[Marxism] Raul Reyes Interview, First Part

[Anthony Boynton <northbogota@xxxxxxxxx>]

I just found this very interesting interview with Raul
Reyes in English online. It explains the FARC's
thinking about the Polo Democratico Alternativa, the
Para Politico scandal in Colombia, and other issues
worth noting.

This interview undoubtedly was one of the reasons
leaders of the Polo started publicly attacking the
FARC for being "isolated from reality" last month.

The interview is long, so I am sending it in two
parts.

C o l o m b i a . J o u r n a l . Online

July 12, 2007

Interview with FARC Commander Raul Reyes

by Garry Leech

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a
peasant-based guerrilla army with an estimated 18,000
fighters, has been waging war against the Colombian
government for more than 40 years. In recent years,
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and US President
George W. Bush have both intensified their efforts to
defeat the FARC as part of the so-called war on
terror. However, despite receiving more than $4.5
billion in US aid over the past six years, the
Colombian government has yet to achieve a military
victory. In June, I travelled to a remote jungle camp
to meet with FARC Commander Raúl Reyes. During a two
hour interview, Reyes discussed the para-politics
scandal, the revolutionary struggle, the dirty war,
child soldiers, the FARC?s controversial use of
home-made mortars and landmines, Plan Colombia, Plan
Patriota, neoliberalism and the prospects for peace in
Colombia.

Q: What is the significance of the para-politics
scandal for democracy in Colombia?

Raúl Reyes: The para-politics scandal is the result of
many years of the existence of drug trafficking in
Colombian politics. Drug trafficking money circulates
at every level of the government, in all the
apparatuses of the State, all the governmental
institutions. Drug trafficking has carried various
presidents to the presidency. But aside from the money
for presidential candidates, the money also funds
congresspersons in the House and the Senate. Many
judicial processes are also bought with drug
trafficking money. Drug trafficking money has also
penetrated inside the police, inside the army, inside
the DAS, the SIJIN, that is to say, inside all the
components of state security. The president is
compromised with this money. This money is also found
in industry, in commerce, in the pharmaceutical
industry, in the chemical industry, in all of these.

For these reasons the situation in Colombia is
serious. Here in Colombia, it is true what some say
about it being a narco-democracy. I believe there is a
narco-state, a narco-economy, but there is also a
great hypocrisy in the Colombian political
establishment because they sell the story that they
are fighting drug trafficking. They go to the United
States to ask for support to fight against drug
trafficking. And they go to the European Union to ask
for support to fight against drug trafficking. They
organize forums and seminars about the fight against
drug trafficking when they themselves are the
drug-traffickers and the beneficiaries of drug
trafficking. This is an extreme degree of hypocrisy,
no?

Q: How has the demobilization of the paramilitaries
affected the FARC?

Reyes: The demobilization of the paramilitary does not
exist, it is a farce. It is the government of Uribe
trying to deceive Colombians and the international
community. The intention of Uribe is to legitimize
paramilitarism and drug trafficking in Colombia. The
structures of those criminals continue functioning
and, therefore, they continue murdering people. Now
they use different names, the ?New Self-Defense
Forces? or the ?Black Eagles,? but they are the same.
In many cases, the demobilization involved the
drug-traffickers buying common delinquents, paying
them a salary to wear a uniform and to appear like
paramilitaries. Then a drug-trafficker appears as the
commander of those boys to whom he paid a salary so
that he is not extradited to the United States and so
that Uribe can show that he is making peace with the
paramilitaries. It is deception, no? And one they know
they cannot maintain because the International
Community are not fools, the International Community
know perfectly what is going on and the Colombian
population is a witness to it all.

There can never be a peace process among those who
have not been at war. There has never been a war
between the Colombian State and the paramilitaries,
because the paramilitaries are an appendix, an
extension of the State. They have been fighting to
defend the same State, they never took up arms against
the State and for a new regime, or a new system. Their
argument has been that the State is so weak that it
needs reinforcing and so we are going to help the
State.

