THE REAL TERRORISTS, THE REAL CRIME

Green Left Weekly’s Raul Cienfuegos interviewed Raul Reyes, a member of the leadership of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The United States and the Colombian government are putting on pressure for the FARC to be included in lists of supposed terrorists. And — to justify its war against the Colombian people and their revolutionary army — the Colombian government has added the narco-terrorist label to the FARC.

• The government does this to hide its dictatorial nature and its known links with the paramilitaries and drug trafficking,

• The FARC expects this from the class enemy.

• The real terrorists, those at the top of the list in world terrorism, are the US administration and their main war allies, including Uribe, who heads a government committed to state terrorism.

• These murderers label those who try to defend people from their aggression as terrorists.

• The aggressors want to appear to be the victims.

• But the real victims are the dispossessed, the people who have the courage to dissent against the government’s bad policies.

• These are the victims of neoliberalism and globalisation, which have been imposed by the United States on all countries throughout the world.

• Dialogue between the paramilitaries and Uribe’s government is the same as dialogue that would occur between father and son.

• Paramilitarism is a child of the [Colombian] state, and Uribe has always been its backer.

• Colombian and international communities remember all that Uribe did as the governor of Antioquia province [in the mid-1990s to establish] “Convivir” to legitimise and promote paramilitary activity

• [According to Amnesty International, Convivir served as government-sanctioned death squads recruiting to the paramilitaries.]

• one of the commitments they are trying to carry out in government is to legitimise the paramilitary gangs, so that the government can go on killing its opponents,

• killing popular, social leaders who disagree with the government.

• All those who protest against human rights abuses or the neoliberal model, or state terrorism, are considered their enemy and are attacked.

• With the legalisation of the paramilitaries, they hope to legitimise impunity for these crimes against the Colombian people.

• What we see with the people in Bolivia, the people of Ecuador, the people of other parts of the region and the world is a struggle against the devastating effects of the neoliberal economic model;

• a model generated by globalisation,

• the imperialist war against the peoples of the world,

• carried out by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

• There are thousands of millions of human beings from the so-called Third World who have not had breakfast today, nor will they have it tomorrow,

• whose children are dying of malnutrition.

• Some women cannot feed their children because they don’t even have food for themselves.

• The real crime, the real terrorism carried out by the world’s financial institutions is seen in the deaths of men, women and children, from hunger, so that a minority can appropriate the wealth of the majority.