COLOMBIA - March 07, 2022

After  the union leadership and the reformist left sold out the revolutionary struggle of 28A 2021...

The 2022 electoral trap has been imposed

Stalinism is submitting the working class to the class collaboration Front with the  bourgeois sector of Petro, the new "democratic" executioner of the masses

The blood of the workers and the rebellious youth is still warm in the streets of Colombia

Ten months are already gone since the heroic struggle that we, the workers, together with the combative vanguard of the Front Lines and the poor people throughout Colombia, were leading.  We were the ones who, with pickets, roadblocks and barricades, put the hated government of Duque-Uribe in check, with our fight preventing the reforms and labor flexibility to be imposed on us.  Overcoming the leadership of the CNP (National Strike Committee) bureaucrats, we imposed the Indefinite Strike from our fighting organizations: the Resistance Committees, the Popular Assemblies of workers, peasants, students and unemployed and combative youth, we advanced, developing the economic struggle into a political struggle that opened a revolutionary process where the fall of Duque and his murderous regime was the order of the day;  because we understood that it was the only way to be able to conquer our most heartfelt demands such as the right to a dignified life, the right to work and to have a future, and the stop to the massacre.
At that time, it was the traitors of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CNP (National Strike Committee), lifting the strike, who separated and isolated the labor movement linked to the production from the worker and youth vanguard, thus allowing the government to launch a massacre by the hands of the murderous police and the ESMAD (Mobile Anti Disturbances Squad) encouraged by the fascist right that watered the soil and rivers of the Colombian cities and countryside with the blood of hundreds of martyrs.

Also Human Colombia with its Historical and pacifist Deal lamented that the masses had gone so far, saying that the blockades had to be lifted, arguing that the tax reform had already fallen and that it was time to abandon the struggle and trust in parliamentary institutions.  Their main reference, the bourgeois Gustavo Petro, former presidential candidate and today a senator, not only moved to Cauca Valley to pour water on the fire of the revolution, meeting with the collaborationist leadership of the indigenous Minga to separate the peasants who were mobilizing in the cities, dedicating themselves to make repeated calls to leave the streets and lift the blockades; but while the state was launching a brutal offensive and assassinating our comrades, Petro launched the electoral campaign presenting itself as a credible alternative to sustain the regime that the revolution was shaking from its foundations.  On the same May 15, 2021, Petro met with Christian Cantor, Israel's ambassador to Colombia, together with business sectors of the Zionist bourgeoisie, presenting himself as a reliable candidate to preserve the property and profits of the capitalists who are robbing and looting the nation on behalf of imperialism…  Part and parcel in that policy was his tour throughout Spain, in which he was treated as a head of state by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, PSOE, which organized an agenda for him with European imperialism.  Hand in hand with that party of the regime of the murderous Spanish monarchy and its 1978 constitution (that guaranteed the continuity of the Francoist regime headed by the king placed by murderous fascist dictator F. Franco), from Spain Petro reassured, together with that party representing the the European Union and the imperialist Maastricht, European investors about the stability of their profits during his eventual government.  This is to cite just a few examples celebrated by bourgeois politicians such as Roy Barreras, Armando Benedetti, bourgeois Liberal Party members and even Uribe supporters who in compromises and agreements behind the backs of the masses and on closed lists entered the Historica.

Today, after having removed us from the streets, the pickets and the barricades, the government and the murderous regime continue to kill us, persecuting the vanguard, deceiving us with gifts and crumbs, while unleashing a brutal attack by carrying out and deepening the reforms of labor slavery and increased taxes against which we stood up and fought and that the puppet parliament has re-approved increasing hardship, famine and misery for us workers.

The world economic crisis is getting deeper every day: the profit rate of the capitalists has fallen vertiginously, and the exploiting class, lackey of the parasites of the usurious world financial system, adapts and refines the mechanisms that lead to achieving a relative economic balance, and at the same time try to stabilize their regime of domination, put in check by the courageous struggle of the masses who rose up and resist in different parts of the planet such as Latin America, the Middle East, South Africa in 2019-2020.

 Currently, hard defeats are imposed on the world working class.  11 years after the Syrian revolution, Putin, the assassin of imperialism who committed a genocide in Syria together with the fascist al-Assad, entered iron and fire to crush the revolutionary workers' uprising in Kazakhstan last February, and today invades Ukraine.

Due to a crisis of revolutionary leadership, a decadent and rotten system that deserves to die survives in its agony as comrade Trotsky correctly states “...due to the opportunistic nature of the leadership of the proletariat, its petty-bourgeois cowardice before the big bourgeoisie and its treacherous relationship with it". (Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 1938. Our translation, our bolds).

