Last week, I focused on Palestine and the defiance of a colonized people in the face of the brutal violence being inflicted on them by an occupation force wielding some of the most powerful and advanced weapons in the world. More than two hundred Palestinians died in Gaza alone over ten days of bombardment, including numerous children. While a ceasefire last Friday has finally given Gaza some peace, the government of the Israeli Apartheid state continues to crack down on Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In fact, only hours after the ceasefire came into effect in Gaza, Israeli security forces again attacked Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It has to be remembered that the latest round of escalation in violence began with Israeli attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the evictions of Palestinian families in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, not in Gaza. It’s not over, comrades and friends. Violence is a pervasive feature of any settler-colonial system and we must continue to stand with Palestine until liberation is achieved for all its people. Don’t turn away. Keep up the solidarity. There was another major march in Toronto on the 22nd, thousands of people coming out supporting Palestine, let’s keep this up and force the Canadian government to stop collaborating with Israeli Apartheid.
I’d like to devote this episode to another country where people are rising against a brutal neo-colonial regime backed by the United States and Canada. A country that has been dubbed the “Israel of Latin America”.
Colombia is a country where institutional violence has been normalized to a terrifying degree. A country where to be a trade unionist, human rights activist, or indigenous leader means facing down a murderous array of hitmen, death squads, undercover cops and soldiers.
Colombia is among the most neo-liberal and pro-capitalist countries on earth. Multi-national corporations, including numerous Canadian mining companies, face almost no regulations or restrictions. Meanwhile, those who would challenge the plundering of resources by these companies, their exploitation of workers, and theft of indigenous land, face death and torture, mainly at the hands of right-wing paramilitary gangs aligned with the state.
Colombia has been in a state of civil war for decades, as left-wing guerilla groups fight for change against a brutal government that has so far crushed every attempt at peaceful political and economic reform.
But the Colombian people have had enough of this horrendous status quo. In the midst of the ongoing and devastating COVID-19 pandemic, during which the far-right government of Colombia basically left the people to fend for themselves, a national strike has begun. Tens of thousands of people have been in the streets for weeks now, facing down horrific police violence, struggling for their own dignity as human beings.
The situation in Colombia gets far less media and activist attention than it deserves. While there have been actions in support of the Colombian protestors in Toronto over the past few weeks, they were tiny in comparison with the actions in support of Palestine, and that’s a shame because these two struggles are very much connected.
The current national strike began on April 28th in response to a proposed change in the country’s tax law by the right-wing, neo-liberal government of President Ivan Duque. The change would have forced a regressive tax-hike onto poor and working-class people through value-added charges on goods and services, and was explicitly meant to deal with the economic shortfalls caused by the pandemic. If passed into law, it would have forced the poorest people in Colombia pay for the pandemic while leaving the fortunes of the rich untouched. According to a study carried out by the Index of Regional Development – Latin America in October 2020, Colombia is among the most unequal countries in Latin America and is the most unequal when it comes to the internal economic/social disparities between its various provinces.
But the proposed tax increase was only the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The 2016 peace accords between the Colombian government and the socialist guerillas of the FARC, which stipulated the demobilization of the latter in exchange for meaningful political and economic reforms, was meant to end decades of violence in the country. Violence that the US-led War on Drugs fueled even further. But the accords had the opposite effect. The demobilization and disarmament of the most powerful leftist guerilla group in the country allowed right-wing paramilitaries aligned with the capitalist state to run amok: murdering and repressing peasants, workers, women, and indigenous people alike. Thousands of people, including hundreds of social leaders and former guerillas, have been assassinated since 2016, with the government refusing to intervene to stop the violence that its own agents and proxies perpetrate against the poor and oppressed.
Not only did the violence not stop, but the progressive reforms promised in 2016 were never delivered on. Instead, the Colombian people have faced wave after wave of austerity measures, privatizations, and corporate giveaways, which proceeded in tandem with the assassinations and repression. Major protests by students and workers in recent years were put down with brutal violence by the notorious ESMAD anti-riot police.
It should therefore come as no surprise that in the period between April 28 and May 6, following the declaration of the national strike by activist groups, trade unions, indigenous groups, students and other progressive forces, the Colombian police made 934 arbitrary detentions and engaged in 1728 documented acts of violence against protestors. In that same period, 37 people were killed, many of them by police, others by right-wing paramilitaries, and there were 11 confirmed cases of sexual violence by state security forces. Currently the death toll is at 51 with 2387 documented cases of police brutality. But this is likely a serious undercount, because hundreds of people involved in the demonstrations have gone missing.
This is why, even though the reactionary tax bill was eventually withdrawn, the protests have continued with an explicit focus on condemning police violence and demanding justice for those who have been murdered. This includes Allison Melendez, who was sexually assaulted by four members of the ESMAD riot police in the city of Popayan after they caught her filming them. They only released her after finding out that she was the daughter of a police officer. She killed herself the next day. She was 17 years old.
This is the kind of violence that the people of Colombia are standing against right now. They want an end to the violence and impunity. They want basic rights to health, housing and education. They want an end to neo-liberal austerity. They want to live. This why they continue to come onto the streets in such massive numbers, even at the risk of their own lives.
This is not the first time that a national strike of this magnitude has happened in Colombian history. The present strike was constructed on a bedrock of popular resistance stretching back decades.
This is a report from Peoples Dispatch describing the national strike of 1977, at the very beginning of the neo-liberal era, and how it relates to what is going on today in Colombia.
Colombia’s Long Struggle: the 1977 National Strike and Today
For decades, the capitalist state in Colombia has been killing its people to create an environment favorable to the Fortune 500. In the name of defeating communism, drug trafficking and “terrorism”, the US government has poured billions of dollars in weapons and training into Colombia, and has set up numerous military bases around the country. The US has consistently supported a government that criminalizes all dissent and views all opposition as a military threat to be crushed. It has used Colombia as a base to launch its attacks and destabilization campaigns against neighboring Venezuela, and to push pro-capitalist policies throughout the entire South American region. The parallels with US support for Israel in the context of the Middle East could not be more stark. Colombia, like Israel, serves as a key regional base for the American Empire. And its people, like the Palestinians, are made to suffer for it.
But this time the Colombian people are refusing to be intimidated. Like the Palestinians, threats of assassination, repression and incarceration have failed to stop them from organizing and resisting. The Colombian government was forced to withdraw its tax reform and more recently has been forced to abandon a planned law that would further privatize healthcare in the country.
The people are winning real victories.
Left forces are on the move again in South America. The people of Chile have voted to scrap the reactionary constitution adopted in 1980 under the Pinochet dictatorship and the right-wing parties that attempted to block the creation of a new constitution have been decisively defeated at the polls, with numerous communist candidates being voted in, even in former conservative strongholds. This only came after years of mass protests and violent repression by state forces, but neo-liberalism is beginning to crumble in Chile, and this shows what can be achieved when the people rise up.
Solidarity with the people of Colombia!
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