Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Colombia’s cities over the last days, struggling against the state and capitalist brutality that they face every day. Since 28 April, the day of a general strike against the new tax reform that the Duque government tried to promote, there have been continuous mobilisations in more than 500 cities in the country. The new tax reform that brought price increases on basic goods (such as coffee, sugar, eggs, gasoline, electricity and water) and affected the great social majority in Colombia was added to a more general condition imposed on the social base, with brutal repressive violence against the militants, the pillage of nature, the encroachment of indigenous territories and the terrorism of paramilitary units under the State’s tolerance.
The Colombian state, assisted by the capital and the organised crime, on the one hand, attempts to intensify the exploitation of the poor and oppressed through a series of anti-social policies of impoverishment, while at the same time the drug trade is the main pillar of its economy, and on the other hand, it unleashes a savage repressive attack on those struggling for life and dignity, on indigenous communities, workers, youth, students. From the criminal state management of the pandemic, where money intended for the needs of the health system was given to big business and bankers, and the use of the pandemic to impose the anti-social plans of the Colombian state, the exacerbation of class exclusion, with half of the country’s population living below the poverty line, the collaboration of economic and political bosses and drug dealers to seize and accumulate land, to the torture and brutal murders of militants, which only in the first months of 2021 and before the outbreak of the uprising exceeded 50.
The people of Colombia are on the streets in a daily basis, fighting constantly, blocking highways, creating self-organized structures, collective kitchens, health and first aid facilities, and organizing political and cultural events. They are confronted with the counter-insurgency mechanisms of the Colombian state and the murderous police violence and the special “riot-control units” (ESMAD), with arrests, chemical weapons, beatings, torture with electric shocks in police stations, shooting protesters in the eyes, rape of demonstrators, murders, the imposition of a state of emergency and the presence of the army in the streets. So far, 27 people have been killed since the beginning of the mobilisations, and a total of 548 are missing.
For our part, as anarchists with internationalist solidarity as our weapon, we stand with the urban insurgents of Colombia, the Afro-Colombian communities, the peasants, workers, students, youth and indigenous people of Cauca. The struggles that break out in every corner of the earth against the imposition of state and capitalist dystopia and modern totalitarianism, for the overthrow of the rotten world of authority, for the construction of a society of equality, solidarity and freedom will win!
INTERNATIONALIST SOLIDARITY IS THE WEAPON OF THE PEOPLE!
FROM GREECE TO COLOMBIA, STRUGGLE FOR THE GLOBAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION AGAINST THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE STATE AND CAPITALISM
Anarchist Political Organization – Federation of Collectives
