FARC-EP Second Marquetalia: Long live the first of May!

If we focus a bit on the statistics, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has calculated that as a direct consequence of the lethal virus, in 2020 the Gross Domestic Product of Latin America and the Caribbean will fall by 5.3 percent, the poverty rate will increase by 4.4 percent and the number of poor will rise from 186 million in 2019 to 214.7 million, also drawing the region into the biggest recession that has been suffered since 1914 and 1930. Thus, a sharp increase in unemployment, poverty and inequality is foreseeable. According to the Economic Commission, in Latin America and the Caribbean extreme poverty will grow from 11 percent to 13.5 percent, which represents an increase of 16 million people (2.5 percent).

Our Colombia, without a doubt and even with the tricks of its leaders’ soap operas, cannot escape this situation. It does not matter that the reality of contagion and the dimensions of the health crisis are made up, and that quarantines and measures of social isolation are expanded and given “intelligent” names to cover up the narco-scandals of the president and his vice-president. Because no matter how the pantomime is staged, the stubbornness of the events and their consequences will reveal the farce of their stingy, crafty and useless policies, such as the publicized twists to Familias en Acción, or the Solidarity Income, or the VAT refund and the Senior Citizen program, among others, which are a mockery if you take into account the huge economic giveaways that the government, using financial juggling, earmarks for those large companies that boast of their “donations” while they process income tax discounts. False “business solidarity”; false “gifts” propagated to facilitate tax evasion for Sarmiento Angulo-type characters, and incidentally cto lean up the discredited image of the country’s gangsters, with the complicity of those who the sacred cows in the financial sector allow to discredit the nation’s resources.

Keep making your August, for surely, like all pigs, your December will come! Continue bailing out the bankers and Mac Pollo, Arroz ROA, Flor Huila and Ingenio del Cauca … with the credits that should have gone to the peasants and to benefit the most needy. The party is not going to last forever. In Colombia, apart from the unemployed and workers on starvation wages, there are around ten million workers termed “self-employed” who are suffering the consequences of so much folly and  like many millions of other poor people, face the dilemma that if they are not killed by the coronavirus they will be killed by hunger. In addition, more than 2 million people do not have access to an aqueduct and sewer… and still it is ordered that people wash their hands with soap and water, apply gel and apply disinfectant, because our rulers do not know what country we live in. Like [Colombian President Iván] Duque, they believe that the country is full of pastries where average employees earn two million pesos a month (!). 

How long can this continue when there is so much humiliation? Let’s shake off this burden, express our outrage at so much abuse against the people, and let social discontent become a single unstoppable force against these rogues and robbers. The fate of the planet is undoubtedly in the hands of the workers; its paralysis is the paralysis of the value creation process, it is the paralysis of the economy and the unfailing collapse of those who need to exploit their workforce. So, in times of pandemic, faced with the apparent crossroads of going to work or staying isolated at home to preserve health, we must first look at the fact that the time has come to say that any sacrifice is valid except to continue filling the pockets of the capitalists and staring impassively at the underfunding and privatization of the public health system, the frauds of the pharmaceutical industry, and to continue respecting the “sacred right of property” of a bourgeoisie bent solely on defending their businesses.

The workers must demand that the wealth they produce be wealth for the common good; it must be a requirement for governments that private hospitals and clinics intervene to care for patients infected with COVID-19, and all the conditions that burden the poor; formalization and an end to destruction of jobs must be demanded. And it must be a demand that the hypocrisy of false philanthropy and the false charity of capitalists and bankers who profit even from the alms they appear to dispose of, be eradicated, for they are only thinking that the anti-neoliberal protests that shook the continent and other world stages, overflowing the avenues, squares and borders in 2019, must not return with more force from the bowels of loneliness and silence of the deserted streets of cities muted by the virus.

The people are eager to break with isolation and with the causes of a tragedy that could have been avoided if not for neoliberal austerity and the dehumanization of the system, which has not really been hurt at all by the agony of the thousands of people who do not have or will not have the resources to access an increasingly privatized health system, not even the few public resources that survive after being trimmed by the fanaticism of those who make everything they touch a business and a feast of corruption. It is known that millions of companies are either bankrupt, or in crisis, or have already closed, leaving millions of workers at risk or already tossed out. It is believed that at least 500 million people will fall into the clutches of poverty, causing greater social calamities than those generated by the capitalist crises of 1929 and 2008; thus proving the need for a new world economic order that brings us social justice and frees us from a new imposition of barbarism and fascism.

So for this May Day in Colombia and in most places, where that date is the most emblematic of the year, although surely you will not be able to leave your homes, you can join hands and fists of memory from the depths of emancipating subjectivity, expressing the old and new demands by all means that we have at hand. We must and we will fly from every home, from every insurgent camp, from every corner of the homeland where the feeling of the proletariat’s struggles beats, the flags of its most laudable causes, in which it believes and has conviction of victory, shouting our faith in Colombia, in Our America and in the oppressed of the world, waving the national tricolor and the red of internationalist resistance, breaking the chains for a better, post-capitalist world, without exploiters or exploited, with social justice, saying long live May Day, long live the workers and the proletariat of the world!

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP), Second Marquetalia

Mountains of Colombia, May 2020

Source

Translated by Greg Butterfield