Versión Español
Spanish – The FARC won the battle, but not the war. Who will win the war in Colombia when this state of “the calm before the storm” ends?
Colombia, for better or for worse, is a country of violent people. History has shown us that not much needs to happen for Colombians to decide to solve their problems by force. Unsuspecting, good people will say that violence is never good. This is not true. Several times in the history of humanity, violent reaction to the advance of totalitarians has saved entire nations. One cannot be tolerant of the intolerant. If in Venezuela, for example, socialism had not been allowed to advance so far, we might not be seeing the misfortune that the country that once was the richest in the region is experiencing today. And if in Colombia, people had not reacted to Marxist violence by demanding a government that would fight the guerrillas head-on, what would have become of our country now?
The spirit of Colombians has been a constraint on the advance of the guerrillas. Those men who were tired of being extorted, robbed, and kidnapped, decided to confront the bandits with weapons, stopped a bloodthirsty guerrilla that was advancing towards a complete takeover of the country with all the money from drug trafficking. Those Colombians, who in 2002, voted for the “democratic security” of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, did their bit to take the country away from the Marxist criminals.
If things continue like this, Colombia still has hope, and the good guys will most likely win. But if the left manages to corrupt a substantial part of society and take away the most valuable thing it has: values and principles, history will be different. They don’t have to defeat us with weapons if they defeat us in the moral arena. If they corrupt us, if they manage to erase history, it will all be over, they will have won.
There could be a day when only the old people remember the concentration camps where the FARC tortured their hostages for years – especially the military and the police. By then, most of the young people will have been poisoned by this idea of false peace and will forget the systematic recruitment and rape of thousands of children. The kidnappings, murders, robberies, destroyed lives, mutilated people, and disappeared children will have been forgotten because we were told that to be a good person, you have to forget. At that time, the Marxists will have won. They will have a free hand because no one will want to face them.
The FARC works in two fundamental areas: they manage to get a good part of society to forget about their evil. Moreover, they work to corrupt and erase the values that have saved the country from the extreme left. They tell us that we have the right to state education, housing, free health care, that if we distribute resources, well, we would all be rich because our country is full of natural resources. They want to erase those times of “work ennobles man,” “with enough hard work, you can achieve anything,” or, “God helps those who help themselves.”
When a large part of Colombia has forgotten what these Marxist guerrillas are and the damage they are capable of doing, the FARC will have the opportunity to get votes from all those young people who grew up at a time they were no longer educated in a culture of work and effort and admiration for progress. Instead, they were indoctrinated by some teachers, journalists, and leaders, who taught them to hate, treated work as a punishment, and told them that they have the right to everything, even to steal because theft is not bad when the victim is from the other side. It is not even called robbery; it is “recovering.”
Victims of everything, offended by everything, believing that the world owes them something, brought up not by their parents but by television and the Colombian Federation of Educators (Fecode), the adults of tomorrow will no longer be those brave men who defended their freedom and private property from the plundering and murderous hands of the Marxist guerrillas.
That is what FARC seeks, and that is why today, more than ever, we must remember. We must teach history. We must prevent them from erasing from the memory of Colombians the tragedy they made us live through. And today, more than ever, we must strengthen the family. We must ensure that children and young people grow up educated in values, unreserved respect for private property, the conviction that we must always do good and speak the truth, hard work, effort, and the importance of thinking for the long term.
Let the young people understand what the FARC is and prefer to work hard rather than ask to steal from those who have managed to succeed.
The FARC has the shrewdness of evil. In the eyes of the world, and knowing that people are good by nature and believe what they are told, they put on a magnificent performance and said that they were moving towards the law. So now they have ten seats in Congress, and all those who are still in the Colombian countryside growing coca and committing the usual crimes, are now the “dissidents” of the FARC and have nothing to do with the political group FARC. They still do the same things they did before, but now they are in Congress and can participate in elections. They just pretend that the armed wing has nothing to do with the political wing.
Although the weapons and drugs remain a fundamental pillar of their strategy, they are no longer the way the FARC will come to power. They will buy votes; they will corrupt society; they will lie until people believe them; they will make us forget what they are.
The frontal combat against terrorists is necessary, but we also need history, truth, values, never giving in to evil.
