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REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL CHANGE IN COLOMBIA
enabling the guerrillas to be the ones who win the hearts and minds of the local rural populations (Felbab-Brown, 2005: 104). What has resulted from these socially supportive activities is a sense of communal alliances between the rural populace and the FARC-EP. Such conditions have led people to view their relationship with the guerrillas as a sociopolitical, economic, and cultural link to their community’s survival, which is sustained by the FARC-EP’s continuity (Ross, 2006: 64). With the complete failure of the government to even attempt to provide any basic services to the local population, it is the FARC that has filled the void by helping to build roads and provide electricity, law enforcement, judges and other public services traditionally supplied by the state. As one local peasant notes, ‘When farmers or their families get sick and can’t afford medicine, it is the FARC that gives them money to purchase what they need’ .… Until the government offers peasants ... something more than military repression, the local populations ... will continue to see their welfare and survival as inextricably intertwined with that of the FARC. (Leech, 2006b) As reactionary economic and militaristic state policies take shape, shifts in FARC-EP support and consolidation may take hold. These shifts have the ability to further the revolutionary capacity of the guerrillas in the countryside, leading to an ever-increasing inability of domestic and foreign elites to withstand radical social changes there. This increase in class opposition reveals the frailty of the Colombian state. There are, however, external factors not yet mentioned that have a great effect on the availability of the resources that the state relies on to sustain its stability. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: THE REALITIES OF CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL CAPITALISM At a time where there has been considerable resurgence in Colombia’s electoral left, alongside muted internal political support from one-time allies, the Colombian state has needed to procure ever more financial resources to keep revolutionary sentiment out of the Plaza de Bolívar. This saw the Uribe administration look to foreign institutions to help it retain or expand its revenue as a means of combating the FARC-EP. Here we look at two examples of this process, and suggest that such external dependencies are unsustainable and only increase the government’s political-economic decline. The FARC-EP’s political-military capacity, coupled with the country’s economy, has placed the state in a very difficult position. Colombia’s civil war, which Uribe said he would end by 2006, is very much alive. In light of this reality, the government cannot increase its already over-reliance on the pocketbooks of the country’s elite or the backs of the working class to help it retain power. As a result, “to finance the war, the Uribe government is running a budget
