First published in our sister site, Cyrano’s Journal Today
[“Isolation” by Neriak.]
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By Chris Gilbert and Vilma Kahlo, MRZine
The Washington mafia has always gone after guerrillas with the zeal of a fanatical exterminator. Never mind that the guerrillas represent the interests of the poor.
If regular armies are generally a man’s world, guerrillas and insurgent forces are just the contrary. There women have always had a central role. Think of Agustina of Aragon, Olga Benário, Tania Bunke, Maria Grajales, and Celia Sánchez, or even (stretching a bit) the legendary Amazons. It is not for nothing that Liberté — the allegorical figure depicted by Delacroix in the barricades of the July Revolution — is a woman.
Colombia is no exception to this rule. From even before the independence, women such as the Cacica Gaitana and Policarpa Salavarrieta have had a key role in armed struggle. Today this legacy of women in resistance continues in Colombia’s FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, People’s Army), which is the world’s longest-lasting guerrilla still in operation. This seasoned political and military organization, now engaged in peace dialogs in Havana, has sent a delegation there that is about a third women.
Who are these women? What makes them risk their lives for the ideals of socialism and national liberation in a country that is heavily dominated by the U.S.? What is their role in the current peace process, which aims at a negotiated solution to Colombia’s 50-year-old internal conflict? As a result of our visits to the peace delegation in Havana during the past months, we have come back with interesting answers to these and other questions about women in the Colombian insurgency.
Poverty and Injustice
That Colombia’s society is characterized by extreme inequality (with a Gini index as high as .89 in some areas) is well known. Yet, like poverty worldwide, its burden is born especially by women. A combatant named Marcela González referred to the link between gender, poverty, and oppression: “Women have the worst lot in this conflict. . . Most displaced people are women. Added to this is the sexual violence, family violence, and the fact that most [displaced people] are heads of families and wander with their children around the national territory. It is a human tragedy that women live in Colombia.”
Though women certainly have it worse in Colombia, making up a large part of the nation’s almost five million displaced people, the principal reasons men and women enter the guerrilla are just the same. These are basically poverty, injustice, and the inability to do legal political opposition from the left. “The indigence and poverty,” Marcela continued, “obliges people to look for a way out of that reality.”
The lack of political options is really key in determining how struggle takes shape. The last serious attempt to constitute a legal alternative party was the Unión Patriótica, formed in 1985. It generated widespread enthusiasm. However, agents of the oligarchy massacred the U.P.’s militants to the tune of about 5,000 deaths in less than a decade. The historical lesson, written on the walls with the blood of the political opposition, is that one has to fight for democracy where it doesn’t exist. For now, it is only possible to question Colombia’s oligarchical regime — armed to the teeth by the U.S and its allies — bearing arms oneself.
Once in the guerrilla, men and women take on all the same tasks. “Men and women have the same rights and the same responsibilities,” explained Bibiana Hernández, who has been in the guerrilla some thirty years. “In the same way as we tote wood and other supplies and organize the mass movement, so we also go to combat and face the enemy. We’re in the same conditions as men.” Women also assume roles of direction and leadership in the FARC-EP, and their equality is part of the statutes of the organization.
The women in the current peace delegation come from highly varied backgrounds. Camila Cienfuegos was born in a family from the countryside and saw extreme poverty with her own eyes as a youngster. Laura Villa got a medical degree in Bogotá. She mentions privatizations in education and health services as weighing in her decision to join the FARC’s revolutionary struggle, where she now contributes her medical expertise. Alexandra Nariño, born Tanja Nijmeijer in Holland, found a job teaching English in Colombia in 1998. Then a gradual process of learning about the oppression and political injustice in the country led to her entering the guerrilla.
These women are continuing an old tradition in the FARC. The organization was founded in 1964, when 48 peasant farmers inMarquetalia successfully withstood the attack of more than 10,000 government troops. Among the “Marquetalianos” were two heroic young women: Judith Grisales and Miriam Narváez.
Away from the War
The dozen or so women members of the FARC’s delegation may be survivors of a brutal conflict — one of the dirty not-so-little wars of the U.S. — but their soft-spoken manners and civilian clothes tend to make you forget about war. You can sit down with them at the historic Coppelia for an ice cream or join them in browsing used books in Havana’s innumerablebookstores. Despite their political tasks, there is still time for reading. Diana Grajales, a guerrillera from southwest Colombia, told us that she is immersing herself in the books of Che Guevara.
