Priest, guerilla,
Board?
As a coordinating board there is
The Simon nothing left.
Bolivar
Guerrilla Coordinating Board was
M-19 formed by the
119 April
Movement,] the EPL, the "reinserted", the Quintin Lame, and the PRT
On the 13 February Colombia's second biggest guerrilla
[Revolutionary Workers Party]. They organisation, the National Liberation Army (ELN), began its own have disappeared from the political peace process — a series of discussions with various picture and from the armed struggle.
Circumstances - which I know nothing representatives of civil society on the key social, political and about + led them to demobilize and military issues facing the Colombian people they disappeared. All was left was the
The formal opening of this "National Convention" comes
ELN [National Liberation Army] and a almost exactly a year after the death of the man who did most very small group of Caraballo's EPL.
Their demobilization ended the to plan and promote it. Manuel Perez Martinez was the ELN's coordinating board.
main leader for the last decade. He was a Spaniard and a priest
•How are relations between the ELN
The nature of this alternative peace process, which seeks to and the FARC?
make the Colombian people the protagonist of peace, and not
Our relations with the ELN are good, either of the belligerent parties, has been completely ignored by even though they are not close relations.
the international media, and very little understood by the
In fact they are somewhat cold. Some international left. Yet it stands as a fitting tribute to its main time ago we called them and told them that we should end the coordinating board because the actions of one or the
Zbigniew Kowalewski looks back at the life and politics of other should not be blamed on some or on others. However, we have suggested
Manuel Perez, one of the most original and inspiring figures of what we have called the principle of the Latin American revolutionary movement.
solidarity or action. It means that when they need help, we help, and vice versa.
We are trying to find points of agreement with them. And the rest, well, we are working on it. *
Mariela Guerrero is research director at Alternativa magazine. This interview is reprinted from the Colombian weekly news magazine Semana, 18 January 1999.
It was translated and brought to our attention by the
Colombia Support Network, which runs a listserve and publishes Colombia Bulletin.. For free copy and info contact CSN, P.O. Box 1505, Madison WI 53701,
USA. Tel. (+1 608) 257-8753 fax: 255-6621 Email:
csn(@igc.apc.org.
Information on Colombia is also available on the
Internet from the Colombia Support Network
(www.igc.org/esn) and Colombian Labor Monitor
(www.prairienet.org/clm)
10 International Viewpoint #308 March 1999 by origin. architect. On 14 February last year, in Colombian guerrilla territory, Manuel Perez Martinez, leader of the Camilista UnionNational Liberation Army (UCELN), died. He was fifty-five and had been suffering from a serious illness.
The UCELN comprises several thousand fighters operating in several dozen guerrilla fronts in a number of regions. Along with the biggest guerrilla movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-Popular Army (FARC-EP), the UCELN is one of the two main politicalmilitary organisations of the Colombian
Before the beginning of the present peace process, there was an increasingly intense war going on in Colombia. The military machine of the decaying bourgeois state was losing more and more battles and the control of more and more territory.
Backed by far-right paramilitaries, it spread a bloody terror amongst the civilian population. This paramilitary terror has continued even after the opening of peace talks.
This homage to the memory of Manuel Perez aims to promote the solidarity so urgently needed by Colombia's rebels and popular movements. ZK
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
Marxist
In July 1966, in a service in the Sistine Chapel, Pope Paul VI ordained some seventy new priests chosen from seminaries across Europe. They had been specially selected: they were to work as missionaries in Latin America, from where the Vatican had been receiving alarming news.
The spreading shock wave of the Cuban revolution had begun to shake the Catholic church itself. It was widening and filling the breaches opened by the Second Vatican Council, which had only
Even in a bastion of conservative Catholicism like Colombia, it had produced an event without precedent which was echoing around the world. A Catholic priest, Camilo Torres, had tried first to mobilise an independent, united and revolutionary mass movement which would aspire, if necessary through popular classes" and build socialism. Then he had joined the National Liberation Army (ELN).
Soon after joining this "Castroite" guerrilla movement, the Cuban magazine Bohemia had commented: "At no time did Camilo find any incompatibility between the purest Christianity and Marxism, socialism or communism - on the contrary he found great affinities"
Bohemia suggested that if Marxists and Christians united, they would inevitably exploitation and oppression.
