2023-08-04 17:41:38
On July 20, the initial whistle for a second term for the Petro government was given. After an end to the legislature marked by the struggles around the reforms, peppered with political scandals in the bowels of the government, ministerial crises and incipient appeals to street mobilization, the halftime was used by Petro to rebuild the game. The government prepared new negotiations to rebuild the majorities necessary to carry out its bills and, on the brink of completing one year of government, have something to show the masses waiting for the longed for and elusive change.
By PST – Colombia
For this reason, on July 20, his departure to the field of play began with the launching of his call for a National Agreement and days later, announcing his intention to name the paramilitary Salvatore Mancuso as Peace Manager. The announcement of this appointment comes about the 20th anniversary of the Ralito Pact, in which the paramilitaries and bourgeois politicians sealed their criminal alliance. Such an appointment is justified by Petro as a means to complete the demobilization of the paramilitaries and total peace.
Mancuso will be a singer hated by his creators
Mancuso’s appointment as peace manager, apparently surprising, has been in preparation for months, even years. In Mancuso’s statements before the JEP during the month of May, with which he seeks to be admitted, he expressed his intention to “collaborate” with the government, providing new revelations and collaboration to find mass graves in Catatumbo and on the border with Venezuela. . In addition, his lawyers have been negotiating benefits for him with the Peace Commissioner, given the prospect of his return to the country after serving a sentence in the United States.
The bourgeoisie opposed to Petro, the announcement has fallen very badly. From Duque, Lafaurie to Uribe, together with the big newspapers and the oligopoly media, they agree to discredit Mancuso, treating him as a simple liar and resentful who seeks revenge on Uribe and his government for having extradited them in 2008. While Lafaurie says that Mancuso He elaborated a “carousel of versions” and is concerned that businessmen and the military will be questioned again, Duque rejects in advance any accusation of Uribe’s relationship with the paramilitaries. Uribe himself was one of the first to react, warning “(…) I am waiting for the evidence of Mancuso’s slander. That the PTE names him a peace manager does not matter, the serious thing is that he lies and that there is discrimination”, he does nothing more than give himself away.
For the Colombian bourgeoisie, Mancuso is nothing more than a traitor, and the contempt with which he is treated is typical of this condition, but he is not just any traitor. Mancuso went from walking around the newsrooms of El Tiempo and other media, or being taken triumphantly to the congressional premises to legitimize his crimes in 2004 by those who today repudiate him. Due to the risk of him telling the truth, he was extradited to the United States, but even so, he has been releasing fragments of the truth, always in exchange for benefits. Now, with his statements before the JEP, he seeks to save himself from the fate of falling into the hands of his old masters. What the former paramilitary chief tells is not out of sincere repentance, but seeking the benefits of the JEP. Thus, he emphasizes what many have known for years as the truth: his pivotal role between the paramilitaries, the State and businessmen.
As a businessman and paramilitary commander, he not only had unrestricted access to battalions, he toured all the elite clubs in each city. Bourgeois like Pacho Santos and others, made a prelude to request their services and create paramilitary structures throughout the country. Entrepreneurs from multinationals and companies of national importance resorted to their services to get rid of union leaders and activists who were in the way of labor exploitation. Mancuso knows each of the names of his bosses and of all the companies that came to his services to silence the unions. Uribe knows it, and Petro too.
For Petro, Salvatore Mancuso is a valuable card in his struggle with the opposition bourgeoisie. Possessing the uncomfortable truth card, the paramilitary becomes a political weapon to pressure support, or at least, to let the reforms pass through Congress. It is a card with two sides, on the one hand, there is the National Agreement and on the other, the truth of Mancuso. That’s why Petro makes him sing.
The face of the National Agreement is presented as the dialogue and altruistic rhetoric of a more equitable world, of a “more just society.” The government has tried to clear the way, deposing its uncomfortable ministers, trying to gather again the necessary parliamentary majorities to pass its reforms. But Petro knows that the Colombian bourgeoisie is hard to convince about the advantages of reformism. That’s why on the other side of the letter she has Mancuso. If they do not give in to the reforms, they will have to give in to the truth of paramilitarism.
