Campaigning in Colombia began January 15 for congressional elections on March 13, and for first-round voting for a new president on May 29. Gustavo Petro, leader of the progressive Humane Colombia movement, will likely be the Historical Pact coalition’s presidential candidate.

A former urban guerrilla, congressional representative, mayor of Bogota, and now senator, Petro ran for president in 2010 and in 2018, when he lost to current president Iván Duque in second-round voting. Duque is not running for re-election.

Petro led the opposition against former president and extreme right-winger Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) who is accused of corruption, narcotrafficking, and ties with paramilitaries. Duque is Uribe’s protégé.  As president, Uribe prioritized war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and later opposed the government’s peace agreement with the FARC.

The Historical Pact is a coalition of left-leaning and centrist parties and of “social movements, indigenous people, feminists, environmentalists,” according to Petro. Coalition partners include the Communist Party and the affiliated Patriotic Union on the left, the Alternative Democratic Pole and Humane Colombia representing social democracy, and centrist anti-Uribe groups. Joining these are politicians who backed Juan Manuel Santos, who succeeded Uribe as president and promoted the Agreement.

Observer Felipe Pineda Ruiz suggests that, “most of those voting for the Historical Pact … are more to the right than are the activists and candidates.”  Also, “as traders and small business people, they gained real economic benefits from the commodities bonanza … that sustained economic growth when Santos and Uribe were in power.”

Gustavo Petro registers 34% approval in a recent opinion poll, down from 40% in October. The favorability ratings of the other top-polling candidates range from 32% to 7%.

The Historical Pact’s election campaign follows more than two years of seesawing protests and repression. The associated turmoil has shaped the constituency Petro is appealing to and leaves an aftermath the next government will be dealing with. It has exacerbated Colombia’s longstanding rural-urban divide, a major impediment to a just society there.

On November 21, 2019 major demonstrations broke out in cities. For weeks afterwards, hundreds of thousands of students, unionists, environmentalists, pensioners, LGBT activists, workers of all sorts, and social movement activists filled streets throughout Colombia. They were demanding pension reforms, revised labor legislation, improved access to healthcare and education, income support, and no more police violence.

Along the way, 200,000 troops and riot police wounded and/or arrested, and killed, protesters. Demonstrations continued intermittently in cities well into 2020. The government’s inept handling of the Covid -19 pandemic was a new grievance.  

The Bogota police, reacting to the burning of their facilities, killed taxi-driver and law student Javier Ordoñez on September 9, 2020. Huge crowds assembled the next day. The police killed 14 young people and wounded hundreds more. Demonstrations culminating September 21 in a “national strike” would continue intermittently for the rest of the year. A government tax increase was a further provocation.

National strikes erupted in May, July, and August, 2021. Now indigenous groups and even sports organizations were involved. International agencies and human rights organizations weighed in against the government.  Polling in May, 2021 showed 75% of Colombians as supporting the national strikes.

Colombian historian Renán Vega Cantor notes that, “State terrorism in the Colombian style became visible to the world.” For him, the “extraordinary national strike was the most important social protest in Colombian history in terms of duration … and the diversity of social sectors that participated.”

Attitudes were changing. Before the protests, “the bombings, massacres, torturing, disappearances were of little interest for residents of middle-class districts. For the rich and powerful they simply did not exist and did not matter.” For “the urban middle classes, state and parastate violence” was faraway and “to some extent was justified to confront security threats or insurgent movements in the countryside.”

Now there was violence in the cities. Vega Cantor mentions “80 Colombians killed by agents of the state, hundreds wounded, dozens disappeared, and a score of women raped.” He describes armed civilians protected by the police showing up in districts of the wealthy and “acting as if to protect their interests from intruders, Indians, Blacks and the poor.”

Observer Fernando Dorado states that the Historical Pact campaign “has to maintain the people’s enthusiasm expressed in the social explosion … and in parallel fashion must attract sectors of the so-called ‘center’ in order to isolate and defeat recalcitrant right-wing forces.”

As the campaign looks for votes from urban population sectors, it shows no sign of attending to injustices, resistance, and longstanding repression in rural areas. That approach may end up reinforcing Colombia’s rural-urban divide.

For Petro, the politics of class struggle is for somebody else. He told an interviewer that, “I don’t divide politics between right and left … My divide is the politics of death and the politics of life. In Colombia a politics of death has governed for two centuries.”  

Historical Pact officials have fixed it so that voters are not readily exposed to class-oriented political views. The coalition is using the “closed list” voting system for the congressional elections in March. There, each candidate of a partnering group appears on a list, with preferred candidates at the top. Voters need only select the coalition of their choice; they don’t get to choose a candidate.  

