Despite signing the 2016 peace deal that brought more than 50 years of war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) to an end, the nation’s establishment, including the right-wing government, have refused to implement the terms of the agreement.
Instead, the state and business community saw peace as an economic opportunity: with the biggest threat to capitalist accumulation out of the way, former Farc-controlled territories have become the veins through which multinational corporations have looked to expand through industries that have a heavy impact on the now-unprotected land and those who live off it.
Mining, logging, drilling for oil, palm-oil extraction, privatisation of fresh water sources, poaching and narco-traffickers have been laying waste to former Farc strongholds, forcing millions of peasants from their homes and into Colombia’s slums, where few jobs and little to no social security awaits them.
At the same time, more than 1,200 social movement leaders, especially trade unionists and ex-Farc combatants have been assassinated by paramilitaries since 2016. Colombian courts have continued the wartime practice of prosecuting left-wing insurgents but not state actors.
The high hopes of the Farc, which announced its reformation as a legal political party under the same acronym – the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force, before renaming themselves Comunes – have so far been dashed, as they have failed to secure any serious land or political reforms as agreed, and, now unarmed, face the pre-existing level of para-state violence.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, on August 29, 2019 scores of historically important Farc leaders, some of whom had suddenly and dramatically disappeared from public life, split from the legal political party, regrouped militarily, and announced the re-establishment of a party that would combine a legal political struggle in the social movements and trade unions, with an armed struggle in rural and urban spaces.
It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.
“
| — |
Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (via philosophybits) |
the washington post is just openly asking the biden administration to stage another coup in bolivia now
