[Lasnetmail] Introduction to Resistance in Bogotá Colmbia

[Viola Wilkins]

Introduction to Resistance in Bogotá

by CrimethInc.

On March 11, 2007, downtown Bogotá was filled with soldiers, snipers, 
undercover cops, and riot police on account of George Bush’s visit to 
Colombia. Nevertheless, hundreds gathered at the police barricades to 
burn flags and express their opposition to neoliberal capitalism. When 
the police turned water cannons, tear gas, and batons upon the crowd, 
the protesters tore lampposts and park benches out of the sidewalk to 
defend themselves and smashed the windows of banks and shops.

Thanks to the internet, many anarchists in the United States have seen 
photos of clashes like this one, but few understand the context in 
which they take place. We paid a visit to Bogotá recently to get more 
background on the political and social climate there and the role of 
anarchists within it. With the helpful guidance of our Colombian 
friends and the understanding that we can only offer limited insight 
into the complexities of their situation, we’d like to share some of 
what we learned.

Colombia is located at the junction of North and South America, a 
strategic position that has brought dire misfortune upon Colombians 
since the first colonial invasions. A century ago, the US forced the 
secession of Panama from Colombia to obtain control of trade passing 
from Atlantic to Pacific, and today the rich ecosystems south of Panama 
are being devastated to open the way for pan-American highway traffic. 
Unlike practically every other major South American nation, Colombia 
was not explicitly ruled by a dictatorship in the latter part of the 
20th century—instead, the pretense of democracy was maintained, with 
representatives of the Liberal and Conservative parties alternating 
rule under the Frente Nacional between 1958 and 1974. This means that 
today, unlike Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, Colombia has yet to enter 
the post-dictatorship era; it is a “democracy,” but one in which every 
serious opposition candidate has been murdered or bought off and 
corporate rule is maintained as often by brute force as by political 
machination.

Having not entered the post-dictatorship era, Colombia is still wracked 
by the kind of internal armed conflict that other Latin American 
countries suffered between the 1960s and 1980s. Politics in Colombia 
are framed by the brutal forty-year civil war between the US-supported 
government—and its paramilitary supporters, who are interlinked with 
the drug cartels the US claims to oppose—and guerrilla insurgents, who 
are also now involved in narcotrafficking. The two primary guerrilla 
factions are the FARC and the ELN, both communist groups formed in 
1964; the FARC is descended from Liberal and communist guerrilla groups 
formed by campesinos in the late 1940s, while the ELN was organized by 
students returning from Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Every year thousands of Colombians die violently in this struggle, but 
Bogotá is the eye of the storm: a space of relative calm in which the 
conflict takes more subtle forms. Latin America has megapolises like 
nothing in North America—Brazil’s Sao Paulo is twice the size of New 
York, and Mexico City is the biggest in the world—and Bogotá is as 
sprawling and heavily populated as any city in the United States. The 
north is known for its wealthier districts, while in other areas some 
neighborhoods still retain their “popular”—that is to say, class 
conscious and defiant—character [1]. The government has moved 
paramilitaries from their rural territories into some of these 
neighborhoods in recent years, ostensibly in an effort to demobilize 
them but certainly with an eye to destabilizing centers of urban 
resistance as well; locals describe the atmosphere of fear created by 
gangs of shaven-headed belligerents drinking on the streets all day. 
The paramilitaries were withdrawn from one neighborhood after a bombing 
directed at them, showing that perhaps there is a proper time and place 
for every tactic.

Like other Latin American metropolises, Bogotá excels all its North 
American counterparts in graffiti. Everywhere you walk—and people do a 
lot of walking—you can see exhortations from various communist and 
anarchist groups painted in three-foot-high letters.

Read More (with many photos)...
http://www.crimethinc.com/features/14.html