[Marxism] Rodrigo Granda

[Anthony Boynton <northbogota@xxxxxxxxx>]

Here is a very interesting document which I
found on the FARC-EP website. It is the statement of Rodrigo Granda, the FARC
leader kidnapped by Colombian agents in Caracas, imprisoned in Colombia, and
then recently released by Uribe-Velez. 


 


Granda's explanation of recent Colombian
history, as well as that of his own personal polticial evolution is as
interesting, or more interesting, than his account of recent events. Here is
the link to the original, the article follows. Anthony


 


http://www.farcep.org/?node=2,3288,1


 


 


August 28th, 2007


 


For the soul not to be hidden from the
facts


 


By: Rodrigo Granda


 


My name is Rodrigo Granda. . My compaÃeros
call me Ricardo. I am a Colombian citizen who was born 58 years ago in a small
forgotten town of the Antioquia department (province) called Frontino. My
father was a versatile man. Coming from a family of miners and muleteers, he
was a professor, mayor, topographer, miner and painter. He belonged to the
Conservative Party without being a "godo", (1*) as then in Colombia
one was born being a conservative or a liberal.


 


It used to call my attention that, although
my father was a conservative, he never hid his permanent critic to the high
echelons of the Catholic Church hierarchy, because he realized that the church
was bound to the terrenal power of the large estate holdings, that it acted as
a support and usufructuary of privileges, and that it was obscurantist and
reactionary.


 


In regards to the relation between his membership
in the Conservative Party and my fatherâs general attitude before life, it
could be said that it was like "if the devil were making hosts",
because his thought and social practice were very advanced for his time. Later,
in the sixties, he entered in the Alianza Nacional Popular (ANAPO) [Popular
National Alliance], the political movement founded by General Gustavo Rojas
Pinilla. Rojas Pinilla reached the Presidency of the Republic in 1953, by means
of a coup d'etat against the conservative President Laureano GÃmez (1950-1953).
The coup of Rojas Pinilla counted with the support of the leadership and the
militancy of the Liberal Party, and from a wide social base formed by workers
from the rural areas and the city, who saw him as a second "liberator"
(the first was SimÃn Bolivar), because the policy followed by the conservatives
against the liberals and communists was to exterminate them by "blood and
bullets". GÃmez himself proclaimed it with those words. At that time, the
"first violence" began, from 1946 to 1953, unleashed by the
liberal-conservative oligarchy, which had a cost of three hundred thousand dead
for our people.


 


With the arrival of Rojas Pinilla to power,
people thought that the violence would stop and a model of independent economic
development would be undertaken. His slogan was: "Bread, Peace, Justice
and Freedom". Soon the General becomes a dictator, makes the Communists
illegal, imposes press censorship, closes the Congress and names a Constituency
Assembly "of pocket" to be perpetuated in government. The liberals
and conservatives, who see their political and economic privileges and interest
threatened, unite themselves against Rojas, they overthrow him in 1957 and
Rojas seeks asylum in Spain. In the decade of 1960, Rojas Pinilla returns to
the country and founds the ANAPO, based in caudillismo (strongman), demagoguery
and populism, which attracts the attention of great masses that, again, believe
to see in him the person able to carry out the changes that Colombia demanded.


 


My mother comes from a wealthy family
related to land tenancy. My maternal grandfather was one of the main landowners
of the Antiochian West. With money and some knowledge of medicine, he gained
the respect of the powerful and the obedience of the laborers submitted to the
prevailing relations of feudal character in that zone at the beginning of the
XX century. By virtue of the economic comfort of the family, my motherâs
childhood was one of a princess. She did not have any needs in her childhood.
She was transported on "indian back" through the rustic trails of the
mountainous and old Antioquia. Today, the Fair of the Flowers, in MedellÃn, is
a memory of that time, only that instead of carrying people, as they did
before, the âsilleterosâ[men-chair] (before indians) load on their backs the
most varied and beautiful flowers of the region. My mother conserves her
aristocratic customs, although the economic comfort does no longer exist.
Unlike my father, she is a practicing catholic. If the "heavens" were
gained by reason of how much people pray, she would have already assured
herself a place in it. I have no doubt about it. All mothers, for me, are
saints.


 


From early age I had social sensitivity and
great sense of solidarity with the destitute. I did it as something natural, as
it came spontaneously from me. At 11 years of age I listened in the radio and
recorded in those old acetate discs, the series Caudillos and Crowds. That was
a collection of the best interventions of Jorge EliÃcer GaitÃn, the great
speaker and liberal caudillo assassinated on April 09 of 1948 by the
liberal-conservative oligarchy, event that unleashes the violence that still
persists in the country. I also listened to the speeches of Laureano GÃmez,
great admirer of the Spanish phalange, whom they nicknamed "the
monster" due to his bloodthirsty practices, and the speeches of Gilberto
Alzate AvendaÃo and Silvio Villegas, formidable speakers and senators of the
Conservative Party.