The object ostensibly is to assure an equal number of female and male candidates and allow for indigenous and African-descended candidates. Voting arrangements for Historical Pact candidates de-emphasize ideological differences among their parties such as, for example, a center-left party pitted against socialist ones like the Communist Party or the Patriotic Union. 

Electoral politics that doesn’t involve working-class power that would challenge  plunder by oligarchs will likely be irrelevant to the realities of Colombia’s countryside.  There, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people relate in one way or another to struggle between rich and poor over the use and control of land. Vast numbers were killed in the 1950s in the wake of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s assassination in 1948, and again from the 1960s on as the Colombian state reacted to the founding of the FARC, an agrarian insurgency.

That phase ended with the government’s Peace Agreement with the FARC in 2016, following which a “Third Cycle of Violence” commenced. Writer Horacio Duque points to more than 1300 mainly rural community leaders and some 300 former FARC combatants killed between then and now.

Blame, he states, lies in part with the government’s failure to carry out agrarian reforms as specified in the Peace Agreement. The Historical Pact’s program mentions agrarian reform, but a Petro government’s likely priority given to cities anticipates neglect of the countryside.

Similarly, Colombia’s military will probably remain untouched, despite the coalition’s promise of “structural reform.”  With much to protect, Colombia’s landowning elites, leery of agrarian revolt, have long sought military capacity.  Now the country’s military consumes 12% of the government’s budget. With 295,000 troops, it’s the second largest military force in Latin America. With no working-class power at the center of governmental decision-making, military control over rural Colombia will likely continue.

The coalition’s statement on “New International Politics” rejects foreign intervention, but is silent on the U.S. role as the Colombian military’s senior partner. The brazen nature of current arrangements reflects the bullying power of U.S. interventionism nourished by global capitalism. An outmatched Petro government probably will acquiesce.

Current U.S. activities include: an annual monetary contribution ($461.4 million in 2021), air bases distributed throughout Colombia, U.S agents there charged with destabilizing Venezuela, and preparation of Colombian troops for special tasks. Some of these are: training the security forces of U.S.-allied nations, fighting their wars (in the Middle East, for example), and performing dirty work, such as assassinating Haiti’s president on July 7, 2021.

This note finishes on a note of tragedy. Much-needed restoration of rural life in Colombia is a distant dream. The rural poverty rate in 2019 was 34.5%, in the cities 12.3%. Learning levels between same-grade children in urban and rural areas differ by three years. Illiteracy in rural areas is more than twice that in cities.  In rural areas in 2016, stunted growth in children (as a measure of chronic malnutrition) was almost twice the rate for urban zones. The 1% of persons individually controlling the largest landholdings in Colombia together own more than 80% of all land there. Colombian inequality in land ownership is the greatest in Latin America.   

And a touch of ambiguity: We’ve been harshly critical of the Historical Pact. But the election of Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia would be good news, or at least as much as is possible now.  He would be Colombia’s first progressive head of state. That’s no small matter.

_{Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine.} 

Viral propaganda: In the social media age, the U.S.’ anti-Cuba efforts have to keep up with the way people get their information (and disinformation). Here, protesters in Key West, Fla., use their phones to photograph and video a flag reading ‘SOS Cuba’ from atop the Southernmost Point buoy, July 13, 2021. | Rob O’Neal/The Key West Citizen via AP

The cruder U.S. methods for destroying Cuba’s revolutionary government—military attacks, bombings of hotels and a fully-loaded airplane, violent attacks on officials, biological warfare—did not work. Nor has economic blockade, which of course continues. A more subtle approach also exists. Like the blockade, its purpose is to cause despair and then dissent.

U.S. officials pay for the collection of bad news about Cuba’s revolutionary government and for its dissemination within Cuba and to news outlets abroad. U.S. paymasters provide money to agents for delivery to opponents of Cuba’s government, real or imagined, in Cuba and elsewhere. The recipients find or devise information unfavorable to Cuba’s image and spread it. Cubans’ well-founded complaints about shortages, bureaucracy, low wages, and living with the pandemic become news items.

The groups transferring the money from the United States to disgruntled elements in Cuba and elsewhere are key to the entire operation. One recalls the “bagman” who in certain U.S. cities deliver pay-offs from point to point within a criminal network. These groups transferring money—as authorized by the Helms Burton law of 1996—are bagmen for imperialism.

