After huge combats of the Colombian workers and people… A great Struggle, a great Betrayal

It was not due to lack of predisposition to combat or lack of heroism; it was the collaborationist bureaucracies and the pseudo-reformist left servants of the regime that supported Duque.

With the deepening of the economic crisis of the imperialist capitalist system since 2008 that reached even deeper levels of bankruptcies in 2012, and now since 2020 has not stopped deepening the crack and crisis, not only because of the COVID19 pandemic as a new aggravating cause, it has derived in greater hardships and miseries for the proletariat of the 5 continents, due to which, enormous uprisings, social outbreaks and a heroic resistance of the exploited have developed.

In Colombia, the masses have also taken to the streets since November 21, 2019, surpassing the leadership of the National Strike Command (CNP), made up of several central and federated unions (Fecode, CTC, CGT, CUT) that in the face of pressure and discontent called opportunistically for a 24-hour mobilization, as they have always used to, in a conciliatory manner and as a mechanism of “pressure” to the government, in order to enhance their stand before the masses; this has always been the practice of these bureaucratic leaderships. But they didn’t count on the willingness and the fighting spirit of the masses, that at that time no one expected that all the domination schemes of both the state and that reformist left would be overcome, in the same way imperialism was convinced of the effectiveness of the "peace" pacts of Havana (See Box), with the belief of having implemented a social peace, the peace of the tombs.

As a continuation of these processes of struggle, the same CNP called for a one-day strike for April 28, but on April 29 and 30 they call to lift the mobilization and commit their first betrayal. In a cowardly way and cornered by the drive of the unemployed youth, workers and popular sectors, the CNP called to "mobilize" in an online meeting on May 1, consummating the second great betrayal of this "left" lackey of the regime, when reality and the belligerence of the masses overcame all the mechanisms of control of the regime, leaving the reformist left relegated to the old junk corner.
The Colombian workers, youth and people staged great revolutionary days that made tremble the government of Duque the Uribist puppet, with huge actions in the streets, leaving our dead, giving everything, because we understood that even to achieve the least it was necessary to overthrow the government and its murderous regime. Only by rolling Duque's head down could the reform package be halted, which meant a redoubled attack on the conditions of hunger and misery deepened by the pandemic in a situation that can no longer be endured.

The exploited won the streets overcoming the bureaucratic leaderships, imposing the Indefinite Strike, surpassing the economic struggle into a political struggle, which opened a revolutionary process where the fall of Duque was the order of the day. We put everything on the battlefield, as well as our fighting organizations: the Resistance Committees, the Popular Assemblies of workers, peasants, students and unemployed and combative youth. Together we organized the pickets, blockades and barricades and the First Lines were activated as embryos of dual power that sought the fall of the regime, while the traitors of the CNP retreated at a time when the government carried out a real massacre operation at the hands of the murderous police and the ESMAD's prey dogs, showing their fascist mask, and while Human Colombia with its Historical and pacifist Pact lamented that the masses had reached those levels of combativity, with the stupid argument that the tax reform had already fallen and that it was the time to abandon the fight and trust the parliamentary institutions.

With this dirty maneuver, they prevented these organizational mechanisms from unite and coordinate in a National Struggle Committee, an organism that would have represented the power of millions, centralizing a workers and popular militia capable of confronting and dissolving the murderous police, the ESMAD and crush the paramilitaries and fascist gangs. They limited themselves to calling for days of peaceful and carnival-like mobilizations with the purpose of taking the struggle off the streets, separating the First Lines as a vanguard from the rest of the working class and popular sectors, preventing them from arising and synchronizing and being able to arm our fighting organizations. Thus they guaranteed the property of the capitalists and supported the hated Duque government that, out of terror of the revolution, had withdrawn the tax, health and labor reform, for fear of losing everything.

Today, the daily reality in the cities and towns of Colombia is one of uncertainty, tension, and expectation about the immediate future, a consequence of the betrayal, on the part of those who gave up our struggle, the Stalinist bureaucracies with the Communist Party at their forefront, those who lead the National Strike Committee together with the workers' centrals, “officially lifting the strike”, crashing against the general feeling of hatred, repudiation, and pain accumulated in the course of decades of repression, massacres, overexploitation, hunger, deception and lies, with which the regime has perpetuated, looting the public treasury and all the resources of the nation in behalf of imperialism.
This front of the Colombian CP, Marcha Patriótica, UP, together with the bourgeoisie of Petro's Colombia Humana which lead the workers' centrals together with the MOIR, meeting in the National Strike Committee (CNP) were, as we have already stated, those who separated the workers' vanguard and youth of the First Lines from the rest of the labor movement and other popular sectors preventing the fall of the murderous Duque regime, which launched a fascist offensive to punish and terrorize the defenseless population, through a repression that continues and deepens day after day. Despite this fascist offensive they haven’t defeated us, we have given everything in the fight and we even had the possibility of victory in our hands, but it was these leaderships that prevented the fall of the Duque-Uribe regime.

