[DEBATE] : Re: James " tijo firo" Petras

Tue May 27 04:53:34 BST 2008

Petras is getting crazier with every new article, so it seems....
He is on his way of becoming a tiro fijo of the sclero-paleo-left.....

a.

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
> To: debate: SA discussion list <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 05:46:26 +0200
> Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Petras on Marulanda
> Homage to Manuel Marulanda
>
> James Petras
>
> Pedro Antonio Marin, better know as Manuel Marulanda and 'Tiro Fijo (Sure
> Shot)', was the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Peoples
> Army (FARC-EP). He was without a doubt the greatest revolutionary peasant
> leader in the history of the Americas. Over a period of 60 years he
> organized peasant movements, rural communities and, when all legal
> democratic channels were effectively (and brutally) closed, he built the
> most powerful sustained guerrilla army and supporting underground militias
> in Latin America. The FARC at its peak between 1999-2005 numbered nearly
> 20,000 fighters, several hundred thousand peasant-activists, hundreds of
> village and urban militia units. Even today despite the regime's forced
> displacement of 3 million peasants resulting from scorched earth policies
> and scores of massacres, the FARC has between 10,000-15,000 guerrillas in
> its numerous 'fronts distributed throughout the country.
>
> What make Marulanda's achievements so significant are his organizational
> abilities, strategic acuity and his intransigent and principled programmatic
> positions consisting of support of popular demands. Marulanda, more than any
> other guerrilla leader, had unmatched rapport with the rural poor, the
> landless, the subsistence cultivators and the rural refugees over three
> generations.
>
> Beginning in 1964 with two-dozen peasants fleeing villages devastated by a
> US directed military offensive Marulanda methodically built a revolutionary
> guerrilla army without either foreign financial or material contributions.
> Marulanda, more than any other guerrilla leader, was a great rural political
> teacher. Marulanda's superb organizing skills were honed on the basis of his
> intimate ties with peasants – he grew up in a poor peasant family, lived
> among them cultivating and organizing, and spoke their language addressing
> their most basic daily needs and future hopes. Conceptually and through
> daily trial and error, Marulanda worked out a series of strategic political
> –military operations based on his brilliant understanding of the geographic
> and human terrain. Between 1964 to his recent death, Marulanda defeated or
> evaded at least seven major military offensives financed by over $7 billion
> dollars in US military aid, involving thousands of US 'Green Berets',
> Special Forces, mercenaries, over 250,000 Colombians Armed Forces and 35,000
> member paramilitary death squads.
>
> Unlike Cuba or Nicarangua, Marulanda built an organized mass base and
> trained a largely rural leadership; he openly declared his socialist program
> and never received political or material support from so-called 'progressive
> capitalists'. Colombia's armed forces were a formidable, highly trained and
> disciplined repressive apparatus, bolstered by murderous death squads,
> unlike Batista's and Somoza's corrupt and rapacious gangsters, who plundered
> and retreated under pressure. Marulanda, unlike many better-known
> 'poster-boy' guerrillas, was a virtual unknown among the elegant leftist
> editors in London, the nostalgic Parisian sixty-eighters and the New York
> Socialist scholars. Marulanda spent his time exclusively in 'Colombia
> profunda', the deep Colombia, preferring to converse and teach peasants and
> learn their grievances, rather than giving interviews to adventure-seeking
> Western journalists. Instead of writing grandiloquent 'manifestos' and
> striking photogenic poses, he preferred the steady, unromantic but eminently
> effective grass roots pedagogy of the disinherited. Marulanda traveled from
> virtually inaccessible valleys to mountain ranges, from jungles to plains,
> organizing, fighting…recruiting and training new leaders. He eschewed
> tripping off to 'World Forums' or following the route of international
> leftist tourists. He never visited a foreign capital and, it is said, never
> set foot in the nation's capital, Bogota. But he had a vast and profound
> knowledge of the demands of the Afro-Colombians of the Coast, the
> Indio-Colombians of the mountains and jungles, the land claims of millions
> of displaced peasants, the names and addresses of abusive landlords who
