[Marxism] Raul Reyes Interview, Second Part

[Anthony Boynton <northbogota@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is the continuation of the Raul Reyes interview.
If you want to find it yourself online, here is the
address. 

http://redresistencia.org

Q: Why does the FARC continue to use home-made mortars
in attacks against police stations when these weapons
repeatedly cause civilian casualties?

Reyes: There are two things here. One thing is the
utilization of mortars against the public forces,
which is the end for which they are used. The FARC
does not have heavy armaments, the FARC as you know
has still not been recognized as a belligerent force
and cannot obtain the armaments that it should possess
as an army. So it develops a lot of homemade armaments
to use against the public forces: the police, the
army, DAS, navy, and air force. Many times those who
operate these apparatuses, the mortars or other
weapons, commit errors. They aim at the police station
but they strike the neighboring house. That has
occurred a few times. It?s lamentable, of course;
there is not a single justification for it. But they
are human failings, caused by the nervousness of
whoever is launching it. Or it is a failure in the
structure of the mortar. This is a failure that has
occurred and we are trying to correct it so that these
mistakes that affect the population won?t happen. But
sometimes it is neither of these. For example, there
is a battle against a police station and then the air
force arrives?airplanes and helicopters?and they shoot
and bomb everything including the neighboring houses,
the church, all that, and then later they say that the
guerrillas were responsible for the destruction.

Q: Some human rights organizations claim that the FARC
recruits children, sometimes forcibly. How do you
respond to these accusations?

Reyes: I think there is disinformation there, because
those who join the FARC are between 15 and 30 years of
age, that is the norm. Nobody younger than that joins.
The FARC never forces anybody to join, it is
completely contrary to our safety regulations. Why
would I give a weapon to someone that has been forced
to join and then tell him he has to be my bodyguard?
The guard is going to make me pay right there with
that weapon. This is disinformation from these
organizations. It never happens. What causes this
disinformation? In many cases there are boys and girls
that join and then later, for one reason or another,
they decide to leave. Life here is very hard, one must
be disciplined. Perhaps they had family that they
couldn?t see, a son or a daughter, or a boyfriend, or
a girlfriend. Or they thought that this struggle would
be easy and then they aren?t willing to make the
sacrifice so they leave. If they are youths, I?m
referring to those under 20 years of age, then in many
cases they are going to say that they were forced to
join in order to defend themselves against the
repression of the police, and also in many cases of
their families.

Then there are cases in which there are those who want
to fight in the guerrillas but many times their
parents do not want them to join because the father
wants to have his son at home and the mother wants her
daughter there. They do not want them to join. But
they persist and join the guerrillas, they flee from
their houses and appear at our guard posts. It so
happens that they join the FARC voluntarily. But many
times when they leave they lie to their fathers and
mothers and say that they were forced to join and the
fathers and mothers believe them. And later, if the
authorities conduct an investigation, the parents say
that their son or daughter was forced to join and then
that information is collected by Amnesty International
or others. But I reiterate, it is not the policy of
the FARC to recruit children or to enlist anybody by
force.

Q: Why does the FARC use anti-personnel landmines when
they cause civilian casualties?

Reyes: The FARC uses mines against the public forces.
The mine fields are used against the public forces,
never against the civilian population, never. There
are cases when a road is suddenly mined and a civilian
might not know they are there and through some
carelessness of the guards or himself he fails to
avoid it. Sadly, those cases have always occurred. But
the norm is that one must try and ensure that there
are no civilian casualties.

Q: The Uribe government claims that Plan Patriota is
succeeding in defeating the FARC and bringing
territory under state control. How has Plan Patriota
affected the FARC and peasants in the region?

Reyes: I am in charge of analyzing the consequences of
Plan Patriota and the ways it has hurt the
revolutionary army of the FARC, as well as the ways it
has hurt the civil population, the popular and social
organizations, and the unarmed revolutionaries. And we
have found that those who have suffered the least are
those of us who have taken up arms. While we do not
possess the weapons that the State has, much less the
aid and the advising that it has received from the
United States, but still in the end we are two armed
forces, two armies. One army has a lot of power, many
men, a lot of technology, air and naval support, and
advisors who they say know everything. It has a very
clear objective: to liquidate the FARC, to kill or
imprison its main leaders, to recover prisoners by
force and to force the survivors to sign whatever
agreement Uribe wants. That has been, and still is,
the objective of Plan Patriota.

