The appearance of US Army Special Forces in the Colombian town of San Vicente del Caguan is a sharp reminder of Vietnam and a clear indication of the escalating US intervention in South America’s oldest civil war. San Vicente del Caguan is the capital of the so-called “safe zone” that was invaded by Colombian troops after heavy aerial bombardment last week.

While the Colombian army failed in the invasion to engage any of the FARC guerrillas, bombs falling on an isolated hamlet killed a man, his two-year-old son and a 15-year-old girl. Although the majority of the FARC's membership are peasants, the Colombian peasantry seems far more safer than those in some Colombian cities. Police rounded up and jailed suspected leftists, students, academics and trade unionists.

With the support and aid of the United States, the Colombian government has intensified its war against the left in Colombia with a policy of extermination. But the essential motive force behind the sudden escalation in the nearly 40-year-old conflict lies in the US-organized buildup of the Colombian military. The Bush administration recently unveiled plans to allocate $98 million more for the creation of a new Colombian army brigade dedicated to anti-guerrilla operations and the defense of oilfields and pipelines operated by Occidental Petroleum and other US-based energy corporations.

With the billion dollars in US arms aid already poured into the Colombian military, the army has nearly doubled the number of its soldiers in recent years, while Washington has supplied more than 50 assault helicopters. All of this military assistance was provided in the name of furthering a “war on drugs”. Congress and the corporate media continues to ignore the links between the Colombian military command and the right-wing paramilitary death squads that are responsible for the massacres and assassinations against the Colombian working class and peasantry claiming some 40,000 Colombian lives in the last decade alone. Last year 3 trade unionists were killed every week.

While independent human rights groups—including those denounced by the guerrillas as CIA stooges—unanimously affirm that the U.S. continues to aid and abet the paramilitary phenonmenon, collaborating directly in their bloody operations, and that the Colombian government has done virtually nothing to punish senior commanders linked to these activities, the US aid continues to flow.

It is now feared the military incursion into the 16,000-square-mile neutral zone will pave the way for the paramilitaries to take command of state operations, subjecting a widely dispersed population of some 100,000 poor peasants to reprisals for their support in the revolutionary movement. Before the Afghan war, Colombia had the largest displaced people after Angola and the Sudan, it is expected to worsen.

While little or no fighting was reported between the army and the guerrillas in the first days of the campaign to retake the zone, clashes between the FARC and right-wing paramilitaries belonging to the Colombian Self-Defense Units, or AUC, left at least 73 people dead and eight missing.

The Bush administration is preparing to invoke September 11 and the worldwide “war on terrorism” to brush aside all restrictions on the use of US military aid, and make the annihilation of the Colombian guerrilla movements a stated goal of US foreign policy. Government officials told the Washington Post that increased aid, including supplying the Colombian army with satellite and electronic intelligence on the movement of the guerrillas, although illegal, could be justified under a National Security Directive signed by Bush in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At the same time, US officials argue, drawing a distinction between counterinsurgency and anti-drug operations is unrealistic and a waste of time.

The fact that the right-wing paramilitaries, who have benefited as much as the Colombian army from US arms aid, provide protection for the narcotics trade and are responsible for the murderous terror against the left is deliberately ignored by Washington policymakers.

President Pastrana has requested that Washington allow the unrestricted utilization of military aid supplied under the Clinton administration’s “Plan Colombia” anti-drug campaign for the war against the guerrillas.

After pictures of US Army Green Berets operating alongside the Colombian military in the invasion of the safe zone appeared on the front page of the Colombian daily El Tiempo, one politician, Liberal Party presidential candidate Horacio Serpa, called the US military presence “very grave” and demanded a clarification from the government.

General Hector Fabio Velasco quickly replied that the US Special Forces had “come simply as observers.” Serpa’s opponent for the Liberal Party nomination, the rightist Alvaro Uribe Velez, said he welcomed the US presence and would support the sending of US combat troops to fight in Colombia, rather than merely providing aid and training.

With presidential elections set for May, narco-fascism has become the official state doctrine to repress the revolutionary war which aims to establish socialism in Colombia. Uribe, considered a reactionary extremist until recently, is projected to win a plurality of the vote in the first round. As the governor of the northeastern province of Antioquia, he allowed free rein to the paramilitary forces and helped create the attack groups used by the Fujimori regime in Peru and the military dictatorship in Guatemala. The result will be a bloody campaign of repression against working class and peasant militants and all those identified with the Colombian left if the world continues to ignore the barbarism of dying capitalism in Latin America.

Uribe has been feted by the Bush administration, which invited him to meet with State Department officials recently. Given his backing for US intervention, Washington is prepared to ignore evidence presented by his Colombian critics linking him to the operations of cocaine kingpins like Fabio Ochoa and Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.

Apparent support for Uribe as well as for Pastrana’s escalation of the war, particularly within the middle class, is in part a reflection of the increasing social and political weight of the military, which has grown in size, power and influence as a result of the flood of arms aid that has turned Colombia into the third largest recipient of US military hardware in the world.

The political strength of the FARC and its mass base of support must not be underestimated.
The latest propaganda campaign against the FARC with the alleged kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt, a presidential candidate who represents a significant layer of Colombia's private sector, earned the reputation of supporting the right wing paramilitary campaign and Colombia’s right-wing establishment of drug traffickers. What is not told in the media is that such class war has been occurring for the past half century.

Founded during the 20-year rural civil war known as “la violencia,” the FARC, like the ELN, which emerged in the 1960s, saw the validity of armed struggle through the real life experiences of state repression, as an effective means to fight brutal third world fascism. Not only has this validity in the Latin American context helped to allow building a more genuine Communist movement in a "Post-Cold War" era, through political action and open mindedness to new ways of thinking, but has exposed the unwillingness in certain so-called "Marxist" circles to move away from sectarian and dogmatic politics. Sectarianism and dogmatism, with almost religious overtones, alienates the left and makes it difficult if not impossible to build any serious movement. To divide and conquer is the enemy's greatest weapon.

The Colombian ruling class and its backers in Washington aim to promote a campaign of military repression against the broad masses of workers and poor peasants and its coalition with the FARC. Those who resist or challenge the interests of the Colombian elites, the foreign oil companies and the Western banks will be the targets of Washington’s expansion of the “war on terrorism” into Latin America.

VIVA LA FARC!

HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!

"The validity of the armed struggle is not determined by whether the Berlin wall fell or not; it is determined by the reality of our country and here, the political, economic and social disequilibrium and the state violence that impelled the rebellion, continue in place."

Manuel Marulanda Velez
Chief Commandant of FARC-EP