Colombia plays a vital role in the imperialist control of Latin America — especially now that, from Venezuela to Ecuador, there are signs of latent restlessness or open insubordination to los gringos. Thus the US and Europe have been working for some time on their "Colombia Plan": several billion dollars invested, with the "humanitarian" pretext of combating coca production, for the rearmament of the Colombian army to be launched, together with the paramilitary bands still in activity, against the evil plant, truly poisonous for imperialism, of the campesina rebellion, the real fuel of the guerrilla movement.
In the past few months there have been negotiations between imperialism and that movement. But in fact the imperialists have nothing to negotiate with the guerrillas. A "national reconciliation" based on a program of independent capitalism, a stop to privatization and agrarian reform (the program, that is, of the FARC) is unacceptable to the imperialists. If they have shown a certain "openness" toward such a prospect, through the policy of "dialogue" of the Pastrana government, it is just to play for time, to divide and weaken the guerrilla ranks. Aggression and "openness" form a lethal cocktail that aims at "peace agreements" like the ones in Salvador and Guatemala, which were so highly effective in blocking the anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation.
Also for the national-bourgeois anti-imperialist movement in Colombia the "calculation" is one of playing for time. Its "plan" is for a "New Colombia" that will become an interlocutor of the "international community" (the same community that attacked Iraq, Yugoslavia...), that will win the "nonbelligerence" of the imperialist countries while seeking to profit from their internal contradictions, especially the ones between the interests of the European and the interests of the North American bourgeoisie. But the "calculation" is in fact a profound miscalculation. Europe can have as many conflicts of interest with US imperialism as you like, but faced with a mass uprising, of which the campesina rebellion is a signal (and which threatens to spread: Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru...), that would destabilize the entire continent and its imperialist domination, Europe cannot but side with the US in the role of gendarme and repressor of the Latin American peoples and of their need for genuine national dignity and social liberation.
No, it is quite a different theater of action in which the anti-imperialist struggle has to make its stand, in spite of all the difficulties due to an international phase that is provisionally unfavorable to open revolutionary struggle: namely, the theater of the unification and unity of the exploited peoples of Latin America projected towards the proletariat of North America and of the entire world.
The European and North American proletariat can make a decisive contribution to the strengthening of the anti-imperialist struggle of the campesina masses and proletariat of Latin America, by helping them to free themselves of the illusion that it is possible to find the protection of a "more human" imperialism. And it can do so by struggling against the imperialist policies of its own states, be it when Western imperialism puts on the ferocious face of the "Colombia Plan" or when it puts on the "dialoguing" face of "openness" — for, indeed, both faces look exclusively to reaffirm the exploitation and oppression of the working masses of the Latin American continent.