But it so happens that it has not achieved its
objective, it has failed to get any of the main
leaders of the FARC, it has failed to weaken the FARC
and it has failed to recover the prisoners of war. On
the other hand, however, it has hurt the civil
population, by applying the theory that ?the friend of
my enemy is also my enemy.? They have displayed many
guerrillas captured in certain regions. However, it so
happens that they were not guerrillas, they were
people considered to be friends of the guerrillas. I
remember one case in Cartagena de Chaira where,
according to the press, 80 guerrillas from the 14th
Front were captured. But the capture of 80 guerrillas
has never occurred, never. But that was the news, that
was what was fed to the people?s imagination. But it
so happens that not one of them was a guerrilla, they
were from the population and later they had to free
them all because it wasn?t true. However, when they
freed them nobody from the army said, ?I was
mistaken.? One time they said that 200 FARC guerrillas
were killed in the Cañon del Duda. It also wasn?t
true. But who is going to challenge that?

But truly those who have been affected most are the
peasants, the civilian population. Many people have
fled, shut their businesses, abandoned their farms
because of fear and because in many parts the
airplanes drop bombs and shoot their machine guns
indiscriminately. And there are others who have been
affected, union members and all these sectors, because
they say that they are all terrorists, or they are the
ones that support the ?terrorists? and so are likewise
the enemy. Then they arrest them and imprison them.
The people are affected by the current government; it
is a fascist, dictatorial government that has used war
as a form of governance and lies and slander as a form
of pressure and to distort what is really happening.

Plan Patriota is a true failure for the government.
Even more, it is not only a failure for the Colombian
government but also a failure for the government of
the United States, because it is the United States who
finances Plan Patriota and the United States who
supplies the military advisors for the war against us.
Uribe and the Colombian army were convinced that with
all that money and with all that advising they would
be able to finish off the FARC, but it so happens that
they have not achieved their objective. The FARC has
not been weakened militarily nor politically by Plan
Patriota.

But Uribe persists in his objective and has large
numbers of troops throughout the Colombian territory.
There are many troops in the areas containing all our
blocs, all our fronts, our columns, our companies, and
those troops are on all sides trying to find us in
order to annihilate us; there is constant fighting.
Among the troops of the State there have been wounded
and dead. They are the ones who are risking their
lives, it is not Uribe, it is not the Colombian
oligarchy, it is not Mister Bush, it is the Colombian
people. They are in the police and the army to earn a
salary because often they cannot obtain work anywhere
else or are unable to go to university. They are
defending the interests of the exploiters of Colombia,
the interests of the multinationals, the interests of
the empire; they defend those interests at the cost of
their own lives.

Q: Plan Colombia is now more than six-years-old and
the Bush administration intends to continue it for
several more years. How has Plan Colombia affected
Colombian peasants?

Reyes: The Colombian government, with the backing of
the entire political establishment, eradicates,
fumigates plantations. And these fumigations are a
great business venture in which they receive millions
of US dollars, originating from the American people
and delivered by the US government. This money is used
for fumigations. Those most affected by the
fumigations are the peasants, because they do not only
destroy the coca plantations, they also destroy food
products: bananas, yucca, corn, beans, sesame,
potatoes, everything. And besides pets, they affect
chickens, pigs and the people. There are cases of
children affected by the glyphosate, pregnant women
that have miscarried, many illnesses caused by the
poisoned environment and water, right? And they still
haven?t achieved the desired results in the
eradication of illicit crops because the peasants
develop new forms of counteracting the effects of that
poison on their farms. To quickly counteract it, they
grow in other places and the business continues. It
continues because there are people who buy the drugs,
because of the consumption in the developed world. It
is an extremely large consumption with prices that
favor, not the peasants, but the drug-traffickers and
the intermediaries.

The FARC has a presence in every part of Colombia and
knows the situation of the peasants very well. It
knows that the peasant does not grow coca or poppies
in the mountains because he is a drug-trafficker; no,
the Colombian peasant is not a drug-trafficker. The
Colombian peasant has had to resort to growing these
products because of the predatory effects of the
neoliberal model. Because it is better business to
import corn from the United States or another country,
or to bring cattle meat from Argentina, than to
produce them in Colombia. Already it is better for
business to import coffee from Vietnam than to produce
it in Colombia because there are no subsidies. Then
the peasant has to find another way to subsist, and so
he grows coca.