Here in Colombia, the Bonapartist regime of Duque is the agent that has to throw on the shoulders of the proletariat, the poor peasants and other exploited, an unpayable external debt that amounts to US$ 170,000 million and that also has a red of -6% in its trade balance, a sum that is equivalent to more than 12,000 million euros.  To the above is added an unemployment rate that is going through the roof.  According to official figures, the unemployment rate at the national level was 10.8% in November 2021; but this percentage includes underemployed workers since the system considers that if, for example, an itinerant worker earns more than 2,000 pesos a day (barely 50 cents of a dollar per day), he/she is considered employed, which if cleared would take the real unemployment rate to 28%, in a country where 20 million inhabitants live in absolute poverty and 7 million are indigent.

PLikewise, a monstrous fiscal gap for a value of 95.7 billion pesos (24 billion US dollars), which represents 8.7% of GDP, is a logical and immediate consequence of the ferocious looting of the public treasury and to complete this devastating panorama of crisis and bankruptcy, 45% of the national budget will be absorbed by the amortization of the debt and the payment of its extremely high interest rates.  Hence, the bourgeois regime of Duque is dying to finish its battered mandate, so that the next government is in charge of applying -by iron and fire if necessary- this "package" of new measures of hunger and misery against the workers and the exploited.

To carry out this task, it counts on the punctual help of the reformist and conciliatory left in order to set up a real deception and diversion of the struggle, since none of our demands, no matter how minimal, can be conquered in that den of thieves of the Parliament of the exploiters and imperialism.  They want us to believe that by “voting well” we will achieve with the votes what we could achieve in the struggle.

Cynics!  Whoever wins, wins imperialism, the IMF, Wall Street and the Uribe regime of the Yankee military bases!
 IN THE FACE OF THE CRISIS OF TRADITIONAL PARTIES, A TRUE FRONT OF CLASS COLLABORATION IS RECONFIGURED AS AN "ALTERNATIVE".

In the face of the enormous crisis in which all the parties of the regime were left as a result of the enormous struggle that we began at the end of 2019 and that was about to overthrow the government of the puppet Duque in the glorious revolutionary days of the National Strike of 28 A of 2021 and less of three months for the next presidential elections, they have already managed to agree on candidates and the distribution of positions and seats in a great electoral circus in the midst of an economic and social crisis that continues and deepens with rising inflation and unemployment, devaluation of the peso and of extreme poverty.

At this electoral juncture, the parties grouped in the Historical Deal with its most visible head, the bourgeois Gustavo Petro and his Colombia Humana, seek to position themselves as an "alternative" to definitively contain and close the path of the revolution within the infamous Deal of Reconciliation of the accords of the "Peace of the Graves".  In order to legitimize this infamous agreement that handed over the Colombian resistance by the leadership of the former FARC to Obama and Castro, Ingrid Betancourt reappears as an "independent" candidate for the presidency, who was released in 2008 in an alleged "military and security" intelligence operation on" of the murderous Colombian army, through which her "rescue" would have been achieved along with 15 other prisoners in the hands of the FARC and was presented by the press around the world, as a "victory" conquered by Uribe, a servant of US imperialism, by their armed forces, their intelligence services -advised by the CIA and the Mossad-, by French imperialism, all washed down with a good dose of crocodile tears, speeches and thanks to Uribe and Sarkozy by the Betancourt.  Today it is known that it was an operation framed by the Uribe lackey government and the imperialist powers;  The “Check Mate” operation, as it was called, was carried out by Chávez, Correa (former president of Ecuador), and other “Bolivarian” governments together with the former Castroite bureaucracy, with the support of the Stalinist currents in their different variants, sustained by the renegades of Trotskyism.  The real "checkmate" was the Colombian peasant resistance, which had to be defeated as a decisive strategic step to advance with the capitalist restoration in Cuba.

The new generation must know and the old must not forget because that is what it is all about, they want us to forget that almost a year ago our rallying cry in the streets was THEY DON'T REPRESENT US!!!
They want us to forget, promoting Petro and that retread of reformist parties and the pseudo-left together with the bourgeoisie who are nothing more than the other end of the same rope to strangle the proletariat through deceit and with electoral phraseology, lull the masses while the fascist whip continues to kill us as it happens with the selective massacre of the vanguard and social leaders.

Parties like the morenista Colombian PST-LIT who, during the combats of 28 A, dedicated themselves to covering the back of this "left" concentrating all their efforts and resources to help save the regime from falling into the hands of the rebellious masses, today with his parliamentary cretinism, under the slogan: "In the face of the social crisis, a critical vote for Francia Márquez- organize the struggle for a new society" proposes to support a bourgeois candidate who is a member of the Historical Deal.

Always following in the footsteps of some progressive bourgeois, as in 2017 he called for critical support for Petro, today after four years -in an attempt to relocate more to the "left" the PST states that within the "Historic Deal the policy of alliances has been imposed with sectors of the bourgeoisie and their professional politicians, who seek in the Deal a way to escape the discredit of Uribismo and use the legitimate expectations that the Deal has generated among the vast majority of those who fought in the streets in the National Strike."  And that "Petro's dominant policy has not only been to seek these alliances, but to grant them privileged positions within the Historical Deal, going over the expressions of struggling sectors, as has happened with 'I am Because We Are'."  'I Am Because We Are' is a multi-class movement within the Historical Deal that brings together feminist and indigenist sectors, Afro communities, LGTBI, peasants, “informal” workers, etc.  And that promotes the candidacy for the presidency of Francia Márquez Mina.

