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Vol. 80/No. 27 July 25, 2016
Colombia: Gov’t, guerrillas sign peace accord
in Havana
BY CINDY JAQUITH
MIAMI — The agreement to end hostilities between the government of
Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia “places us
closer than ever before to the end of the armed conflict that has been
suffered for more than five decades by the brother people of Colombia,”
Cuban President Raúl Castro said at the June 23 signing of the agreement
in Havana. The government of revolutionary Cuba hosted and played a key
role in facilitating the negotiations.
The war between the government and various guerrilla armies, as well as
attacks by government-backed rightist paramilitary groups, has claimed
more than 220,000 lives and displaced 5 million people since the
conflict began.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces, known by its Spanish acronym as the
FARC, launched its guerrilla struggle in response to massacres of
peasants carried out by capitalist landowners in the 1960s. The FARC
became the largest of several guerrilla groups.
Using the guerrilla war as a pretext along with charges that guerrilla
groups were involved in drug trafficking, Washington deepened its
military involvement in Colombia and used Colombia as a base for
intervening in the internal affairs of other Latin American nations.
The FARC, which took its political lead from the Colombian Communist
Party, “never planned to conquer power through the armed struggle,”
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro has explained. “The guerrilla
was a resistance front and not the essential instrument for conquering
revolutionary power.”
This was the opposite of the course followed by the revolutionaries led
by Fidel Castro in Cuba, who led working people there to overthrow the
U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. From the time of the
Cuban revolutionaries’ first encounter with the dictatorship’s troops in
1956, it took little more than two years for the revolutionary struggle
to triumph.
Castro has also criticized the FARC’s taking of hostages, both civilian
and military, during the war.
“Civilians should have never been kidnapped, nor should the soldiers
have been kept as prisoners in jungle conditions,” he said in 2008.
“These were objectively cruel actions. No revolutionary aim could
justify them.”
“We won our revolutionary war in Cuba by immediately releasing every
prisoner absolutely unconditionally,” Castro pointed out. “The soldiers
and officers captured in every battle were released to the International
Red Cross; we kept only their weapons.”
The agreement states that the FARC’s estimated 7,000 fighters will go to
“concentration zones” in areas under FARC control to hand over their
weapons to United Nations officials.
Under an earlier agreement, FARC soldiers who admit to “crimes” during
the war will receive reduced sentences, often amounting to community
service, the New York Times reported.
The agreement stipulates that paramilitary groups will not be tolerated,
nor will attacks on human rights organizations, demobilized FARC
members, and their right to engage in legal political activity.
In April Nidia Quintero, general secretary of the farmworkers and
peasants union FENSUAGRO in Colombia, spoke at meetings in the U.S.
The Colombian government has used the ongoing war as a cover for
violence and repression aimed at workers fighting to organize into
unions and small farmers resisting being driven off their land, she said
at a meeting at the AFL-CIO hall in Miami.
Quintero explained how Plan Colombia — the name given to the U.S.
program of assisting the Colombian government in combating “terrorism
and the illicit narcotics trade” — was a disaster for workers and
peasants, destroying their crops with herbicides and facilitating the
theft of their land by the big landowners.
Ending the war will remove some obstacles to fighting for agrarian
reform and organizing with less fear of paramilitary attack, she said.
Chuck Guerra contributed to this article.
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