One of these women’s current projects — in addition to “rearming” with books and participating in the peace conversations with government delegates — is to make contact with women’s organizations. “We are listening to the proposals of Colombian women’s organizations that come to us,” Alexandra explained, adding that the contacts are also with international women’s groups. Comandante Yira Castroobserved that women’s movements are often made invisible, but the peace process has allowed the guerrilleras in the delegation to learn more about other women’s struggles and share experiences with them. They also maintain a Web page and Facebook account.
Despite the unbroken tranquility of Havana, the war comes back in surprising ways when you are in the company of the delegation. Seeing a scar on an exposed arm or noticing the limp of a compañera serves as a reminder of how Colombia’s government has systematically violated human rights during the war. Colombia’s is an unequal, imperial conflict in which — like those in Vietnam or Algeria — no holds are barred to maintain the neocolonial order. Many of these women have survived high-tech bombings that resemble the U.S. and Israel’s “surgical” assassination attempts. Some have lost close friends and family members, killed in cold blood or disappeared into mass graves like the Macarena, the largest mass grave in Latin America, where Colombia’s special forces depositedsome 2,000 corpses. At least one member of the delegation has been a victim of torture and rape by enemy soldiers.
Laura Villa spoke of the harsh realities of war: “A war is a war. This is a war for the liberation of the people, and in it there are deaths and wounded. There are casualties that affect us very deeply.” Among the painfully felt losses is that of Comandante Alfonso Cano, who initiated the current peace process but was murdered by the army two years ago. “The historical record is full of military people who abuse power and are guilty of disappearing people,” said Camila Cienfuegos. “Think of the mothers ofSoacha, whose children were presented as false positives [assassinated and then dressed as guerrilla fighters]. That is . . . state terrorism.” Camila speaks from experience about state terror: she has cigarette burns on her hands and arms from being tortured during an interrogation by the Colombian army.
On top of the human rights violations, there is nonstop defamation of the FARC’s women combatants by Colombia’s mass media. They invent stories about guerrilleras that are simply a projection of the society outside — a society that, because it pressures women to enter into all kinds of exploitative relationships in work and private life, sometimes accepts the mistaken and malicious idea that women are forced to enter the FARC. Or again, the commercial media falsely accuses guerrilleras, who enjoy conditions of gender equality in the FARC that are far superior to those in the society outside, of being merely the cooks and sexual partners of the comandantes.
Looking Toward Peace
One reason for this kind of defamation is to try to divide and conquer the FARC-EP, separating women from men. The effort is futile, say the women of the delegation. In fact, it does not deter a growing number of women from making the decision to change the world rather than simply contemplate it — to use Laura Villa’s description of her own motives for entering the guerrilla — nor does it cause the women already in the FARC to alter their basic vision of social problems or abandon a struggle that they understand to be essentially about class and social justice.
This last point is important. The women in the FARC see patriarchal domination as part of class struggle and are unwilling to separate the two, as some feminists have fallen into the error of doing. They fight not just for Colombian women but for Colombia as a whole. By the same token the peace they might make — a peace with social justice, a peace which goes to the roots of the conflict in social inequality — would also be a peace for the whole society.
 Still from Rosas y Fusiles |
How, then, to understand the importance of women in the struggle of the FARC-EP? Why is it that, as Victoria Sandino says, “a revolution without the participation of women is impossible”? Perhaps the key lies in the old idea that says those groups, the ones that a society’s structure places between a rock and a hard place, are the very ones called upon by history to change the society. This is what is called a historical mission. Nothing could better describe the position of Colombian women, whose situation cannot be improved without fundamental changes in the whole society. For this reason, the most conscious sector of Colombian women has often taken up arms to change their country’s oppressive conditions.
Today that same mission may call for new tactics. With profound changes occurring in many Latin American countries and the resurgence of Colombia’s popular movement, insurgent men and women may find that they can now make peace to achieve the same goals once pursued with war. Whether that is possible or not depends on whether the Colombian state will change its tune and permit a democratic opposition. That is, whether it will be willing to allow the forces of change to become participants in normal, legal political activity. From this humble starting point — a “democratic window” paid for with the lives of many guerrilleras as well as guerrilleros — Colombia’s most committed and selfless political force could begin the process of dismantling the country’s structural injustices and thereby forging a lasting peace.
Chris Gilbert is professor of Political Science at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. Vilma Kahlo is a documentary filmmaker who is currently working on Rosas y Fusiles, a film about women in the FARC-EP. En Español: www.mujerfariana.co/index.php/nos-gusta/141-las-guerrilleras-de-las-farc-ep-parteras-de-la-historia.
By Nick Barrickman and Barry Grey, wsws.org
Ibragim Todashev’s father seeking (futilely) justice.
Abdulbaki Todashev, the father of slain Boston Marathon bombing witness Ibragim Todashev, released an open letter to President Obama last week pleading for justice and asking the president to ensure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) not interfere with his investigation into the killing.
