Sureshot’s last death

Monday 9 June 2008 23:37 COT

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This time was for real, and on a bed. In the past, the newspapers’ headlines held a wake for him 18 times, in step to military prayers, but he ran away every one of them. From Marquetalia to Venezuela, this man with sallow look, who Pastrana made Caguán’s Star, always mocked death.

They say everything started with the theft of some chickens and a cow. The campesino did not forgive the conservatives to have taken all his patrimony away. And later, when he defended the Lleras and the Santos families carrying a rifle, he learned that as they were killed in the mountains, the Liberals were dying… of laughter, with the godos (the Colombian “tories”).

Then the Marquetalia bombing came, the first time he was killed. He ran away, with 47 men, through the sheer cliffs. President Valencia’s army did not follow them. Who cared about a bunch of nobodies who were useless even for death. False reasoning. This was not the time of the pájaros and the chulavitas but the ones of the Cuban Revolution.

There is nothing more dangerous than a dream came true, because you start to believe in miracles. The pious fellows can do anything and Marulanda believed the story. Since everything was possible in the 1960s, the FARC were born, followed by the ELN and the EPL, to seize the power using bullets and Cuban recipes.

What happened next is enough known. Guerrilla warfare, permanent state of siege, an inept army, power partition, retrograde rural and urban elites, a backward, excluding country buried by corruption, and a guerrilla group growing up from extortions to the transnational companies and alliances with drug-trafficking.

But it was not until the peace conversations during the Belisario Betancourt’s administration that Colombia knew the man who was going to become one of her worst nightmares. The man with the towel appeared as the FARC’s chief and was simple and direct with the media. In the construction of the new country they should be counted on. Ingenuity or trick? The truth was the war won again and political paths were closed with the extermination of the Patriotic Union.

Marulanda saw his empire grow. He expelled mayors, killed councilmen, kidnapped people, seized towns, murdered civilians, destroyed barracks, governed, enacted laws, become the top drug lord, befriended presidents, allied himself with internationalist movements, supported political candidates, infiltrated the State…

His guerrilla grew so much, he handled so much money that he ended corrupting himself. There he started to lose. Kidnapping helped a lot. And to top it all, his crimes were so many that he ended strengthening and legitimating his enemies. With the paramilitary militias, Colombia changed. Everything became a justification to defeat this guerrilla, trapped in its own decadence.

Thanks to Marulanda and his degraded organization, the majority of the Colombian people rallied around one of the most corrupt administrations in history, buyer of consciences, protector of paramilitaries, protector of the big fortunes. Thanks to the FARC the democratic left is demonized and we’re preparing for the second re-election of an exclusionary regime which with every step destroys the legitimacy of the State.