The Uruguayan magazine Marcha had reported that: "Camilo Torres defines himself as a nationalist, a revolutionary and a Christian. His platform contains nationalist measures combined with fundamental socialist ones. His method, the armed struggle of the masses to seize power and carry out this programme, Is the beginning of a socialist revolution."
months before that ordination service in the Sistine Chapel, Torres had died, gun in hand, in a battle with government troops.
Manuel Perez was one of the priests ordained that day. He felt irritated by the all the pomp and ceremony of the service. Neither the Pope nor any other member of the church hierarchy present had the least idea that he shared Father Camilo's belief that "it is very difficult to serve two masters: God and mammon", and that his desire was to follow the same path as Torres, if possible in the same country and as a member of the same revolutionary organisation.
Perez was convinced admitting Torres into its ranks, the ELN had resolved the complicated relationship between Christianity and Marxism which "Incarnation in those most exploited
Perez came from a village in Zaragoza province in Aragon (in the Spanish State). His family were poor peasants and deeply religious. During the civil war, his father, convinced it was a religious war and that he had to defend the catholic faith, fought in Franco's army.
The only place the son could afford to study was in a seminary, and so he decided to become a priest. Before he and his two friends, Domingo Lain and Jose Antonio Jimenez, were ordained as priests, they travelled to France. They were driven by "the desire to be close to the poorest and most exploited" members of society and to live amongst them a commitment of incarnation".
They shared the life of poverty, overexploitation and xenophobic or racist oppression experienced by immigrants from the Spanish State and other countries of southern Europe and North Africa. In Paris, Lille and Arras, "we joined the world of capitalist exploitation", Perez would later recall.
They began to question many aspects of the traditional faith. They stopped routine praying and developed an aversion to ritual. "Why go to Sunday mass in a church if we live a more profound 'mass' being in the immigrants' shacks ?"
The traditional catholic conception of sin also fell by the wayside as they realised that "morality depends on the social class to which you belong and there is a bourgeois morality and a working-class morality".
Back in the Spanish State, they collaborated with the Comisiones Obreras (Workers,. Commissions) which, under the Franco dictatorship, were beginning to build an independent workers' ment, and with communist activists. But they knew that elsewhere in the world — in Latin America for instance were more people exploited and oppressed than in Europe. That's why they entered the Hispano-American Seminary in Madrid.
"Two things began to resonate: firstly, the death of Father Camilo, and secondly, the guerrilla struggle for a socialist revolution. At that time in Europe the relationship between Marxists and Christians was developing around the debate over worker-priests"
Once ordained, the three were sent to the Dominican Republic, but they decided that Lain should go and explore the lie of the land in Colombia.
Perez and Jimenez worked in a parish on the border with Haiti, inhabited by Haitian cane-cutters. They refused to act for a church in which "everything smelt and tasted of gringos" guardian" of appalling toil, extreme poverty, total illiteracy, savage racism and severe repression.
The government decided to expel them from the country and the Church supported this decision. They moved on to Colombia and together with Lain, himself threatened with expulsion by Cardinal Concha Cordoba, they took refuge in a poor neighbourhood of
At that time, Pope Paul VI visited Colombia to exhort the masses "not to put their trust in the revolution". For Perez and his friends, the trip's only purpose was "to counteract the impact of Camilo Torres' choice on a Christian, mostly catholic people". "We were very worried that the church was acting as an instrument of ideological domination."
Fifty priests, meeting in what became known as the "Golconda Group" and led by bishop Gerardo Valencia Cano, launched a public challenge to the church hierarchy and the ruling class by declaring themselves ready themselves more and more to the different forms of revolutionary action against imperialism and the neo-colonial bourgeoisie".
