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Mass protests in Colombia continue into second week amid deadly repression

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The excessive force used by the police and military reveals to the instability of the Colombian government, which only recently released its former leader from house arrest while he awaits trial. The nearly 20% sales tax exposes the economic failure of the U.S. financial and corporate empire backing the Colombian government. As the U.S. fails economically, propping itself up with the printing and handing out of money to the rich, this failure will take the most difficult forms in the allies of U.S. imperialism throughout the colonized world. South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and now Colombia have all experienced economic shocks that threatened the rule of the government. The U.S., having spent over $5 trillion fiscally on containing the fallout from the pandemic, now has $28 trillion in national debt, or 128% of GDP. This makes it impossible for the US to support even its most loyal allies except through the provision of weapons to suppress the people’s legal mobilizations with illegal force and attacks on human rights.

Gustavo Petro’s role in defending Duque and the police force shows the need for the establishment of a revolutionary party that will not cede control of the movement to defenders of the state. The people have a right to break from their dependence on the U.S. empire and organize the economy according to their own interests, not for the irrational accumulation of fortunes in the U.S., where they are not even welcome, and Western Europe. This means all compromises where the parties of the establishment hold on to the power should be off the table. Only the demand for the resignation of the old government should remain and the establishment of a new one based on elections that ban or severely limit the use of money from the U.S. and Europe in campaigns. A new constitution should finance all candidates publicly and require their programs to adhere to basic principles with regard to democratic rights and the redistribution of wealth and economic power from private holdings to public control by committees controlled by and representative of the working class.

Such a change will not find support in the PST, which has devoted its efforts to trade-unionism, the belief in obtaining contracts with capitalist class that the capitalist state will enforce. This position becomes impossibly absurd when considering that only 4% of Colombian workers belong to a union. The solution to the absence of political leadership depends not on winning over members of the PST but the construction of a new party within the working class and the students’ movement. This cannot happen as long as the SEP bureaucracy stands in the way of the organization of meetings and discussions guided by these principles.

When the dust settles, the confrontation between the people and the government will prove extremely costly for a poor society like Colombia. The costs will be born by the working class, but the real responsibility lies with the leadership of the SEP. When the revolution finally comes to power, they will suffer for their repression of Democratic Power on behalf of the state.