From enormous independent mass actions to a combat retreat and a fierce counteroffensive by the murderous Duque government and the regime of the American military bases ...

A great struggle, a great betrayal!

The workers never gave up, it was the traitors of the CNP (National Strike Committee) bureaucracies and Stalinism, supported by the entire reformist left, which gave up our fight!

Indefinite National Strike of The 28th of 2021: A monumental revolutionary uprising and a historical milestone in the class struggle of the Colombian workers and popular masses.

The revolutionary uprising in Colombia is the continuity of the  onslaughts that in 2019 and 2020 the working class of the Latin American continent has been leading in Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, as part of the revolutionary hotspots in the semi-colonial world, where in the middle of the crack of the world economy, imperialism is forced, for saving itself from its crisis, to unleash a superior attack with entrenchment and taxes, making the living conditions for the masses truly unbearable.
This great struggle was the most important historical event in the history of class struggle in Colombia, which shook the foundations of the old bourgeois regime, overthrowing ministers, throwing back the package of reforms that they wanted to impose on the Colombian working class and popular masses; they intervened after more than 40 years of passivity since the civic strike of 1977, as never before, in open political struggle, surpassing the union bureaucracies and the reformist leaderships that wanted to tie them up.

The masses understood that if Duque and the regime were not defeated, they would not be able to overturn the reform or win a single demand.
The actions were huge independent revolutionary days that cornered the government and made the regime tremble, a regime that is a central counterrevolutionary device of the American SouthCom throughout the Americas. We knew that if we did not act and if we did not take the power we would not achieve anything either.
That is why the Colombian revolution that had started, was also of fundamental importance for the rest of the Latin American masses; if it did not succeed it was due to the betrayal by the leaderships that did not allow the independent organizations suitable for political struggle that emerged to coordinate, centralize and arm themselves, and also in the face of such mass onslaught these leaderships granted that it would not be able to overthrow the puppet Duque.
That is why they want us to forget and only in the face of the enormous energy and the war cry of the rebellious masses today can we understand the great concentration of counterrevolutionary forces that conspired to push back and defeat the great Colombian revolution. This phenomenon also showed the essence of the fascist regime, which not only massacred us with its official repressive institutions, but also felt forced to use hitmen, criminals, fascist gangs and its urban paramilitaries, as it uses to do in rural areas, assassinating peasant leaders, social leaders and going beyond its own institutions and its  so much boasted about "democracy".

The magnitude of this insurrectionary uprise of the proletariat and the poor masses was supported, endorsed and legitimized, by a great movement of internationalist solidarity all over the world through great mobilizations and worldwide actions of solidarity with the Colombian people's uprising. But none of that stopped the murderous regime in its eagerness to impose the reform measures and to break up and crush this glorious struggle. Today, when corpses still float down the rivers of Colombia, there are hundreds of missing, thousands of wounded, and the prisons are full of prisoners, the pseudo-left, having turned its back on the struggle, surrendering it, is preparing to legitimize this regime of bandits, washing their faces with their electoral participation, looking for a little place in the rotten bourgeois parliament, a real carnival and circus and a farce aimed to deceive the masses and get them off the streets.
The masses have retreated, but they have also gone into a phase of resistance, despite the treacherous leaderships and the sinister plan to lead the movement into an electoral trap that would take the workers and rebel youth off the streets while Duque and his ESMAD  continue a fierce repression on the vanguard and the fighters.
Likewise, throughout the continent new betrayals and new counterrevolutionary blows by the regimes that were weakened as a result of the heroic struggle of the masses have been performed to crush the fighters. With the lies of Constituent Assemblies, electoral traps, "agreements and dialogue roundtables", all of them siren songs, they disorganized from inside, paralyzing the revolutionary mass offensives, while fascism and Bonapartism crush the best of the vanguard, such as it happens in the uprisings of the exploited in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, Colombia not being the exception. Here it was the traitorous strikebreakers of the Stalinist centrals, of the National  Strike Committee (CNP), which, having called for an indefinite strike, suspended it and called a meeting by Zoom on May 1, supported by the CCP (Colombian Communist Party) , Colombia Humana, the MOIR, the Greens and other parties of the "opposition bourgeoisie", which with deception and detours gave up our fight.
 