They fused Camilo Torres' slogan that "the duty of every Christian is to be a revolutionary" with that of Fidel Castro that "the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution"
The three Spanish priests joined the Golconda Group. They soon became local leaders of the popular movement, filling the vacuum left by the leaderships of the social organisations which either sold out or were eliminated through the
One day it became clear that they had acquired a formidable capacity for mass mobilisation. The authorities decided to destroy the San Jose neighbourhood, a poor slum near Cartagena airport. The three priests called on the inhabitants of other poor neighbourhoods to come and help and led a confrontation which stopped the bulldozers, held off the police and the army and culminated in big and militant solidarity meeting. The strength of the mass protest forced a public consultation, with the presence of the mayor, the governor and counsellors, where the authorities reconsidered their
The following day the three priests were arrested. The secret police ordered their expulsion from the country. It was then that Manuel Perez and his two colleagues took an irreversible decision and communicated it to the Golconda group — to join the guerrillas. They were expelled from Colombia in April 1969, bit managed to make contact with the
They received guerrilla training in Cuba and that same year returned secretly to Colombia and joined the guerrilla group operating in the Magdalena Medio
In February 1970, the ELN announced publicly that Domingo Lain was now a member. "In accordance with the public nature of the priest's role in our society, have decided to fulfil my duty as a guide to the people by joining the ELN guer-
, he explained in his declaration which also expressed the convictions of Perez and Jimenez. "I have chosen the
International Viewpoint #309 March 1999 11
* Colombia socialist revolution because it is the only way of uprooting the causes of man's exploitation of man."
Lain denounced "the complicity of the Church in acting as a guardian and main pillar of this [exploitative] regime, thereby abusing the influence it exerts on the consciences of large numbers of the proletarian masses". With the guerillas
The guerrilla movement which Perez joined was very different from the one he had imagined. It had only 60 or 70 fighters and was unable to consolidate even a second guerrilla front. It lacked the most basic resources, and operated in a very difficult natural environment. It rigorously applied the principles of constant movement, vigilance and mistrust, often pushing its members to the very limits of human survival.
The urban network had been hit very hard. The trauma of a bloody factional battle still weighed heavy. First Jose Ayala, a member of the leading faction had been murdered by members of the rival faction in an obscure settling of accounts. Then three members of this rival faction, including Victor Medina Moron, the ELN's former second-in-command, were judged and shot under the false charge of plotting and enemy
The crisis was the result of political and tactical differences emerging in a framework where militarism and caudillo leadership ruled, with no space for regular debate or internal democracy. "To political problems, were put forward not political solutions, but military ones", Manuel Perez would later recall.
What's more, the ELN's commanderin-chief, Fabio Vasquez Castano, promoted an extremely "pro-peasant" line, which led to a ferocious "dictatorship of the peasantry" over guerrillas from urban backgrounds.
The internal regime was hierarchical and repressive. Human relations were very hard. For eight months Perez was submitted to a kind of test which he thought he would never be able to pass, physically, psychologically or morally, and which he later considered far harder than the circumstances had warranted.
Jose Antonio Jimenez, the oldest of the three priests, did not survive; eight months after joining the guerrillas he died of an unidentified disease. Contrary to Perez' expectations, the ELN remained silent about the specifically Christian character of Camilo Torres' commitment to revolutionary struggle.
As soon as he'd grown used to life in the guerrilla movement, Perez had to face something even more difficult. Whilst serving in a guerrilla commission headed by the ELN's second-in-command, Ricardo Lara Parada, he took part in a discussion amongst several guerrilla members in which criticisms were raised of the fact that "Ricardo lived in better 12 International Viewpoint #309 March 1999 conditions than the other fighters".
The guerrillas involved, including Perez, were accused of planning to split the ELN, murder Lara Parada, desert, and so on. They were judged and condemned
"Probably some influential opinions", said Perez, probably referring to the leaders of the Cuban revolution, "played a part in our sentences being reduced". He was expelled from the ELN, but in the end Fabio Vasquez agreed to let him rejoin the guerrilla
The ELN claimed that "the working class has been infiltrated by the cunning workings of bourgeois ideology; it raises only economistic interests, concentrates on struggling for limited demands and is backward in assuming the revolutionary process". Until this class manages to become "the fundamental factor" vanguard of the socialist revolution can only be "the peasantry, which has placed itself there without any prompting or leadership from the working class and which is the one which has armed itself with the proletarian ideology. This ideology is not the exclusive property of the working class; it is a great contribution to the cause of all the exploited of the world", and therefore the peasantry can take it on in its own right.
