Colombia
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Note: Information on this page was lifted from the article Introduction to Anarchism and Resistance in Bogotá.
Colombia is located at the junction of North and South America, a strategic position that has brought dire misfortune upon Colombians since the first colonial invasions. A century ago, the US forced the secession of Panama from Colombia to obtain control of trade passing from Atlantic to Pacific, and today the rich ecosystems south of Panama are being devastated to open the way for pan-American highway traffic. Unlike practically every other major South American nation, Colombia was not explicitly ruled by a dictatorship in the latter part of the 20th century—instead, the pretense of democracy was maintained, with representatives of the Liberal and Conservative parties alternating rule under the Frente Nacional between 1958 and 1974. This means that today, unlike [[Brazil], Argentina, and Chile, Colombia has yet to enter the post-dictatorship era; it is a “democracy,” but one in which every serious opposition candidate has been murdered or bought off and corporate rule is maintained as often by brute force as by political machination.
Having not entered the post-dictatorship era, Colombia is still wracked by the kind of internal armed conflict that other Latin American countries suffered between the 1960s and 1980s. Politics in Colombia are framed by the brutal forty-year civil war between the US-supported government—and its paramilitary supporters, who are interlinked with the drug cartels the US claims to oppose—and guerrilla insurgents, who are also now involved in narcotrafficking. The two primary guerrilla factions are the FARC and the ELN, both communist groups formed in 1964; the FARC is descended from Liberal and communist guerrilla groups formed by campesinos in the late 1940s, while the ELN was organized by students returning from Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
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[edit] Bogotá
Every year thousands of Colombians die violently in this struggle, but Bogotá is the eye of the storm: a space of relative calm in which the conflict takes more subtle forms. Latin America has megapolises like nothing in North America—Brazil’s Sao Paulo is twice the size of New York, and Mexico City is the biggest in the world—and Bogotá is as sprawling and heavily populated as any city in the United States. The north is known for its wealthier districts, while in other areas some neighborhoods still retain their “popular”—that is to say, class conscious and defiant—character [1]. The government has moved paramilitaries from their rural territories into some of these neighborhoods in recent years, ostensibly in an effort to demobilize them but certainly with an eye to destabilizing centers of urban resistance as well; locals describe the atmosphere of fear created by gangs of shaven-headed belligerents drinking on the streets all day. The paramilitaries were withdrawn from one neighborhood after a bombing directed at them, showing that perhaps there is a proper time and place for every tactic.
Like other Latin American metropolises, Bogotá excels all its North American counterparts in graffiti. Everywhere you walk—and people do a lot of walking—you can see exhortations from various communist and anarchist groups painted in three-foot-high letters.
The city only cleans the walls on rare occasions, and vigilante interference is limited to covering up the name of President Uribe wherever it appears in a negative light; this seems to have increased recently, perhaps due to the relocation of paramilitaries to the city. Other than this, the paramilitary presence in Bogotá is largely invisible on the walls, perhaps because the right wing controls the officially sanctioned media; in Ecuador, where leftist Correa just came to power, the walls of Quito bear more swastikas than circle-As.
Walking through Bogotá’s lovely downtown district early in our stay, passing the Justice building occupied by the M-19 urban guerrillas in 1985, we came upon a packed concert in the main square calling for an exchange of guerrilla prisoners for soldiers held hostage in the countryside. The city government of Bogotá has recently swung to the left, perhaps following the trend sweeping Latin America for which Venezuela’s Chavez would like to take credit [2]. For city officials to permit such an event is doubtless a slight to the right wing national government, which has vowed never to parley with the guerrillas. This intra-government tension has resulted in the public investigation of some officials involved in paramilitary groups—as of this writing, six congressmen from Uribe’s political party are in jail because of their links with paramilitaries—but doesn’t seem to have changed anything in the daily lives of Colombians.
[edit] Colombian Universities
Universities in Latin America, especially public ones, differ dramatically from their counterparts in the US in that they are taken for granted as hotbeds of dissent and social struggle. The campuses of Colombia’s largest university, like the walls of all adjacent neighborhoods, are adorned with spray paint urging people to “DEFEND THE UNIVERSITY!” and threatening “THE UNIVERSITY IS FROM THE STREET AND IN THE STREET WE WILL DEFEND IT,” a claim that would be doubly false anywhere north of Mexico. This talk of “defense” addresses the government’s immediate efforts to privatize the university system, but also extends to a more general notion of the university as a safe space for dissent: parodying her own feisty radicalism, one filmmaker explained that she documented anticapitalist protests “because wee are stoodents in a pooblique ooniversitee!” in the same tone in which an anarcho-punk from Minneapolis might joke “because we are THE ENEMIES OF CIVILIZATION!”
