Committee for Solidarity with Colombia/FARC-EP P.O. Box 21564, 1850 Commercial Drive Vancouver, B.C. Canada V5N 4A0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW YEAR'S MESSAGE FROM THE CENTRAL GENERAL STAFF, FARC-EP To all Colombians we send a warm New Year's greeting and our optimistic resolve to persevere in the pursuit of non-violent and political solutions to the national crisis. First among the challenges the country must face during 2001 is the defence of our national sovereignty threatened by the imperialist Plan Colombia and the neo-liberal impositions of the INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND. Second is the need to expose and defeat STATE TERRORISM which, by means of the paramilitary dirty war, is trying to intimidate the people, rob its conquests and divert it from its democratic struggles for better living conditions. Convinced as we are of the necessity of finding solutions to the crisis, we are persisting in the dialogues process at San Vicente del Caguan. But we also understand the need to make it consistent: we insist in demanding that the national government produce actions and strategies against the paramilitary barbarity, in accord with the constant assertions of President Pastrana and the conversations he held with Commandant Manuel Marulanda. On Jan. 24, 1999, we provided the national government with a list of military personnel and civilians connected to Para-militarism but to date there has been no concrete response to this information. The reform of Military Criminal Justice with respect to forced disappearance and genocide has been ineffective since the mechanisms of the paramilitary facade have already been created and they claim the official dirty war as their own deeds. What happened recently in Putamayo and Valle de Cauca, when soldiers disguised with masks massacred the civilian population and took credit for their crimes in the name of paramilitarism, testifies to this official conduct. In the meantime, and after the status conceded to it by the Minister of the Interior, paramilitary barbarism has continued its infamous genocidal march under protection of the military High Command, the political bosses of the traditional parties, the leaders of the business associations, the superstars of the national Congress and the flattering collaboration of the big national media. Since paramilitarism is a structural policy of the Colombian state, we are demanding transparency and concrete action. We are not just asking for minor statistics about non existent squabbles with the armed forces, nor the list of hit men detained in military custody and the prisons. We sustain our decision to await unequivocal stances, concrete results and definitive anti-paramilitary strategies on the part of the government, in the same terms of the public communiqué of November 12, 2000. We are convinced that President Pastrana will make a timely response to this concern which is shared by the majority of Colombians. The FARC-People's Army call upon those Colombians who long for a democratic peace to struggle for a political solution to the conflict in the coming year and reject the neoliberal measures, like the miserable minimum wage approved in shameful accord between union leaders and bosses, the announced privatizations of more public enterprises and the new taxes, measures that are heaping poverty onto the workers. We call upon them to repulse, with struggle in city and countryside, the yankee military presence on the soil of our homeland. We call upon them to denounce and punish those corrupt individuals who take possession of the national budget for personal benefit. We call on them to prevent the new war legislation against the popular movement, announced by the President. We call on the people to join the alternative political Bolivarian Movement to continue strengthening the foundations of the New Colombia, worthy, sovereign and socially just. CENTRAL GENERAL STAFF Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - Peoples Army FARC-EP Mountains of Colombia, December 2000