At the same time the ELN followed a militarist line quite alien to Camilo Torres' emphasis on mass organisation and mobilisation. It behaved as if the revolution could be, fundamentally if not exclusively, the work of a specialised apparatus, in this case a military one.
Nothing had changed since the time four years earlier when Torres had told Vasquez that he "saw much stagnation in the camps and no permanent work in the peasant areas and that "in his opinion, the guerrillas should never stop political work amongst the peasants"
Vasquez was totally opposed to "what others call 'mass political work?, which in reality is just an artificial transplant of failed trade-union, sectoral and reformist struggles from the towns into the countryside".
According to him real revolutionary political work consisted "fundamentally in armed actions which create consciousness and channel it, weaken the enemy and strengthen our own (guerrilla)
In 1971, a year in which the peasant movement in Colombia was radicalising, demanding "land without land-owners" and invading 645 ranches, the ELN leader declared such land invasions and expropriations to be useless and counterproductive, just like the "activities aimed at achieving better living conditions and wage increases" amongst the working class. He claimed that "these objectives, if achieved, far from bringing the masses closer to their strategic objective [which is the seizure of power], would distance them from it, by conditioning them to
Manuel Vasquez Castano, a man of greater political vision and with a deeper understanding of Marxism than his brother Fabio, questioned this orientation. This coincided with the beginning of an upturn in the workers movement. "[Manuel] said that in this country, with the developments going on, the vanguard of the revolutionary process was the working class; this was part of the classic discussion of who should be the vanguard in the building of socialism" recalls ELN leader Nicolas Rodriguez.
Manuel Vasquez pushed for the guerrillas to move from the agricultural frontier (areas of peasant colonisation in the forest) in Santander province towards the modern capitalist ranches of Antiochia province, and to begin to orient towards and recruit broadly amongst the agricultural labourers there, establishing links with the leaders of the workers movement in that department.
The ELN greatly extended its area of action. It developed much bigger military operations than before, like the simultaneous seizures, in January and February 1972, of the towns of San Pablo and Remedios and various other locations. It grew rapidly, reaching at one point 270 guerrillas.
But in the course of this over-rapid progress it committed some serious mistakes which the government took advantage of to mount a major counterinsurgency operation.
In October 1973 at Anori, the army wiped out a whole column of one hundred guerrillas led by the brothers Manuel and Antonio Vasquez, killing them along with dozens of fighters. Ricardo Lara deserted. Domingo Lain died in another clash.
Manuel Perez lost contact with the others and for 26 days managed through superhuman effort to make his way alone across the jungle. He spent two more months looking for the rest of the guerrillas and surviving off the solidarity of local peasants.
It was during this three month period that he finally broke with the idea of God which had served him up until then; from then on, he later confessed, "God for me became the people". Rebuilding
After the defeat, Fabio Vasquez could barely muster 80 fighters. He insisted on making someone responsible for the Anori disaster, singling our as scapegoats three leaders of the urban network, who were duly judged and shot.
He then travelled to Cuba for medical treatment. In his absence a balance sheet of his leadership was discussed, and he was dismissed. It was decided that he should remain abroad as an ordinary member, and that his position in the organisation should be decided in a democratic assembly. (Vasquez never agreed to attend such an assembly.)
The crisis in the ELN continued to
"By 1978, the worst year of our crisis, there weren't even forty of us guerrillas in the field, Manuel Perez later recalled. The fighters were distributed in two fronts, far separated from each other: it took several months of walking to communicate between the two.
It was in this period that Perez took responsibility for rebuilding the organisation, together with Nicolas Rodriguez Bautista, known as "Gabino". The latter had been part of the group of 17 peasants who in 1964, under Fabio Vasquez leadership, had founded the ELN. He'd been just 13 years old at the time.
Questions of political line began to be discussed, as did principles of organisation and leadership. They began to build collective leaderships and plan activities which would combine military command with internal political democracy, practical military experience with theoretical and political study, military action with mass political work, rural guerrilla struggle with political struggle
Amongst other things, Perez recalled, the organisation decided "to link itself much more closely to the natural organisations of the masses, in order to understand better their demands, respect their own rhythms, and give priority to their interests and struggles, rather than just seeing the armed struggle as something masses had to support".