In the letter, the elder Todashev accused the FBI of murdering his son in order to prevent him from testifying in court.
Ibragim Todashev, 27, was shot to death at his Orlando, Florida apartment last May by FBI agents who were interrogating him about his ties to Tamerlan Tsarnaev. An ethnic Chechen like Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev is alleged to have carried out the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombings along with his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Three people were killed and another 264 injured in the terrorist bombings.
Young Todashev: Interrogated with terminal prejudice. Chalk up one more death to a lawless empire.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed by police on April 19. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured and faces a possible death sentence on charges of using weapons of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death.
[pullquote][As usual, the filthy and complicit] establishment media have imposed a virtual wall of silence on the extraordinary death of Todashev, which has continued in relation to the open letter to Obama from his father.[/pullquote]
The death of Ibragim Todashev remains unexplained more than seven months after the event. Initially, it was alleged that Todashev had lunged at officials, wielding a knife, during the interrogation, upon implicating himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple killing in Waltham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where the two had been acquainted. Government officials subsequently acknowledged that Todashev had not been armed when he was fatally shot.
Authorities have refused to release the name of the FBI agent who shot and killed the unarmed Todashev at point-blank range, and the FBI has blocked the release of the autopsy report. No charges have been filed and no one has been arrested for what was evidently a state murder.
The establishment media have imposed a virtual wall of silence on the extraordinary death of Todashev, which has continued in relation to the open letter to Obama from his father.
In the letter, Abdulbaki wrote: “My reaching out to you is dictated by the calling of my soul and the unsubsiding pain of the father who has lost his guiltless son to a violent shooting death…
Apparently he was shot in the head and the back as well as in the chest. The whole thing remains intentionally murky.
“Did my son know that he had the right to remain silent or did he have rights at all, including the right to live? Being a citizen of another country he might not be aware of the laws as he was only 27 years old and wanted to live so much. No, they left no chances for him, inflicting 13 gunshot wounds and multiple hematomas on his body…
“They did it deliberately so that he can never speak and never take part in court hearings. They put pressure on my son’s friends to prevent them from coming to the court and speaking the truth.”
The letter concluded: “I rely on you, Mr. President, and hope that the prosecutor’s office and the court do not let the agencies conducting internal investigation on this case prevent the truth from coming to light so that at least some part of our grief, caused by the murder of our son, is relieved, and that the murderers stand trial instead of sit in their desk chairs.”
Included with the letter were postmortem photographs of Ibragim Todashev, showing in graphic detail the numerous bullet wounds inflicted to his head and torso.
When asked by reporters about the administration’s plans to respond, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlyn Hayden said that “[W]e have just received Mr. Todashev’s letter and will be reviewing it to determine the appropriate follow-up.” Hayden referred all further questions to the FBI.
Abdulbaki Todashev initially ventured to the US in the immediate aftermath of his son’s killing with the intention of uncovering the reasons for the death, announcing his own private investigation in August. This was meant to coincide with an investigation being conducted by the FBI. Nothing has come of reported official investigations, with authorities at both the federal and state level repeatedly stonewalling attempts to obtain information.
Instead, authorities have taken to intimidating the family and friends of those associated with Todashev. In October, the former live-in girlfriend of Todashev, Tatiana Gruzdeva, was deported to her native Moldova after she gave an interview to Boston Magazine questioning the FBI’s killing of her fiancée. Another friend of Todashev was taken into custody while being denied access to an attorney.
The murder of Todashev and the subsequent government-media cover-up raise the very real possibility that the young man was killed because he was in a position to reveal facts about Tamerlan Tsarnaev that would be highly embarrassing to the US government and various intelligence and police agencies. Todashev may have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s links to Islamist separatist terrorists in the Russian Caucasus as well as his relations with the FBI and other US state agencies.
No explanation has been given for the fact that the FBI and CIA had warnings, well in advance of the Boston bombings, of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s radical Islamist leanings, having been alerted by Russian authorities in 2011 as well as, according to some reports, by Saudi officials. The FBI says it conducted an investigation of Tsarnaev, questioning him and other family members, and gave him a clean bill of health.
The elder Tsarnaev brother was taken off a federal watch list in 2012 and permitted to travel to Dagestan, neighboring Chechnya, where he reportedly established links to radical Islamist separatist movements. The Tsarnaev family maintained links to Chechen rebels and the US government through the Congress of Chechen International Organizations, set up by Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of Tamerlan and Dhzokhar. That outfit was run from the suburban Washington DC home of Graham Fuller, former vice-chairman of the US National Security Council. (See: “Who is Ruslan Tsarni”).
