The chief of the FARC has announced that he will run for president of Colombia. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are the armed wing of the Colombian Communist Party. That candidacy was predictable, and so are the following three questions: Why did Timochenko change his stance? What will enable him to enter Nariño Palace? Why does he covet that post? But before answering them, we need to acquaint the reader with this personage.
His real name is Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, the descendant of a provincial, lower-middle-class family. He replaced it with Timoleón Jiménez as his nom de guerre but later Sovietized it as Timochenko, probably chosen as a not-so-secret homage to Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, an intimate friend of Stalin who died a few years before the Colombian arrived in Moscow to study (just a euphemism) at Patrice Lumumba University before traveling to Cuba to continue nonstudying on the island of Dr. Castro.
It is said he studied something related to medicine, a discipline in which he will probably be more dangerous and lethal than as narco-guerrilla, in spite of the humongous dossier compiled by columnist Héctor Gómez Kabariq, from whose writings I quote the following three paragraphs.
Gómez wrote:
“Timochenko’s record includes a great number of crimes, such as kidnapping, terrorism, homicide, rebellion, recruitment of minors, aggravated theft, damage to property, drug trafficking, extortion, conspiracy, sedition and association for criminal purposes. The top commander in chief of the guerrilla group has been the target of 117 arrest warrants issued by Colombian authorities.
“He has been sentenced to prison by several judges for multiple violent acts. All of Timochenko’s sentences add up to 164 years: one sentence for 34 years for the raid on Gigante (Huila) City Hall; a 25-year sentence for the assassination of Monsignor Isaías Duarte Cancino; a 27-year sentence for the kidnapping of a former Congresswoman in 2001; a 40-year sentence for a 1998 assault on a military base in the Orinoco Region, and a 38-year sentence for the assassination of Consuelo Araújo Noguera.
“The government of the United States offered a $5-million reward for his capture.
“As head of the FARC, Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri (‘Timochenko’) led the peace talks with the government of President Santos during the past four years in Havana, Cuba. This Sept. 26, [2016] in Cartagena, he will be in charge of signing the final peace accord with the Chief of State, in the presence of delegations from at least 50 world nations.”
Why does someone with such a biography renounce violence and decide to pursue the same objective by political means? Simple. Because he knew he had lost the war and it was a matter of a short time before the perfected drones used by the Colombian Air Force would exterminate the top ranks of the FARC. The violent deaths of Raúl Reyes, Mono Jojoy and Alfonso Cano, “retired” by the enemy’s bombardments, were the perfect augury of what awaited all the guerrillas, as war technology and military intelligence continued to improve.
What resources does Timochenko have to win the Colombian elections? Also simple. The narcodollars controlled by the FARC. They add up to a huge amount of money. The FARC have been called “the world’s largest drug cartel” and they’re very likely so. They will have enough money to “spread marmalade” — as bribery is known in Colombia — on any communicator or leader who accepts it. They will have (they already have) on their side the shrewd Cuban political operators — the same who carried Hugo Chávez to the presidency — and the entire leftist ideological camp, such as Podemos in Spain, Maduro and his 40 Thieves in Venezuela, and their cronies at the São Paulo Forum.
Why does he want to settle in Nariño Palace? He wont’ say so, because he’ll just denounce the huge deficiencies of Colombian society, but I suspect that few people ignore that Timochenko is not interested in alleviating society’s ills with honesty, investments, the market and private property, as the world’s happiest and most prosperous nations do, but in changing the sign of the disasters that afflict that country.
As a good Marxist-Leninist of the Cuban strain, he will transfer the existing wealth from the hands of the “oligarchs” to those of the cadres segregated by the mythical revolution (in reality a new oligarchy) in a process called “the formation of primary capital.” He will organize the diversion of the private production apparatus to collective units, mindless of the damage that that might cause to the economy and the people, while building a bridge of silver on which his natural adversaries will flee. At the same time, he will amend the Constitution to impose an indefinite re-election and overturn that bourgeois fairy tale about the separation of powers and the alternation of governance.
“That’s how the revolution and I are, madam,” an elderly Spaniard might say, paraphrasing a famous theatrical quote.
Published in Spanish by El blog de Montaner on Sunday November 5th, 2017