The ELN recognised publicly that the executions carried out in the past had been grave errors. It rehabilitated those shot as revolutionaries.
From this painful experience Perez drew three conclusions. "Firstly, the humanisation of the revolution is a must; it may not always be achievable, but it is always the ideal. Secondly, public self-criticism by revolutionary organisations is the best way overcoming and learning from historic mistakes. Thirdly, it is fundamental to think of the value and dignity of human beings as individuals, and to try to get the right balance between this and their collective worth."
"The aim of the revolution and the new society is that life, mankind's most treasured attribute, should have value and be valued in all its dignity, and that the human being should be the centre of society. That is why, in so far as we can — in our lives, in our struggles, in the revolution and in the society we want to build - we should put an end to the death penalty. And that is why we should try to humanise our own guerrilla movement. The humanisation of the war should be the object of massive education amongst our own fighters."
The process of rebuilding lasted until 1983. Its success was due, at least in part, to three factors. One was the existence, in different towns and regions across the country, of various revolutionary political ircles (14 in Bogota, 8 in Medellin, etc.) which against all the odds, and not withstanding the apparent extinction of the ELN, continued to identify with it,
Another factor was the support of sections of the Christian left and grassroots church communities, supporters of liberation theology, for whom the ELN remained "Father Camilo and Father Domingo's gang".
A further element was the incorporation into the ELN of the Domingo Lain Guerrilla Front, which had emerged in Arauca province out of big peasant struggles and a mass movement which included several regional civic strikes.
The victory of the Sandinistas and the rise of the Central American revolution also gave a big boost to the rebuilding of the ELN
In September 1983, a collective national leadership was formed for the first time, and by democratic means. Manuel Perez and Nicolas Rodriguez were elected respectively as first and second in command - equivalent to political and military leaders — of the ELN.
Between then and the first national assembly in 1986, the organisation's numerical strength grew three and a half times. It reached the figure of 600 or 700 rural guerrillas distributed in four war fronts, each comprising ten guerrilla fronts, as well as four regional (urban) organisations. The military personnel made up about 25% of the total member-
In 1987 the ELN fused with an organisation of Maoist origins, thereby changing its name to Camilista Union -National Liberation Army (UCELN).
As it continued to grow and expand the radius of its political and military activity, the UCELN acquired a national profile. Manuel Perez played a prominent role in this, and in the strategic rethinking which was underway. Amongst the UCELN leaders, he was one of those who contributed most to establishing the principle that the development of the revolutionary struggle depends on "an ever greater role for the masses", and at the same time that the role of the revolutionary organisation in giving political leadership to this struggle, "grows in the same measure that the leading role of the masses increases". Marxism and Christianity
For many years the ELN had had a number of priests amongst its members, and for several years it had had a priest as its main leader. It enjoyed considerable support among Christians, and had an organised Christian section within it. But the situation of Christian members was still far from clear. Manuel Perez noted that in the guerrilla movement there wasn't enough room "to express your taith, to see yourself as both a believer and a Marxist", and that "although the policy is clear enough -that there is no contradiction between being a believer and a Marxist - it still hasn't been possible to break down the barrier of fear that prevents fighters from openly recognising their faith in front of the others"
This contradictory situation resulted from the fact that in the ELN "there were different levels, with a tradition of Christians taking part in the organisation, but
International Viewpoint #309 March 1999 13
* Colombia also of very dogmatic Marxist education". Many ELN fighters would argue that "if Marxism speaks of religion as the opium of the people, how can we accept the faith of our Christian comrades?" And "if we are trying to promote a scientific vision of the world, then we must be consistent and reject idealism from the word go".
This debate reached its culmination at the ELN's first national assembly in 1986. Perez remarked: "Once people could see how revolutionary Christians also fight against religion as magic, how they unmask the connections between the traditional church and capitalism, how they denounce the Vatican as the ideological instrument of imperialism, then that helps to put the argument in the right framework. Because for these revolutionary Christians the religion which is used to lull the people to sleep and serve capitalism is just as open to criticism as it is
"[We began to study] religion and the class struggle and to learn how the latter has operated within the church, in order to understand the issue not just in philosophical terms but in historical terms too. And we came to understand better the difference between the traditional church and the popular church in Colombia, because we could see that the ideological struggle was not just between the traditional church and the revolution, but also between the popular and the traditional churches. Another thing we want to do is to try and look at all these questions from the point of view of developing a more Latin American Marxism."
