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The strategy of 21st century socialism or castrochavismo is to legalize its organized crime by turning dictatorships into revolutionary governments, state terrorism and human rights violations into popular defense, terrorist guerrillas and drug traffickers into liberation processes. It is about turning very serious crimes into political facts and giving impunity to criminals. In this agenda, Gustavo Petro leads Colombia to dialogue with the National Liberation Army (ELN), with the Venezuelan dictatorship as host, using peace as a subterfuge for the impunity of crimes promoted by Cuba.
Petro’s action, besides opening the way to impunity for ELN members by covering up crimes against humanity, drug trafficking and terrorism, has created the double effect of seeking to reincorporate the Venezuelan dictatorship as a subject of international law, placing the dictator Nicolas Maduro as a head of state sponsor of peace above the condition of head of the “Cartel of the Suns” and the international arrest warrant with a reward of 15 million dollars. International agenda of Castro-Chavismo clearly designed by Cuba and converted into Colombia’s domestic and foreign policy.
The ELN of Colombia, like all the guerrillas that burst into the Americas after Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba, are the creation of the Cuban dictatorship. Its first operation was recorded on January 7, 1965 with the seizure of the municipality of Simacota, department of Santander, by a guerrilla group that repeats the ideology of the Cuban revolution and applies foquismo.
There was ELN in Peru in 1962 led by Héctor Béjar and was defeated militarily in December 1965. The ELN was organized in Bolivia and operated in the Ñancahuzú guerrilla war 1966-67 that ended with the death of Che Guevara. In Brazil, they organized the National Liberation Command led by Murilo Pezzuti which operated from 1967 to 1969. In Argentina -among others- the Frente Argentino de Liberación or Fuerzas Argentinas de Liberación operative from 1967 to 1973. In Uruguay the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros since 1966. In Venezuela, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, created in 1962 as the armed wing of the National Liberation Front.
The guerrillas in the Americas were the expansion of the Cuban dictatorship, organized and sustained in the framework of the Cold War, with an anti-imperialist inspiration, which bloodied the region. There are more than 50 guerrilla organizations of this type that were deactivated like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico, were defeated militarily like the ELN in Bolivia and Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA in Peru, achieved peace agreements like the FARC in Colombia, or took power like the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua.
The issue of the guerrillas is their criminal actions with crimes ranging from kidnappings, assassinations, terrorism, hostage-taking and exploitation, subjection to slavery, drug trafficking and more. There is a point at which the claims of liberation are alibis for atrocious crimes committed against the very people and populations they claim to defend and for which they proclaim their armed struggle.
The self-proclaimed revolutionary legitimacy ends definitively with the democratization of practically all of Latin America effective since the eighties of the last century, with the exception of the dictatorship of Cuba that maintains support to the operative guerrilla groups.
The recovery of the dictatorship in Cuba since 1999 with the support of Hugo Chavez and the taking of extraordinary economic resources with the subjugation of Venezuela, corruption with federal funds from Brazil, and the establishment of narco-states, turns the Castroism of the 20th century into Castro-Chavism of the 21st century and allows the open protection of the chief dictatorship to its criminal movements, in the field of drug trafficking and crime based on violence and attacks against democracy.
Colombia’s peace negotiations with the FARC, with Cuba the sponsor and protector of the guerrillas as mediator, and the outcome of the negotiations ignoring the October 2, 2016 Plebiscite on Peace Accords that rejected the agreements, are very important precedents. FARC continues to operate guerrillas and organized crime with the so-called FARC-EP or dissidences, while kidnappers, drug traffickers, rapists and unpunished criminals are members of the Colombian Parliament and politics. There is no peace in Colombia but there is impunity.
This article is part of an agreement between El American and the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.
Carlos Sánchez Berzain es abogado, politólogo, máster en ciencia política y sociología. Catedrático. Estadista perseguido y exiliado político. Director del Interamerican Institute for Democracy // Carlos Sánchez Berzain is a lawyer, political scientist, with a master's degree in political science and sociology. Professor. Persecuted statesman and political exile. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.