INTERVIEW WITH FARC COMMANDER IVAN MARQUEZ

A PART OF INTERVIEW (TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH)

Q) For many, these blows, these deaths, leave to the FARC in difficult situation. There are several analysts who consider that this guerrilla almost is defeated militarily. Is in the certain thing?

Ivan Marquez:-They do not know any thing about FARC. They confuse with the reality and they are deceived with their own fantasies. The FARC is not an army of unexperienced soldiers. To these it happens to them what to Bolivar, who became conceited in the middle of the adversity. When aiming to FARC they are speaking from the attack to Marquetalia in May of 1964. In 44 years they have sent to all the plans and combat operations to annihilate guerillas, and they have not been able… First, the Plan LASO, abbreviation in English that means Latin American Operation of Security; the objective: to prevent the sprouting of the new Cuba in the continent, that was the intention of the Marquetalia Operation. Soon they unfolded the Sonorous operation that it looked to defeat Farc militarily in the Central Mountain range, but that did not consider the soldiers of Manuel. Later Centaur or Green House sent to the Operation, but the aggressors had to return with the tail between the legs to Tolemaida, where they waited for his North American mentors and instructors from them. These aggressions to him they followed administering extreme unction to like the Thanatos plans, Destroyer 1, Destructive 2, Plan Colombia; and parallel to these they untied the horror of the paramilitaries, criminal counterinsurgent strategy of the State that it looked for to destroy the social bases of the guerrilla through the massacres considered, the common graves and the chain saws. And now with the Plan Patriota designed by the strategists of the South Command of the United States, with the use of sophisticated military technologies, satellites, airplanes and unmanned apparatuses, a foot force that exceeds 4000000, cash and thousand of foreign advisers and mercenaries, with the “military aid” of Washington with tens of helicopters and 10 billion dollars in the last period, they aspire in a desperate effort to defeat to the insurgency and the popular displeasure. Neither the fire, nor the pumps of the combat operations of the oligarchies and the empire, nor the marches manipulated will manage to dis articulate to the resistance and the fight by a Bolivarian campaign of the new Colombia. The armed warfare in Colombia is effective and takes place because the political, economic and social problems that motivated it have disappeared. In 1984, with the Agreement in the La Uribe, we tried the fight by the electoral route, but the political alternative that we raised, the patriotic Union, was swept to shots. Five thousands were dead by the intransigencia of the santanderista regime that it presses to Colombia. For that reason now we fought clandestinely through Bolivarian Movement for the New Colombia. In FARC we are people of principles. We are brave Indians. They do not seduce to us with songs of sirens. We are ready to enter them the combat, with passage of winners, to the Ayacucho of the century XXI, to which we summoned all the towns of Our America. Paraphrasing Bolivar: we are like the sun; bringing forth rays throughout