Painting composition with flags and faces of Latin American heroes, leaders, and defenders of the idea of the Patria Grande. Photo: Liceo del Sur/File photo.
By Iván Márquez — Jul 24, 2023
240 years after the birth of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, as a tribute to the hero who—in this hemisphere and in other latitudes—fought for human dignity and respect for the free self-determination of peoples, we share these words on continental unity and the Bolivarian geopolitical strategy.
The time is coming to define the destiny of Our America; to finish what has been started, following what was written in the pages by the Liberator with his own hand. The end of the war is nearing, the great battle not concluded by Bolívar: that of continental unity.
For two centuries, we have suffered the tyranny of the oligarchies of the continent and the shackles of the new colonial slavery, especially the slavery of the mind with which the United States intends to plunder us and dominate us as a submissive herd, without protests or popular revolts.
It was an extraordinary idea of the Liberator to place unity as the determining factor of his geopolitical strategy, because without it, a power cannot be configured: a material and spiritual force that turns Our America into a balance between the north and the south, into a respectable force that, based on love for humanity, deters all attempts by anachronistic empires to subjugate and oppress peoples at any latitude, wherever they may be, even at the ends of the earth.
We need—like the air, to survive—to accelerate the collapse of the unjust, slave-owning, and inhumane unipolar world, imposed by Washington and world capitalism.
We have to clear with our own hands the clouds that obstruct the vision of the new horizon of multipolarity, of a new order based on respect for international law, the free self-determination of peoples and human dignity, so that, like a fiery sun, flashing hope everywhere, it enters planet earth in triumph. The power of change moulded in unity is in our hands.
If we would have armed ourselves with the powerful and invincible weapon of unity, activated by the internationalist thought of the Liberator; if the plenipotentiaries to the Congress of Panama had followed Bolívar’s instructions without the sabotaging interference of the oligarchies manipulated by Washington, to give life to the unity of the nations recently liberated from the oppression colonialism, the “terrible monster of the North” would not have stripped México of much of its territory, nor would we be enduring today the disrespect of the United States to our dignity, nor would we have to listen to the applause of the perfidy of the continent’s rights and the world to the locks economic, financial and commercial blockades, genocidal blockades that are sharpened without any feeling of humanity with insane sanctions against countries that enforce their sovereignty and free self-determination.
That the flags of the whole world tremble in the wind of your solidarity towards Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Syria, and other countries that are the target of the madness and hatred of a decadent empire. On 30 occasions, the United Nations General Assembly has demanded that the government of Washington put an end to the blockade against Cuba, but on 30 occasions the United States, with its contempt, has made a fool of the world’s highest authority of nations.
What took place in Panama between June and July of 1826 was the triumph of the divisive intrigue of the United States of the North over the unsuspecting Disunited States of the South.
Bolívar detailed in his letter to Hipólito Unanue his admirable vision of continental unity: “Our republics will call in such a way that they do not appear as nations, but as sisters, united by all links that have embraced us in the past centuries with the difference that then they obeyed a single tyranny; and now, they are going to embrace freedom with laws different, even with diverse governments, since each people will be free in its own way and will enjoy its sovereignty according to the will of its consciences.”
Bolívar wanted to give this league of nations the splendor of being the standard-bearer for the poor peoples of the world. He conceived it as a perpetual structure, such that, in future centuries, it would fulfill the role of balance of the earth.
This unity of sister republics would have a supranational government with permanent institutions, a military power capable of defending the territory of the Patria Grande on land and sea, as well as a democratic constitution and ensuring the abolition of enslavement. This alarmed the White House, which did not wanted the outbreak of popular states supported by true democracy. The United States—which has always hypocritically proclaimed itself a democratic nation—trapped over two million human beings under the leash of legalized and institutional enslavement. This is how the conflict between Bolivarianism and Monroism was born, and which, 200 years after it began, has still not been resolved.
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Bolívar also planned to organize an expedition with soldiers from Colombia and México to go by sea to liberate Cuba from colonial chains.