"We have to make Marxism begin to understand this reality, and we also have 14 International Viewpoint #309 March 1999 to make revolutionary Christianity understand that the guide of the revolution is not Christianity but Marxism."
Perez argued that Christians could be members of the ELN on an equal footing with Marxists, because — as a revolutionary organisation — what mattered was not whether the soul was mortal or immortal, but rather that imperialism and capitalism were certainly mortal.
As for his own attitude, he recognised that Christian motivation was a fundamental part of his revolutionary commitment. "All those things they told me belonged to the other world, I have brought into this one" , he said. "I came to the profound conviction that it was here and now, within our own history, that liberation and salvation had their
But he added: "Christianity is a motive, it is not the science of revolution. The science of revolution is Marxism." "For that reason we are not going to build a Christian organisation, nor a Christian society, but a Marxist-Leninist organisation and a socialist society."
Perez gave great importance to an idea floated long ago by Fidel Castro, that the revolution in Latin America needed the forging of "a strategic alliance between revolutionary Marxists and revolutionary Christians". However, he observed that even in Cuba we have to question the kind of education and instruction in Marxism-Leninism which has led people into harder and dogmatic positions, even though Fidel has remained open to Christians" because many people "were educated in the soviet school of what Marxism-Leninism was"
Explaining the position developed by the UCELN, Perez declared: "We should no longer be talking about a strategic alliance between Christians and Marxists in the revolution, but about a real unity" He believed this was one of the most important things the UCELN "had brought to the renewal of revolutionary ideas within Marxist organisations" Socialism, democracy and popular power
The fall of so-called "real socialism" has not undermined the UCELN's strategic direction towards national liberation and the building of socialism. "Both components are built into the character of our revolution and into our
", the UCELN insists. no doubt that the historic subject of the revolution is the proletariat" "the social class called upon to play the main hegemonic role in the Colombian socialist revolution".
On the collapse of the "Stalinism project" we can read the following in the press of the UCELN: "This is the end of a particular way of understanding socialism and trying to build it, a narrow version that sought to squeeze into a single model a body of ideas and a social project which are by nature diverse, complex and flexible, and which tried to convert that single model into a universal truth. This is absolutely the end of a way of thinking which saw the world mainly through the prism of a single nation and sought to direct the socialist movement in function of that nation's interests."
According to the UCELN, "this project implied a profound clash between socialism and democracy", whereas "the full democratisation of society, as well as being synonymous with socialism, may also be seen as the only guarantee a society has of making as few mistakes as possible, of correcting those it does make as quickly as possible, and above all of not becoming alienated from itself".
The result of that clash was catastrophic: "civil society ended up living by and for the state, by and for the party, by and for a line that was decided in the end by and for an elite which some called a state bureaucracy, others a ruling class of a new type, and so forth."
At the same time the UCELN recog nises that many of the deviations that occurred in the socialist countries and many of the injustices and calamities propagated in the name of socialism have also been present in our own social and political practice." But for the UCELN, "the deep crisis of socialism does not put in question the revolutionary road, in fact it frees it from myths and taboos"
It also "frees Marxism from the chains of dogma and schematism, revitalising its materialist dialectic" and "stimulating the creativity and originality of peoples who struggle to forge their own social and national destiny"
Amongst other dogmas the UCELN
helped to create the has rejected that of the single party. "The crisis of the socialist camp has shown us that for popular and socialist democracy it is healthier to have distinct political tendencies and proposals which, within a revolutionary context, compete for political and ideological leadership in the new society."
Perez insisted, both within the UCELN and in dialogue with the commanders and combatants of the FARC-EP, that "democracy is the essence of building socialism" , and that "to guarantee democracy in any future society, we have to begin building it here and now and promote it in the people's organisations that we help develop".