The CNP,  together with the three trade union centrals and FECODE, divided us  separating the labor movement linked to production from the vanguard, leaving the latter isolated at the roadblock points, preventing the workers from intervening centrally, with factory and mine strikes, attacking the property of the capitalists. However, we took a leap forward, got on to the streets and with blockades, the Indefinite Strike was imposed, cornering the murderous Duque Government, which withdrew the reform package that he had intended to impose to try and dilute the masses onslaught. Thus,  the trap and deception to fence and divert the mass offensive began. The betrayal of the CNP union bureaucracy alone was not enough. The Colombia Humana of the bourgeois Petro -who described the blockades as madness and called to lift them- said that a "great victory" had been achieved and the chorus of  pseudo-left leaders joined his claim. Giving partial concessions, at the risk of losing everything, the bourgeoisie recovered the breath with the gust that the treacherous leaderships insuflated  them once the latter had divided and driven the masses from the streets. Then the government was able to respond by launching a brutal repression and massacre.
Faced with the enormous revolutionary struggle advanced by the masses, the betrayal of the bureaucratic leaderships led the workers' struggle  to a dead end, allowing the retreat of the masses and the bourgeois counteroffensive. Today emboldened the bourgeoisie imposes a new Tax Reform. The Government enjoyed the complicity of the parliamentarians, who approved it by an absolute majority in a single day of discussion in the Congress, voting the make-up proposal, to hide that also the old Tax Reform has been imposed that seeks to collect 15.2 billion Colombian pesos, which implies, among other things, modifications in Labor matters  against workers, such as the freezing of the salaries of public employees for ten years, hourly hiring, paying only 75% of the salary to new workers who enter the labor market, layoffs of registered workers that are under collective bargaining, huge tax advantages for large companies, indebtedness and privatization of assets of the state in Ecopetrol, measures that the whole bourgeoisie supports to be able to repay 167.5 billion dollars of the fraudulent foreign debt.

The masses offensive in a great struggle has come to an end, we face a very hard defeat and an attack on the labor movement as a result of a great betrayal, the policy of the CNP bureaucracies, who became true strikebreakers, was imposed. They do not represent us! They are a fundamental pillar that supports Duque's head and the regime so that the government centralizes its forces by sending ESMAD, the "paracos" (paramilitary forces) and the lumpen to kill us. The mutilated corpses still appear floating in the rivers of Colombia, the comrades are still imprisoned and impunity, arbitrary arrests and attacks continue for us to never dare to raise up again. This is why the workers' ranks must be regrouped. All the political and union currents that speak in the name of the working class and the poor peasantry MUST BREAK WITH THE BOURGEOISIE AND THE REFORMIST LEFT THAT SUBORDINATES THEM TO IT.
Enough is enough! Out with the traitors, scabs and strikebreakers of the National Strike Committee! these are agents of the bourgeoisie who call for silence and look the other way.
They have to respond to the proletariat for their cowardice and pettiness because they drove the masses off the streets when the corrupt and bloodthirsty regime, supported by the bayonets of the lackey officer caste of the nine Gringo military bases, was about to be swept away by the popular insurrection.
Clearly, this deadly attack against Colombian workers lays the foundations and conditions to advance the plans of the IMF and the bourgeois regime on the proletariat in their quest to restore the rate of profit that has fallen sharply since the crisis, the crack and the financial crash of 2008/2009 and that has deepened even further since 2020.
As if this were not enough, at the beginning of June the National People's Assembly (ANP) was set up, a concentration of forces where the pact for "peace" and reconciliation played all its counterrevolutionary role, imposing a policy of "continuing the Strike" by means of...  "marches," "peaceful sit-ins" and cultural events, calling for negotiations with the Mayors and the Government, "respecting human rights" and "peace" together with the Government, the bourgeoisie and the para-state Human Rights entities and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights IACHR of the OAS, a true pantomime that came to cover up the massacre in order to finish surrounding and enclosing the masses under the cloak of the reconciliation plan of the Havana accords agreed with the Castroes, imperialism and the CIA. The ANP ended up being a true class collaboration front with the aim of demobilizing the masses completely and locking them back into the reconciliation pact for "peace" and "democracy."

The reformist left role:
Supporting from the left the Stalinist trade union bureaucracy and its "democratic front" policy with the bourgeoisie,  a policy that is in full opposition to the revolutionary uprising of the workers and the exploited.
The National Social and Popular Trade Union Coordinator (CNSSyP) and the National Popular Assembly (ANP),  true Trojan horses to help save the regime legality within the bourgeois parliament.