The initial stage of his unity project proposed that the assembly of plenipotentiaries would resolve border disputes through the utis possidetis iuris, a legislation based on respect for the limits set by the already defeated colonial power.
The strategy of Bolivarianism also included the formalization of Spanish-American citizenship, and the establishment of a bilateral trade system in which sister nations would reciprocally provide preferential treatments between each other.
You cannot cover the sun of truth with your hands, just as you cannot hide the fact that both United States and England wanted to fill the vacuum of power left by the Spanish monarchy; and that for the oligarchies of the continent, possessed by an overflowing ambition for power and more money, the only thing that mattered to them was to sit in the chairs of the viceroys to continue their systems of oppression. The attitude of those twisted and wayward beings opened the doors to the imperial policy of the United States in Our America.
The oligarchies did not understand that unity made us a power of freedom and humanity. They did not know how to think long-term. They just wanted to control and rule the little power they had. It was not their blood on the battlefields, but they believed that victory was theirs and no one else’s.
In their minds, the reins of government had to pass exclusively into their hands, because they were the only educated connoisseurs of the art of governing, while the vast majority were ignorant who only had to keep quiet and obey.
The Monroe Doctrine, first promulgated on December 2, 1822, arose as a result of the Congress of Panama. The United States already had in mind to strip México of California, Texas, Arizona, etc, and planned the annexation of Cuba as well. The doctrine maintained that Latin America and the Caribbean belonged to them, and that they should by innate right be for them.
The Monroe Doctrine had two faces: that of violent and rapacious dispossession, and that of Pan-Americanism, within which the United States—through a consensus with its allied oligarchies—would gently search to place itself at the forefront of the nations of the hemisphere, to try to do for good what it has always done for bad.
The oligarchies of the continent gleefully embraced the Monroe Doctrine; they adopted it as their lifeline, believing that the United States would defend them from the Holy Alliance and from the political and social claims of the impoverished popular masses, as well as from having to finance the army and the naval force—just as Bolívar had proposed—to defend our independence and freedom against any threat from foreign powers. Those who never shed their blood on the battlefields did not want the liberators—an armed force made up of blacks, indigenous, peasants, common people, illiterates, and Creoles for independence who were enemies of slavery and defenders of human rights, all of them led by Bolívar and San Martín—to extend their political influence beyond what happened in the bloody battles for independence, much less to times of prosperity, peace, and mutually beneficial trade.
With this adverse environment, the Congress of Panama could hardly produce favorable news for the future of Our America. The full approval of Bolívar’s main ideas were postponed and deferred for other future events. A little disenchanted with those conclusions, the Liberator expressed: “The Congress of Panama, an institution that could be admirable if it had more efficiency, is nothing other than that crazy Greek who tried to direct from a rock the ships that were sailing. His power will be a shadow and his decrees will be nothing more.”
The deeply human struggle of the Liberator against enslavement, and against the corrupt thieves of the State and those who would threaten the unity of Our America, unleashed the infernal opposition and hatred of the oligarchies and the United States against him; as a result, these powers attempted to assassinate him on several occasions.
In Chile, Bernardo O’Higgins and Freire opposed the Congress of Panama and its sublime purposes with very petty arguments. Bernardino Rivadavia and Las Heras, in Buenos Aires, made up the idea that Bolívar wanted to assume the reins of the supranational government, and clamored to include the United States in the alliance. Bolívar preached that “the greatest danger there is [in these circumstances] mixing a nation that is so strong with others that are so weak.”
Despite the precise instructions given from the Liberator to Santander, in the sense of not inviting the deliberations of the isthmus [Panama] to the United States, England, the Netherlands and other oppressive powers, it was the first thing that the rabula who governed Colombia did in the absence of President Bolívar. Santander also had the impudence and mistake of not inviting Haiti, arguing in a racist way that, because they are black people, they could arouse suspicion among the European guests. He forgot that the president of Haiti, Alejandro Petión, supported Bolívar’s enterprise of liberty with money, arms, men, and ships. Bolívar opined about this sinister character, with good reason: “Santander is a perfidious; I don’t even trust his heart.”
