ABSTRACT
The Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, recently wrote that ‘the experts, known as violentologists, say Colombia is a country in love with death’ (Galeano 2009: 351). For more than half a century, the Colombian state has misrepresented itself as a ‘democracy’, while engaged in a life and death struggle against the landless poor. This chapter concerns a popular struggle in the first Latin American country ever to be subjected to the theatre of modern United States government imperialist anti-guerrilla warfare. It is a struggle with profound political consequences for the struggle of the working class, not just in Colombia but in Latin America and throughout the Third World where US imperialism is also being challenged. In a period of world history where enemies of the US government can be classified ‘terrorists’ and armed struggle is considered ‘outdated’, I will argue that any discussion of political violence in Colombia is incomplete without understanding ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’ as the politicomilitary dimension of contemporary high-intensity class warfare. In Colombia there are principally two armies leading this war. One is the ‘special bodies of armed men’ of the Colombian state, which include the army, police and paramilitary death squads. The other army is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP), whose mass base of support is among the landless poor campesinos. The chapter will examine what is essentially a class question: what is ‘narco-terrorism’? In doing so it examines why a comprador regime in Bogotá has been able to wage a largely unsuccessful war of terror on FARC with impunity but, more importantly, why the popular struggle has become almost indomitable for both military and ideological campaigns waged by the Colombian state and mainstream analyses. The chapter demonstrates how it is in the political as well as the economic interest of compradores as the national business class of Colombia and their key sponsor the United States that the popular struggle is blamed for their crimes.
