How the FARC-EP has affected politics

teachings of Christ, then why would the guerrillas not be made up of many Catholics?” What I mean is, just because one joins the FARC or that those involved are communists does not mean that they abandon their faith. On the contrary, some are members as a result of their faith .… I remember one instance when we were asked to baptize children and new-born babies in one town, which included FARC members located throughout the region. I had met, or more accurately crossed paths, with members of the guerrillas many times, but this was my first time seeing how large and faith-filled many who belonged to the guerrillas were. While I know some no longer follow the church in their beliefs, it was astounding to see the loyalty, solidarity, and love that they all bestowed for their fellow comrades in attending the holy sacrament. The church where we held the baptisms was bursting at the seams with literally hundreds of townspeoples and guerrillas, side by side, having their children brought into the church. That day will always remain with me as a true statement of the unity that exists between many civilians and the insurgency, and the hope that the FARC are doing what they are doing for the right reasons.

When asked to expand on the above, the former would-be priest quietly looked out into the countryside and peacefully said,

The teachings of Christ and the Apostles are interpreted in various ways, which greatly depend on what part of the world one comes from. In the North, many see the Church as teaching tolerance, acceptance, and to carry the burdens of life in the image of Christ so as to benefit in the life thereafter. This was an important way of teaching Christ, especially considering the development of capitalism in that part of the world, the trade of African slaves, and the treatment of blacks during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. This interpretation creates a relationship that is individualistic. In the South, especially in Central and South America, many people have internalized the Church not as an institution but as a relationship with others. The Church is not a building per se but our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends, the people that surround our lives. If we are to live like Christ, if we are to be true Christians, than it is our community that must come first, it is the person who has the least amongst us that is important, and as long as they suffer, so do we all. When we look at Christ, he was constantly battling the authorities and was always with the most impoverished. I am not saying that I condone all their actions, but this is important to understand. Some revolutionaries see this as being their struggle, a struggle to work with and fight for the most repressed peoples as Father Camilo46 did.

HOW THE FARC-EP HAS AFFECTED POLITICS

We cannot think of the revolutionary struggle in Colombia as existing inside a political system that abides by conventional democratic forms (Goodwin, 2003:

139). “While officially a democracy, the Colombian state is part of a protection racket that employs violence against the excluded to maintain supremacy of the oligarchic structures” (Schulte-Bockholt, 2006: 105). Some have even classified the country as a “bureaucratic authoritarian state” (Munck, 1984a: 358).47 Colombian political scientist Jaime Zuluaga Nieto (2007: 117) argued that, at best, Colombia is nothing more than a “precarious democracy”, “one with permanent recourse to a state of siege, suspension of fundamental freedoms, criminalization of social protest and political opposition, militarization of the official response to social conflicts, and the overall authority of military officers rather than civilians over ‘public order’.”48 For such reasons, Colombia “should not be regarded as a democracy, but rather as a civilian dictatorship because of the rampant violence wrought by army-backed paramilitary groups” (Lilia Solano Ramírez as quoted in Bond, 2006: 1). Looking upon this reality Arturo Escobar (2004: 16) concluded that Colombia suffers from “selective inclusion and hyperexclusion – of heightened poverty for the many and skyrocketing wealth for the few – operating through spatial-military logics” which creates “a situation of widespread social fascism.” Those who would promote Colombia’s political system as functional or legitimate refuse to acknowledge that it structurally negates the vast majority of the population (see also Mészáros, 2006: 41; Goodwin, 2003: 138). It should then come as no surprise when people move to a position of support for, or even formal membership of, the FARC-EP. Even the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (1998–), has weighed in on this controversial issue by asserting that Colombia’s politick is not a democratic arrangement but rather a pact, which purposely straitjackets any transformation of the country’s socioeconomic and governing system (see Harnecker, 2005: 32, 42). Such a system of elite control is not new or the fault of one specific administration, but rather the by-product of entrenched class relations (Cherry, 2002: 55; see also Alejandro and Billon, 1999; Kline, 1988a). While numerous attempts have been made to alter these conditions, here is some evidence of how those showing even the most non-threatening forms of political will have been prevented from participating in Colombia’s “democracy.” Efforts, including those of the FARC-EP, to work within the conservative system have only witnessed violent reaction. In response a revolutionary series of laws, policies, and justice has been created from below. Before we look at the current situation, there follows a historic overview of Colombia’s exclusionary political structure.

The fallacy of Colombian democracy In early 1964 Tad Szulc (1964: 297–8) warned that excluding Colombia’s electoral left, together with the growing influence of guerrilla movements in the countryside, could ignite “long-range revolutionary potential” (see also Mészáros, 2006; Guevara, 2004: 157). Far from heeding Szulc’s warning, the state spent the next two decades further segregating the left via attacks on

peasant-based self-defense communities and the National Front agreement (1958–74). The 1980s and 1990s were no different, with the onslaught of paramilitarism and its targeting of critical political opponents. Others have shown that more human rights violations were committed per year during the Uribe administration than during the entire Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1974–90) (Colombia Reports, 2008b). With a shocking rate of political casualties, Colombia has been put in the same company as Latin American countries that once experienced authoritarian rule. Cynthia McClintock (1998: 6) even cited Colombia as being substantially less democratic than the highly publicized Argentinean state during the “dirty war.” Other see Colombia as a “death-squad democracy,” where “rightist paramilitary forces and death squads acting with the tacit approval, if not active participation, of armed forces” murdered any opposition, especially those on the left (Petras and Morley, 1992: 20, 21). It is for this and other reasons that Ronaldo Munck (2008: 40) has continued to categorize Colombia’s regime as hardly democratic. Evaluating these deplorable political conditions, István Mészáros (2006: 41) criticized Bogotá and Washington for blocking processes that could lead to the betterment of the country.

For forty years the forces of oppression – internal and external, U.S. dominated – tried to suffocate the struggle of the Colombian people, without success. Attempts to reach a negotiated settlement – “with the participation of all social groups, without exception, in order to reconcile the Colombian family,” in the words of Manuel Marulanda Vélez, the leader of FARC-EP – have been systematically frustrated. As Vélez wrote in an open letter addressed recently to a presidential candidate: “No government, liberal or conservative, produced an effective political solution to the social and armed conflict. The negotiations were used for the purpose of changing nothing, so that everything should remain the same. All of the political schemes of the governments were using the Constitution and the laws as a barrier, to make sure that everything continues the way as we had it before.”

(Mészáros, 2006: 41)

Here Mészáros provides an important commentary on how the Colombia’s internal conflict is a consequence of class-based reaction to the explicit will and agency of those from below. State-centered theorists may depict Colombia’s conflict as a derivative of “the historic and contemporary institutional failure of the state” (Richani, 2007: 405). On the surface, this may seem accurate; however, a proper evaluation of the state shows that it never held authority over the entire country – especially the countryside. This makes it impossible to argue the state has fallen into a period of decline, loss of power, or failure, as it never had control. The revolutionary situation developing in Colombia is not the cause of the state, but rather the result of class consciousness in action.49 Hence, it was not the left’s promotion of change (and peace) that brought violence to the countryside, but rather the response to these alternatives.