Colombia’s Foreign Ministry responded to the recent Israeli military campaign in Gaza by expressing “concern over terrorist acts” and “solidarity with the victims of these actions.” But the terrorist acts it condemned did not include Israel’s 11 days of airstrikes against a captive, mostly refugee population crowded into a densely populated strip, while its solidarity was reserved only for the 12 Israelis killed, not for the 248 Palestinians.
That was no surprise though, because Israel and Colombia are two peas in a bellicose pod, engaging in the United States-backed state terrorism known as the War on Terror. Israel and its allies reserve the “terrorist” label for Palestinians, who, as we know, have been subjected to 70-plus years of land theft, ethnic cleansing and massacres. In Colombia, the “terrorists” have traditionally been members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – the left-wing guerrilla movement formed in the 1960s in response to obscene economic inequality and authoritarian tyranny – although the term is quite flexibly applied to pretty much anyone opposed to a right-wing government.
Like in Israel, land theft and the forced displacement of Indigenous communities is also a theme of the Colombian political landscape. The survival of campesino, or small farmer, communities has tended to complicate corporate plunder and other profitable endeavors in resource-rich areas. Many years ago, I visited the persecuted peace community of San José de Apartadó in northern Colombia. The community co-founder María Brígida González – whose 15-year-old daughter Eliseña was killed in her sleep in 2005 by Colombian soldiers who portrayed her as a FARC militant – surmised that the purpose of such operations was to “sow terror” in order to clear the land and facilitate resource exploitation. READ MORE AT subtext, by AJE+