Indeed, the university is widely known to serve as a recruiting ground for radical groups of all stripes, both public and clandestine. As in Chile and Greece, police officers are not permitted on campus; in the militant demonstrations that erupt once or twice a semester, police gather outside the gates, firing tear gas into the university while students throw back papas bombas—projectiles made with black powder and coins or rocks, which can disable armored water cannons if used correctly[3]—and build bonfires to neutralize the chemical irritants. An enormous mural of El Che, looking somewhat younger than usual, gazes upon the central student plaza; university officials have ordered it painted over a thousand times, but never succeeded in eradicating it. Passing through the university at dusk one evening, we beheld half a dozen masked figures in black dashing from wall to wall with stencils and spray paint, past other students who took this apparently regular occurrence nonchalantly in stride.
Both the FARC and the ELN maintain clandestine student groups in the universities, from which some of their membership is derived. The ELN student groups appear to be experimenting with more horizontal structures, though our sources doubt this extends to their rural cadres. It is rumored that the two guerrilla groups have clashed violently in the countryside recently, though the details of this remain obscure; in any case, those clashes haven’t extended to the university.
[edit] FARC and ELN and Other Groups=
The guerrillas are not in a powerful position in Colombia right now; decades of conflict with the US-backed government have taken their toll, and in much of Colombia the zeitgeist seems to be that people are exhausted and disillusioned by the ongoing armed struggle. Their reliance upon kidnapping and narcotrafficking to raise funds have compromised them in many people’s eyes, and some say they have lost touch with the needs of common people in the course of their fight for resources and survival. To North American anarchist eyes, these are simply the inevitable results of a militaristic strategy predicated upon hierarchical organization. Despite all this, many who seek social change still see the guerrillas as the most “serious” opposition to the government, and those who wish to be “serious” themselves often end up collaborating—or at least sympathizing—with them.
Groups who organize against the government, corporations, and paramilitaries without working with the guerrillas are isolated from both sides. The government still regards them as terrorists, and can explain away repression by presenting them as a front group; the guerrillas still see them as enemies of The People, in traditional communist fashion. Villages in the countryside such as Cacarica have put up walls and declared themselves autonomous from all armed groups, government and paramilitary and guerrilla alike, but this stance is not easy to maintain.
[edit] Colombian Anarchists
All this makes the position of Colombian anarchists very difficult. Most who have been active for any length of time have had friends murdered by the police or forced to flee the country. As in other nations in the Americas, anarchists in Colombia are able to maintain a handful of social centers, a presence in punk rock and other countercultures, some social programs, and sporadic eruptions of protest and resistance; but all this comes at great cost, and it’s hard to maintain consistency. These activities can seem unimpressive next to kidnappings and bombings coordinated by clandestine groups, and more confrontational direct action is extremely dangerous because it is interpreted as guerrilla activity.
In this context, some—including some anarchists—see what they describe as “purist” anarchist approaches as dogmatic, isolationist, and insufficiently effective. In the US, the default setting for dissident thought is left liberalism, but in Colombia it’s Marxism, and the circle-A’s spraypainted around Bogotá with crossed hammers and sickles are just one example of anarchists trying to accommodate themselves to the dominant paradigm of resistance. In stark contrast to most parts of the world, in Colombia the anarchists who consider themselves flexible and willing to collaborate with authoritarian groups are often the ones most interested in militant confrontation, while some of the anarchists we met who limit themselves to strictly horizontal, autonomous activity believe the guerrillas have spoiled any possibility of progress through armed struggle. Throughout Colombia, there are many indigenous and civil society groups that are de facto antiauthoritarian, and the latter anarchists see these groups as their natural allies.
Relations between Colombian anarchists and anarchists in neighboring countries are sometimes strained on account of these internal tensions. For example, the anarchists in Venezuela who publish El Libertario explicitly oppose Chavez, the socialist President who has bolstered social programs with funds from environmentally destructive oil extraction, and suspect some Colombian anarchists of supporting Chavez. In fact, there are Colombian anarchists who feel it is better to organize under a Left regime than a Right one, who prioritize working with people in popular movements even if they are “Chavistas” or receive funding from Chavez over struggling against his government. We were also surprised to learn that Chavez and the FARC are seen as sharing similar ideological positions; all this, not to mention the difficulties of open political debate under repressive conditions, make it very complicated for anarchists in northern South America to resolve their differences.
Considering all they are up against, we were impressed with the range of activities anarchists and other anti-authoritarians have organized in Colombia. Early in our visit, our friends made a list of all the groups we should visit during our stay in Bogotá; we scarcely made it to a fourth of those, and that kept us quite busy for well over a week. Here are a few brief descriptions of what we did see.
