies that pay little or nothing for what they take out. The military budget is a giant burden on the national income and things go from bad to worse.
In this panorama of poverty and frustration, the masses look more and more to the Cuban example. The American government and its Latin-American puppets manipulate all the main media of communication (press, radio, TV) to distort and falsify the truth about the Cuban revolution; but even so, not everyone has been fooled. A number of Colombians have come to believe that the only way the masses can achieve political power and open up the possibility of carrying out a program in their own interests is through armed insurrection. They have come to the view that under the objective conditions, the best way to get this type of insurrection started is through armed struggle in the hinterlands -- guerrilla warfare.
Several attempts have been made in this direction. In the early sixties, the student leader Larrota tried to join the peasant bands in western Colombia. He was murdered before he could accomplish anything. Tulio Bayer, a physician, directed a guerrilla front in the Eastern Plains;; but this front collapsed, too. Likewise in the early sixties a group, splitting from the Communist party, decided to develop a front in the northern part of the country. The leaders of this group, Fabio Vasquez Castafio and Victor Medina Morén, organized the Frente Guerrillero José Antonio Gal&én which "opened fire” on January 7, 1965, by attacking the police station in the town of Simacota. The Colombian Communist party openly criticized and opposed this movement, holding that guerrilla tactics was a game for adventurers and provocateurs. According to their view it was necessary to build a strong party and play the electoral game.
V&squez and Morén kept up their fight with minor skirmishes here and there. They got a real boost when Father Camilo Torres, a Catholic priest who had been very active politically in previous months and who enjoyed tremendous popularity among the students and city workers, decided to join the ELN (Army of National Liberation, the group headed by VAsquez).
Camilo Torres joined the ELN sometime at the end of 1965 and from the mountains sent a message to the Colombian people telling them. that he had joined the guerrillas because he was convinced that it was the only way to gain political power and carry out the radical reforms that
Colombian society so badly needs.
This was a hard blow to the government. Up to then the government had referred to the guerrillasas bandits and assassins. But now it was different. The Colombian people knew Camilo Torres very well. They knew that he was a Catholic priest, who had studied sociology in Europe, and that he had been the chaplain of the National University until he decided to leave the priesthood and join the political struggle.
Unfortunately Camilo Torres was killed in an ambush a few months later on February 15, 1966. According to the official account, an army patrol, deep in the jungle looking for guerrillas, was suddenly machine-gunned and several soldiers were killed or wounded. When the guerrillas moved in to take the dead soldiers' weapons, a wounded sergeant machine-gunned them, killing Camilo Torres and several others.
The death of this priest-guerrilla was a big victory for the government and a blow to the guerrilla forces which had placed big hopes in him as a leader. But the movement did not collapse. The survivors regrouped and went on organizing. Later on they opened a second front which they called the Frente Camilo Torres.
The ELN has been very active ever since, and their latest activities indicate that they have grown in strength both in manpower and...firepower. At the end of February, the ELN attacked the town of Vijagual on the Magdalena River. They killed several soldiers, wounded others, and took all the weapons with them after explaining to the local civilian population what the revolution was about. In March they ambushed a payroll train, derailing it with dynamite and gunning the troops from both sides of the tracks. The guerrillas fled without a single casualty on their side and with considerable acquisitions in weapons and money.
In the southern part of Colombia, meanwhile, the survivors of the peasant republics reorganized themselves and formed the FAR (Revolutionary Armed Forces) under the leadership of Comandante Manuel Marulanda Vélez, a veteran guerrilla from the time of "La Violencia." This must be a heavily armed and well-organized group because the Colombian army (which is wellequipped and trained under American supervision) has been unable to bring them under control despite massive efforts to hunt them down. The relationship of this southern bloc to the Colombian Communist party is not very clear at present.
It seems that there was a break after the peasant republics were crushed and that now the guerrillas plan to follow a line of active insurrection contrary to the "peaceful coexistence" line of the CP.