An odor of criminality is sensed. To interfere with Cuba’s conduct of its own affairs violates norms of international law relating to national sovereignty. And it turns out that, as of 2011, “Accusations of fraud, reckless distribution of funds, and diversion of monies to stateside anti-Cuban groups have prompted temporary stays in disbursement of funds.”

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is one of two big U.S. paymasters. Founded in 1983, it’s a non-governmental organization funded exclusively by the U.S. Congress. The projects funded by the NED are similar to those formerly undertaken by the CIA.

The Cuban Communist Party’s Granma newspaper on Jan. 18, 2022 presented a list published on the NED website on Feb. 23, 2021. Groups are named “which received funding to intervene in Cuba during the year 2020, with sums ranging from 20,000 to 650,000 dollars.”

The list includes 42 groups; the total amount dispensed was $5,077,788. Below appears a short list. It contains the names of groups receiving $146,360 or more, the amount of money each one did receive, its home base, and the supposed shortcoming in Cuba needing to be fixed.

The top recipients of NED funds were:

• Cubalex: $150,000 – Memphis, Tenn. (human rights)
• National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI): $500,000 – Washington, D.C. (gender rights)
• Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos: $150,000 – Madrid (human rights)
• Asociacion Diario de Cuba: $215,000 – Madrid (access to information)
• Instituto Cubano por la Libertad de Expresion y Prensa: $146,360 – Hialeah, Fla. (access to information)
• Cuban Democratic Directorate: $650,000 – Miami (access to information)
• Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE): $309,766 – Washington, D.C. (private sector needing support)
• Clovek v tisni, o.p.s. (People in Need): $150,882 – Prague (access to information)
• Grupo Internacional para la Responsabilidad Social Corporativa en Cuba: $230,000 – Miami (labor rights)

The State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is another paymaster. On Oct. 23, 2021, journalist Tracey Eaton’s “Cuba Money Project” website reported on disbursements USAID announced during the previous month. The total being delivered to 12 organizations was $6,669,000. The list, constructed like the list above, includes:

• International Republican Institute: $1,006,895 – Washington, D.C. (human rights)
• Pan American Development Foundation: $800,000 – Washington, D.C. (labor exploitation)
• Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba: $717,000 – Miami (medical workers exploited)
• Digital News Association: $604,920 (military abuse)
• Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia: $625,000 – Miami (political prisoners)
• International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights: $546,00 – Washington, D.C. (human rights and racism)
• Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: $545,573 – Washington, D.C. (democracy)
• Directorio Democrático Cubano: $520,179 – Miami (tourist workers exploited)
• Outreach Aid to the Americas: $500,000 – Miami (humanitarian crisis)
• Cubanet News: $408,003 – Coral Gables (tourist workers exploited)
• Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos: $250,000 – Madrid (political prisoners)
• Libertatis: $166,430 – Houston, Texas (human rights)

Cubans in many cities, predominantly young people, took to the streets on July 11, 2021. They were protesting shortages of medical supplies, food, and other goods; the failure of remittances from abroad to arrive; and, in some instances, racial discrimination. Arrests and detentions followed and, more recently, trials and prison sentences. Social media played a major role in mobilizing the protesters and subsequently in disseminating news of arrests, injuries, property damage, and reaction from abroad.

As with social media trial runs in earlier anti-Cuban propaganda campaigns, some of the U.S. government funds delivered by the intermediaries were undoubtedly earmarked for expanding the role of social media in recruiting protesters and in publicizing adverse fallout.

As bad news from Cuba makes its way to anti-Cuban politicians in the United States and Europe, it takes on added value. New pretexts crop up for administrative actions and legislation that, aimed at destabilization in Cuba, imposes sanctions and tightens blockade rules. These in turn generate reports of new grief in Cuba.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently responded to the trials of some of the July 11 protest leaders and the resulting prison terms by announcing visa restrictions against eight Cuban officials. A legislative proposal recently introduced by South Florida congresspersons calls upon President Joe Biden to urge the United Nations to issue sanctions against Cuba. The bill’s title is “Atrocities and Genocide in Cuba.”

The story here is about siege socialism. In his Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti shows Russian revolutionaries under Lenin cutting back on their aspirations due to pressures of civil war and invasion by capitalist nations: “[I]n May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled…to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party.”

Fidel Castro once offered a vivid characterization of a socialist society faltering under enemy attacks while being advertised, by those enemies, as the best that socialists can do—as if peaceful circumstances did prevail. He declared that, “For 40 years you try to strangle us. And then you criticize us for the way we breathe.”

_{Author: W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}

_{Source: People’s World, January 25, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/u-s-government-pays-big-money-for-bad-news-about-cuba/}