> brutalized and raped peasants and their kin.
>
> Throughout the 1960's, 70's and 80's numerous guerrilla movements raised
> arms, fought with greater or lesser capacity and disappeared – killed,
> surrended (some even turned collaborator) or became immersed in electoral
> wheeling and dealing. Few in number, they fought in the name of non-existent
> 'peoples armies'; most were intellectuals who were more familiar with
> European narratives than the micro-history and popular culture and legends
> of the people they tried to organize. They were isolated, encircled and
> obliterated, perhaps leaving a well-publicized legacy of exemplary
> sacrifice, but changing nothing on the ground.
>
> In contrast, Marulanda took the best punches thrown by the
> counter-insurgency Presidents in Bogota and Washington and returned them in
> spades. For every village that was razed, Marulanda recruited dozens of
> angry and destitute peasant fighters and patiently trained them to be cadres
> and commanders. More than any guerrilla army, the FARC became an army of the
> whole people: one-third of the commanders were women, over seventy percent
> were peasants although intellectuals and professionals joined and were
> trained by movement-led cadres. Marulanda was revered for his singularly
> simple life style: he shared the drenching rain under plastic canopies. He
> was deeply respected by millions of peasants, but he never in any way
> cultivated a personality cult-figure: He was too irreverent and modest,
> preferring to delegate important tasks to a collective leadership, with a
> good deal of regional autonomy and tactical flexibility. He accepted a
> diversity of views on tactics, even when he profoundly disagreed. In the
> early 1980's, many cadre and leaders decided to try the electoral route,
> signed a 'peace agreement' with the Colombian President, formed an electoral
> party – the Patriotic Union – and successfully elected numerous mayors and
> representatives. They even gained a substantial vote in Presidential
> elections. Marulanda did not publicly oppose the accord but he did not lay
> down his arms and 'go down from the mountains to the city'. Much better than
> the professionals and trade unionists who ran for office, Marulanda
> understood the profoundly authoritarian and brutal character of the
> oligarchy and its politicians. He clearly knew that Colombia's rulers would
> never accept any land reform just because a 'few illiterate peasants voted
> them out of office.' By 1987 over 5,000 members of the Patriotic Union had
> been slaughtered by the oligarchy's death squads, including three
> presidential candidates, a dozen elected congressmen and women and scores of
> mayors and city councilors. Those who survived fled to the jungles and
> rejoined the armed struggle or fled into exile.
>
> Marulanda was a master in evading many encirclement and annihilation
> campaigns, especially those designed by the best and the brightest from the
> US Fort Bragg Special Forces counter-insurgency center and the School of the
> Americas. By the end of the 1990's the FARC had extended its control to over
> half the country and was blocking highways and attacking military bases only
> 40 miles from the capital. Severely weakened, the then President Pastrana
> finally agreed to serious peace negotiations in which the FARC demanded a
> de-militarized zone and an agenda that included basic structural changes in
> the state, economy and society.
>
> Unlike the Central American guerrillas who traded arms for elected office,
> Marulanda insisted on land redistribution, dismantling of the death squads
> and dismissal of Colombian generals involved in massacres, a mixed economy
> largely based on public ownership of strategic economic sectors and
> large-scale funding for peasants to develop alternative crops to coca, prior
> to laying down arms.
>
> In Washington President Clinton was hysterical and at first opposed the
> peace negotiations – especially the reform agenda as well as the open public
> debates and forums widely attended by Colombian civil society and organized
> by the FARC in the de-militarized zone. Marulanda's embrace of democratic
> debate, demilitarization and structural changes puts the lie to the charge
> by Western and Latin American social democrats and center-left academics
> that he was a 'militarist'. Washington probed to see if they could repeat
> the Central American peace process – co-opt the FARC leaders with the
> promise of electoral office and privilege in exchange for selling out the
> peasants and poor Colombians. At the same time Clinton, with bi-partisan
> support, pushed through a massive $2 billion dollar appropriation bill to
