truce between the government and the guerrillas:
The PSR's view of negotiation and dialogue was the best way to deal with the guerrillas and to prepare the way for the counter-offensive against the masses. The regime will not, of course, withdraw its support from its so-called plan of civic-military action, the modernisation of the armed forces or the formation of new operational com-
On May 28 the truce agreed two months previously between the Chief of staff of the Armed Revolutionary Force of Colombia (FARC) and the
Commission for Peace (1) was finally brought into effect.
was ratified by the president of the Republic, Belisario Betancur, and will last for one year.
It allows the restoration of civil authority in the militarised zones and the use of identity cards instead of the military safeconduct passes which had replaced them in these areas. The militarisation oI several regions of the country has been condemned by the civil liberties organisation, Amnesty International.
In particular, it prevented them from moving food and medical supplies, which were under the control of the army requisition posts.
The truce involved a ceasefire between the army and the guerrillas and the cessation of all military operations and activity, but it did not mean, as far as the guerrilla organisations who accepted the agreement were concerned, that they should lay down their arms.
charged with overseeing the implementation of the truce will be working in the main areas affected by military clashes, and will monitor the plan for rehabilitation of these zones.
Socorro RAMIREZ
The government has committed itself, in the guerrilla agreements, to present constitutional reforms to the norm..
session of Congress on July 20 and to draw up social reform measures.
The agreement was backed by both the trade- union and popular movements, which considered it an important step on the path of negotiating with the guerrilla movement and as creating a democratic discussed with president
Betancur at the time of his trip to Spain in October 1983, the leaders of the April
19 Movement (M-19), Ivan Marino Ospina and Alvaro Fayad, met with the
Peace Commission and the government.
Together with Ernesto Rojas, commander of the Popular Liberation Army (EPL)
and his comrades; and Francisco Caraballo and Oscar William Calvo, members of the central committee of the Communist Party Marxist Leninist (PCM-L)
they signed a joint statement.
In it they announced that: "The government has taken an important step in recognising the guerrilla movements as a force engaged in war, and meetings will take place in the next few days to discuss a ceasefire in the framework of the agreements signed with the FARC. (2)
Both organisations demanded party meeting and a national dialogue to accompany the negotiations.
Colombian Communist
(PCC), which is currently undergoing an internal crisis, recently made proposals for a plebiscite on political reforms and a truce with the guerrillas, if the Congress
International Viewpoint 16 July 1984
This agreement This system led to numerous commissions, failed to approve such reforms.
A new group, a split off from FARC, called the Franco column, has claimed a series of military actions and announced ** urban guerrilla offensive. These moves were clearly desg.od to show their disagreement with the pact signed by the FARC leadership and with the latter organisation's condemnation of kidnappings and individual terrorism, which it underlined by ordering the release of the people it was holding. The position of the PSR
The Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR), the Columbian section of the Fourth International, welcomed the agreement between the government and the guerrillas as a positive gain for the democratic, revolutionary and people's movement, which had dem • led that negotia-
The Colombian guerrilla movement has a It developed as self-defence of the peasants against violence from the landowners and the army. The civil war of 1948 between
Conservative parties gave rise birth of a Liberal guerrilla movement, of FARC which came later the Colombian The Commission for Peace is a structure or dialogue with the guerrillas created on tl itiative of the Betancur government and i independent of the Socorro Ramirez, a leader of the PSR, being
M-19 is a more recent guerrilla movement
It gained some popular sympathy by engaging in offensive actions, whilst FARC toward a defensive strategy. the last period, the M-19 has squandered much action based on an overestimation of the revolutionary potential of the
The signing of the truce does not mean that all sections of the bourgeoisie are in agreement with the strategy of negotiapaper editorials, statements from the emand the military hierarchy have demanded that the guerrilla movement give up all arms before president Betancur announced the ceasefire. But the conclusion of the agreement means that the preference of the ruling class, in response to the events in Central America, has opted for confronting the movement on a basis of bourgeois democratic legality.