Now, as it affects us, the FARC? It affects us in that
we are the people, the people in arms; it affects us
in that it is a great lie, a great deception; it
affects us in that Uribe wants to show that the
paramilitary groups and and us are the same; but in
practice it does not affect us. It is the population
that it affects, because these types who were
supposedly demobilized continue murdering people and
disappearing people, they continue conducting their
business. But it has all turned against Uribe, because
over time it has become clear that his government is a
spurious government, that is to say, an illegitimate
government, because he became president by buying
votes with drug trafficking money. His presidency is a
product of electoral fraud. What?s known as the
Uribista coalition consists of gentlemen
drug-traffickers and paramilitaries. For that reason,
the illegitimacy of this government is immense. What
is difficult to understand is why other decent
governments maintain relations when they know all this
about the president.

Q: Some claim that the FARC is nothing more than a
criminal organization, that it is not political or
ideological. What do you think of these claims?

Reyes: It is a campaign of the war, it is nothing more
or less than a form of war. They use it to discredit
the revolutionary struggle. This campaign has gained
strength from September 11, right? When the twin
towers fell in the United States and everyone began
talking about terrorism, the Colombian government
started calling the FARC and all the revolutionary
organizations in Colombia and the world ?terrorists.?
Then they could liquidate them, intimidate them and
force them to renounce the revolutionary struggle. And
this has increased war in the world. But the results,
in our judgment, have not favored the United States,
nor Mister Bush, whose credibility today has been
dramatically diminished. The popularity of Mister Bush
is not the best at this time, because of the war
against Iraq. Álvaro Uribe, to the shame of us
Colombians, is the only ruler in our region?South
America?that has supported that war. I believe that
the American people will take measures to discontinue
the wrong policies of their government. Fortunately,
one sees some expressions of this now. Some Democrats
are beginning to say ?No, we are not going to support
the deployment of our troops to Iraq, they have to
return to United States as soon as possible. We are
not going to approve the budget for the war. Neither
are we going to approve more money for Plan Colombia
without conditions. We are not going to sign an FTA
with a government like the one in Colombia, which is a
narco-paramilitary government, a corrupt government, a
government that has fought an endless war against
Colombians.? We don?t think that this is a solution,
but is an important step that the FARC values. At
least the Democrats are helping some thinking sectors
in the United States to understand this phenomenon and
to work to dismantle the machinery of war.

Many think that every American, by virtue of being
from there, is an imperialist. For this reason the
FARC has produced two or three documents indicating
that we deeply respect and admire the American people,
but we do have deep differences and are affected by
the policies of the American State. Before the attack
against Marquetalia in 1964, the embassy of the United
States was contributing money for the war against the
FARC and has always funded Colombian governments so
that they can maintain the war against the FARC. And
we recall what happened in the dialogues in San
Vicente del Caguán with Pastrana. The government of
Clinton was the first to oppose the dialogue, and
Clinton is the father of Plan Colombia. The world has
to know this and we cannot forget it in Colombia
because it is part of our history. And what did we see
happen with Plan Colombia, a continuation of the
strategy of war, not only against Colombians, but
against the region. The United States seeks to expand
into this region that contains the greatest
biodiversity in the world; it?s called the lung of the
world. There are geo-strategic interests that the
United States intends to achieve through crimes,
killings, slander and lies.

Q: Why do you think that members of the Democratic
Pole have not been massacred to the same extent that
members of the Patriotic Union were?

Reyes: I believe that the massacre that the Colombian
State perpetrated against the Patriotic Union, the
communists, and important revolutionary and union
leaders has been costly for Colombia. Above all, I
point to the slaughter of the leadership of the
Communist Party. At that time there was a large
Communist Party with very well developed, very well
formed cadres. It would suffice to recall, among
others, presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal and
Manuel Cepeda Vargas, director of the newspaper VOZ
and a senator of the republic. They murdered them all.
None of them had ever been involved in guerrilla
warfare, never. The ones that were guerrillas, the
ones the FARC sent to help with the work of the
Patriotic Union, I ordered them to come back once the
murders became evident. And they all came, among them
Iván Márquez, who today is a member of the Secretariat
but at that time was a representative in the House.
The leadership of the Party continued because it was a
legal party, but they continued murdering them one by
one.

