By Pablo Nariño on May 27, 2021
Photo: Colombia Informa
The death throes of the Colombian regime can be heard, its stridency is projected in the high levels of repression, and in the brutal exhibition of State crimes, many of them being witnessed by millions of people around the planet.
Since Uribe-Duque ordered “to deploy all the maximum capacity of the public force to unblock the roads throughout the country” the entire repressive apparatus, including the paramilitary, went out to attack entire neighborhoods, and to murder, torture, dismember, disappear and injure Colombians.
Under the excuse of “a situation of manifest urgency”, the government, the parties of the bourgeoisie, the unions, the mass media, the institutions, and the Gulf Clan, all of them have united around a new partial military occupation by the State, the same as when the Security Statute, or when the Patriot Plan, only that today it seems not to be partial neither in time nor in coverage. In fact, they have been relieving the civil authorities of their functions and decisions in several capitals and other areas of the country. It is more and more frequent these days to observe mayors and state officials denouncing that the Armed Forces have made decisions and committed actions without consulatation. Simultaneously with this situation, the ruling social class is screaming to impose a fascist constituent assembly, which would be the device to formalize the dictatorship and its actions.
The representatives of the capitalist mafia, the Gaviria, Santos, Lleras, etc., and the representatives of the mafia capital, the Uribe, Char, Gneccos, etc., have converged in order to save the sewer of oligarchic power. It is undeniable that as synthesized by V.I Lenin “There are decades in which nothing happens, and weeks in which decades pass”, and the popular power, and the political education that millions of Colombians have been acquiring at an intense speed during the strike, are a real danger for the stability of the political and ideological apparatus of the State.
The confluence of the political class is subordinated to that of the economic unions, including the Andi, Asobancaria, Fenalco, Acopi and the SAC, the same ones that last December proposed a 2% increase in the minimum wage. Now, through their media, they express their abhorrence towards the blockades, since it affects the normal process of theft of the country’s wealth, and the importation of products that Colombian farmers and businessmen, now bankrupt, produce in the country.
This situation has strengthened, in the midst of the strike, popular initiatives such as farmers’ markets and forms of economies based on. The fear of the economic guilds is really because the strike has blocked, in some way, the traditional pace of looting.
It is not without sarcasm that while social and human rights organizations request the presence of the Human Rights International Commission (IACHR) to investigate on the ground the massacre that the police and paramilitaries have been carrying out during the strike; at the same time 29 corporations of the National Trade Union Council beg for the presence of international organizations to verify the damage caused by “the criminal blockades”. It is not surprising that in correspondence with the complicity of the international organizations, the organizations that look after the investment interests of the elite, rather than the humanitarian ones, make their presence in the country first.
There are 358 cases of forced disappearance, and dozens of murders at the hands of the security forces; and the presidential silence, as well as that of the control agencies is eloquent, while the corporate media shout – despite the state massacre – that “the State acts with prudence”, this governmental silence and media hype, continue to provide sufficient impetus to the unleashed state violence.
However, in spite of the massacre, the people have decided to live their mourning in the streets, some political sectors are calling to stop the current dictatorship in development, with a different vote in the next elections, but apparently, as things are going, the ballot box will only be possible if the dictatorship is confronted right now, and the current social movement has already resolved it; massive marches day and night, and barricades, as a form of control and popular protection that together with the front lines save lives of the people. The barricades are an almost natural response to the brutal repression of the regime and the existing imbalance between unarmed demonstrators or with stones, and well-armed police, and protected with complete impunity.
In addition, the barricade guarantees the normal development of the assemblies and popular tables, and makes possible the community sancocho.
On the other hand, the selective demolition of statues, is also a present activity that reflects the fall in the future of the political descendants of each decapitated monument. The renaming of spaces is a flag that officializes a real victory; the Bridge of a Thousand Struggles, the A.V, Misak-former A.V Jimenez, Puerto Resistencia, the Loma de la Dignidad, Portal de La Resistencia, among others, express a new cultural, collective and emancipatory cartography.
The strength of this social movement is also revealing the artifices of different political forces, unveiling the hesitant, demagogic and electoral disposition. The lukewarm expression of the right is becoming dysfunctional, and while the leadership of progressivism tries to clarify that it is neither lukewarm nor incendiary, the lukewarm ones make an effort to show themselves as a left-wing opposition, and the extreme right is shedding its heavy “center and democratic” shell, and exhibits its real fascist make up.
Rural and urban communities are implementing in practice a new way of doing politics, beyond the slogans of the traditional parties. They have also been solving in practice the problem of how to organize a constituent process, whose essential features are already visible: permanent character, autonomy -which is not spontaneity- but as defined by Professor Mario Giraldo “the decision-making action of the people as a majority component of society, with its own project”, and independence as “political action of the people without the interference of substitute powers”.
Only the advance of a social movement with such attributes can defeat the developing dictatorship and an eventual fascist constituent of Uribism.
Source: Rebelion, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English