For the left and the guerrilla organisations the framework of the truce of fers the opportunity to highlight the need to oppose militarism by demanding the demilitarisation of the rural areas, the dissolution of the paramilitary organisations and the punishment of those responsible for torture such as General Vega Uribe.
Currently the commander of the army and a candidate for the job of minister before 1982 General Vega Uribe was head of the Military Institutions Brigade under the government of Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala. This was when Amnesty International raised an outcry existence of fifty centres where 35 different forms of torture were heing applied on a mass scale.
It is the big landowners of Colombia, who hang on to their economic power by using gangs of hired killers and by maintaining direct links with the army, who are responsible for the widespread violence in the rural areas. Urban guerrilla activity, on the other hand, is a re. sult of the straitjacket of the 'two-party system (4), which makes it difficult to mount political opposition to the regime, as well as of the militarisation of the about a crisis of the regime in an artificial way.
organisation linked to the facing an internal crisis which came out into committee member and was elected Senator the list for the Democratic Front.
leaders of the party, Alvaro and Alvaro Delgado, also members of the EC announced their withdrawal at the same time.
After a murderous and fratricidal war, the called the Frente Nacional by which they agreed to alternate the presidency. extended to 1978, the tramework of the so-called two-party sys
The capitalist political game was reduced to its crudest form, being restricted to the two dominant bourgeois parties.
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COLOMBIA
country in the name of 'national secur-
This 'national security' doctrine was imposed by the Pentagon on the armies of Latin America at the end of the 1950s. In Colombia it was instituted by the 1958 National Front Agreement (Frente National) between the two main bourg-
The question of the military struggle is, therefore, a tactical political problem. In view of the recent evolution of the regime and the level of consciousness of the masses, it seems to us that the best way to advance the struggles of the masses is to orient to their natural organisations - the unions, peasants' committees, citizens' committees, neighbourhood committees, popular committees.
We have to put forward the fundamenrevolutionary Marxists, the conviction that even if we do not get immediate results or success in the short term, we can move ahead towards building an organisation of workers and peasants that can offer a class alternative to the existing regime. Tasks for revolutionaries
The vanguardism of the guerrilla movement presents an obstacle to such slow and patient work. We are opposed to the adventurist practices of individual terrorism and kidnappings which have sown confusion amongst the popular masses and given the regime an excuse to resort
For revolutionaries, the task is not so much to invent new forms of struggle as it is to work to generalise the forms that emerge naturally in the mass movement by organising in action. This is why we support the self defence of the masses, which is developing in the rural areas in response to direct attacks by landowners and their hired thugs.
We emphasise daily the need to comviolence of the semi-colonial bourgeoisie, the state and the repressive forces through exposing it, through protest action and by mobilising the masses. The people and the working class oppose this violence, especially in its most brutal form of torture and political killings, by mobilising and through any means available.
Despite positive experiences such as the 15 workers' strikes last year and the peoples' strikes this year, the mass movement has still not developed a leadership capable of focussing its demands on the national level.
The workers and popular movement is thus caught in an ideological trap In this situation revolutionaries are obliged by the official two-party system to fight in a highly undemocratic constitutional set-up in order to try to win the independence of the organisations of the
The fact does not mean the start of a process of expanding bourgeois democracy, because the bourgeoisie is combining a legalist approach with repression and will step up their attacks on the mass movement in that context.
the recent judiciary reforms and the agreement amongst employers aimed at revising the labour code in a reactionary direction as well as by the reintroduction of the state of emergency on
All these circumstances have led the Colombian two-party system to decide to rely mainly on means that have a certain legitimacy in the eyes of society at large, such as constitutional mechanisms, judicial pretences and a limited parliamentary democracy, to exercise its domination over the exploited. It has opted for these means to prepare to confront, tie down, divide and divert the workers and
Such a strategy does not alter the anti-working class nature of the Betancur government whose fundamental aim, which defines its attitude toward the masses as a whole, is to guarantee their super-exploitation by the ruling class. It is doing this, for example, by foreing working people to pay the cost of the crisis that is raging at the moment and by holding wage rises below increases in the cost of living, by imposing austerity plans and by assuring that unemployment will rise.
