Latest News on the FARC in Colombia

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Here are some of the latest updates in the war the FARC is waging against the fascist, criminal oligarchic dictatorship that has always ruled Colombia. Please note that this blog supports the FARC's campaign to the hilt. The system in Colombia is shit, and it needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth.

September 22: An Ecuadorian patrol occupied a FARC base along the border with Colombia, setting off a firefight in which 1 soldier was wounded.


October 8: The Ecuadorian Defense Minister noted that the border area of Ecuador and Colombia is is very thick with FARC guerrillas, which is amazing considering that the group is on the verge of collapse and defeat.


October 8: A force of 30 soldiers waded into a minefield in Barbacoas municipality in Nariño Department. 8 soldiers died in the ensuing explosions. Through August, the FARC, despite tottering on the edge of collapse, has somehow managed to kill 70 Colombian soldiers with landmines.

Barbacoas municipality in Nariño Department. This department borders on Ecuador.


Nariño Department in Colombia. The FARC is very active in this area along the border with Colombia.

October 12: The FARC bombed two small hotels in Neiva, a city in the south of the country, killing 1 person and wounding 12 more. The motive for the attack was not known.


October 14: A community organizer was assassinated by paramilitaries while participating in a community meeting in Curvaradó in Choco Department. Walberto Hoyos Rivas was a community leader for two Afro-Colombian communities in the Bajo Atrato region of Choco Department.

Chocó Department in Colombia. This area has a large population of Afro-Colombians and there has been fierce fighting here for a long time. The fighting probably started in 1993 when the EPL, A Maoist force, appeared. Since then, paramilitaries have taken over much of the province, but obviously, they haven't helped anyone.

In March, 2007, it was reported that 50 kids starved to death here in less than three months. This is some of the richest land on Earth, but most of the population lives in horrible poverty. Most of the land is controlled by a tiny, murderous elite who are always seizing new peasant lands, using the Colombian military and the paramilitaries as their enforcers.

There is 400 inches of rain here, making this area the rainiest lowland on Earth. Nevertheless, the capital of the Department, Quibdó, has no water supply. The population here is mostly Afro-Colombians and Zambos (Black and Indian mixed race)

He led groups that opposed armed seizures by the fascist Colombian military of peasants' land by rich scum in order to convert peasant farms into palm oil plantations and cattle ranches. If peasants oppose the armed seizure of their lands, this is what happens to them.

People here wonder why I support the FARC. This is why. There is no space for democratic opposition to the murderous Colombian elite. If you go against them, you may just die. Under those circumstances, the entire unarmed Left may as well just take up arms instead of waiting for the army to come out and kill you.

Furthermore, this is why the FARC even exists in the first place. If the government and the oligarchy didn't run around murdering people who went against, the FARC would never have needed to take up arms in the first place.


October 15: A private helicopter carrying a commander of the Army's 8th Mobile Brigade went down during an operation against the FARC in Tolima Department. 4 soldiers, including the commander, were killed. The helicopter was apparently shot down by the FARC.

Tolima Department in Colombia. Large agriculture is big here, in particular large plantations.

October 16: Ecuadorian forces carried out raids on FARC camps in Buena Vista and along the Putumayo River in Sucumbios Province. Guerrillas abandoned the camps and fled across the border to Colombia. The Ecuadorians may be doing this because Colombia is threatening them over the presence of FARC camps in Ecuador.

Sucumbios Province in Ecuador. Long a FARC haven. My understanding as of a couple of years ago was that most of the peasants in this region supported the FARC, but I don't have any recent data.

October 19: FARC Guerrillas passing a military checkpoint in La Momposina in the department of Guaviare on a motorcycle threw explosives at the soldiers as they rode by, killing 3 and wounding 15 more. Guaviare is swarming with FARC guerrillas, which is amazing considering that the organization has been decimated and is on the brink of defeat.

Guaviare Department in the jungles of Colombia, swarming with nearly-defeated FARC guerrillas hiding behind just about every bush. I believe there is a lot of coca growing and cocaine production in this department.

October 20: Reports indicate that the FARC has actually made alliances with some of the demobilized paramilitary gangs which were used as death squads to carry out the government's dirty war against the Colombian people.

A number of new organizations have sprung up in the wake of the demobbing of the paramilitaries, but the FARC has entered into nonaggression pacts with some of them, such as the "Don Mario" organization and Pedro 'Cuchillo' Olivero Guerrero's gang, while waging war on others, such as the Águilas Negras.

The fact that pacts are being made with some of these new paramilitaries shows that they are more interested in control of drug trafficking than anything else.