Last May, the Boston police commissioner and a top Massachusetts Homeland Security official told a congressional panel that local and state police were never informed by the FBI or the federal Homeland Security Department, in advance of the Boston Marathon, an international event that draws tens of thousands of people to downtown Boston, of warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev or the investigation carried out by the FBI. This was despite the presence of state and local police officials on a joint terrorism task force for the region that included the FBI, Homeland Security and other federal agencies.
The Boston Marathon bombings were seized upon by the federal government to impose an unprecedented lockdown of Boston and its environs, during which the streets were occupied by heavily armed troops and police and patrolled by machine gun-mounted armored vehicles, while military helicopters flew overhead. Residents were ordered to say indoors and warrantless house-to-house police searches were conducted throughout entire neighborhoods.
The terror attack, carried out by people who had been closely monitored by the FBI and were known to the CIA, became the occasion for imposing de facto martial law and testing out plans previously drawn up to impose dictatorial control over major American cities.
The authors also recommend:
The state killing of Ibragim Todashev
[3 June 2013]
The Washington mafia has always gone after guerrillas with the zeal of a fanatical exterminator. Never mind that the guerrillas represent the interests of the poor.
Last Sunday’s Washington Post carried a front-page article by Dana Priest, in which she revealed “a CIA covert action program that has helped Colombian forces kill at least two dozen rebel leaders.” Thanks to “a multibillion-dollar black budget”—“not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia”—as well as “substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency,” the initiative has been successful, in Priest’s assessment, decimating the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, as the country’s “vibrant economy” and “swanky Bogota social scene” flourish.
The lengthy piece offers a smorgasbord of propagandistic assertions, pertaining both to Washington’s Colombia policies, and to its foreign conduct in general. For a sampling of the latter, consider one of the core assumptions underlying Priest’s report—namely, that our noble leaders despise drugs. The FARC’s “links with the narcotics trade” and “drug trafficking” motivated U.S. officials to destroy their organization, we’re supposed to believe. True, CIA informants in Burma (1950s), Laos (1970s), and Afghanistan (1980s) exploited their Agency ties “to become major drug lords, expanding local opium production and shipping heroin to international markets, the United States included,” Alfred W. McCoy’s research demonstrates. True, a few decades ago the Office of the United States Trade Representative joined “with the Departments of Commerce and State as well as leaders in Congress” for the purpose of “promoting tobacco use abroad,” the New York Timesreported in 1988, quoting health official Judith L. Mackay, who described the resulting “tobacco epidemic” devastating the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries: “smoking-related illnesses, like cancer and heart disease” had surpassed “communicable diseases as the leading cause of death in parts of Asia.” True, the DEA shut down its Honduran office in June 1983, apparently because agent Thomas Zepeda was too scrupulous, amassing evidence implicating top-level military officials in drug smuggling—an inconvenient finding, given Honduras’ crucial role in Washington’s anti-Sandinista assault, underway at the time.
But these events are not part of History, as the subject has been constructed in U.S. schools. It’s common to read, every year or so, an article in one of the major papers lamenting the fact that “American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject,” as Sam Dillon wrote in a 2011 piece for the Times. The charge is no doubt true, as far as it goes: Dillon explained that only a “few high school seniors” tested were “able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War,” for example. But the accusation is usually leveled to highlight schools’ inadequacies, with little examination of the roles these institutions are meant to serve. And the indictments are hardly novel: in 1915, a Times story on New York City’s public schools complained their graduates “can not spell simple words,” were incapable of finding “cities and States” on a map, and so on. That piece explicitly critiqued graduates’ abilities to function as disciplined wage-earners, and so was more honest than the majority of today’s education coverage. The simple fact is “that the public schools are social institutions dedicated not to meeting the self-perceived needs of their students [e.g., by providing an understanding of how the world works] but to preserving social peace and prosperity within the context of private property and the governmental structures that safeguard it,” David Nasaw concludes in his fascinating history of the subject. Private schools, to be sure, are similar in essential respects. And one result of this schooling is that well-educated journalists can repeat myths about U.S. foreign policy, as their well-educated readers nod in blind assent.
