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4 May, 18 tweets, 5 min read
CW: Sexual Assault

¡Solidaridad por Colombia!

The people of Colombia are rising, and are facing murderous opposition from the Colombian police, militarized and trained by the US military.

We can’t ignore the role of the US empire in the state-sanctioned massacre in Colombia!
The Latin American nation of Colombia has seen consistent popular uprisings since 2019, largely in response to the negligence of the US-backed, right-wing austerity government of Ivan Duque, as well as heightened violence against Indigenous activists. [1]
The tactics that organizers used 2019-2020 included a national strike as well as protests, which resulted in physical confrontations with the Colombian police and military that killed 17 people, injured hundreds, and led to the arrest of 500 activists. [2]
We are seeing echoes of the uprisings in Bogotà and around Colombia, with another national strike beginning on April 28 and protests in response to a recently-withdrawn neoliberal tax reform bill, which would place an extreme economic burden on Colombia’s working class. [3]
Days of union-led protests, augmented by the police killing of a 17 y/o demonstrator, have resulted in at least 21 extrajudicial murders, 503 arbitrary arrests, and at least 10 sexual assaults by police, who were deployed by the tens of thousands to suppress the people. [4]
Colombian police have unleashed rubber bullets, armored vehicles, and tear gas to quell the mass mobilization of Colombians protesting Duque’s austerity regime and the continued looting of the country by transnational corporations.
While the gratuitous state violence in Colombia speaks volumes about the interests of the national bourgeoisie, we must also recognize that the situation would be very different if not for Ivan Duque and his predecessor Alvaro Uribe’s alliance with the US.
Under Bill Clinton, the US and Colombia authored Plan Colombia, a foreign aid project that ultimately ended up promoting right-wing death squads against left-wing FARC combatants, peasants, and Indigenous activists. [5]
Plan Colombia had the US sending money and troops to Colombia to train police and military (the same beating back protesters today), all while turning their backs to right-wing paramilitary violence against Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. [5]
Undergirding the US government’s support of right-wing reaction in Colombia is that of its own imperialist bourgeoisie. Chiquita Brands “has admitted that it made at least 100 payments to the AUC [right-wing militia] in the period from 1997 to 2004, a total of $1.7 million.”[6,7]
Chiquita Brands, as you may know, is the rebrand of the infamous United Fruit Company, which lobbied strongly for the US-backed coup of leftist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, and the installation of military junta leader Carlos Castillo Armas. [7]
The civil war that ensued UFC’s imperial meddling claimed at least 250,000 lives, and impacted peasant communities the worst. Those same peasants were the main stewards of farmland outside of agricultural monopolies. [7]
The function of this was to firmly cement hegemony over Central American natural resources and labor, as has been the prevailing genocidal colonial project over Latin America since the late 15th century.
In addition to peasants, reactionary militias funded by the US government and corporations waged campaigns of terror against Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples, and continue to do so now even as the Duque government slowly enacts a peace deal with the leftist FARC. [8]
The demand for US leftists is simple: US out of Colombia! We must not stand idly by while our comrades are killed for the profits of the greedy imperialists whom have been ransacking Latin America for centuries! RAS stands is solidarity with the rising Colombian people!
To help support the people of Colombia during this crackdown of state violence, please share and donate if you can to Red Condor Collective’s @RedCondors fund for Colombian organizations on the ground.

gofund.me/2aad24e4
SOURCES:

1. aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/2…

2. aljazeera.com/videos/2020/9/…

3. batimes.com.ar/news/latin-ame…

4. telesurenglish.net/news/Colombia-…

5. telesurenglish.net/news/Plan-Colo…
6. AUC, or Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, translates to United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia in English.

7. inthesetimes.com/article/chiqui…

8. reuters.com/article/us-col…

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