October 30: An excellent article by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), Colombia’s Political Horizon: The Rise of a New Left, notes the rise of a new leftwing political party in Colombia, the Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA, or Polo).

The PDA somehow managed to get 22% of the vote in the last Presidential election, which is amazing for a country in which leftwing candidates are typically murdered like flies. The party's ideology ranges from moderates to hard Left. Some demobbed guerrillas from the ELN are reportedly participating in the party.

In Bogotá, the country’s capital, PDA mayoral candidate Samuel Moreno defeated the Urubista candidate, so the PDA now controls the capital city itself.

Uribe's support is high but thin. 80% of the population lives in poverty, and Uribe has deep ties to the murderous oligarchy that has always run the country, including personal ties to the paramilitary death squads.

He has run on a security first ticket, and he has indeed pursued the war with the FARC vigorously. The FARC is now under the worst pressure that any Latin American guerrilla group has ever been under and they have suffered some serious blows.

As representative for the murderous elite, of course, Uribe has not and will never do anything to improve the shitty lives of the overwhelming majority of Colombians.

When he ran for office, Uribe formed a new political party, splitting off from the Liberals and Conservatives, two oligarchy-based parties that hate each other, despite being almost identical ideologically. He played off the fact that people are sick and tired of these corrupt, horrible and decrepit parties.

Uribe was elected by a wide margin in the last election, but 75% of Colombians didn't even bother to vote. Political surveys are done by phone, and most rural Colombians don't even have one. So a vast section of the electorate has nothing whatsoever to do with national politics.

The Polo has a Leftist platform similar to that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The Polo has been making inroads in devastated slums that no major candidate would ever think of entering.

The Polo also has a good approach on the insurgency. Their idea is apparently with a Polo government in power, the FARC would probably disarm or declare a ceasefire and go into electoral politics. I think that analysis may be correct. Electing the Polo may be the best way to end this long civil war.

Great article - highly recommended! Finally, some good news to come out of this tragic country.

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Help Fight Anti-Semitism!

Click to enlarge the cartoon and read the text easier.

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Paper Adds Support to Aryan Invasion Theory

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The notion of an Aryan Invasion that occurred 3,500 years ago in India had shaped the physical and religious landscape of the country is a controversial one, but it is steeped in Indian socio-cultural politics. Though it is uncontroversial outside of India, a huge debate has heated up inside India.

On the one side are the Dalits and their allies. The Dalits claim that they were the original Indians and practiced some sort of a nice, Utopian religion. I don't know if it was Goddess worship, but I guess it was something like that. The Dalits really hate Hinduism, because Hindus have decided that Dalits are born and doomed through life to be lower than whale shit, and that's at the bottom of the ocean.

So the Dalits say that these Aryans (White folks) invaded down from the steppes to the north and west (possibly Tajikistan or around Iran) and conquered a large part of India. They brought with them Hinduism and caste. They made themselves the lighter Brahmin caste and made the darker folks lower castes, and the darkest of all were made into Dalits. So the Aryan invasion started the whole mess.

Hindu nationalists (Hindutvas) love their Hindu religion and feel that it can do no wrong, so they dislike this Aryan invasion theory. Their whole line is that there was no Aryan invasion. Hinduism was native to India and was not some wicked religion brought by evil lighter-skinned dudes. This theory is also very popular with Brahmins, almost all of whom support caste, no matter what they tell you.

White nationalists, some high caste Indian racialists and Afrocentrists all support the Aryan invasion theory. White nationalists feel that there are two races in India - light-skinned cool guy "Aryans" in the north who are smart and get everything done in India, to the extent that anything gets done there, and darker Dravidians, who are apparently inferior muds or something.

In reality, there are just Indians of varying shades. The ones towards the northwest to tend to be more European-looking and lighter, and the ones heading to the south and east from the northwest to tend to get darker and more Dravidian looking. However, there are plenty of dark-skinned North Indians with varying degrees of Dravidian features, and in the south, there are a lot of lighter folks with more European features.

The "Aryans" and "Dravidians" have gotten so mixed in over 3,500 years that these categories no longer make much sense, except to idiots. In which case, they are encouraged to continue using them.

High caste Indian racialists go along with this, and hang out in White nationalist fora trying to convince White nationalists that funny looking light-skinned Indians are really just White people too, albeit with patchouli oil and a taste for curry. White nationalists are dubious about admitting wogs into their midst of their White purity.

Afrocentrists like this theory because they moronically think that Dravidians are Black folks. Except that they are not. Actually, all Indians are pretty closely related and are very distant from Africans - they are no closer to Africans than anyone else on Earth. Any resemblance to Africans is just convergence, genetic drift or coincidence.

