News-Colombia, FARC, Uribe.

Colombia has become a bulwark of US imperialism in South America. At the head of the country is a reactionary psychopath named Alvaro Uribe, fully supported by the landowning and industrial oligarchy and has close connections with paramilitary groups which in the last 15 years have massacred more than 4000 trade unionists and leaders.

It may come as a surprise that a reactionary rabble-rouser like Uribe could win two consecutive presidential elections. However, on the last occasion in 2006, 60% abstained. Colombia has a semi dictatorial regime and functions as a military camp for the USA with the excuse of the "war against drug traffic". Hence electoral fraud is present in many areas. What was really striking was the great performance of the left coalition, the Democratic Pole (based on the old Communist Party), that came second with 22% of the votes and that has held the Mayor's office in Bogotá since 2003.

Faced with a workers' movement on the rise and the emergence of a political alternative on the left, the Colombian bourgeois has an interest in keeping alive "the guerrilla problem" to justify before the population the restriction of their democratic rights, indiscriminate detentions and the assassination of popular leaders.

What's more, the maintenance of an internal "war front" has permitted Colombia and the USA to justify the increasing militarization of Colombia with the perspective of launching a war against Venezuela as the last card, with the intent of defeating the government of Chavez, destroying the Venezuelan revolution and stopping it from spreading to the rest of Latin America.

The limits of the guerrilla struggle are clear in Colombia. Over 40 years the battlefront has remained relatively stable and another 40 years could pass without any fundamental change. Even in a country with a numerous peasantry like Colombia, the vital hubs of society are not anchored in the countryside, but in the cities. It's here that the economic and political centres and the principle transport hubs of the country can be found.

No regime would be able to stay on its feet in the face of a revolutionary general strike which would paralyse the country, starting in the cities, not for a month, but even just for a single week and where the masses of workers occupied the countryside and the factories, the offices and the official centres and organised their own organs of power. It is towards this perspective that the main energies of the revolutionary cadres should be orientated.

Should they then dissolve the FARC? Not at all! The FARC can and must play a very useful role, but acting to complement the struggle in the cities, making itself available to workers and peasant communities, to help train and arm the committees of workers and peasants who have the task of confronting the hired assassins of the employers and the paramilitaries.

The Colombian revolution must combine the armed struggle in the countryside with an insurrectionary movement of the masses in the cities, lead by the working class and by a revolutionary party rooted in the masses. Remember, no movement "leads" the workers, but the workers must conduct the revolution themselves.

The adjustment policies of Uribe and the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the US that further weaken the Colombian economy, as the general crisis of capitalism develops, will result in a stormy awakening of the class struggle in Colombia, which cannot be stopped by the actions of the paramilitaries or the army.

On the basis of the experience and the effects of the revolutionary movements just across the border in Venezuela and Ecuador, the working class and the poor peasants will rise to their historic tasks in the struggle for socialism.