The renegades of Trotskyism of the PST-LIT are also highly responsible for this treacherous betrayal, which by covering the back of this "left” which, with its parliamentary cretinism, concentrates all its efforts and resources to help save the regime from its legality within the bourgeois parliament. This position is a continuity of that pact of the constituent of 1991, with which they legitimized the decomposed and rotten regime and that brought as an immediate consequence this tragedy that is deepening to this day.
Today, again, all the renegades of Trotskyism in Latin America have begun to proclaim that the way out is a Constituent Assembly that would leave the Uribe regime intact and take the masses off the streets, as has happened in Chile. The LIT-CI and its PST group go very far in stating that the masses will be able to “politicize” and “educate themselves” with a Constituent Assembly. These people have no return to the revolutionary movement. They want the masses to retreat towards a parliamentary consciousness, when in their combat they have already educated themselves sufficiently, understanding that the bourgeois governments are overthrown with the revolutionary struggle in the streets. For more than 50 days these traitor leaderships have dedicated themselves to calling different days of marches and pressure mobilizations to try to get the masses off the streets while they keep their miserable privileges.

Meanwhile, a new trap at the "left", behind the backs of the masses was simmering to definitely close the road to the revolution that we workers and the Colombian people had begun to develop:

The National Popular Assembly, ANP: a new scam to the Colombian working youth and people.

From the 6th to 8th, the National People's Assembly was held, convened by a fraction of these same directorates. We are facing a maneuver by this bureaucracy allied with the reformist sectors and the "historical pact" (Colombia Humana, Green Party, Indigenous and Social Alternative Movement (MAIS), added to the Communist Party and its organizations (Partido Comunes, Unión Patriótica, Congreso de los Pueblos, CNA, etc.). All these are the ones who have summoned this meeting with the support of the National Union, Social and Popular Coordinator (CNSSyP), the PST-LIT and Direct Democracy.
This is a great lie and conspiracy against the people, the other end of the rope to finish tying up and demobilizing the masses, leading them to peaceful marches and to negotiate one by one with the cities and towns' mayors, proclaiming democracy and "peace" that is nothing else than to continue giving life to the treacherous Santos-Obama-Castro and ex-FARC pact, in other words "the pact of the graves."
This "peace" has already been used as a smokescreen to cover up the massacre of social leaders and ex-FARC ex-combatants, betraying dozens of years of peasant struggle for land and to impose on the part of the regime the measures dictated by the IMF. The prisons were filled with ex-combatants, political prisoners and poor peasants. Social, union, environmental and popular leaders fall dead every day. All betrayed by reformism and Castroism, as happened in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s, until today.
One of the motions voted in that Assembly in early June was to summon a month later, that is, on July 20, to a meeting in the city of Cali, although the dead bodies of hundreds of young people go on appearing and the regime continues the repression by militarizing the working-class neighborhoods, a true chastising to those of us who dare to rise up against the true vandals and terrorists of this Government. Together with Human Rights organizations, they come to cover up the massacre under the command of the pacification plan of the Havana accords, agreed with the Castroes, imperialism and the CIA.

With these leaderships we couldn’t and will never be able to succeed, the task of the moment is to build the leadership that the proletariat needs for the victory against the yoke of capital, since these bureaucratic leaderships don’t represent us, on the contrary, they are the worst obstacle to the struggle.

Reformism has imbued the workers' vanguard with pacifism, subjecting it to the bourgeoisie and their "mermaid songs", while fascism murders the best of the working class youth.

The great struggle of more than 50 days of barricades, fighting in the streets, was temporarily cornered and what prevails today is repression and negotiation, once the nefarious action of all that "left" gave up the fight; it’s what we call from Marxism, a Popular Front (an alliance between the bourgeoisie and workers' organizations), a conciliation that is totally impossible and a farce when trying to reconcile the interests of antagonistic classes. What exists today is an imperialist bourgeois counteroffensive that is imposing itself. The popular front and the treacherous leaderships are used as the central axis to remove the masses from the scene with deceptions and sweet phrases while the bourgeois state and its repressive forces try to consolidate a Pyrrhic victory of their offensive, massacring and murdering.
Only by resuming the path of regrouping by putting the organizations with direct democracy back on their feet to prepare the counteroffensive, this will be a step back to take two forward. If we don’t set up our organizations for the struggle and we let them continue leading, after Duque kills us, they will come and tell us: "let's vote and solve the problem" and our revolution will have aborted. It’s the counteroffensive that the popular front and the regime are imposing, together with fascism, the military forces and other repressive forces of the State.