The notion that U.S. officials have a coherent counterdrug policy is, again, one of these myths. In addition to the historical examples of U.S. support for drug traffickers cited above, we can note that the slur “narco-guerrilla,” which Washington uses to imply that the FARC is somehow unique for its involvement in the narcotics trade, ought to be at least supplemented by—if not abandoned in favor of—“narco-paramilitary.” Commentators tend to discuss the paramilitaries and the Colombian state separately, presupposing the former are “rogue” entities—another myth—when it would be better to view them, with Human Rights Watch, as the Colombian Army’s unofficial “Sixth Division,” acting in close conformity with governmental aims. Paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño admitted in March 2000 that some 70% of the armed groups’ funding came from drug trafficking, and U.S. intelligence agencies took no issue with his estimate—and “have consistently reported over a number of years that the paramilitaries are far more heavily involved than the FARC in drug cultivation, refinement and transshipment to the U.S.,” International Security specialist Doug Stokes emphasizes.
When these substances enter our country, they become a key pretext for the skyrocketing incarceration rate, which has more people imprisoned for drug offenses today than were incarcerated for all offenses in 1980, criminologist Randall Shelden has pointed out, with rates of arrest and sentencing durations especially severe for blacks. “Every criminal prohibition has that same touch to it, doesn’t it?” legal historian Charles Whitebread once asked. “It is enacted by US,” he stressed, “and it always regulates the conduct of THEM”—“you know, them criminals, them crazy people, them young people, them minority group members,” he added sardonically. Reviewing the history of marijuana prohibition, Whitebread noted that, at the Marihuana Tax Act hearings in 1937, two men spoke regarding the drug’s medical effects. One was Dr. William C. Woodward, Chief Counsel to the American Medical Association, who explained his organization had found “no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug.” “Doctor,” a Congressman complained, “if you can’t say something good about what we are trying to do, why don’t you go home?” The second was a Temple University pharmacologist, “who claimed that he had injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 dogs, and two of those dogs had died.” When one Congressman asked him whether he had experimented on dogs because of some similarity they bore to humans, the pharmacologist professed ignorance: “I wouldn’t know, I am not a dog psychologist.”
That was the extent of the medical basis for outlawing marijuana in the U.S., as threadbare as the anti-drug pretexts of Washington’s Colombia policies. Nearly four years after Plan Colombia’s 1999 announcement, for example, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that “the Departments of State and Defense [had] still not developed estimates of future program costs, defined their future roles in Colombia, identified a proposed end state, or determined how they plan[ned] to achieve it.” But while efforts to reduce coca cultivation and cocaine production were poorly articulated—and failed consistently—other endeavors met with great success. For example, aerial fumigation displaced some 17,000 people from the Putumayo Department, where the FARC had a major presence, in 2001 alone. The fumigation effectively converted the land from a means of subsistence into a profit source: journalist Garry Leech pointed out that, from 2003-2004, there was “a slew of new contracts signed between multinational companies and the Colombian government,” and the events in Putumayo and elsewhere suggest that Colombia’s herbicide-spraying campaign was never really aimed at illicit crops, typically described as the main target. It seems that if the point were to eradicate, say, coca, the solution would be relatively simple: let coca growers harvest something else. But Plan Colombia has consistently devoted only minimal funding for alternative development schemes, indicating the peasants’ sin isn’t growing coca, but living as subsistence farmers. That kind of activity is an inappropriate use of the land in an oil-rich region, where there are profits to be made.
A Guatemalan peasant made a similar point to author-activist Kevin Danaher, when he visited her country in 1984—shortly after School of the Americas alumnus Ríos Montt had completed his genocidal tear through the countryside. The woman, Danaher writes, “told us that soldiers had come to her home one night and hacked her husband to death, right in front of her and her three children;” the man “was a subversive,” in the military’s eyes, “because he was helping other peasants learn how to raise rabbits as a source of food and money.” Danaher struggled to understand the connection between this effort at self-sufficiency, and the brutal end its advocate met. “Look,” the widow explained, “the plantations down along the coast that grow export crops are owned by generals and rich men who control the government. A big part of their profit comes from the fact that we peasants are so poor we are forced to migrate to the plantations each year and work for miserable wages in order to survive.” Were she and other Guatemalan peasants to become self-reliant, they “would never work on the plantations again”—an indication of the severe threat rabbit-raising posed.
This woman’s remarks indicated who Washington’s real enemy was in Guatemala, and throughout the world. The U.S. government was not opposed merely to “Communists,” real or imagined, during the Cold War, and in Colombia its policies have helped ruin—or end—the lives of millions of destitute individuals beyond the FARC’s top officials. Of course, Sunday’s Post article ignores this fact, portraying the struggle as one between the U.S. government and its Colombian allies on one side, and aggressive guerrillas on the other. But we can expect little else from this mythmaker of record.
Abby Martin reports on what many on the left have long suspected. Is it paranoid to think you’re being persecuted and watched when you are being persecuted and watched? The challenge for activists is to keep their nerve and fight on for social change and justice while keeping themselves out of the snares set up by informers.