The following is an open letter from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) to the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The text is available in the original Spanish on the website of the FARC-EP, and is reposted here as translated by Pravda:
Although the Colombian government held the door closed to dialogue with the insurgency, sparked by an illusion of military victory and interference from Washington, we want to reiterate to the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) our unyielding desire to seek a political solution to the conflict.
It is a fact that inundated, years ago, the landmark of the national borders are a result of “preventive” strategies imposed on Bogotá by the U.S. government. If Colombia is now under military occupation by a foreign power, it is in the development of geo-strategic interests, predominantly continental and not because of a local counterinsurgency war. No one discusses the fact that the White House concerns itself with their bigger political presence, ever increasing in this hemisphere, or of governments that opt for patriotic decorum and sovereignty.
In our country, Plan Colombia, the neoliberal strategy for institutional violence, aggravated the conflict to unexpected levels, making it very difficult to overcome this stage of fratricidal confrontation without the help of brother countries.
The humanitarian crisis in Colombia calls for mobilization and continental solidarity. The oligarchic obsession in militarily subjecting the country to guerrilla war for 46 years, and execution of war plans and the repressive plans of Washington, cost innumerable massacres, mass graves like the Marcarena that hides more than two thousand corpses, the largest in Latin America; crimes against humanity euphemistically called “false positives”, the forced displacement of five million farmers; disappearances of citizens for political reasons, arbitrary arrests, 30 million poor in a country of 44 million inhabitants
Mural of South America's "Liberator" Simon Bolivar and FARC-EP founder Manuel Marulanda
Some allude frequently to the obsolescence of the revolutionary armed struggle, but say nothing of the conditions and guarantees for the political struggle in Colombia. Others locate the threat on the insurgency and not the neocolonial strategy of U.S. government, apparently unaware that, without it, the empire will give course to its agenda of domination and the guerrilla war. And there are those inclined to punish only one of the rival parties, almost always the insurgency.
Peace with social justice, not war for war, has always been the strategic goal of FARC since its inception in 1964 in Marquetalia. If the peace talks in Casa Verde, Caracas, Tlaxcala and Caguán did not reach a happy ending, it is because it was the oligarchs who would not consider any change in the unjust political, economic and social factors which would motivate the end of the insurgency. Today we face, raising unquestionable political banners, the largest guerrilla war machine that none has ever faced, but always fighting for the possibility of a political solution.
Sirs, presidents, when deemed appropriate, we are willing to exhibit our vision of the Colombian conflict in a meeting of UNASUR.
The peace of Colombia is the peace of the continent.
Receive our greetings
Central Secretariat of the General Staff of FARC-EP
Mountains of Colombia, August 2010
Year of the bicentenary of the cry of independence
Source: Vermelho
Translated from the Portuguese version by:
Lisa KARPOVA
PRAVDA.Ru