> fund the biggest and bloodiest counter-insurgency program since the war in
> Indochina, dubbed 'Plan Colombia'. Abruptly ending the peace process,
> President Pastrana rushed troops into the demilitarized zone to capture the
> FARC secretariat, but Marulanda and his comrades were long gone.
>
> Between 2002 to the present the FARC alternated from offensive attacks and
> defensive retreats – mostly the latter since 2006. With an unprecedented
> degree of US financing and advanced technological support, the newly elected
> narco-partner and death squad organizer, President Alvaro Uribe took charge
> of a scorched earth policy to savage the Colombian countryside. Between his
> election in 2002 and re-election in 2006, over 15,000 peasants, trade
> unionists, human rights workers, journalists and other critics were
> murdered. Entire regions of the countryside were emptied – like the US
> Operation Phoenix in Viet Nam, farmland was poisoned by toxic herbicides.
> Over 250,000 armed forces and their partners in the paramilitary death
> squads decimated vast stretches of the Colombian countryside where the FARC
> exercised hegemony. Scores of US-supplied helicopter gun-ships blasted the
> jungles in vast search and destroy missions – (which had nothing to do with
> coca production or the shipment of cocaine to the United States). By
> destroying all popular opposition and organizations throughout the
> countryside and displacing millions Uribe was able to push the FARC back
> toward more defensible remote regions. Marulanda, as in the past, adopted a
> strategy of defensive tactical retreat, giving up territory in order to
> safeguard the guerrillas' capacity to fight another day.
>
> Unlike other guerrilla movements, the FARC did not receive any material
> support form the outside: Fidel Castro publicly repudiated armed struggle
> and looked to diplomatic and trade ties with center-left administrations and
> even better relations with the brutal Uribe. After 2001, the Bush White
> House labeled the FARC a 'terrorist organization' putting pressure on
> Ecuador and Venezuela to tighten cross-border movements of the FARC in
> search of supply chains. The 'center-left' in Colombia was totally divided
> between those who gave 'critical support' to Uribe's total war against the
> FARC and those who ineffectively protested the repression.
>
> It is hard to imagine any guerrilla movement surviving under conditions of
> massive US financed counter-insurgency, quarter million US-armed soldiers,
> millions displaced from its mass base and a psychopathic President allied
> directly to a 35,000 member chain-saw death squads. However Marulanda, cool
> and determined, directed the tactical retreat; the idea of negotiating a
> capitulation never entered his mind nor that of the FARC secretariat.
>
> The FARC does not have contiguous frontiers with a supporting country like
> Vietnam had with China; nor the arms supply from a USSR, nor the
> international mass support of Western solidarity groups like the
> Sandinistas. We live in times where supporting peasant-led national
> liberation movements is not 'fashionable', where recognizing the genius of
> peasant revolutionary leaders who build and sustain authentic mass peoples
> armies is taboo in the pretentious, loquacious and impotent World Social
> Formus – which 'world' routinely excludes peasant militants and for whom
> 'social' means the perpetual exchange of e-mails between foundations funded
> by NGO.
>
> It is in this hardly auspicious environment facing US and Colombian
> Presidents intent on pyrrhic victories, that we can appreciate the political
> genius and personal integrity of Latin America's greatest peasant
> revolutionary, Manuel Marulanda. His death will not generate posters or tee
> shirts for middle class college students, but he will live forever in the
> hearts and minds of millions of peasants in Colombia. He will be remembered
> forever as 'Tiro Fijo': the legend who was killed a dozen times and yet
> returned to the villages to share their simple lives. The only leader who
> was truly 'one of them', the one who confronted the Yankee military and
> mercenary machine for a half-century and was never captured or defeated.
>
> He defied them all - those in their mansions, presidential palaces,
> military bases, torture chambers, and bourgeois editorial offices: He died
> at after 60 years of struggle of natural causes in the arms of his beloved
> peasant comrades.
>
> Tiro Fijo presente!
>
>
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-- 
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Andrej Grubacic

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/andrejgrubacic