Socialist Action /June 2000
Libardo Gonzalez: A Revolutionary in
Colombia
By RODRIGO O'FARREL
The following article was written by a veteran Colombian Trotskyist.
Comrade Libardo Gonzalez died in Bogota, Colombia, at the end of March
of a heart attack. He was 58 years old.
The outstanding fact of his political life was that he was a first in
Colombia to try to create an organization based on an idea that began to
circulate among some left intellectuals in the early 1970s: Neither the
Colombian Communist Party nor the armed struggle of the guerrilla organizations
that existed at the time could offer a future for the working class or the
revolutionary left.
The conclusions were that a revolutionary Marxist party had to be built
as an alternative to local Stalinism and that such a party could only be
built by following the orientation of the United Secretariat of the Fourth
International.
To carry out this task, Libardo Gonzalez, along with a handful of activists,
founded a study group that took the name "Spartacus." In 1971,
it launched a mimeographed journal called Prensa Obrera. Although this publication
had a very narrow audience, it had the merit of offering a new kind of analysis
of the political, economic, and social reality of Colombia.
Its articles were appreciated by a nucleus of radical students, especially
at the National University of Bogota. After two years of work in consolidating
an activist core, Spartacus was recognized as an official section of the
Fourth International at the latter's Tenth Congress in December 1973.
Libardo Gonzalez failed in his attempt to create a party. However, his
efforts to build a section of the Fourth International in Colombia deserve
considerable respect.
Like other activists attracted by the debate in the Fourth International
provoked by the theses and the controversies that came out of the Ninth
World Congress of the FI (April 1969) and the Tenth World Congress, Libardo
lacked real organizational experience.
The groups that were formed never achieved any consistent growth. However,
the political debate within the workers movement, the mass movement, and
the trade unions in that period was enriched by the organizations that called
themselves revolutionary Marxist and undoubtedly were that from a programmatic
point of view.
Themes such as the crisis of Stalinism, the Transitional Program, the
permanent revolution in semicolonial countries, democracy, and trade-union
unity began to be taken up despite the efforts of the Communist Party to
prevent this.
Unfortunately, the debate on the ineffectiveness of the armed struggle
and its effect of disorganizing the masses' real political struggle (which
was the subject of intense discussion in the FI) was not won in Colombia.
Despite their political emptiness, the spectacular actions of Guevarist
organizations such as M19 captured the minds of sections of the revolutionary
intelligentsia. Accordingly, Spartacus, without real internal debate, aligned
itself with the International Majority Tendency of the Fourth International
[which supported rural guerrilla warfare as a long-term strategy].
The Grupo Marxista Internacionalista (GMI) was founded as an alternative
to Spartacus. It supported the positions of the United Secretariat minority
and the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency, the international tendency led by
Joseph Hansen [of the American Socialist Workers Party], especially with
respect to Latin America [rejection of guerrilla warfare as a strategy].
The GMI and Spartacus were the pioneers of Trotskyism in Colombia and
of the Fourth International. The GMI, recognized as a sympathizing section
by the Tenth Congress of the Fourth International, was the first group in
Colombia to publish a Trotskyist monthly on a rotary press.
Spartacus was reorganized subsequently under the name of the "Revolutionary
Communist League" (LCR). A part of the cadres of the LCR and the GMI
participated in the founding of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR)
in 1979. The PSR was the result of entry work in a centrist current, the
Bloque Socialista, given impetus both by the United Secretariat and the
PST [Socialist Workers Party], led by the Argentine Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno.
In 1983, Libardo Gonzalez was wrongfully imprisoned for some days by
the army, following the violent eruption on the scene of a group calling
itself the Movement for Workers' Self-Defense, which claimed to be Trotskyist,
although it had no relation to any of the Trotskyist groups existing in
Colombia. As a consequence of his imprisonment, Gonzalez developed a bone
deformity in one leg from which he was never cured.
Libardo worked in university centers in Bogota. He was the editor of
a collection of documents by Leon Trotsky called "Acerca de la revolucion
socialista" ["On Socialist Revolution"] and authored studies
entitled "El Estado de los partidos politicos en Colombia" (1975)
and "Contribucion a la historia politica de Colombia" (1984).
Libardo wrote articles in the publications of his tendency and those
of wider circulation. His death has saddened an entire generation of fighters
in Colombia.
Socialist Action /June 2000 |