The following statement is reprinted from the FARC-EP

Political Declaration: 
BOLIVIARIAN MOVEMENT FOR THE NEW COLOMBIA 

The Nation is Threatened 

Using the pretext of the crusade against the narcotics traffic, the Government of the US is widening its intervention in the internal affairs of Colombia and preparing conditions for an invasion. As part of its counter insurgency strategy, and with the approval of the domestic political class, it is trying to implement the so-called Plan Colombia in order to develop without restriction its imperialist neo-liberal policies that will sink our people even further into misery, condemning it to a future of more indignity, violence and social injustice. 

They are not satisfied with the terrorism the Colombian state has imposed as a conception and the practice for governing the country, a determining cause of the national crisis. Nor with the massacres carried out by the paramilitary death squads, which leave our countryside in mourning every day and which have caused the displacement of two million compatriots in the last few years, practices taught and promoted by the Yankees themselves in their specialized courses for business men, politicians and military commanders of our suffering country. 

The fact that in Colombia, thanks to this state policy, there is no real, legal opposition to the system because the official dirty war eliminated it with bullets, does not seem enough to them. This reality confirmed the armed revolutionary path as the only possible alternative in the struggle for the power exercised by the oligarchy, through which it has imposed its neo-liberal policies in service of big capital and the trans-national corporations, to the detriment of the country. 

The most productive state enterprises, which were built by the collective effort and wealth of all Colombians, continue to be privatized. This is being done through shadowy transactions in which the people have been the only loser. It had left them to the governments to administer, and these, criminally, have decided to sell them. 

Sectors and branches strategic to our development, such as energy, transportation, finance, iron and steel, communications, public health and education are being handed to private capital. This has caused tremendous levels of unemployment and the loss of our national independence and sovereignty as well. 

In spite of the growth of imperialist interference in the internal life of our country, of the military, paramilitary, political, economic and social violence that the state exercises in every way against the popular sectors and of the profound corruption of the ruling class, the FARC-People's Army persists in the pursuit of political solutions to the Colombian crisis. 

Militarists of all tendencies have concentrated their efforts in order to exhaust the political possibilities for the dialogues process we are developing in San Vicente del Caguan. They aim to close the paths for the non-violent resolution of the conflict. But since the longings of the national majorities for democratic peace are much greater, the Dialogues Table is proceeding. 

For this very reason, and as evidence of the broad perspectives we are looking toward, we have decided to reinforce our delegation at the talks to make that of the FARC-EP equal in number to that of the government. 

We are certain the country will understand our interest in deepening the process, in tying the talks closer to the concrete problems being experienced by the various sectors of the nation, and that among us all, we will be able to progressively raise the quality of the Dialogue Table, elevating its part in the civilized transformation we require in order to find the paths toward the New Homeland. 

To complement the tools that would permit us Colombians to continue opening these paths, this coming month of April we are launching the Bolivarian Movement for the New Colombia as an organization which under the leadership of the FARC-EP will unite all those who are looking for the end of state terrorism, the injustices, the inequalities, unemployment and humiliation in the face of imperialism, by way of political action and from the trenches of clandestinely that would protect them from paramilitary barbarity. 

In order that Colombians can express their preferences at the local level, we shall not interfere in the October elections of mayors and municipal councils. We shall work for it to be popular assemblies that choose the civic candidates and programmes to be executed and that the communities be the ones who oversee the administrative initiatives that will prevent quarrels and corruption. And for certain, we will work for a situation in which the population itself rejects the electoral activity of the usual corrupt politicians, in each locality of Colombia. 

We call upon the Yankee government to quit interfering in the internal affairs of our country, to cancel its criminal and warmongering PLAN COLOMBIA which will only increase the conflict, transforming it into a war of national liberation. If it is really interested in eliminating the narcotics traffic as the cancer it is for all humanity, we exhort it to LEGALIZE the consumption of narcotics and thus cut out this shame of contemporary society from its roots. 

We call upon you to take up the initiative that the external debt of our country be pardoned and that we be given a period of twenty years to utilize these resources for the reconstruction of our battered society. Let it not attempt to exercise in Colombia the role it has played as policeman of the world, because the whole nation will rise up to defend its dignity. 

We call upon all the Colombians to strengthen their struggles for democracy, sovereignty, social justice and the political resolution of the conflict from which we are suffering, since it is only the pressure of the majorities in the streets and hamlets of the whole country that will make possible the construction of the New Colombia we long for.

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army FARC-EP 

Plenum of the Central General Staff 

"With Bolivar, for Peace and National Sovereignty" 

Mountains of Colombia, March, 2000.