Colombia: It’s not Polarization, It’s an Uprising

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Source: Rebelion, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau

Today, the government of Colombia is being artificially supported, and while time passes on without a break, the elite, the traditional parties and their host of professional politicians, hastily whipped up their speeches and authorize the illegitimate violence of the State to confront the people; police, army, undercover structures, the media, pollsters, are preparing for more actions of confusion and fear, preparing it as chaotically as possible, only in this way will it fit their immediate interests. Entrenched, armed with corrupt institutions and repressive forces, the governing party is increasingly outlining a premeditated and visible trajectory of state terror.

The current government is maintained and sustained by the financial-landowning aristocracy (which today holds 85% of Colombia’s land), powerful businessmen and industrialists, the high commands of the army and police. The “distinguished” traditional political class, obviously has the power derived from the mass media; historical cover-ups of the dirty war and repression including Blu Radio, Canal Caracol, El Espectador from Grupo Santo Domingo, Caracol and W Radio from Grupo Prisa, RCN and Carlos Ardila Lülle’s FM and the newspaper El Tiempo from Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo. The control is also manipulated by the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), a department that has just subtracted 1.3 million from the number of people identified as black, Afro-Colombian, Raizal and Palenquera populations. The DANE turned a population of 4,311,757 into a population of 2,982,224, a true statistical massacre, with which the government managed to reduce the amount of State funds destined for that population.

The Duque regime is organized and directed by elite, which does not exceed 5% of Colombians, which has always governed, by historically obtaining its economic and political power through the plundering of millions of Colombians, the looting of the resources of the State, and facilitated by promoters or cover-ups of the genocide against the communities, through covert operations.

Except for this, nothing else supports the current government.

The rejection of the Duque-Uribe,  political parties, the Congress of the Republic, the euphemistically called Public Force, the institutions of the State, in a word the rejection of the regime by Colombians, is directly proportional to the advance in support, amplitude, resonance and extension of the protests in the country.

That is why, as social organizations and processes articulate their links, and project themselves as a powerful and broad force, and as they gain in levels of coordination and coherence; the elite do the same, and merge in a last-minute embrace with their corroded traditional political parties.

For their part, the eternally renewed “independents”, in the midst of the prevailing confusion, in the “disarray of the great deck” in the words of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, show themselves off to play their role as custodians of programmatic cleanliness and self-proclaimed spokespersons for political coherence, as if to cover up their not at all cautious ideological proximity, and in some cases their close relationship, with the traditional political parties and their splits.

Its function is limited to preaching the control of corruption, as a device to avoid the storm, but that for a people like the Colombian, knowledgeable of political jugglers, it will not be difficult to decipher as the pretension to hinder the initiative, control the irritation and prevent its unleashing. Because if the ultra-right in Colombia is known for its skills in fleeing forward, there are others, who in acts of messianic drama exonerate themselves from practicing traditional forms of politics, and flee towards the term “independent”, ostensibly as champions of the new way of doing politics, while the genuine new forms, are being built in the streets day by day and in the squares, mobilized, in full view of everyone, and while being repressed.

This phenomenon from the point of view of the ultra-right and right-wing sectors social protest must be “regulated”, for some independent sectors the mobilization must be sufficiently circumstantial, virtual and short-lived, so that their pressure limits them to reach only the appropriate level of demands and organization that fits in with their tenuous and lukewarm government programs.

But as Shakespeare said,”A sky so cloudy is not cleared except with a storm,”, and it can break loose at any time. If the demonstrations of rejection of the oligarchy, if the current social demands on the government to dismantle the congenital policies of plundering and new reforms that deepen the misery and exclusion of Colombians continue to be responded to with defiance and -increasing- repression in the countryside and cities, and if the Democratic Center and the traditional parties are obstinate in believing that the people can be turned away, and do not facilitate the transformations that society demands, these changes could be turbulent, although equally deep and extensive.

In both cases, it will also flood those sectors that are always so quick to drink from the rancid sweat of the traditional political class, and whose political careers are carried out with the unimportant ambition of appearing as a fatuous fire in the refined heights of power and corruption, pressed by some administrative position, as a platform to offer society a supposedly new political outlook reduced to “important” reforms to the regime, but which really fulfill a cosmetic task of power of a “moral capitalism”.

In turn, characters from the Colombian ruling class still believe they can pose as irreproachable for some time to come, without being identified by public opinion. This pack of politicians, who with clear audacity pretend to appear in the media, as if they were a species alien to the feast of the greed of this elite that has forged only ruin for the Colombians, or innocent of the execution, complicity or complacency with economic, administrative, political and military operations against the people, no longer manage to mimic the current situation, not even with the funniest opportunistic visible even to the most indifferent Colombians

While the traditional political class, with its usual arrogance, strives to unleash its worn-out “experts” in approaches, such as Angelino Garzón, who failed in 2013 in the context of the powerful peasant strike in Catatumbo; Duque, with a troubled tranquility, delivers insubstantial speeches, feigns poorly trained smiles, while in the surroundings dozens of police try to silence the “diabolical” sound of the popular pans that ceaselessly denounce the evil misery.

To the elite we must say that: “Wishes are not enough”, the social mobilization will not fade away, 2020 could gradually become the funeral procession of the historical political fanfare, whose gravedigger will not be a new way of doing politics, but a new political content, a popular force, which will lighten the pace, which already understood that the problem is not only corruption but the rottenness of the economic and political elite of this country, and that, moreover, will not hesitate to clear the sky so cloudy with a storm.

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