 


By then the Cuban Revolution had already
prevailed. Many of the counter-revolutionaries that emigrated from that country
went to Colombia and were taken to the secondary schools to dictate conferences
on the evils that Communism would bring to Cuba. In Marco Fidel SuÃrez School,
of MedellÃn, I attended several "conferences" of those repulsive
subjects that received the rejection of those of us who attended the last years
of secondary education. I remember them speaking of "executions without
trial", of "mothers who the government took their new born children away
from", of "people who their clocks, their gold chains, automobiles,
their houses and other properties were confiscated" and that "all
those who protested were executed in the act". In synthesis, the calumnies
and the insults were so many that I wanted to know the truth, and thus I began
to listen to Radio Havana Cuba.


 


The speeches of Fidel Castro impacted me
with hurricane forces. Names before strange to me became familiar: I am talking
about heroes of the young revolution such as Camilo Cienfuegos, Chà Guevara,
Ramiro ValdÃs, Haydee SantamarÃa, Melba HernÃndez and Vilma EspÃn, and of
martyrs such as Abel SantamarÃa, Frank PaÃs and many others. I wanted from my
heart that what was being done in Cuba we repeated in Colombia, but I did not
have the most remote idea from where to begin. In my innocence and lack of
revolutionary conscience, I believed everyone who did speak of revolution and
change, regardless of them not having a clear project nor that their words
agreed with what they practiced. The most radical that I knew then was the
ANAPO, whose youth organization I joined because that movement, for me, was
composed by the people, and that movement won the elections of 1970 with
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla as candidate to the Presidency of the Republic.


 


The presidential election of 1970 was
robbed from Rojas Pinilla by means of the greatest fraud committed in the
history of Colombia. At 8 oâclock on the night of the April 19, when all the
counting gave Rojas as the winner, President Carlos Lleras Restrepo decrees a
curfew commanding all Colombians to go to sleep. Shortly after, at dawn of the
20th, the conservative Misael Pastrana Borrero candidate of the National Front
shows up as the elected President. After an insignificant struggle in the
Apostolic Nunciature, Rojas Pinilla reaches a compromise with the government,
while the people are deceived and disillusioned. These events give rise to the
Movimiento 19 de Abril [Movement April 19] (M 19). (2*)


 


In 1971, I take root in Bogotà to work as a
banking employee. In that city I establish my first contacts with the labor,
communal and neigborhood movement, and is there where I meet members of the
Partido Comunista Colombiano [Colombian Communist Party] (PCC). After studying
its program, I request entrance to the party and am assigned to a cell of the
Restrepo district, in the south of the capital. I could say that it is then
when I begin to have class awareness, and to understand why and how one
struggles. I take the first introductory steps to Marxist-Leninism, and combine
the work, the study and the political activity. To the PCC I owe a great part
of my formation, that later continues and is deepened in the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia - Peopleâs Army (FARC-EP). (3*)


 


In the PCC I undertook local, regional and
national tasks. In 1985 the UniÃn PatriÃtica [Patriotic Union] (UP) arises, to
which leadership I was promoted in its First Congress. That movement was a
product of the Agreements of the Uribe, signed by President Belisario Betancur
and the FARC. The agreements of the Uribe, which motto was "Cease of Fire,
Truce and Peace", allowed the insurgency to participate in the electoral
competition, that is to say, they could elect their own mayors, councilmen,
deputies and senators, on the bases that it was the elected functionaries, in
particular the members of the National Congress, who had to approve and to make
work in the day to day life the changes that would end the armed conflict.


 


The irruption of the UP caused turmoil in
Colombian politics for the number of councilmen, deputies, mayors and senators
that it managed to elect, and for the voting obtained by its presidential
candidate, Jaime Pardo Leal, ex- magistrate of the Superior Court of Bogotà and
member of the PCC, later assassinated by the State terrorism in 1986. That
turmoil scares the national oligarchy that undertakes the route of the physical
elimination of that movement, without concerning for the methods used. The high
spheres of the government stimulate the mafia groups to attempt against the
leadership of the UP and give green light to the Armed Forces to organize the
paramilitary groups, while the political chiefs, the landowners and the
obscurantist sectors of the clergy, that see their political and economic power
threatened, begin to fuse their interests with the mafia.