At the beginning of his government, Petro was aware that if he did not carry out reforms during the first year, the social outbreak of the National Strike could not be contained any longer, and the demands for change would return to the streets. To dismantle the struggles, the reforms would have to be sufficiently attractive, that they appear as a response to the demands of the historically exploited and oppressed masses; but at the same time that they were not so deep that they questioned the conditions of exploitation and appropriation of the profits of the bourgeoisie and scared away foreign capital.
The balance tilts to the right
This impossible balance has been resolved by tilting the balance towards the bourgeoisie, which with its pettiness has opposed tooth and nail any reform that modifies its model of accumulation imposed by blood and fire for decades. This is how they have managed to stop and torpedo the reform projects, despite the fact that they guarantee private business and have the approval of imperialism, allowing the pension counter-reform that strengthens the AFPs to pass. But that pettiness of preventing reforms is more fire under the pressure cooker that Petro tries to appease. For this reason, and already with the experience of a year of coalition government with bourgeois sectors, he raises the stakes of the game.
But that it bothers the bourgeoisie and Uribe is not enough justification to appoint Mancuso as peace manager. The fact that he now tries to appear remorseful, willing to tell part of the truth or adopt “politically correct” language does not cover the horror for which he is directly responsible. For the victims of paramilitary violence and terror, for the relatives of thousands of disappeared, of those murdered with the greatest brutality and cruelty, the atrocious crimes and torture, sexual violence, that one of the main executioners present himself, as a manager of peace, is a real affront, a revictimization.
The Total Peace policy, focused on negotiation and the indiscriminate offer of benefits to all those who exercise political violence against the population, will not bring true peace to those who have had to suffer it for decades. The failures of peace negotiations since the handover of Guadalupe Salcedo’s liberal guerrillas in the 1950s to the Havana agreements in 2016 show that there will be no peace in Colombia without returning and distributing the land to those who have been taken from it; without restoring the labor rights taken away during the 90s and without putting an end to the repressive and undemocratic regime that survives to this day.
We all know the lyrics of the song
Mancuso knows what the world knows. That all paths of paramilitarism reach Álvaro Uribe Vélez. His trial and punishment is a claim of the victims and of history. But the relationship of the bourgeoisie with the paramilitaries does not end with Uribe. It is the businessmen, landowners and multinationals who directly or jointly benefited from the paramilitary violence and must pay for their historic crimes against the working class, the peasantry, the indigenous people, the student movement and all the victims of decades of political violence.
Mancuso’s truth is part of the historical truth of the bloody bourgeois rule in the history of Colombia. The various political regimes under which the bourgeoisie has ruled to this day have used private armies to do what the army and police have not been able to do openly. Torture, massacres, selective assassinations and forced disappearances are historical methods that the bourgeoisie has used through the legal and illegal armed apparatuses, of which the paramilitaries of the eighties are only its expression. The political regime that emerged from the Constitution of 1991 has been nothing more than the cover of the Social State of Law, for a regime that for the last 40 years has relied on the institution of paramilitarism to exercise its domination and crush resistance to exploitation. and oppression.
Historical crimes such as those in Colombia have been faced in the world and truly judged when the justice of the victims, popular justice, has had the strength to impart justice. The trials of the dictatorships, the destruction of Apartheid in South Africa, have been given on the basis of the triumph, sometimes revolutionary, of the victims. But in Colombia, the legitimate yearning for peace, justice and reparation for the victims has been taking place from above, with pacts between the perpetrators.
Paramilitarism is one more of the institutions of the Colombian political regime, of a Bonapartist nature, which, covered under the shreds of bourgeois democracy, must fall. And it will only fall when those of us below bring it down, take our destiny into our own hands, not in the hands of reformist governments without reforms, but through a socialist revolution under workers’ democracy, with a true workers’ and people’s government.
PST Executive Committee
August 1, 2023
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