The action of the two guerrilla fronts has compelled the government to keep the country in a state of siege, and to launch a huge military operation to an~ nihilate the guerrillas. But this may prove to be a very difficult if not impossible task. The Colombian guerrillas are now veteran fighters with deep, deep roots among the local population, and the Colombian masses are beginning to see in the guerrillas their liberators from the corrupt oligarchy.
The guerrillas are growing in strength and the machine politicians are losing in popularity. In a country with 7,000,000 potential voters, only forty percent went to the polls in the 1962 presidential elections and only thirty-six percent in 1966. The current president, Carlos Lleras Restrepo, received a little more than 1,000,000 votes. He travels under heavy guard. A few months ago when he visited the National University accompanied by one of the Rockefellers, the students greeted them with bricks, stones, tomatoes and eggs and shouts of "Down with the government!" and "Long live the guerrillas!"
[The Ejército de Liberaci6n Nacional (National Liberation Army), the Colombian guerrilla force, issued a strong statement in support of Fidel Castro's stand urging revolutionists in Latin America to go ahead and make the revolution and not be dissuaded from it by those who want to follow a line of class collaboration or "peaceful coexistence."
(The text of the declaration issued by the Colombian guerrillas, as published in the April 2 English edition of Granma, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist party is as follows.]
* * *
With the exception of Cuba, every Latin-American country today presents the same picture of hunger, poverty and exploitation.
After more than a century of domination by the bourgeoisie, our peoples are still living at the lowest levels of civilization, with ignorance and backwardness
rampant. This landowning bourgeois class, incapable of creation, living off the dispossessed (almost enslaved ) masses, always tagging along in the wake of the European and United States bourgeoisie, turning us over lock, stock and barrel to the power of Yankee monopoly interests, today faces only decline. This Latin- American bourgeoisie can no longer continue deceiving the peoples as it did in the past when it paraded as the champion of freedom and democracy.
For awareness of what must be done has awakened the peoples of the Americas.
Millions of human beings have had their eyes opened. The picture is clear: Miserable wages, which leave the worker and his family starving; tumble-down, unsanitary shacks, places of suffering rather than shelter; backwardness, with no possibility of escape; in short, the absence of any chance for a decent future. These are the conditions offered by the bourgeoisie in exchange for the riches produced by the millions who face death from hunger or malnutrition, those millions of Latin America's sons, of our brothers throughout the Americas.
The small farmer of Latin America is doomed to perpetual misery. He ekes out only a starvation existence from his tiny parcel of land. He is condemned to waste away from disease, neglected conpletely by the grasping landowning class.
Along with the exploitation by the pourgeoisie, the tentacles of imperialism have been strangling Latin America, making the continent its captive, the easy, defenseless prey of the imperialist monopolies.
The enormous natural resources deposited in our earth, which could insure our economic development if placed in the hands of the people, are instead ruthlessly wrested from us without the slightest qualms. Chilean copper, Venezuelan iron and petroleum, Bolivian tin, and our own Colombian oil and platinum; all these riches of our continent are extracted from our soil at the cost of blood and sweat, benefiting the true owners of that wealth not at all, but rather causing them growing suffering and poverty.
When the products of the countryside such as coffee, sugar and bananas are not used to feed our own people, but placed in the hands of Yankee imperial-~ ists, they mean economic ruin and starvation. The Latin-American bourgeoisie and Yankee imperialism are growing rich off the hunger and poverty of the millions of people of the Americas. And they resort to any and all means to perpetuate this regime of exploitation: from sham assistance programs to the massacre of workers and farmers. And if all else fails, there is always the armed intervention of imperialisn.
First they trot out "economic assistance" programs, and when these are unmasked for what they are -- subtle means of economic domination -- something more refined but just as hypocritical is brought forth: the Alliance for Progress. And the Latin-American bourgeoisie bows shameless-— ly to the new commands from its imperialist masters. And since such fables serve this exploiting class as well, the bourgeoisie plots right along with the imperialists, proclaiming changes and reforms bedecked with democratic trappings.
But the situation does not improve; it grows worse for the peoples of Latin America. The crumbs which the imperialists offer in an attempt to quiet the peoples cannot hold back their discontent.