What prevails today, once the popular front has demobilized the masses, is repression, because repression consolidates. Not the call to the constituent, but Bonapartism. The popular front worked to maintain the Bonapartist institution of a semi-fascist regime and government. Duque remains. He does it with the armed forces treading on heads. That is the role of the popular front and fascism in Colombia, which is why Duque doesn’t fall, the slogan is to crush the vanguard with iron and fire. The popular front disorganizes so that fascism kills, before the arming of the masses and dual power organizations arises, otherwise the coordination committees of workers, peasants and armed students would have arisen, that is what reformism has prevented. If even the bosses of the small industry and the small truckers stopped, they were blocking all of Colombia.

We believe that the last word has not yet been said, since with this counteroffensive they have not managed to win a relationship of forces favorable to imperialism and the bourgeoisie at all, because reality is totally unstable and the revolutionary situation remains open. But yes, it’s a moment of retreat, of a necessary retreat, for reflection, drawing lessons about who are our allies and who are our enemies. It’s a withdrawal in order to regroup our forces and to prepare a second attack, a mass counteroffensive that would complete the unfinished task that we began: the fall of Duque's murderous semi-fascist government and the regime of the 9 Yankee military bases.

The bourgeois state and its agents, be they fascists, Bonapartists, reformist and conciliatory organizations or Stalinists (Communist Party), focus their forces to prevent the emergence of the dual revolutionary power, to prevent it from rising, arming and centralizing at the national level by defeating the bureaucracy of the National Strike Committee (CNP), which negotiates with the Duque government, taking the masses out of striking and off the streets, to preserve the current State of the capitalists against the revolutionary popular offensive.

The working youth must march to the factories to look for the workers and defeat the strikebreakers of the union bureaucracy that separated us from the first lines, preventing unity and lifting the strike.
Against the reformists and their "peace pacts", who want to impose us, it’s our duty to call to set up a National Congress of Workers and Working Class Youth, peasants, students, with delegates elected from the grassroots grouped in factories committees, community and village committees, by university, high-school, union, from indigenous and black communities, one representative for every 100 electors chosen in assemblies, to unite what the traitors have divided and vote a plan of struggle, a true workers' plan of emergency against empty-handed alms from mayors and the government; that raises the unity of unionized workers with "informal" workers, casualized and unemployed workers, reducing the working day with one more shift in all factories for all available hands to come into production with a salary equal to the family basket. We workers, who are the vast majority of the Colombian people, mostly young people who don’t have the right to even have a decent job, must fight to conquer it on the basis of the expropriation without payment and under workers' control of any factory that closes, suspends or dismisses: Factory closed factory taken. For this, it’s necessary to kick out the traitors of the union bureaucracy from the workers' organizations and to conquer a revolutionary leadership in the unions under a true workers' democracy. They don't represent us!

In order to have free and quality health, the Public Health Committees must be formed, expropriating without payment and under the control of the workers all the private clinics, the EPS, IPS (private health agencies and operators) and the laboratories, together with the factories of supplies to provide and prevent diseases, eliminating law 100.
Faced with false promises of the suspension of Enrollment 0 for strata 1, 2 and 3 (the three lowest socio-economic strata of the Colombian society) in the National Universities, we must resume the fight for free and quality education at all levels, subsidized dining services and transportation, as it was in the 70s, a conquest of the student struggle that today has been snatched away, by law 30. The struggle is also for 4 hours of work and 4 hours of study paid by the employers and the State on the basis of taxes to the great fortunes and the non-payment of the foreign debt. Free scholarships for all students; there is enough money, but it is stolen (50 billion a year).

We must recover the land to return it to its true owners, the poor peasants and agricultural workers, indigenous communities and groups of black people; we are for the restitution of the more than 7 million hectares expropriated by shooting and with massacres by the paramilitaries, the regime and imperialism. Expropriation without compensation and under the control of the workers of the big landowners, the Chiquita Brand and other multinationals of the imperialist agro-industry, mining and oil companies. Expropriation and nationalization of private banks, in a single state bank to give cheap credit to peasants and small merchants.

To confront and stop the massacre, we must organize ourselves in self-defense in the city and in the countryside, calling without delay to form centralized worker and peasant militias, to defeat the paramilitary groups, the army and the police! Dissolution of the murderous police and dismantling of ESMAD! Out with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights -CIDH-, coming from that den of imperialist bandits that is the OAS! It’s a new fraud to impose on us the sinister plan of reconciliation and "peace of the graves" of a people enslaved and handed out to imperialism by the leadership of the former-FARC (today Comunes) and Castroism in the Havana accords.
Trial and punishment of all those responsible for the more than eighty murdered comrades! Unconditional release of all political prisoners! Appearance Alive of all the disappeared comrades!
We must rely on our own forces calling for a revolutionary leadership to stand up to prepare a new attack that this time would allow us to overthrow the regime and the murderous Duque government!
TO STOP THE MASSACRE ... A REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP OF WORKERS AND YOUNG REVOLUTIONARIES MUST BE SET UP!