For that reason the FARC?s proposal, from the
dialogues in San Vicente del Caguán, calls for the
replacement of coca cultivations, seeking a solution
that will put an end to the phenomenon of drug
trafficking because the FARC considers it a cancer for
society, for humanity, that one must fight. We offered
to make the municipality of Cartagena de Chaira a
municipal pilot, that is to say, we wanted to show in
that municipality that it is possible to fight the
phenomenon of the production of the commodities of
cocaine. Likewise, we put forth the proposal calling
for the legalization of consumption. I believe that
this issue badly affects all of us Colombians and it
is not solely the responsibility of Colombians; it is
the responsibility of the consuming countries, the
responsibility of the bad governments that we have had
in Colombia, the responsibility of the poor policies
of the International Monetary Fund and of the banking
sector, the responsibility of the countries that
produce the chemical precursors, that is to say, in
short, the responsibility of the misconceptions of the
neoliberal model. It has drastically affected
Colombia. The neoliberal model has also affected the
developed countries, like the Europeans, with many
people in the streets begging for charity, children
cleaning car windshields, but in underdeveloped
countries like Colombia, or other countries in what is
called the Third World, it is much worse.

Q: How is it possible to change the neoliberal
policies implemented by President Uribe and previous
governments in Colombia?

Reyes: For the FARC the only way to change the
neoliberal model and the policies of previous
governments and of the current one is by taking power.
It must begin with the formation of a new democratic,
patriotic, diverse government of national
reconciliation, which seeks to change the course of
the country in a way in which it is truly the people,
with their leaders, who build the future. Without this
it will be impossible because Colombia has endured 50
years of war during which each of the governments did
the same thing, even before the neoliberal model
appeared and they applied the prescriptions of the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And
then the neoliberal model appeared and they became
wedded to neoliberal policies. This was before Uribe,
it was those who preceded him in the presidency. Then
they developed the terrorist state and this has
increased the problems.

So we think that to truly achieve change, and the ones
demanding this are the majority of the Colombian
people, what is needed is to form a completely
different government to that of Uribe and the previous
governments. That is to say, a government that is
committed to deep changes and that opens spaces of
democracy in order to be able to build the New
Colombia. A new Colombia where people would not be
exploited and, of course, there would be no
exploiters. But to achieve this is a task for titans,
because Colombia has a mafia class and a corrupt
murderous ruler. And as long as they continue
controlling the destiny of our country it is going to
be very difficult for the people to become controllers
of their own destinies. This is the reason that the
FARC continues its revolutionary struggle.

We spoke in a previous question about how they
assassinated the Patriotic Union and they assassinated
the communists, and how this closed spaces for the
legal struggle. And we noted that they continue to
murder popular leaders and continue to carry out some
selective assassinations. We think this validates the
revolutionary armed struggle, whose end is not war.
The end of the revolutionary struggle being waged by
the FARC is peace. For us, peace is the fundamental
thing. We understand that peace is the solution to the
problems that affect our people. We understand that
peace means that in Colombia we have a true democracy.
Not a democracy for the capitalists, but a democracy
for the people, who can protest, who can participate,
who have the right to live, who have the right to
healthcare, to education, who have the right to
communication, to electricity, to agrarian reforms, to
fight corruption, to not have to kneel before foreign
powers, but to be a country free, independent and
sovereign with respectful relations with all countries
on equal terms. Also, that the weapons of the army not
be not used against the people, but just for the
defense of our sovereignty and nothing more. To
achieve that objective is why we are here in this
jungle. And in search of that objective we are willing
to continue for as long as is necessary.

And our proposal for a ?prisoner exchange,? which
cannot be modified to the favor of Mister Uribe, is
issued with the desire to solve one of the by-products
of the conflict. Colombia suffers an armed, social,
political, and economic conflict that no government
has wanted to resolve. Therefore, we say, the signing
of an agreement to liberate prisoners on both sides
could also be the door to the beginning of a new
dialogue to work towards achieving peace. As I already
said, the FARC seeks peace, but not a peace that comes
from surrender, nor a peace that accommodates the
leaders of the organization and certain friends, but a
peace for the people. It must be a peace that protects
the life and the dignity of our population.