Well, India was populated by all these really cool Indian Black folks and then evil White dudes came in, brought an evil White Supremacist religion called Hinduism, and cruelly imposed it on the darkies.

In the midst of all of this swarming intellectual idiocy, it falls to the scientists to add some sense to the discussion.

This interesting paper (available on this blog here) adds to the evidence for an Aryan invasion.

They did find that higher-caste folks tended to be lighter than lower-caste Indians, but that was just a trend. There are light-skinned low-caste Indians in the northwest and many of the Brahmins of South India are quite dark.

They also found a trend for lighter skin and more European features and genes towards the northwest and darker skin, more indigenous features and more Asian genes and one moved to the south and east. The paper felt that they had evidence for a large introgression of European-looking peoples maybe 3000-4000 years ago, though things have gotten pretty mixed up since.

Other papers studying the genetics of India have concluded Indians have been evolving, more or less in situ without a lot of outside inputs, for 15-20,000 years (call it 17,000 years). The result has been this endlessly varying type we call the East Indian. And where did the Indian stock come from prior to 17,000 years ago?

The authors were not sure, but they felt that the seed for the stock that started to grow the modern Indian tree came from the Middle East 17,000 years ago.

India, along with North Africa, the Caucasus and the Middle East, is also one of main staging grounds for the evolution of Caucasians and proto-Caucasians from 39,000-52,000 years ago. In particular, there was a movement out of India to North Africa 30,000 years ago which probably helped to create the Berbers.

There are also other, lesser known influences on the people of India and Pakistan. The Mohajirs in Uttar Pradesh are heavily Persian and Arab. Former Pakistani President Musharaff is a Mohajir, so his background was mostly Arab and Iranian.

Mohajirs are the Muslims that fled India to Pakistan during the bloody partition in 1947. They have since suffered a lot of persecution in Pakistan and are not all that well-liked there. They have set up their own patronage system, along with patronage political parties, that benefit them and only them.

We see an interesting thing in the far western states of Haryana and Rajasthan. Possibly 50% of the population of Haryana and probably all of Rajasthan is related to Scythians from 1,500-2,000 yrs ago. The Scythians probably the Ossetians of today. Long ago, the Ossetians were known as the Alans, horse-riding nomads of the Central Asian steppes.

There are some theories that try to connect to the Alans to Japan, especially to the Caucasian-appearing Samurai caste, in an invasion centuries years ago. This rests on similarities between Alan names and legends and those of the Samurai. At present, the Alan-Japanese theory remains little more than a controversial hypothesis.

The Caucasian appearance of the Samurai class is probably due more to their Ainu roots than to any Alan invasion.

Even today, the Japanese ruling class looks different (some say, more Caucasian) than the rest of the Japanese, who are closer to the Yayoi, rice-farmers from Korea who invaded 2,300 years ago and conquered the island, displacing the Ainu. The Ainu, despite superficial Caucasian appearances, are actually anthropologically Australoids close to Aborigines. Genetically, they are Asians.

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Awesome Pics of October 2007 California Fires

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The fires in California last October 2007 were historic. 1,500 homes, 500,000 acres were burned, 9 people died, and 85 more were injured, including 85 firefighters. Here are some of the more spectacular pictures of the fires.

An incredible photo of Mount San Miguel burning during the Harris Fire on October 23, 2007. I was following all of these fires closely and I remember as this wall of flame charged down Mt. San Miguel towards the homes below. This horrible fire burned 206 homes and 252 outbuildings and damaged 253 structures. It killed 5 people and injured 55 more, 34 firefighters and 21 civilians. What an incredible fire. Those flames must be 100-200 feet high.


This photo still creeps me out. It reminds me of some popular horror movie like Friday the 13th. I keep expecting Freddy to pop out and start roaming the streets. This photo was taken in Irvine, California, and the fire is the Santiago Fire. The wall of smoke is so vast it seems to have blotted out the sun altogether. Awesome photo. I'm not sure when this was taken.


Another strange and very creepy photo. A number of fires were burning in and around Santa Clarita northeast of Los Angeles at the time that this photo was taken on October 21, 2007. The fires with the halos around them almost look like UFO's. The homes in front lit up by street lights adds to the creepy effect.


A strange photo of the Santiago Fire taken on October 23, 2007. The Hellish-appearing flames of the fire seem to loom in the background, while another strange line that looks like headlights on a distant freeway burn closer to town. The photo was taken from Aliso Viejo, with Lake Forest in the foreground.

