On one hand, President Santos and senior officers of the armed forces almost constantly repeat that they have been coming nearer and nearer to Alfonso Cano and that every day the siege tightens around him. In response, the FARC unleashed an offensive military action in several regions of the country.
On the other hand, several Catholic Church’s senior leaders, former guerrillas like Navarro Wolf and Petro, presidents of other countries such as Chavez or Evo Morales, make several kinds of calls for the FARC to open room for negotiations and for a dialogue that would lead to a political solution for the conflict and that they renounce their military option, turning the guns into the “powerful weapon” of the vote.
In response, the Secretariat of the FARC announced, through Piedad Cordoba, the release of some or all (to be checked) of the “retained” (“kidnapped” according to the government and the big media). At the same time, Alfonso Cano[1] gives interviews in which everything shines except the attack on Santos’ policies and plans, tactically implying that this would be a government with whom a process of negotiation is likely to take place.
Pieces of different value
Although it is not a friendly board game the analogy is suitable. The chess is the best game to simulate the military confrontation. It is therefore necessary to try to analyze the value of the pieces and their relative positions to try to predict the continuity and the confrontation’s aftermath.
First, Santos’ government shut down almost completely the international room FARC had been conquered in the neighborhood, especially in Venezuela and Ecuador. Considering Santos’ new relationship with Chavez and Correa, having Maria Emma Mejia[2] in the Secretariat General of UNASUR, and without the internationally important “retained” people due to the loss of the Americans and Ingrid Betancourt[3], the FARC lost a lot of its political, logistics and even military mobility in that regions.
The U.S. government policy after Obama’s rise is a key element of this international “closure” to FARC. Santos deals a lot better with Obama administration’s policies than Uribe did in the end of his term. Uribe, in his two government terms, was a faithful expression and almost ventriloquist guidance from the last Bush administration. This opened a space of “sympathy” to the FARC in several neighboring countries where governments had had their differences with such administration. It could be said that the FARC are “surrounded and blocked” in Colombia. And this, in the political sense, it is a big negative factor for a guerrilla organization.
Looking for a final?
It is correct to state that a part of the Colombian bourgeoisie, the one linked to the military apparatus and to landowning sectors has been benefited from the fact that the “beginning” of the confrontation with FARC has taken so many decades to start. They are largely convinced of the very low probability that the FARC would “conquer” the power through military confrontation. But its existence allows them to justify the enormous size of the repressive apparatus that they use, at their discretion, against the population to clamp down on any other manifestation of social discontent.
However, since long ago, another important sector of the bourgeoisie and the imperialism have become convinced that it is impossible to place a total “checkmate” to a guerrilla such as the Colombian one. They have therefore decided to perform, on a permanent basis, a combination of military pressure with the systematic pursuit of a negotiation’s possibility. Santos’ government seems to clearly express this option.
Proven ability
The FARC, meanwhile, clings to its military and logistical capacity built over the years. It is constantly fed by the demonstrations of rejection of the social conditions of poverty prevailing in the areas in which it has most of its military capacity and in poor areas of large cities. That is currently its fundamental strength.
Although some of their proposals clash with the interests of the bourgeois, they have not established a contradiction quite antagonistic to the existence and development of Colombian capitalism – which is what matters to the vast majority of the bourgeoisie and the imperialism.
Being FARC a victim of its own programmatic concept, and bearing in mind the way President Santos governs it seems that the confrontation with the political system, quite reactionary and repressive, has been losing importance. There is not the same hard collision with a government as it used to be with a government like that of Uribe.
But when it is time to look for a “final timetable” it is crucial to show the contender that there is no chance to get a quick or stunning win. And in politics and in war time plays a decisive role. It seems likely then, that the pursuit of negotiations calling for the end of the game will soon be raised again
Source: El Socialista nº 659, August 2011
[1] Guillermo León Sáenz, known by his alias Alfonso Cano is the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC).
[2] Colombia’s former Foreign Minister. The UNASUR was formed in 2008 and is composed of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay and Venezuela.
[3] Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans, Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Thomas Howes, were rescued by Colombian security on 2 July 2008, six and a half years after her retaining.