 


Although I rejected all the pressures
exerted against me to try to turn me into an "intermediary" of their
plans to divide the guerrilla movement, and that I also refused the
unacceptable conditions that the government raised as requirement to
excarcerate a group of so-called FARC guerrillas, I was left in freedom,
against my will, on the 4 of July of this year. Mr. Uribe said to the country
and the world that my excarceration took place for reason of State, because he
had received the request of the President of France, Nicholas Sarcozy, to
release me unconditionally. Uribe added that he had not asked the French
President what were the motivations that move him to make such request, and
that in his decision confidence was put ahead of any other interest.


 


I am frankly between those who ask oneself
what is the role that the President of France plays in this plot. My conviction
is that the High Peace Commissioner, by order of Uribe, resorted to blackmail
so that I lead a demobilization from jail, of dark individuals who have nothing
to do with the guerrilla movement. The plan consisted in leaving the true
guerrillas in jail, and that the false ones, chosen by the government of Uribe,
would leave with me.


 


The "unilateral measures" of the government
of Uribe were part of a meticulous plan, whose second part consisted of
rescuing, by blood and bullets, the ex-deputies of the Assembly of Valle del
Cauca who were prisoners of the FARC-EP in mountains of the south of the
country. With that commando action, the government of Uribe wanted to do
something similar to the "Entebbe Operation" (5*) or to the rescue of
the hostages captured by the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru [Tupac Amaru
Revolutionary Movement] (MRTA) in the embassy of Japan, in Lima, Peru. (6*)
This became known when on June 28 of this year the News Agency Nueva Colombia
[New Colombia] (ANNCOL) informed on an attempt of rescue of the mentioned
prisoners, executed on the 18 of that same month by a unidentified commando,
that caused the death, in the middle of the crossfire, of 11 of the 12
prisoners of that group, who were in control of the organization since the 11
of April of 2002, and who were part of the group of 56 people included in the
proposal of humanitarian exchange.


 


The Colombian government failed in what we
can define as a combat and propaganda operation, based on an attempted
"two-pronged effect" that would take place between the unilateral
excarceration of so-called FARC guerrillas, and a commando action to rescue 
prisoners
in control of the FARC, that would show that the humanitarian exchange was
"unnecessary". If the rescue would have been successful, the
government would had projected, on the one hand, an image of
"moderation" and "indulgence", by way of the liberation of
the "guerrillas" who accepted their conditions, and on the other
hand, a successful vision of his militarist policy. In other words, if it is
possible to defeat the guerrilla, there is no need for humanitarian exchanges
and much less for undertaking a peace dialogue. As far as me goes, they would
have deported me to Paraguay to put me on trial under false charges of
kidnapping and murder of the daughter of ex- president Cubas.


 


After the failure of this plan, the
national and international outcry for the humanitarian exchange has multiplied,
as has been expressed in the massive mobilizations of this past July 5. We wish
for the exchange to happen, we continue working for it and are convinced that
it is absolutely viable. I am convinced that the international climate is very
favorable. We continue calling on all the governments and peoples of the world,
to personalities and organizations in general, to accompany us to achieve this
noble objective.


 


I believe that the presidents of the Group
of the Eight recognize the existence of the social and armed conflict that
Colombia is living through. I observe that in their most recent declaration
they do not talk of kidnapped but of hostages; I notice that they support the
steps taken by France, Spain and Switzerland in favor of the dialogue; I
ascertain that they talk about the parts in conflict, which constitutes
recognition that we the FARC-EP are a belligerent force. For that same reason,
I conclude that it looks very bad on their part to continue labelling us as
"terrorists", after having explicitly recognized that we are a
movement of national liberation.


 


The Colombian government must leave its
obstinacy aside and show political will to carry out the humanitarian exchange.
This does not imply that the prevailing political system will crumble or that
the Armed Forces will feel defeated, neither that Colombia will become
balkanised. It is simply to accept the solution of a problem that concerns and
it is in the best interest to all the parts. As we arrived at this point, it is
necessary to refute the lie propagated by the Colombian government, when
stating that the clearing of the municipalities of Pradera and Florida,
requested by the FARC-EP, would be for an indefinite time. That clearing would
only be for between 45 and 60 days, sufficient time to give security to the
guerrillas, to the government; to the countries, the organizations and the
accompanying personalities; and to the retained of both sides. The clearing of
those municipalities is, then, an urgent necessity.


 


Rodrigo Granda (Ricardo) is a combatant of
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia â Peopleâs Army, a member of its
International Relations Commission of which he was the highest hierarchical
representative in the exterior until the time of his kidnapping and for that
reason he is known as the Chancellor of the FARC-EP.





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