Colombia - July 18, 2024

With Chiquita Brands and the IMF plundering Colombia, with the US bases controlling the ESMAD and the murderous Armed Forces…

Petro’s Constituent Assembly is a new
deception against the people!

Only a revolutionary workers' and peasants' Colombia will
conquer the land, bread and national independence!

Faced with the stalemate of his projects in the bourgeois Congress (reforms to Health, Labor and Pension, Justice, Education, Tax, etc.) Petro is now gambling with the need for a Constituent Assembly to “give him a way out” of the political crisis he is facing. In this sense, his Party and electoral alliance with bourgeois and Stalinist sectors, called Colombia Humana, are recomposing his government team, once again changing the heads in some of its ministeries, being the main ones at this moment the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Justice.

The proposal for a New Constituent Assembly has been rejected by the bourgeois majority of the country. The last National Constituent Assembly was that of 1991, led by Alvaro Gómez, a bourgeois conservative politician, Horacio Serpa, a bourgeois Liberal politician and Antonio Navarro, the leader of the then demobilized M19, with the basic objective of replacing the centenary constitution of 1886.
Petro proposes for this new Constituent, the task of guaranteeing what the current congress has prevented, by not giving way to his reform proposals. According to him his reforms “would guarantee basic living conditions for all”, including pension, health and access to water; besides, his Judicial Reform would act “so that the system is more effective and has a restorative dimension in terms of truth and guarantees of non-repetition”, to give continuity to the “National Agreement” and “TOTAL PEACE”, main slogans of his campaign.

In general, the proposals for political reforms have been rejected or bogged down in Congress, where the government has a minority. An exception was the Education Reform, the only one approved but which was later dismantled, after a month of strike and marches by the teachers themselves, because it had not met their expectations.

The PST-LIT supports the Petro popular front government and its bet on a Constituent Assembly, as it states that: “It is necessary to go beyond the limited constituent assembly proposed by the government. A broad, free, democratic and sovereign constituent must be an objective of struggle that the National Meeting of Social Organizations must approve and promote with decision. From the Socialist Workers Party we place ourselves at the forefront of this struggle.” (Executive Committee of the Socialist Workers Party of Colombia, June 12, 2024).

The program proposed by the PST is for Petro to head a Constituent Assembly, that Is, it tells the workers that the democratic tasks can be conquered by the hand of a bourgeois peacefully, becoming the last link of this deception to the people. As in Chile, when a Constituent covered up an anti-democratic farce with hundreds of political prisoners in jails, taking the masses out of the streets and the Plaza de la Dignidad. That is how they saved the Pinochetista regime, and the hated Piñera was left in place ST the head of the government. PST reformist remedy and its support to the “progressive bourgeois”, led the masses to the worst setbacks and defeat. Today the Stalinist party of Boric is the best student of the US plans in Latin America.

If a Democratic Constituent Assembly is called upon, we revolutionaries will intervene in it to denounce it as anti-democratic and to reach the broad masses of workers and peasants, telling them that the way out is the Socialist Revolution. We will use it to denounce their traitorous leaderships, and collaborate with the workers in getting rid of them, to fight from there to organize millions and get the thousands of political prisoners out of the jails of the regime.

There can only be a Free and Sovereign Constituent Assembly:
- Free means without the rifles of the executioners of the people.
- Free means with the majority of the masses armed in workers' and peasants' militias.
- Free, if it gives the land to the peasants.
- Sovereign is if it expels the military bases and breaks with the IMF…
- …and disarms the murderous police, the para-military and the murderous caste of the army, and instead ir is the people who are armed.
- If deputies are elected, one for every 50 thousand inhabitants, and earn the salary of a worker.

We Revolutionary Socialists fight for the revolution of those from below and a Workers' Peasant and Socialist Colombia, while combatting for the Federation of Socialist Republics of Latin America.

That Workers' and Peasants' Republic based on councils of armed peasant workers would be the most democratic since it would group the majority of the nation against the minority of parasites and plunderers.

Then, we denounce that the bourgeoisie and this bourgeois government of Petro, which continues without removing the oligarchy, the US bases and the murderous police, is incapable of guaranteeing even this extreme democratic demand.

Against what the reformist left puts forward, we Trotskyists affirm that only the workers and peasants in a victorious revolutionary action, as in 2020-2021, without bureaucrats and leftist servants of the capitalists, will be able to guarantee a Free and Sovereign Constituent.

Petro will never carry out the agrarian reform, nor nationalize the banks and strategic industries, or disarm the paramilitaries. He is an enemy of expropriation and the generalized arming of the people. He defends the Constitution of '91 with its State, its officer caste and the US military bases. Even in the hypothetical case that a Constituent Assembly such as the one proposed by the PST would take such measures, the tanks of the Armed Forces and the US Marines would immediately cause its dissolution by gunfire.

Trotskyism and the resolution of the national liberation tasks in the oppressed countries

As the theses of Leon Trotsky's PERMANENT REVOLUTION state, only the working class leading the other exploited in the cities and the countryside, with its councils and its armed militias, will be able to give an answer to the land problem and confront the imperialist yoke. The democratic tasks are linked to the worker and peasant revolution.

In Colombia, to carry out agrarian reform, Chiquita Brands and the oligarchy must be expropriated; to break with imperialism, the people must be armed, the US bases expelled and the armed power of the exploiters destroyed. To support Petro and his proposal for a Constituent Assembly is to renounce in advance the right to give the land to the peasants, and the welding together of the worker-peasant alliance. Even a Constituent Assembly truly free from US imperialism can only be guaranteed by a revolutionary government of the armed exploited masses on the ruin of the US bases' regime. Never by Petro and his party.

This policy of seeking a "progressive" bourgeois has been already tested by Stalinism that sought “patriotic” and "democratic" bourgeois generals; this only means breaking with the theory and program of the PERMANENT REVOLUTION.
These currents of the new "Progressive International" proclaim to submit the working class to the "democratic" bourgeoisies against the "right-wing" or "dictatorial" fronts... As we see today in Colombia, it is Petro who keeps the prisoners for fighting in jails, respects the land of Chiquita Brands and deepens the subjugation of the nation to imperialism.
Meanwhile, the same US imperialist pirates that support Petro, bring out the whip of the paramilitaries and Uribism to discipline him and prevent him from flirting too much with the people.
This is what the infamous regime of "reconciliation" that Petro wants to impose with Uribism and its genocidal generals is all about.

The Trotskyists of the FLTI will defend the program and strategy of the Fourth International against those who use its banners to kneel before the class enemy. The Colombian working class must stand up against all its class enemies.

Open the road to the program of the Fourth International of 1938! That is the banner of victory over imperialism!

Down with the pact of “reconciliation” of Petro and all those who sold out worker and peasant Cuba to the capitalists!

Colombia will be Socialist or Wall Street Colony!

Utopia La Palabra Collective - FLTI-CI