I just got back from the offices of NACLA (North American Committee on Latin America), the oldest and most prestigious research center on Latin American politics in the US. I picked up a copy of the March/April 1998 NACLA Report, which was devoted to Chiapas and Colombia and titled "The Wars Within". It is interesting to compare the attitude taken there toward the EZLN and the FARC. The EZLN, with scant chance of overthrowing the Mexican state, is praised for its challenge to existing oppression, while clearly lacking the means to abolish it. On the other hand, the Colombian guerrillas, who do have the possibility of winning state power, are urged to give up their fight. Marc Chernik, who teaches at Georgetown University and is a member of the editorial board of NACLA, writes in the final paragraph of his article "The Paramilitarization of the War in Colombia": "But any negotiation will be, as Gabriel Garcia Márquez recently said, a negotiation among losers. All sides have lost in this war. The final question that remains to be answered is whether the outlines of a new Colombia might emerge on the heels of this tragic loss." Compare this with the attitude of 15 years ago, when NACLA championed the cause of the FSLN, FMLN and Guatemala's Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Activists in the United States had formed solidarity committees to win public opinion on behalf of the insurgencies, either in the field or in the case of Nicaragua, after having won power. What accounts for the shift in leftist opinion? Actually, it is dialectically linked to the defeat of the Central American revolution. In the aftermath of the defeat, illusions were fostered about the possibility of a "new" El Salvador rising up out of the ashes of a military stalemate. The FMLN/FDR assumed that justice could be achieved without the sort of structural changes that had taken place in Nicaragua. The model put forward was something like a leftist version of Costa Rica, rather than Cuba. In reality, a social democratic state was not even possible in Europe any longer, let alone in poverty-stricken and class-polarized Central America. As part of the overall project to put forward non-socialist solutions for Latin America, arguments on behalf of the need for "civil society" were advanced. This meant that rather than targeting the state in the old fashioned Leninist sense, the radical movement should build what amounted to counter-institutions such as NGO's, soup kitchens, land or housing squats, co-ops, etc. This was the core strategy of Jorge Castenada's "Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War" and was eagerly embraced by the constellation of left academics around NACLA. It is also the main argument of Roger Burbach and Boris Kargalitsky's "Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms." Interestingly enough, Kargalitsky seems to have drawn back from this strategy as indicated by his article in the new 1999 Socialist Register, which makes the case that the state remains the central and key institution for socialist politics. NACLA went so far as to advance this strategy as a possible way of transforming Cuba. When Castro cracked down on US-supported NGO's, NACLA chided him for not understanding the new realities of the marketplace and civil society. Ironically, while Castro seems adamant about defending the proletarian basis of state power in Cuba, he tends to be pessimistic about the possibilities of achieving it elsewhere. He told a conference of Latin American economists in 1998 that armed struggle was "a thing of the past." Meanwhile, the Colombian guerrillas go about their stubborn, antediluvian way. Paraphrasing the Paine-Webber commercial of years past, they seek to win power in the old fashioned way, by defeating the armed bodies of men defending capitalist property relations. The Colombian guerrillas seem to have very few friends because of this refusal to understand new realities. There certainly is a need for them to develop a network of well-informed partisans in the USA and Western Europe if the war in Colombia escalates, as it certainly seems destined to. The U'Wa incident is obviously related to this growing confrontation. Whoever is actually responsible for the deaths of the indigenous activists, they certainly will be used for only one purpose: to prepare the American people for an escalation, just as the "killings" of babies in a Kuwaiti hospital by Iraqi soldiers was used as a justification for all-out war in the Gulf. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