Q: What needs to be done in order to achieve a just
peace in Colombia and greater equality between the
rich and poor?

Reyes: To achieve that objective there needs to be a
change in attitude. The ruling class must understand
that the best business is peace. That peace is a
business and that business requires an investment,
because the large amount of wealth that exists in
Colombia, which results from the labor of the people,
could generate much more wealth if there was peace.
But since there is a war by the State against the
people, they invest in the war and not for the benefit
of the population, therefore Colombians are getting
poorer. The gap between the rich and the poor grows
and popular discontent grows and so does repression
against those who dare to express their discontent
through legal means. Often they are murdered, forced
into exile, displaced by threats, or their goods are
expropriated, then the number of guerrillas increases
and the armed struggle grows. In the case of the FARC,
it is a political-military struggle. Uribe Vélez
claims that there is no internal conflict in Colombia.
That is the first great lie that he tells to Colombia
and to the world and according to that great lie there
is nothing to resolve here. But there is a
confrontation here in which people are constantly
being killed, and for which he himself is asking for
aid from all sides in exchange for mortgaging the
sovereignty and the dignity of the Colombian people.
And so one must ask, ?If there is no internal conflict
then why demand aid?? It is completely contradictory.

The attitude of the ruling class must be to declare,
?From now on the best business for us is peace. And as
the business for us is peace then we are going to
invest in it. We are going to return part of what we
have taken from poor Colombians and invest it in
peace.? But I do not believe that the ruling class
will arrive at such a decision easily because the
essence of capitalism is something different: it is to
obtain greater profits at the cost of the sacrifice of
the population. For this reason, we are motivated to
wage the revolutionary struggle. We are motivated to
support actions by the popular masses, protests by the
unions, by organizations, and likewise guerrilla
actions. And this is what we call ?the combination of
all forms of struggle,? because the FARC is a
revolutionary army and it does not only engage in the
armed struggle. The FARC is characterized as a
political-military organization. Its leadership is a
political cell. All of the FARC is a political cell.
Therefore, its work involves the formation of
guerrillas who are strong both politically and
ideologically so that they understand it is a fight
for the structural changes that the country requires
and not for the benefit of certain people. And so that
they understand that this fight requires making
sacrifices including leaving one?s family to be in the
jungle and exposed 24 hours a day to attacks by the
enemy. We feel that with this sacrifice we are
contributing to the revolutionary struggle of Colombia
and other peoples of the world.

Q: What is the FARC?s vision for Colombia?

Reyes: When we speak of the New Colombia we are
speaking of a Colombia in which there are neither
exploiters nor exploited; of a Colombia without
social, economic or political inequalities; of a
Colombia without corruption; with neither
paramilitarism or state terrorism; of a Colombia with
industrial development; of a worthy Colombia,
independent and sovereign; a Colombia where resources
are invested in scientific research and technological
development; a Colombia where the environment is
protected; a Colombia whose wealth is used for the
benefit of the population; a Colombia that does not
continue privatizing, that does not continue selling
the businesses of the State but instead uses these
businesses to benefit social programs; a Colombia with
agrarian reform, not an agrarian reform that delivers
land to the people and keeps them hungry, but an
agrarian reform with technical assistance; an agrarian
reform that includes infrastructure for the peasants
and that makes it possible for their children to
study; an agrarian reform in which a market and the
purchase of their products is guaranteed; an agrarian
reform in which they can obtain affordable credits
from the State; a Colombia with employment; a Colombia
with subsidies for the unemployed; a Colombia that
guarantees education, healthcare, homes and all that.

That it is the Colombia that we dream of and that we
call the New Colombia, directed by a new State, by a
new democratic, patriotic and diverse government,
which does not exclude any part of the population. And
that everyone that is interested in contributing to
that new government can do so, even if he is a
businessman. If he is going to pay some taxes and he
is not going to exploit the workers and he is going to
pay them according to the law, then it is not a
problem that he earns profits. As long as he pays
taxes and complies with the norms of the law not to
exploit the population. Because the large businesses
cannot be allowed to earn profits by paying starvation
wages and evading taxes.

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