Although the PST poses it as a policy of class independence -even when compromises were made for positions in Congress and Francia Márquez threatened to withdraw from the Historical Deal (PST valued this attitude  and came out to “recognize the courageous action of withdrawing from the Deal list to run independently under the special black constituency for the House of Representatives”), the truth is that Francia Márquez never withdrew from the Historical Deal.

The latest declarations of the PST speak and account for the turn to the "right" of the Historical Deal justifying its support for Petro in 2017: "Four years ago, from the Socialist Workers Party, we recognized that Petro's candidacy expressed the discontent of the masses and the aspiration of the working class to alleviate the social and economic crisis, that is why we accompanied it through the critical vote.  Today, his candidacy expresses more of an agreement with those bourgeois sectors than an agreement with those who were the protagonists of the 2021 social outbreak in Colombia.”, Historical Deal… Turn to the right, 02/17/2022.  An open confession of guiltiness makes relay of evidence superfluous...

In their declaration of February 9, they say “Unfortunately, 'I am Because We Are' Party did not go further in the necessary political independence and defined in its assembly that they would continue in the Historical Deal.  Despite this mistaken decision, its list to the Afro Chamber is made up of activists from the Afro-Colombian social movement, which has been waging important struggles in their territories, which is why we have decided to call a critical vote for this movement in the special Afro constituency.”  In other words, although Francia Márquez never broke with the historical Deal, which means being allied with the bourgeoisie, the PST continues to support her… ” Against the Hunger Regime: Fighting in the streets, critical vote for Francia Márquez and 'I am because we are', at the polls." March 9, 2022.
This position, which breaks absolutely with class independence, is not surprising, since this same policy the LIT has just applied in Peru, supporting Castillo, who, as president of that country, met with Duque in January signing bilateral cooperation agreements that mean a redoubled attack on the backs of the workers.

In Chile supporting the fraudulent Constituent Assembly proposing the "democratization" of the Pinochet regime and then calling to vote for the Stalinist Boric in the second round of the elections at the end of 2021 as "lesser evil".
 THE WORKERS AND COMBATIVE ORGANIZATIONS MUST BREAK ALL THEIR SUBORDINATION AND SUPPORT TO THE BOURGEOISIE.
 AGAINST THE ELECTORAL TRAP, TODAY MORE THAN EVER IT IS TIME TO REGROUP OUR FORCES UNDER AN EMERGENCY WORKERS PROGRAM TO DEFEAT DUQUE AND ALL THE BOURGEOIS PARTIES.
From COMUNEROS we reiterate our call to set up a FRONT OF STRUGGLE FOR STUDENT WORKERS AND COMBATIVE ORGANIZATIONS, to resume the path of the National Strike and prepare for the General Strike affecting production and for the capitalists to pay for their crisis.  For this we must kick out the treacherous union bureaucracy of the unions;  THEY DON'T REPRESENT US!

OPEN THE WAY TO THE FACTORY COMMITTEES!  FOR COMMITTEES OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS, MIGRANTS AND STUDENTS BY NEIGHBORHOODS, BY COMMUNES, BY SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES!
AGAINST HIGH PRICES AND THE UNBEARABLE LIVING CONDITIONS WE MUST FIGHT TO CONQUER DECENT WORK FOR EVERYONE WITH A WAGE EQUAL TO THE FAMILY BASKET, FREE AND QUALITY EDUCATION AND HEALTH SERVICES.  WE WILL ACHIEVE THIS ONLY BY EXPROPRIATION FROM THE TRANSNATIONAL LOOTERS OF COLOMBIA'S WEALTH WITHOUT COMPENSATION AND UNDER WORKERS' CONTROL.

ENOUGH OF PERSECUTION AND MASSACRE!  TO CONQUER A TRUE PEACE, WE MUST EXPEL THE IMF, IMPERIALISM AND ITS MILITARY BASES FROM COLOMBIA AND THE WHOLE OF LATIN AMERICA…
Against that sinister infamous Peace deal that does not stop massacring us, we call to organize WORKERS AND POPULAR SELF-DEFENSE COMMITTEES to defend ourselves from the murderous army, its paramilitarie, the police and the ESMAD, DOWN WITH THE INFAMOUS DEAL OF RECONCILIATION OF THE PSEUDO-LEFT AND STALISM WITH THE MURDERERS OF THE PEOPLE!

FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY ALLIANCE OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS.
 THE COLOMBIAN REVOLUTION IS A SOCIALIST AND LATIN AMERICAN ONE.
 EITHER COLOMBIA WILL BE WORKERS AND SOCIALIST UNDER A WORKERS AND PEASANTS GOVERNMENT OR IT WILL BE A WALL STREET COLONY!