TRAGIC CASUALTIES OF WAR
Colombian guerrillas apologize for deaths
By Deirdre Griswold
March 25, 1999--At the beginning of March, three people from the United States were killed on the border of Colombia and Venezuela in an area where
fierce battles have raged between the guerrilla organization FARC and Colombian troops supplemented by right-wing paramilitaries.
The three were in the area to assist an Indigenous people, the U'wa, in their struggle against Occidental Petroleum, which plans to drill
for oil in their ancestral lands.
One of the people killed was Ingrid Washinawatok, a Menominee widely known and respected for her work in the International Indian
Treaty Council. She also participated in the international tribunal in 1992 that tried the U.S. for war crimes against Iraq.
The other two were Lahe'ena'e Gay of Hawaii and Terence Freitas of Oakland, Calif. The two women were Native people; Terence Freitas
was a white progressive who championed Indigenous causes.
The imperialist media immediately blamed the FARC, which has been carrying out a revolutionary war against the Colombian regime.
Its leaders are Marxists affiliated with the Colombian Communist Party, which plays a leading role in the working-class movement
there. The national leader of the Colombian trade unions is openly a communist.
The FARC has grown so strong in the liberation war that this year for the first time the government of Colombia had to recognize its
authority over a vast area and agree to peace talks.
Why the right was suspected
At first it was strongly suspected, not only by progressives but even by some in the U.S. corporate media, that the three killings were
engineered by the CIA and/or Colombian government to discredit the revolutionaries.
The U.S. has done this in the past. For example, during the Vietnam war the CIA arranged to have puppet troops carry out atrocities
while dressed like National Liberation Front fighters. Then the killings were blamed on the NLF. The media were of course encouraged
to make this front-page news, which then became the excuse for greater U.S. intervention.
In its early statements on the matter, the FARC said it would launch an investigation and that it appeared these killings were carried
out by the right-wing paramilitaries who have slaughtered so many people.
However, on March 10 FARC Central Committee member Raul Reyes gave a press conference in the liberated zone and reported that a
fighter named Gildardo from the FARC's 10th front was responsible for these killings. Reyes said that this local commander had
captured the U.S. citizens and executed them "without consulting higher-ranking bodies."
He apologized to all the Indigenous peoples of the world and asked their forgiveness.
He said these executions of unarmed civilians were not FARC policy.
That has been true of all the genuinely popular and revolutionary liberation move ments. A liberation movement by its very nature
seeks to win the support of the population, and its tactics are shaped accordingly.
In any revolutionary situation, especially one where a long-fought war has created deep and bitter emotions among many of the
fighters, there can be excesses and mistakes. But they are exceptions to the general rule.
It is just the opposite with the reactionary state apparatus. The more the system comes under siege from the masses, the more the
state turns to terror against them, resorting to "paras" or death squads that pretend to be independent of the government. Terror
against the revolution is not an exception but the norm, because the goal is to terrorize the population into accepting the status quo.
At the same time that this event happened in Colombia, a commission in Guatemala released a report about the genocide practiced by
the military there against poor, mostly Indigenous people. Some 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala over the period of the
guerrilla war. Almost all of them were Indigenous villagers massacred by the army. The Pentagon and the CIA were deeply involved,
as the report admits.
In the 1980s progressives in Colombia entered the elections as the Union Patriotica. Thousands of their members were elected across
the country. But within a few years, 2,000 of these progressive mayors and city council members had been assassinated by death
squads. That's standard practice for the right wing in Colombia, and shows why there is such popular support for the revolutionary
armed struggle today.
Who will judge and punish
Reyes called on anyone who would enter areas under the authority of the FARC to seek authorization from the guerrilla organization
first. And he added that the FARC would see that revolutionary justice was done in this case.
The question of who should judge and punish those responsible for these three deaths has become a new arena of political struggle.
The U.S. government is demanding that the Colombian government capture and extradite the FARC members involved--to be tried in
the U.S.
This demand is not likely to meet with sympathy around the world, especially after Washington arrogantly refused to let the Marine
pilot who caused the death of 20 skiers in Italy be tried there. The Pentagon brass's verdict finding the pilot not guilty is still causing
protests and anger in Europe.
Nevertheless, two U.S. representatives, Benjamin Gilman and Dan Burton--of the anti-Cuba Helms-Burton law--have written a letter to
the FBI demanding that the U.S. indict the FARC guerrillas.
The FARC has declared that it will not hand over its fighters to any state.
The FARC has for years been conducting a revolutionary war against the Colombian ruling class and its U.S. backers. It fights to extend
its authority and diminish the authority of the capitalist regime, whose bloody terror campaign against the workers, the peasants and
all progressive organizations has killed 40,000 people over the last decade.
Just as progressives here demand community control of the police, and support the efforts of oppressed peoples to set up their own
centers of authority, the FARC is fighting for its right to exercise sovereignty as a genuine revolutionary organization of the Colombian
masses. It has liberated vast areas of the country, where it has encouraged the people to set up their own system of justice and
self-defense. For it to be forced to relinquish this authority to the government or to U.S. imperialism would be a great blow to the
revolutionary process.
The candor of Commander Reyes--and his appeal for forgiveness from all Indigenous peoples--shows that the FARC takes this situation
very seriously and will do all it can to rectify this terrible injustice.
This episode is tragic both for the activists who were killed and for the Colombian revolutionary movement. Progressives have to
stand firm to keep it from being used as an excuse by the Colombian regime to break off peace talks, or by the U.S. to increase its
already very dangerous military intervention there.
Most important, it must not become a dividing wedge between two movements that are natural allies in the struggle against the
transnational banks, oil companies and corporations that plunder the world in search of profits.
