Re: "Marxist guerrillas are fighting back history"

[Chris Brady <chris_brady@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I also sense as an escalation of the war tempo in The New York Times
coverage of Colombia. Clifford Krause is the Times' top Latin America
correspondent.  He goes to the hot spots to write the establishment
slant.  He reported from Chile during the past elections there.  In one
instance he painted a most flattering portrait of Joaquin Lavín, the
right wing candidate.  His recent article ?Colombia's Rebels Keep the
Marxist Faith? (NYT, 25 July 2000) works the other side of the time-worn
coin: red-baiting.

Along with all the baggage of a century of manipulated popular
associations concerning commies, Krause adds allegations of pederasty to
demonize the ?Marxists.?  His accusations follow Larry Rohter?s story in
the July 14 New York Times: ?Colombians Tell of Massacre, as Army Stood
By? wherein witnesses claim the Colombian Army kept help from reaching
villagers who were molested, raped, tortured and butchered by right-wing
death squads in an incident remarkable only by its magnitude. In the
incident of February last at El Salado, Rohter reported,  ?The
paramilitary troops ordered liquor and music, and then embarked on a
calculated rampage of torture, rape and killing. ?The victims, for the
most part, were men, but others ranged from a 6-year-old girl to an
elderly woman.? There had to be a counter.  Call in Krause.

 Teen Press Gangs

As for the allegations Krause dredged up about the guerrillas
conscriptions of teenaged girls into their ranks, a pair of reports by
the Associated Press a couple of years ago throws light on a wider scene
of the involvement of youth in war.  The ELN then captured 15 young
women, or kidnapped teen girls as some would have it.  The AP turned up,
however, that these girls were members of the Colombian armed forces who
were known as ?girls of steel?: ?The army insists?the women go uniformed
but unarmed, delivering food and giving vaccinations in poor villages
where the rebels have sought influence.  The rebels say the community
work was a cover for espionage.?  Anyway, the rebels made their point,
and saw no further profit in keeping these people so they let them go,
but not without a warning. The women said they were treated well, they
had even ?been allowed to write to their families,? but that they were
all going to quit the program.  Here is the bit that counters Krause:
?Eleven of the hostages [were] minors, two have young children and two
are pregnant, the army said. All are between 13 and 21 years old.?
Well, maybe they were volunteers, although the concept of volunteering
from an age group considered not yet responsible enough to vote remains
a conundrum to me. (See ?Colombian Kidnap Raises Concerns,? AP, JULY 01,
[1998], 20:24 EDT; and ?Colombian Guerillas Free Hostages,? AP, JULY 03,
[1998], 20:47 EDT, both by Jared Kotler, Associated Press Writer).

Lest readers come away with the fatalistic shake of the weary head and
the muttered frustrations casting curses on both houses, left as well as
right, Rohter reported:
?Over the past 18 months, more than 2,500 people, most
of them unarmed peasants in rural areas like this village
in northern Colombia, have died in more than 500
attacks by what the Colombian government calls
"illegal armed groups" involved in the country's
35-year-old civil conflict. And according to the
government, right-wing paramilitary groups are
responsible for most of those killings.?

 Commie Coke

Krause reports that coca leaf is grown more and there are more airstrips
since the FARC took over that ?Switzerland-sized? chunk of Colombia.  As
far back as 1997 Diana Jean Schemo, reported ?coca-growing peasants have
also said the guerrillas sometimes force them to limit the land used for
coca, and to grow food for their families instead.? (See ?U.S. To Send
Arms to Fight Drugs in Colombia but Skeptics Abound,? by Diana Jean
Schemo, NYT on line October 25, 1997).  While taxing entrepreneurial
traffickers, the FARC has not discouraged crop substitution among the
peasants.  This does not contradict the perceived ideological
underpinnings of the FARC, but it does contradict the fulminations of
Clifford Krause.  (Diana Jean Schemo contributed some of the most
perceptive reports from Colombia  to the New York Times but she seems to
have moved on?)

My four years of sometimes concentrated and sometimes spotty attention
to media reports about the Colombian civil war indicate that the rebels
of the left characteristically attack capitalist state institutions and
economic targets.  The capitalist state and the death squad agents of
capital characteristically attack the people, the working classes.  That
is the essential nature of this war.  It is a class war.

This is not the quality of propaganda that eases the cause of United
States intervention.
Krause contributes a corrective.

As for the international ramifications, there must be no delusions in
the corridors of power about the potential for peace in the region.  It
actually looks like a grand opportunity for profit for the
military-industrial complex as well as the extension of US power.
Cost-conscious critics might decide it makes more sense in the bottom
line to simply press the war further to totally eliminate the problem of
active resistance to the dominant order.  (See ?Peace in Colombia likely
to cost more than war,  conference told? by Tim Johnson Miami Herald, 23
July 1998).  Even if the goal of such a Carthaginian peace is missed,
the process of going for it will continue to be vastly enriching for the
capitalist class.  Trifling matters of pederasty remain opportunities
for propagandists such as Clifford Krause ?necessary opportunities that
must be seized, and necessarily slanted.  Talk about obscene and
corrupt.

Krause also joins the chorus of triumphalists who try to make everyone
take it for granted that Marxism is a passe delusion.
If so, why does he and his ilk remain so haunted by that specter?

YFTR,
Chris "Boo!" Brady