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In reality, Santander was not Colombian in body or soul, but simply a miserable pawn of Washington and sepoy of the Monroe Doctrine. With a frightening inversion of values, he said that this doctrine was comforting to the human race.
In Mexico, due to the intrigues of Joel Poinsett—Washington’s agent—President Victoria ousted Foreign Minister Lucas Alamán, with whom important agreements had been reached to give life to the unity of our nascent republics.
Santander, O’Higgins, Rivadavia, Victoria, Páez, Torre Tagle, Luna Pizarra, Riva-Agüero, Las Heras, and Freire, are the cursed parents of the “Disunited States of the South.”
We are going to get out of this situation of mental slaves and sepoys of an anachronistic empire, and soon, because the unjust and tyrannical unipolar world—whose buccaneer ship is helmed by the White House—has begun to sink into the dark sea of sunset.
“The nations that I have founded,” Simón Bolívar predicted, “after prolonged and bitter agony, will suffer an eclipse; but later, they will emerge as states of a great republic.”
Recently, another admirable man passed through the land: Commander Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan like Bolívar, passionate like Bolívar, who—by pushing with all his might for the creation of UNASUR, CELAC, and ALBA—has allowed us to take a few steps forward in the integration of the peoples of Our America, following the same path and footsteps taken by the Liberator. We are already coming out of the eclipse.
Unity will win, and with unity we will win. We will win the battle for the unity of Our America.
Bolívar’s love and humanism transcends the continent of his battles for freedom, and soars alongside his tenderness to reinforce the fight for dignity and justice, which—for centuries and centuries—has been waged by our brothers in Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the people of the United States, whose hearts yearn for a different government, far from all world tyranny.
We call on the youth of the world to stand at the forefront, in the front line of combat, and fight for a new world: without oppression, just, humane, supportive, respectful, and protective of all life on the planet. Adults, thinking people, our elders and grandparents, will follow us because this will be a fight of all for human dignity, commanded by an invincible and irresistible force: unity.
The oppressors of the world have tried, with refined techniques, to appease millions and millions of human brains by placing upon them the shackles of mental enslavement, leaving us with the hopeless idea that nothing can be done for a better world, and that our destiny is resignation.
A few years ago, Francis Fukuyama was invented—because they brought him out of nowhere—to tell the world that the “end of history” had arrived, and that capitalism was the highest step to which humanity could aspire. With that bizarre tale, they believed they were disarming the resistance of the peoples to the global tyranny of capital.
Now they spread—always aiming at the brain—the notion that there is nothing that can be done, because the empire has the most powerful and lethal weapons of mass destruction; that if we protest, they can wipe us off the map, with their nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles; from outer space, they can bring to ashes any area or country on earth in rebellion. Rather, the apocalypse would come with lightning and sparks.
Well, then we could rehearse a global strike, an insurrection from below, a silent mobilization with the powerful human cry of indignation, until the unipolar planet of injustice goes haywire and a new world emerges.
The now deceased physicist, Albert Einstein, discovered that there was a very powerful and little-studied universal force; we know it to be the universal force of love.
We know that this force exists and shimmers in the cosmos of humanity with an overwhelming power. Let’s use it to change humanity and the world, and to establish a just and peaceful civilization on this blue planet of the solar system.
Their weapons, equipped with the highest technology of death, will be of no use to the United States or their NATO puppets, if millions and millions of human beings stand defiantly in front of them waving the flag of life, love, human dignity, and justice.
We have to arm ourselves with the weapon of the future—which is the weapon of love—to advance together, neutralizing scoundrels, and laying the foundations of brotherhood, solidarity, and peace in the new world.
All united, charge! This battle for humanity we have to win.
WE WILL WIN!
Luciano Marín Arango, better known as Iván Márquez, is a Colombian guerrilla leader and member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), part of its secretariat higher command and advisor to the Northwestern and Caribbean blocs. He was part of the team of FARC negotiators that concluded a peace agreement with President Juan Manuel Santos. On 29 August 2019, Márquez ended the peace process and announced a renewed armed conflict with the Colombian government, led then by far-right president Iván Duque.
(FARC-EP)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/AU