"The best thing is to begin building the new society here and now through the direct democracy of the people in economic development and the participation of the masses in the political decisions of the state." He explained that this was possible where the guerrilla forces and the mass movements exercise "municipal repeatedly argued that the left needs to rethink its. understanding of power, not as something that's there to be seized, like the Bastille or the Winter Palace, but as something that needs to be built from
This argument has informed their attitude to armed struggle, to participation in elections, and to the formation of a Zapatista political movement.
Shortly before his death, Perez commented that "to some extent we agree with the Zaptista comrades when we talk about building popular power and not waiting for the revolution to triumph before helping the people to organise their own self-management in whatever form they see fit.
"However we do not share [the other part of the Zapatistas' view], because as a part of the vanguard that we are, we do aim to play a part alongside the people in the seizure of power."
Towards the end of his life, Manuel Perez gave this reply to those who claimed that "socialism no longer has any relevance in Latin America" "We say it has more relevance now than it ever had. What we are aware of is that it will have to be a socialism particular to Latin America. Particular to our identity and our assimilation of Marxism-Leninism to the peculiar conditions of our reality.
"This means that we cannot copy anybody's models, and what's more we will have to be very careful to correct the mistakes which others have made in the building of socialism. One aspect we see as especially important is that of democracy. And socialism by definition defends democracy. That's why we raise this as our flag. That's why we have to work hard for direct democracy so that the people can participate in building socialism." * control" (and provincial and regional
Drop the debt!
control as well).
This was the policy adopted by the
Second Congress of the UCELN in
In preparation for the G7 (+1) annual summit, 19th to 21st of June 1999 in
December 1989. It decided that the
Cologne, Germany, the Brussels-based Committee for the Cancellation of the strategy of prolonged people's war had to
Third World Debt (COCAD) is collecting signatures for the following petition.
be above all a strategy for building popu-
"Popular power finds its edness of their counhighest expression in the destruction of the old state and the configuration of a
In order to make a fresh start possible, it is
But " it is essential from the very start to begin to develop the masses' vocation vital that reparation be made for the injustice for power, helping them to build their own autonomous forms of organisation whose payment is and creating forms of self-government, in direct relation with the building of the revolutionary organisation"
ed, nor were consul-
In the framework of "municipal control", the UCELN "seeks for the ted, nor benefited people themselves to set themselves up
A debt which has as the new municipal power", "for the been repaid many communities themselves to make their own decisions".
times over but which continues to grow day
At the same time, "in order to consoafter day. A debt for lidate this real popular power which is which those who made built in conditions of war where the the loans are as enemy is stronger than we are", the
UCELN also promotes a "combined struggle inside and outside the existing institutional spaces, within the strategy of
The text was originally written by the Argentine group Dialogo 2000 in the framework of the "Jubilee 2000" final paragraphs are by millennium to be one of justice and peace for all of humanity, and that our common home, the cosmos, be preserved. This is why we ask, in the spirit of be cancelled by the end of the year 2000. change by supporting
[To be signed by the citizens of indebted countries] We demand that those who govern our country, together with the leaders of other that are now used to foreign indebtedness, Social and Ecological people as a consequence of the Foreign [To be signed by the citizens of industrialized countries] citizens of indebted
We therefore call on the governments of
For example the intervention by the the creditor countries revolutionary forces and the mass moveto cancel these unpayment into bourgeois democratic instituable debts before the tions, through the election of mayors and local counsellors, must be combined with the building of new institutions of popular power, because "popular power this petition. With it, we are joining millions of persons in Latin
America, the Caribthat those who govern the resources that are now used to maintain the cycle of foreign indebtedness, so as to cancel the Social and does not exist without direct democracy those peoples who and self-management by the masses".
have been impoverished by them the means
The continuing validity of necessary for a dignisocialism fied livelihood, by
Right to the end of his life, Manuel
Perez saw the question of power as a fundamental question for all revolutions
The Zapatistas in Mexico have signed, believe that the start of the new millennium should be an opportunity to generate new hope for people now imprisoned by poverty due to the illegitimate indebtconsequence of the
Foreign Debt.
Return petition sheets to: COCAD, 29 rue Plantin, 1070 Brussels, Belgium
Email: cadtm@skynet.be
International Viewpoint #309 March 1999 15