The most reactionary sectors of the oligarchies come to power, and military gorillas or new-style civilian strongmen appear in those countries where imperialism is attempting to oppress the people through force. Repression is on the increase and the constant threat of armed intervention hovers over such countries.
And this has unleashed a revolutionary wave. As oppression becomes more ruthless, the peoples become more revolutionary. And to fight in a revolutionary way does not consist in bending before Yankee might, but rather facing up to fighting and defeating it.
Even before this situation became quite as clear as it is today, the heroic Cuban people threw off the same yoke that weighs down upon the rest of America. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution, its example and historic significance, marked the beginning of a new stage in the strug-~ gle: this time the decisive stage. For the Cuban Revolution has brought new fighting methods to the revolutionary struggle in the Americas.
And the awakening of the peoples which began with the Cuban Revolution is now manifest in other nations.
In Colombia, a nation with a tradition of struggle going back many years, revolutionary experience has crystallized into revolutionary armed struggle.
This new concept has come to the fore as a burning need of the people: the need to organize themselves and destroy the power of the exploiters.
The National Liberation Army (ELN) came into being as a direct product of this need, as a force prepared to carry on revolutionary warfare until final victory. We believe this to be the correct path,
and therefore follow it and proclaim it to our people.
Our experience, our own growth, has confirmed our views.
In Guatemala, as a result of the conditions forced upon the people by the oligarchy and imperialism, the popular revolutionary forces have created the FAR (Rebel Armed Forces), which has successfully advanced the armed struggle and day by day continues to hit hard against the reactionary troops. . In Venezuela the FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation), under the leadership of Comrade Douglas Bravo, and the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left) have advanced greatly, basing themselves on a correct conception of revolutionary struggle, truly prepared to wage an armed struggle for the liberation of Venezuela.
And in other countries as well, revolutionary movements have shaken off temporary difficulties which hampered them and have today launched their revolutionary armed fight. ;
An entire continent is making ready for the great armed struggle of liberation, a battle to be waged against the exploitation of the oligarchies and imperialist domination.
Imperialism, of course, will not let itself be taken off guard. Preparations are being made to savagely suppress the people's liberation movement. The Inter-American Defense Council and the Inter-American Peace Force are instruments of aggression being prepared by the imperialists for use against the peoples of the Americas.
Revolutionaries must answer this campaign by uniting all truly revolutionary movements. But such unity must be sought on a solid basis, on the basis of the stand each takes against imperialisn.
And the only correct stand to take against the imperialists is that of being prepared to fight, to confront the eneny with arms.
We, of the ELN, who are fighting against the enemies of the people with weapons in our hands, and who are determined not to relinquish our weapons until final and decisive victory is ours, will always stand beside true revolutionaries, those who in Guatemala, Venezuela or any other country are making a positive contribution to the liberation of the Americas. We consider such men our true conrades-in-arms and we declare our most fervent solidarity with then.
The revolutionary situation in the continent is forcing the oligarchies into their final critical stage. The oligarchies seek a way out of this crisis by turning to groups which might possibly give them a democratic fagade, an appearance of independence from Yankee domination. In such maneuvers they have even asked for econonmic assistance from countries of the socialist camp.
We feel that any aid whatsoever from the socialist camp for countries such as Colombia -- where aid is projected for Lleras Restrepo's ruling oligarchy -- will only serve to give those in power more resources with which to crush the revolutionary struggle. This is hardly a consequent [consistent] way to help oppressed peoples win their liberation from the exploiting oligarchies and imperialist domination.
Consequent with our position and revolutionary concepts, we consider that the position adopted by the Revolutionary Government of Cuba, as expressed by Major Fidel Castro on March 13, to be correct and appropriate. Moreover, we consider those statements concerning revolutionary tactics and strategy, as well as the general position of Revolutionary Cuba in relation to revolutionary struggle in the Americas to be quite correct. We also believe that the Cuban Revolution has every right to unmask its detractors, as well as those who pass themselves off as a revolutionary party.