The task of all the reformists was to put pressure on the bureaucracy from the left to demand that they negotiate well, though at the same time keeping Duque’s Government and the regime of the "reconciliation pact" intact. They are the greatest enemies of the emergence, development and centralization of the self-determination bodies for masses political fight and their armament.
In a recent statement, once the masses have been taken off the streets, the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores  (Socialist Workers Party -PST- Colombian group of the LIT-CI, in its statement "The role of the First Lines and the Dismantling of ESMAD on August 16, 2021" declares: “The emergence of the front lines, in the face of the constant aggression of the National Police through the Anti-riot Squads, ESMAD, throughout the country is not a conjunctural issue, on the contrary, it is a legitimate response from the organizations and communities in the face of an authoritarian presidential regime that has responded in a criminal way to the social explosion generated by the application of neoliberalism, the crudest face of the capitalist economy ”.
An opportunistic and belated recognition of the organizations that emerged in the heat of the struggle in the national strike of 28/A, expressed in the Popular Assemblies, in the barricades and their blocking points, the Resistance Collectives and the First Lines, as we faced in the streets day and night the brutal response of the bloodthirsty Duque-Uribe regime, against the police, ESMAD, groups of hired hitmen and narco-fascists, today called "good people" who murder, imprison, disappear, torture and carry out real witch hunts against the working youth, mostly informal workers, precarious to the maximum in the informal sector, unemployed, with no future for themselves and their families.
The PST and the Coordinadora Nacional Sindical Social y Popular (CNSSyP) in a bureaucratic agreement of leaders, legitimized and strengthened the CNP when it unmasked before the masses as true strikebreakers. They refused to call a National Committee of Struggle to advance towards the path of the General Strike to defeat the CCP and MOIR bureaucracy that were coming from a hard defeat at the beginning of 2019 due to the great battle of the workers' base that kicked them out of the stage of the Eliecer Gaitán Theater in the Meeting on January 30 and 31, 2020. The CNSSyP was the expression of that new labor movement that sought a new leadership, but the reformist left and the renegades of Trotskyism led it to transform itself into a new, smaller bureaucratic apparatus.

The last word has not yet been said ... We must stop the attack and defeat the Labor Reform!
Against the capitalists' plan:  An emergency workers' plan to unite the workers' ranks by driving out the traitors of the union bureaucracy.
The power of the exploited must be put back on its feet!
  Down with the "new" Labor Reform that liquidates all the workers' conquests!

We must call from the grassroots to set up the factory, workplace, unemployed, students and poor peasants Committees, centralized in a workers' militia to set up a National Fighting Command and prepare the Revolutionary General Strike without leaving one stone on another of Duque's murderous pro-imperialist regime. A revolutionary leadership must be achieved in the Unions, ending with all these bureaucrats for life, and the Unions must be independent from the State, based on the base Assemblies and Unitary Committees of factories and establishments. Because no serious fight can be faced or won under the lead of the traitors and strikebreakers of the National Strike Committee -CNP-, who are Duque's partners and employees of the capitalists. Against the wage reduction and the hourly contract: an emergency worker plan against the empty-handed promises and miserable handouts of the Mayors and the Government; one that declares the unity of unionized workers with "informal"at, flexibilized and unemployed workers, reducing the working day with one more shift in all factories so that all available hands  enter into production with a salary equal to the family basket.  Collective Bargaining Agreement for all!. Enough of enslaving the sons and daughters of the working class!
Faced with the false promises of the suspension of "Enrollment 0" for strata 1, 2 and 3 (the poorer layers of the population, NT) to enter the National Universities by 2023, we must resume the fight for free and quality education at all levels. Out fight is also for 4 paid hours of work and 4 paid hours of study by employers and the State on the basis of taxes on large fortunes and non-payment of foreign debt. Free scholarships for all students!
Bread, land, health and decent work for all!
We workers must fight to conquer all that on the basis of the expropriation without compensation and under workers' control of any factory that closes, furloughs or dismisses: Factory closed, factory taken over!
We must expropriate the expropriators of the people! Let the capitalists pay for the crisis! Out with the IMF! No repayment of the fraudulent foreign debt!

Although what prevails today is a counteroffensive of the regime due to the betrayal of the collaborationist leaderships that deceived and diverted the masses leading them to negotiations and the electoral trap, the situation remains indefinite because nothing has been achieved. Nor will it be achieved if we do not overthrow the Government and the regime, expelling imperialism, advancing in the expropriation without compensation and under  worker control of the large landowners, the Chiquita Brand and other multinational agribusiness companies, the mining companies, and the imperialist oil companies and their banks.