On May 1, a state of emergency was declared after the assassination of the minister of justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, by the drugs mafia. (5) The minister's main programme of action was to combat the involvement of sections of the mafia
In fact, these criminal elements wield a considerable influence in the country's economic and political life.
The accusations got no real back up. If the government had wanted to support his campaign, it could have taken steps like applying the treaty that calls for extradition of anyone connected with the international drugs traffic.
Senator Lara had named the members of the drugs mafia who financed the activities of MAS (Death to Kidnappers). (6) The attorney general, Carlos Jimenez Gomez has begun inquiries into the terrorist activity of this paramilitary threatened and been responsible for the disappearance of so many hundreds of trade-union and popular leaders.
However, the results of these investigations which incriminated more than fifty high-ranking military officers in active service were covered up. Pressure from the military ensured that the trials were
The weight that the armed services brought to bear kept the regular courts from concluding their investigations, kept these murder gangs from being checked and the guilty from being pun-
The minister was assassinated, therefore, to put a stop to the exposures he was making and to display the power of the mafia and the impunity they enjoy-
In fact, they wanted to provoke a state of emergency. Sections of the army and the bipartisan regime that opposed a truce and any moves toward liberalisation, took advantage of the new situation to push for a clamp-down by the govern-
A state of emergency had already been established three months before in Huila, Caqueta, Cauca and Meta provinces as a response to the military occupation of Florencia, the capital city of Caqueta, by the M-19. Now that the state of emergency had been extended to the whole country, president Betancur justified it in public by saying that it aimed to confront the mafia, to fight crime and
Ex-president Turbay Ayala used this method to justify the extremely repres sive "Security Law', which was used subagainst strikers and protest actions of all kinds. Its results were the violation of human and trade-union rights with the military intervening in strikes, gaoling of workers, the murder or "disappearance' of revolutionaries and the torturing of political detainees. Violence and insecurity increased, but the mafia
The present economic crisis has had enormous social consequences especially in the main towns, with unemployment rising to nearly a million. alarming instance is the city of Medellin, where unemployment is running between 14 and 17 per cent of the economically active population, while in Bogota it has reached 12 per cent. This situation was aggravated by the introduction of a value added tax, which caused a sharp rise in the price of necessities.
The Betancur government still has support from wide sections of the population, even though it is implementing clearly anti-working class and anti-popular policies (which are embodied in its so-called Plan for Just Change). It was illustrated in a string of other measures such as wage controls, increases in tarifs (both open secret), increases in tarifs in the public services, use of military methods in conflicts with dockers, petroleum workers and steel workers, the militarisation of rural areas where disappearances and assassinations have been rife, and in5. In June 1982, the lifted the state of emergency and in November of that year took certain amnesty meas ures. 6. The MAS is a paramilitary organisation created by the drugs mafia in order to stop abductions of members or near relatives.
International Viewpoint 16 July 1984
creases in redundancies with the endorsement of the Ministry of Labour.
The Betancur government has, to be sure, made a change in style from its
USA predecessors.
This has involved accepting a democratic amnesty and choosing to join the group of non-aligned countries
Portrait of a revolutionary known as Contadora (Colombia, Mexico,
Panama, Venezuela) which is putting up a rather feeble resistance to the US policy of aggression in Central America.
