February
21, 2002
Pastrana
and the FARC: The Peace Talks Show is Over
Narco News '02
Drug
War Goes
Boom
in Colombia
"The
Revolution Will Be Reported"
A Communiqué
from Narco News
By Al Giordano
Colombia's lame duck president Andrés Pastrana began his
televised speech last night by seeking the legitimacy that has
evaded his presidency. His first words were:
"Fellow Colombians:
In October of 1997 nearly 10 million Colombians - in the highest
voter turnout in the country's history - voted for peace, a vote
that obligated all the presidential candidates to pursue peace
in Colombia through political negotiation.
"In June of 1998,
six-and-a-half million votes - also the highest voter turnout
for any presidential election - supported my peace project. That's
why, since the first day of my government I have not stopped
working to comply with the mission that you gave me: The mission
in which democracy trusted in me!"
Pastrana,
last night, on National TV
Pastrana did not mention the October 2000 elections, for
good reason. They were held just two months into the implementation
of the U.S. military intervention, endorsed by Pastrana, called
"Plan Colombia."
In the October 2000 elections
for state governors and legislators - at the time, Narco News
was the only English-language news agency to report the results
- the
voters massively repudiated and rejected Pastrana's conservative
party, which lost
every single state election and saw the election of many governors
and officials from small independent parties, breaking the lock
of a corrupted two-party system.
From that moment on, Pastrana
has struggled in vain to regain legitimacy.
Last night's televised
declaration of war had been planned for a while. It was clear
the hour was near when the U.S. government spent $3 million taxpayer
dollars on February 3rd, Super Bowl Sunday, to convince the taxpayers,
with their own money, to support a war in Colombia. Pastrana
and his U.S. commanders were simply waiting for the next political
pretext to begin the shooting: In this case, the alleged hijacking
and kidnapping of a member of Congress by the rebel FARC; The
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Within hours last night,
aerial bombardments began upon 85 rural Colombian communities,
bases of support for the rebels. More bombing has been announced
for this afternoon.
But Colombia is not Afghanistan,
and the FARC has more than four decades of survival experience
against the Colombian army.
Author Bert Ruiz - a political
moderate - gave
a speech last May
to the conservative Heritage Foundation about Plan Colombia.
He began by reminding of his own considerable establishment credentials:
"My views are based
on a diverse background that includes two tours in Vietnam with
a United States Marine Corp elite G-2 military intelligence unit,
a formal education in journalism at New York University's Graduate
School of Arts and Science and nearly twenty years of experience
in Latin America as a senior Wall Street executive primarily
for Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. Secondly, I must formally
state that the views expressed here today are my own and do not
represent the position of the Colombian American Association
in New York City of which I am the former President and current
Chairman.
"Quite frankly, I
think it is my responsibility to state here and now that there
is a 'bright shining lie' in Colombia. And the truth is that
the Colombian armed forces have entered a sinister relationship
with the paramilitary death squads and have orchestrated a slaughterhouse
mentality to rid the nation of the guerrillas. Colombia has the
worst human rights crisis in the Hemisphere. Our own State Department,
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia,
Human Rights Watch Americas and Amnesty International have all
documented that the Colombian military maintains links to the
paramilitaries."
Ruiz went on to say, based
on his direct reporting within Colombia:
"What I bring to
the table today is an important insight to the overall rural
and urban strength of the FARC organization. I have dedicated
the past three and one half years to complete a book titled 'The
Colombian Civil War.' It took me nearly two years to establish
contact with the FARC and in September of last year while on
a 40-day trip to Colombia, under dangerous conditions I met with
the FARC. I think its important to make it clear I am not sympathetic
to the guerrilla position but in order to complete my book I
needed to better understand the position of the revolutionaries….
"The first thing
I learned is that the FARC considers Colombia today in 'ideal
conditions for a revolution.' They pointed out the wretched poverty
in the countryside, the intensifying urban squalor and the repressive
and dictatorial political regime that allows death squads to
randomly slaughter unarmed campesinos will eventually help them
assume power. They explained that guerrilla warfare is also a
business and a way of life and that they have institutionalized
sources of income. I found that the fight in Colombia is using
a plan that combines elements of the Nicaraguan insurrectionist
model and that of the Vietnamese model of a prolonged war of
attrition.
"And amazingly I
was quoted a military strategy that states, 1. The war must be
carried on in the interior of the country. 2. The war cannot
hinge upon a single battle. 3. The theater of war must extend
over a considerable area. 4. The national character must support
the war. And 5. The terrain must be irregular, difficult, and
inaccessible. I was also told the FARC is content with attacking
when success was certain, refusing to give battle likely to incur
losses or to engage in hazardous actions. I was told in the Vietnamese
theater of operations this method was used and carried off great
victories. Lastly I was told that Che Guevara wrote that the
duty of revolutionaries is to make revolution. In essence I was
brought into the world and language of a class struggle and found
the FARC to be intelligent and confident. And I quickly understood
what Andy Messing was trying to explain in 1998 when he said
the FARC 'were not farmers with pitchforks.'
"However, the most
troubling information, which came from several sources, is the
strength of the FARC in Colombia's large cities of Bogotá,
Cali, Medellín, Barranquilla and Bucaramanga. A shocking
statistic of the Colombian reality is that 56.3% of the nation,
21.6 million citizens suffer from extreme poverty, making less
that 110,000 pesos a month or $55 US... Moreover, as of today,
Bogotá is inundated with displaced campesinos attempting
to escape the war in the countryside - raising the population
of residents in the capital to over 8 million Colombians….