But with the Democratic Pole it is different. The
Communist Party is part of the Pole, but it is a
reduced Communist Party, a party that maintains the
same political line, but has difficulty developing
because it is frightened, struck by the orgy of blood
that was the genocide against the Patriotic Union. And
inside the Pole, there are different sectors. Inside
the Pole there is the right, the social democrats and
the left?the Colombian Communist Party, the
Marxist-Leninist Party and other revolutionary
expressions, some Trotskyists, but all too small and
without much influence in Colombian political life.
The social democrats have the largest presence in the
Pole and they are taking advantage by trying to get to
the presidency of the republic; to attain important
positions inside the government, inside the State.
Among these are several demobilized members of the
M-19: Navarro, Gustavo Petro and others. Also, there
are some who left the Communist Party to join the
social democrats and they are proclaimed the
?democratic left .? These include Lucho Garzón and
Angelino Garzón, among others. These people have
accepted the establishment, the State, because they
calculate, and it?s a miscalculation, that they will
be able to attract the revolutionary left. But it so
happens that the revolutionary left cannot be
attracted to the social democrats because we are
conscious that social democrats end up favoring the
right, the bourgeoisie.

In the fight for the New Colombia, ?la patria grande?
and socialism, we are indicating that any important
change in Colombian life such as the search for a
lasting and final peace, a peace without hunger, a
peace with social justice, a peace with liberties, a
peace with dignity and with respect for our
sovereignty should include the FARC and the entire
revolutionary left. But these social democratic
sectors in the Pole want to sell the idea that they
can resolve the country?s problems while excluding the
left and by doing favors for the right. For that
reason we do not see a great difference between the
social democrats and the right headed by Álvaro Uribe
Vélez.

Within the Pole, the struggle for the revolutionary
left?represented by the communists?against the social
democrats is very hard, it is very difficult, because
the social democrats have the support of the right.
And now they are determining who is going to be the
new mayor of Bogotá, the successor to Lucho Garzón.
And clearly, nobody in the Democratic Pole wants
Bogotá?s city hall to return to the hands of the
extreme right. But the social democrats, united with
the right, want to continue the same programs, the
same politics that have been developed under Lucho
Garzón and they don?t want anything to do with the
revolutionary left, they want to try to exclude it.
Therefore, Navarro Wolf and Petro proposed, without
the consent, or without a consensus among the
leadership of the Democratic Pole, the name of Maria
Emma Mejía to be the candidate for mayor of Bogotá.
Maria Emma Mejía is a Liberal who became close to the
Pole, and finally joined the Pole, but she has never
been on the left. What we see here is that, with this
political maneuver, Navarro and Petro intend to
flatter liberalism with the one hand and Uribismo with
the other, while at the same time hurting the
revolutionary left inside the Pole.

It so happens that the commitment is not to the
people, the commitment is to fight for new
possibilities to attain positions inside the
government. However, within the Pole, some continue to
fight to maintain it a little toward the left. They
say that if the Pole cannot be maintained toward the
left then later they are not going to be able to
differentiate between the Liberal Party and the Pole.
But it is going to be a very difficult fight.

I believe that for all these reasons, the Colombian
State has not used the force, has not had the
disposition to commit the assassinations, that it did
in the past. But nevertheless, it should be noted that
they do continue murdering people, but they are
selective murders of the people that truly are on the
left. These people are union leaders, peasant leaders
and teachers who are engaged in the struggle on behalf
of the people. They murder them and as usual nobody is
held responsable because it is terrorism by the State.



       
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