But, basically Betancur heads a Liberal-Conservative government that still rules in the manner of the Frente Nacional, August 1984 is the tenth anniversary of the death of James P. Cannon. since the official two-party system con- Cannon was a founder of American Communism and a central figure in tinues to dominate the political life of the party until 1928. Subsequently he established the American Trotskythe country. The deal between the two ist movement and was the most important leader of the Socialist Workers big bourgeois parties sets the tune for Party for several decades. Following is a biographical sketch that will also the means of communication and, by introduce the readers of International Viewpoint to books by Cannon that fraudulent means, it controls elections. contain additional information about his life and ideas. Workers fight back
James Patrick Cannon was born in
Martin Abern, formed a bloc with William
Z. Foster's group against the faction of
Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone
Some important regional and city- Rosedale, Kansas, on February 11, 1890, over such issues as the attitude toward wide strikes took place recently in the the son of Irish immigrants raised in a labor party, trade union strategy and southwest of Antioquia and in Narino. Workers protesting against price rises in the public services and the abandonment of any social policies in these
There were large mobilisations against the government's education policies and in defence of state education. There were strikes on the docks and in the textile industry. In telecommunications and the administrative services, the judiciary and other state services there were stoppages and protests.
The actions, led by the union federaation FENALTRASE, defeated the government's wage control policy. This is a sign that new struggles can develop in the future. At the same time, the process of drawing together a unified, democratic, pluralist trade-union movement on a class struggle basis is gathering momentum.
During the municipal and provincial elections on March 11, the Colombian left presented a joint electoral platform called the Democratic Front. This bloc advanced working class, anti-imperialist demands. It called for trade-union and civil rights, for a negotiated truce, for dialogue and a democratic peace, for a single union confederation and for solidarity with Nicaragua, Salvador, Grenada and Cuba.
Unity of the left, excluding Conservatives and Liberals, was achieved in most areas of the country, except the towns of Barranquilla and Narino, where the Communist Party allied itself with the Liberals. The unity achieved by the left was a big political victory. It could undoubtedly develop and help to consolidate a policy of independence from the official two-party system and to promote popular and revolutionary action that we hope would carry over into the fight for political reform, for democracy and into the anti-imperialist battles on the agenda today. This orientation could be expressed in the 1986 presidential elections by presenting a mass political alternative based on mobilisation. International Viewpoint 16 July 1984
England. His father, John Cannon, worked as a laborer in a foundry and introduced his son James to the Irish nationKnights of Labor, the Populists and the
Leaving school to start work at age twelve, Cannon was propelled into radical politics by the Haywood-PettiboneMoyer defense case. He briefly returned to high school but left again to become a traveling organizer for the WW and a follower of Vincent St. John. He later joined the Socialist Party, replacing Earl Browder as editor of Workers' World in Kansas when Browder was sent to prison during World War I.
Cannon quickly became a leader of the left wing of the Socialist Party. Following the 1919 expulsion of the left wing, he joined the Communist Labor Party led by John Reed
When the United Communist Party was formed in the spring of 1920, he was elected to its central committee and assigned as organizer of the party's St. Louis-Southern Illinois District.
Toward the end of 1920 he moved to Cleveland to edit The Toiler, a party organ, and in 1921 he transferred to New York to participate in the top leadership of the party. After an internal struggle to create a legal party and end the under.
existence of the Communist movement, Cannon was elected person of the national committee of the
Party, the new above-ground
In 1922-23 he served on the Presidium of the Communist International in Moscow, and between 1925 and 1928 he headed International Labor Defense. In licized the cases of the Centralia prisonand the McNamara Brothers. He also organized the International Labor Defense's Sacco-Vanzetti campaign.
During these years Cannon's group of followers, including Max Shachtman and tactics, the location of the national office and the nature and composition of the party leadership. Cannon's reminisof this period were later published as The First Ten Years of American Communism (New York: Lyle Stuart,
In the summer of 1982 he attended the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International where he received a translation of Trotsky's "Criticism of the Draft Program of the Communist Inter-
Won over to the ideas of Trotsky's Left Opposition, Cannon and his followers were expelled from the Ameriican party in October for circulating
Cannon described the first decade of the American Trotskyist movement in The History of American Trotskyism (New York: Pioneer, 1944). Along with Schatman and Abern he founded the Communist League of America (Left Opposition) in mid-1929, and began publishing the Militant newspaper. They had only a hundred followers at first, but doubled their size over the next several years. A theoretical magazine, New International, was launched in 1934.
That same year members of the Communist League of America were in the leadership of the sensational Minneapolis Teamster strikes, and