"Overall, those human
rights activists who have not fled Colombia in terror from right
wing death squads estimate the FARC guerrilla organization now
had hundreds of thousands of urban sympathizers in the major
cities of Colombia - some with suitcases filled with weapons
ready for a revolution. All totaled I am convinced the FARC has
30,000 AK 47's hidden in Bogotá, has a militia of 10,000
in Bogotá primarily from the ranks of the 4 million poor
Colombians crowded into the downtrodden barrios of Bolivar, Kennedy
and Soacha…."
"Why is this not public
information?"
asked Ruiz. "Why is it we are told that 95% of Colombians
reject the guerrillas and they have little public support."
And he explains:
"Another bright shining
lie in Colombia is that the polls are skewed. The major polls
in Colombia are all primarily random digit dialing or a systematic
interval spacing of listed numbers that capture the ideas of
the upper and middle classes. The truth is in Colombia the poor
do not have phones and are the silent majority. Subsequently,
Colombia is a democracy in peril and the truth be known: anti-American
sentiment in Colombia is growing dramatically.
"The FARC is convinced
that as they grow stronger, the Colombian armed forces will one
day fire on or bomb the poor in the major urban centers and the
revolution will start in earnest. The FARC have teamed up with
common bandits and gangs, which are plentiful in the barrios,
the workers unions and students in universities. They are much
stronger than the U.S. or Colombian government admits and that
is a clear reason why President Clinton waived every major human
rights clause in the aid package. The Clinton administration
found out too late that the Colombian armed forces are impotent
and unable to protect or provide for the poor. Moreover, security
forces in Colombian blatantly conduct illegal actions that are
not consistent with the leadership of the nation."
Now is the hour in which we will begin to find
out whether the U.S. government and its obedient press corps
have been telling the truth about the alleged weakness of the
Colombian revolutionary movements.
One of the first maneuvers
by the US-backed Colombian regime in its declaration of all-out-war
was to ban press coverage.
The French Press Agency
(AFP) reports
today:
"The Colombian army
did not permit the entrance of journalists into the former demilitarized
zone in the south of the country on Thursday….
"According to journalists
working near the border of the zone the FARC occupied until midnight
last night, General Javier Arias, Commander of the 7th Military
Brigade… banned the entrance of the press into the 42,000
square-kilometer zone.
"A military spokesman
told the press that the prohibition of journalists was ordered
by the president himself.
'These are our orders, and until they are changed we cannot allow
the entrance of journalists,' said the military spokesman.
However, the special correspondent
of AFP documented that civilians have been permitted to enter
the former demilitarized zone.
"The journalists
are now at a military roadblock… on the highway between
Puerto Rico and San Vicente del Caguán (700 kilometers
south of Bogotá) in the ex-neutral zone."
If past is prologue, information will continue to
find its way out of the war zone despite the efforts by the official
censors to shut down authentic journalism. Narco News
will continue to translate, analyze and report the facts to the
global public.
Narco News, today, repeats three vital facts
that we have frequently reported:
1. The U.S. and Colombian militaries
are fighting side by side with, and protecting, the brutal and
illegal paramilitary death squads, despite the rhetorical admission
by the U.S. State Department that the paramilitaries are "terrorists"
and profit-driven narco-kingpins.
2. We reject the cowardly and ignorant
statements from some "moderate" quarters that seek
to create a moral equivalence between the rebel guerrillas and
the paramilitary troops. That view reflects official propaganda,
not reality. The rebels oppose the rule of the large landowners,
foreign capital, and the Colombian oligarchy. The paramilitaries
seek to maintain that status quo. The governments and the paramilitaries,
together, wish to enforce a brutal and undemocratic regime to
violently prevent every aspect of an open society; they seek
to keep the impoverished majority from participating in elections,
in unions, and in civil organizations. By assassinating and repressing
all social movements, they have made violent revolution inevitable.
3. One of the most ignored differences
between the FARC and its opponents in government and paramilitary
forces is that the FARC openly calls for legalization of drugs
as part of the program it hopes to bring with its revolution.
New
York Stock Exchange President Richard Grasso Visited the Rebels
in 2000
We have often repeated that when a government calls a
policy a "war," as with the war on drugs, things will
eventually go "boom!"
The explosion began this
morning, at midnight.
We expect that this will
be a protracted conflict. It's also clear that, every day, the
United States government wades deeper into this Big Muddy war.
Narco News will be covering this
war, and monitoring
how the rest of the media reports on it. As always, we will bring
you the words of Colombians and Latin Americans that are not
often translated into English, much less reported by the English-language
media. You will read very different opinions here than those
allowed in the commercial media. The Colombian reality has been
cloaked by the screeching hysterical rhetoric of the false wars
on terrorism and drugs. We will continue to rip that cloak apart,
so that our readers may see a greater truth emerging from Bolívar's
América.
Finally, we wish to stress
that events in Colombia are integrally related to events throughout
the hemisphere. Narco News reports underway from Bolivia,
Ecuador, Venezuela, Perú, México and the United
States are all related, one way or another, to the Colombian
war.
América is a whole
made up of many lands and peoples. It cannot, journalistically
speaking, be pulled apart. Efforts by the U.S. government to
stage a
coup in Venezuela,
to poison Ecuador's peasants with herbicide, to prop up a puppet
narco-regime in Bolivia, to provide cover for a new model of
narco-regime in Perú, and to bolster sagging public opinion
in the United States for a drug prohibition that causes all the
ills that Washington claims to be combating in our América,
are all pieces of the same story.
Zero Hour in Colombia
means Zero Hour for América.
The revolution will be
reported.
From somewhere in a country
called América,
For
more Narco News, Click
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The
Revolution Will Be Reported
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