With events escalating in Syria/Rojava following the Turkish fascist regime’s invasion of Kurdish liberated areas, attention should also be kept on events in South America.
After five years of negotiations between the Colombian FARC rebels and that country’s government, a peace deal was announced in 2016 to end the 50-year old civil war. We said at the time:
“It is entirely understandable that the Colombian masses, weary of a conflict in which a quarter of a million people have died, and with no immediate prospects of a victory for the guerrilla forces, would welcome an end to civil war.
“However, they should harbour no illusions about the possibility of achieving peacefully what they could not achieve through armed struggle….
“It is absolutely the case that just as there is a time to pick up the gun, so there is a time to put it down.
“It is also regrettably the case that only one side will be laying down its weapons under the agreement.” (see “The Civil War in Colombia ends”, )
Now, three years after the signing of the peace agreement, a section of the FARC is rearming. Early in the morning on August 28, the former head negotiator for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), Iván Márquez, announced via a YouTube video the official rearmament of a faction of FARC in what appears to be the eastern plains on the Colombian border with Venezuela and Brazil. New groups have spread rapidly across the nation as ex-combatants feel betrayed by the government’s failure to live up to its promises to enact land reforms and as para-military squads continue to murder hundreds of progressives.
The other main guerrilla group still active in Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN) could enter into an alliance with the newly re-armed wing of the FARC in several regions of the country where they remain active.
Although the majority of FARC still support a parliamentary approach to changing the power structure in Colombia, the new developments create major problems for US imperialism and its lackeys in South America.
US imperialism has determined that the Colombian government and army should be its cat’s paw in creating trouble for Venezuela along their shared border, with the backing of other reactionary governments allied with or under US control in the region.
A recent (September 2019) report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela (Marxist-Leninist) – the PCMLV – refers to the activation of the Inter-American Reciprocal Assistance Treaty (TIAR) by the US and ten South American governments, saying:
“It is not the first time that the bourgeoisie uses the stimulus of the war between oppressed countries as an excuse to curb the actions of a rebel people who are advancing in a democratic process, trying to create the conditions for direct aggression. In this case, this old policy is intended to apply to the people of Venezuela who have been resisting and fighting against imperialist aggression…. (through an) increase of tension on the border with Colombia as steps prior to military action.”
“Possibly the capitalists who run the United States Department of State are not in a position to generate direct military aggression against Venezuela with their own troops because their economic situation is not the best: it has an ongoing trade war, problems on all continents and a rising armed confrontation in the Middle East.
“The US government, to avoid getting directly involved in a new war adventure, uses its puppets and aims to incite right-wing nationalism, religious fanaticism, as well as fascism and other tendencies of deep reactionary roots to provoke fights between the same peoples….”
Noting that class contradictions still exist in Venezuela, the PCMLV said that along the border regions “The class struggle continues to be present there, and it is clearly expressed when the peasants and the working class serve as a base for the guerrillas and the social and anti-Yankee policies of the Bolivarian government. On the other hand, landowners and the bourgeoisie support paramilitarism and the fascist government of Colombia.”
To rebuff Colombian provocations, the Maduro government in Venezuela has declared an “orange alert” along its border with Colombia, sent 3000 FANB (National Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela) troops and mobilized local militias.
The PCMLV has predicted that with the build-up of revolutionary forces in other parts of South America, any “conflagration will spread to a wider area than the territory of Venezuela.
It has issued the following call:
“From the PCMLV we call the democratic, revolutionary forces, and especially the Marxist-Leninists to express without any doubt their solidarity with the people of Venezuela who are resisting and fighting against imperialist aggression, who in the midst of a complex situation are building the foundations for revolutionary struggle, who assume imperialism as the main enemy in all its expressions, and are accumulating forces for a harder struggle every day.”
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