*Some thoughts about Colombia, Latin America, and Revolutions* A new left is rising here in Colombia. It is a left that rejects the guerrillerismo of Che as well as the rancid and failed examples of Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega. It is closer to the new left of Chile than to the lefts of Bolivia and Peru. It is located halfway between anarchism and social democracy, and halfway to revolutionary politics. It is youthful, not well-organized, but smart and learning.
The suspended *paro nacional *mobilized this new movement, and in a way, the paro created it. The closest thing to an organized expression of the new movement is *la primera linea *(the first line of defense, or the first line of battle). *La primera linea* came into existence in virtually every city of the country during the paro but became especially strong in Bogota, Cali, and Medellin. At first they functioned as the defenders of the road blocks set up by demonstrators on the main highways and on city streets. When the police, especially the hated ESMAD (riot squad) tried to remove the blockades, *la primera linea* resisted. They threw rocks, bottles, and bricks at the advancing ESMAD lines. When the ESMAD shot tear gas grenades at road blocks, members of *la primera linea *threw them back at ESMAD*. *They wore makeshift defensive gear made of motorcycle helmets and shields made from street signs. Some of them have been killed when police fired rubber bullets, tear gas grenades, or live ammunition point blank at these youth. Many have been injured. Some have disappeared. More thousand were arrested or detained. They claim to have no leaders, and no organizations, but individuals and groups of them have acted as their spokespeople in interviews with the media and in negotiations with local authorities. At the height of the paro they probably mobilized more than 10,000 young people, with thousands in their three centers but hundreds in many other cities and large towns. Some people here call them *ninis ‘ni estudiar, ni trabajar *which means neither studying nor working. The term is not always derisive since more than 40% of the country’s young adults are currently unemployed and access to public universities is limited while private universities are expensive. My own impression is that many of them are in fact public university students and former public university students who live in the working class neighborhoods which are the strongholds of *la linea*. However, these students have departed from past student-only movements, and mobilized other young people from their neighborhoods. Throughout the paro they demonstrated that their support went deeper into their communities than just their own age groups by their well supplied soup kitchens and first aid stations provisioned with food and supplies donated by neighbors. When the strike committee decided to suspend the paro, the mass demonstrations stopped. They had been going on for nearly two months by that time, especially on Wednesdays and Fridays. Participation and enthusiasm had dwindled over that time. At the beginning the paro has scored two big wins: the government withdrew its regressive tax reform bill (which had been the initial reason for the paro), and the government’s equally regressive health care. The government appeared to be in crisis with the resignation of four ministers and various other key officials. >From that point on, things went nowhere. Police repression was undoubtedly one reason attendance at demonstrations fell. Repression was combined by the government’s negotiating tactics. It claimed to be open to negotiation, but then tore up the agreement on protocol that it made. It became obvious that the government was using the negotiations, and the promise of negotiations, to create a smokescreen about its own intentions to avoid ever making any agreement with the strike committee. Meanwhile, it engaged in a war of attrition against the demonstrations. Covid 19 was another reason. Colombia is at its worst moment so far in the pandemic. The government had relied on restrictions on movement to dampen the spread of the virus, but had increasingly relaxed restrictions under pressure from businesses to reopen the economy. The slow and uneven vaccination program guaranteed that the country was extremely vulnerable when new more contagious and more deadly variants of the virus appeared in the late spring. By the time the paro began, all of the country’s ICUs had been expanded but were still at well over 90% capacity. Halfway through the paro, individual ICU waiting lists were in the hundreds, and people were dying for lack of treatment. The country’s president, Ivan Duque, went on television daily to blame the collapse of the healthcare system on the demonstrators. He was joined by a chorus of right wing politicians and most of the mass media, and shamefully some leaders of the Green Party like Claudia Lopez, the Mayor of Bogota. (Surprisingly, the demonization of the demonstrators was blunted by the strong assertions of 140 medical and scientific associations laying the blame for the health care crisis on the government’s reopening of the economy, new variants, and the government’s incompetent roll out of the country’s vaccination program.) Still another reason explains falling demonstration participation and ultimately the suspension of the paro itself: confusion. The strike committee was formed by the main union federations, several independent unions, a number of business associations (*gremios*), student organizations, indigenous peoples, organizations of Afro’Colombians, LGBT groups, and assorted others. When negotiations were about to start, it finally presented a program of demands that included everything from specific items like reducing highway tolls to big strategic demands like an end to all discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. In truth, the program of the strike committee is a program that can only be achieved by taking political power. In other words, it is not a program that can be imposed on an antagonistic government through mass demonstrations. Some of the demonstrators demands were won, but others are far too radical for the current government to ever accept. Take for example the demands to abolish the riot squads and radically reform the police. Taken together, the radical reforms of the strike committee’s list of demands would require, at the very least, an electoral sweep of historic proportions that would put strike supporters in control of the presidency and the congress. More likely, achieving that program will require social revolution. In any case, nobody on the strike committee proposed that it reconstitute itself as a political party to seek power either through next year’s elections or through social revolution. Why this was not proposed was a function of the past: the loyalties of key strike committee leaders to the existing parties and factions of Colombian politics. Hopefully, I will be able to continue this in the next day or two. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#9796): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9796 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/84084351/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