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Maoists Are Ruling Nepal

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated December 7:

The news has been pretty confusing for a long time coming out of Nepal. The Nepalese Maoists laid down their guns and gave up armed struggle for a variety of reasons, after a brutal civil war in which 13,000 people were killed, 10,000 of them by the security forces.

The Maoists decided to try to seek power by peaceful means. They seem to have won about 1/3 of the vote in the nation's first real democratic elections. They got into power, apparently in a coalition with some other parties.

They are now part of a ruling coalition in Nepal. One of the first things this new government did was to get rid of the Nepalese monarchy. The next agenda was to call for a Constituent Assembly, apparently in order to rewrite the Constitution. This was their program toward the end of the war - an end to monarchy, a constituent assembly, a true multiparty democracy with the right to dissent.

I've been reading quite a few interview with these guys, especially with their leader, Prachandra. He has taken the position that Marxists need to toss out Stalin, Lenin and even Mao, or at least not follow them to the letter. He says that they all had some good ideas too, but Marxism has moved beyond them. In particular, he takes the fascinating position that modern Marxists should support full democracy.

His argument is that in Nepal, the Maoists' program will be so popular that they hope to get re-elected over and over. It is true that this party has managed to get huge support on the ground. He also says that socialism has to be completely democratic, with civil liberties for all.

One of Prachandra's arguments is that with the world in such a death grip of imperialism these days, Communists have to adjust themselves to that reality and try to make some sort of peace with imperialism, at least in order to survive.

This has caused quite a rift in the International Communist Movement. Most non-Maoists haven't had much to say about it, but the debate in Maoist circles has never quit. There are supporters of the CPN-M and opponents of them.

The opponents take the line that the CPN-M should not take part in parliamentary politics ("parliamentary cretinism", according to Lenin) and instead should have a dictatorship of the proletariat and a people's republic. Prachandra seems to take the position that the dictatorship of the proletariat is through.

If it really is over, we can say goodbye to some of the harshest criticism of Communists for being cruel and wicked dictators who denied basic civil liberties and deliberately killed millions of people. I feel this is an albatross off the neck of the movement. Capitalism does such a great job of killing people as it is. Why should Communists be killing anyone once they get into power. Leave the killing to the capitalists. They do it so well.

The CPN-M seems now to have split into two lines - a hardline faction wanting to go straight to a people's republic (And dictatorship of the proletariat?) and the more moderate faction surrounding Prachandra and his followers.

Prachandra has made some disturbingly pro-imperialist statements, including saying he wanted to work with the World Bank and the IMF. But maybe in today's Nepal, if you blow off the World Bank and the IMF, you are screwed.

The people around Prachandra also want a positive relationship with China, and have taken tours to China to see Chinese socialism (or socialism with Chinese characteristics) in action.

The hardline Maoist position that China has reverted to capitalism is not correct. Chinese villagers still live much better than Nepalese villagers, and the differences are in large part due to the achievements of Chinese socialism. The countryside still retains a cooperativist and collectivist nature, and in general, private ownership of farmland is not yet allowed, although this may be about to change.

This article from a couple of years ago shows us just how much the Maoists have achieved in Nepal in the course of their revolution.

At the time, CPNM controlled 80% of the countryside in the country. The rural situation is dire because most Nepalese are cut off from trade, schools, hospitals, mostly due to the lack of roads. The monarchist regime in Nepal has had a century to build roads in the country and they have completely failed.

In an extremely sexist nation, the Maoist army had a very large number of female fighters - 40% of PLA was female. The All-Nepal Womens Association (Revolutionary) - has 2 million women members. The situation for women in Nepal is horrible -women cannot own land or vote, die 13 yrs sooner than men, and are routinely trafficked as sex slaves to India at age 10.

Prior to the revolution, land could not support the people, but due to the changes instituted by the Maoists, now it does. Previously, men had to migrate to other areas to work at day labor to survive.

The party has placed solar panels in many villages to wire them up for electricity, and has set up seven party radio stations that broadcast in different languages. Language rights is one thing that Communists have generally pushed better than most groups.

Nepali is the language of the feudal upper class (yes, Nepal still has a feudal to semi-feudal land tenure system) and languages other than Nepali are banned in Nepal for official purposes such as education. The Maoists have instituted mother tongue education and literacy classes. Literacy figures in Nepal are horrible - below 50%, much lower figures for women and in rural areas.

It's pretty amazing that here we are in 2008, and a Maoist Communist Party is leading the government of a country after a successful revolutionary war. They have re-evaluated the many long-held Marxist tenets and are calling for a radical re-evaluation in Marxist thinking. Here's hoping they succeed.

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