The Saga of Emmanuel, pt. II

Yesterday as we were drinking a beer in a faux-English pub near a park in Bogotá, the girlfriend of an old friend called a conversation time-out to inform us that FARC had communicated a precise set of coordinates for the release of Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzáles. The release went through successfully this morning in Guaviare, and the two women, both apparently in good health, were flown to Venezuela to reunite with their families. Emmanuel remains in Bogotá under the custody of the ICBF.

A seemingly noble end to a flagrantly ignoble travesty. The release this morning took place without December’s international publicity fanfare, and Chávez’s remarks on the matter were decidedly more toned down this time around.

Is this, nevertheless, a victory for the Venezuelan president? The idea is that without Chavez’s intervention, FARC would never have considered releasing the hostages; Uribe’s presidency is unabashedly dedicated to eliminating any and all guerrilla presence via (largely US-funded) military pressure, and such a policy logically tends to exclude any sort of peaceful negotiation. FARC, on the other hand, has clearly been willing to deal with a leader like Chávez, whose politics are theoretically more aligned with those of a leftist guerrilla group.

The fundamental problem here is the assumption that FARC, behind their anachronistic rhetoric, has any sort of substantial ideology at all—for decades, their methods (which consistently and brutally victimize the very peasant communities one would think a Marxist guerrilla force would represent and defend) have rendered such a notion hard to believe. Nevertheless, the alternative offered by the Uribe regime is not much easier swallow: an authoritarian right-wing military campaign which, a) is explicitly aligned with the American imperialist project through dollars channelled toward the hopelessly misguided Wars on Drugs and Terror, and b) many of whose leading officials have been proven to hold strong ties with paramilitary groups whose methods are just as despicable as FARC’s—if not more, given their de facto (though illegitimate and clandestine) sanction from certain segments of the Colombian government, and by extension the U.S. policy that backs them.

Then, of course, there’s Chávez. And herein precisely lies the impossibly huge question posed by this mess of a situation and its apparently clean denouement: do the policy and rhetoric exemplified by Chávez constitute, after all, a valid, cohesive and actualizable Latin American left? The kind that, as many of us (perhaps a little starry-eyed) hope, could possibly transform the long-sorry state of an entire continent and add substantially to the international opposition to America’s overlarge combat boots? Chávez and many of his underlings and allies have often proven alarmingly hypocritical, cynically demagogic, and on occasion delusionally paranoid. Are these merely flaws we have to put up with on the road to such a unified left? And how much can we allow this hypothetical left to deal peaceably with groups like FARC, whose only real guiding principle is ruthless violence for the sake of moneymaking?

The problem exists locally as well as internationally: Colombia’s various left-wing parties united fairly recently into the Alternative Democratic Pole (Polo Democrático Alternativo, PDA, most often simply ‘El Polo’), which has successfully elected two consecutive mayors in Bogotá. Many left-leaning colombians I’ve talked to consider El Polo to be a brilliant idea with something of a shady execution: doubtless the effort to consolidate the Colombian left is indispensable, but many of its top representatives have shown themselves to be unproductively dogmatic and disappointingly unwilling to distinguish themselves and their principles from FARC’s.

Point being: beyond its obvious humanitarian worth, should we take the release of Rojas and Gonzáles to be a victory for Chávez over Uribe? And, by extension, a victory for the Latin American Left over the Latin American Right? The implications are many and complicated—the clearest is that ’left’ would thus be inalienably equated with Chávez and potentially even with FARC. Is this really what we want?

Kindly send hopeful and enlightening answers to   noriega [dot] david [at] gmail [dot] com