The Same Coin

CARACAS, Venezuela: Manuel Marulanda, the guerrilla tactician whose rise from peasant origins to top commander of Latin America's largest rebel group was a mythical feature of Colombia's long internal war, died on March 26 in a mountainous hideout in the Meta department in central Colombia. He was believed to be 76 years old.

James Petras: Marulanda, unlike many better-known ‘poster-boy’ guerrillas, was a virtual unknown among the elegant leftist editors in London, the nostalgic Parisian sixty-eighters and the New York Socialist scholars. Marulanda spent his time exclusively in ‘Colombia profunda’, the deep Colombia, preferring to converse and teach peasants and learn their grievances, rather than giving interviews to adventure-seeking Western journalists. Instead of writing grandiloquent ‘manifestos’ and striking photogenic poses, he preferred the steady, unromantic but eminently effective grassroots pedagogy of the disinherited. Marulanda traveled from virtually inaccessible valleys to mountain ranges, from jungles to plains, organizing, fighting… recruiting and training new leaders. He eschewed tripping off to ‘World Forums’ or following the route of international leftist tourists. He never visited a foreign capital and, it is said, never set foot in the nation’s capital, Bogota.

--- I supported FARC as a people’s resistance movement in the ’60s and ’70s but they failed to obtain and sustain the support of the masses, and today’s generation of Farc-sters are thugs. They traffic drugs, run guns, kidnap, rape, murder. The elders are no longer freedom fighting heroes - but aging criminals, raising their young to maintain a lifestyle of jungle hegemony - by any means necessary. They are no longer a “resistance” but have become no different than those they fight against - and are very aware that the “left” in the US is simpatico.

The American "left" - always advocating non-violent movements at home yet praise and pay homage to violent rebellions abroad, although at home and abroad the "left" are fighting the same enemy, are they not? US government policy?

Petras does not mention FARC's execution of 3 US Indian (AIM) activists Ingrid Washinawatok, Lahene Gay, and Terence Freitason on Venezuelan soil in 1999 after they were kidnapped for ransom in Columbia.

No mention of why the "left" is against child soldiering yet 30% of FARC members are under 18, many under age 15.

The "left" romanticizing violence - "the ends justify the means" - the same b.s. the "right" uses to justify their crimes, but no surprise - America's left and right are both sides of the same coin.