La revolución no será calco ni copia, sino creación heroica (The revolution will not be traceable or a copy, but a heroic creation).
— Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894–1930)
By Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle
FARC guerillas.
November 3, 2011 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Colombia is the first Latin American country to become subjected to the theatre of United States anti-guerrilla warfare. Colombia has also one of the richest histories of revolutionary politics on the continent extending well over half a century. It is throughout this time, that Colombia has been the battleground of an undeclared civil war.
Two mutually complementary causes are traceable. First, Colombia’s compradores, the national business and landlord classes have waged a life and death battle against the landless poor. Second, a policy of repression and repossession has been pursued by the Colombian ruling class with the financial and military support of the USA.
The aim of the US counterinsurgency has been to defeat the long and enduring struggle for national liberation by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army, FARC-EP), Latin America’s oldest and most powerful Marxist insurgency. Longer than Vietnam, it has been America’s longest and toughest counterinsurgency war (Leech 2011). No other Latin American country has experienced so long a period of almost undisrupted violence from the mid-twentieth century as Colombia.
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