(Translated by Marta Zárate, a CSN Volunteer Translator, edited by David Van Den Brandt)
Bogotá, May 26, 2014
Open letter to Clara Eugenia López Obregón and Aida Avella Esquivel
To the Executive Committee of the POLO party and the Coordinating Team of the UP (Patriotic Union)
For a National and International Platform for Peace in Colombia,
Ample Front for a life with dignity
In the name of the collective organizations “Another Colombia is Possible” we welcome the extraordinary campaign led by Clara Eugenia López Obregón and Aida Avella Esquivel. We did not doubt at any moment our efforts to join them with joy and willpower in the electoral campaign that took place, May 25th in Colombia. It’s a campaign that represents popular trust and those from the Left like us who accept the demands from men and women in this diverse and unequal country. We are aware of the suffering and the costs that the war produces. Clara and Aida, we want to continue working at your side for the peace processes with social justice. We call upon political parties such as the POLO and the UP to embrace the popular social movement with an agenda for Peace in the second round election of June 15, 2014.
For the first time there are two women who address the political-electoral scene with intelligence and courage. They approach Colombian challenges in light of a National Debate with a global perspective. They are aware that the challenges for solutions to our structural problems (as revealed in their own agenda) are not resolved only with our participation and local concern. We know that it is impossible to tackle peace as long as money is invested in the war, we have our territory as a platform of death, and we surrender our sovereignty to external interests.
We make clear and recognize that although we have differences with the presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos, we are able to address a dialog and an open discussion with diverse political expression, in favor of an agenda that includes our participation and particularly the real meaning of the advancement of the peace process in Havana.
We see here an opportunity to create a national and international platform for peace. We integrate efforts in an ample front composed by men and women that want peace, which implies larger incidental participation, counseling discussions of mechanisms that make advance the acknowledgement of a long war. We want all of this to lead to and generate a consensus of mechanisms to materialize the redistribution of power in order to achieve the redistribution of wealth and political power in the territories at the service of life.
We cannot accept that the difficult and complex process in Havana breaks and ends. We do not tolerate the imposition of fascism and a confessional state. We address women and men, political leaders from the POLO and the UP to discuss among others this proposition and to make a decision for peace.
Today, more than ever, the relevant question about how to stop war from Virginia Woolf in her 1938 “The Three Guineas” brings up the question on how to confront the seductive argument in favor of war. This is the question that in 2014 we formulate to all and we have to respond with a strong decision to this challenge. No more war, no more open wounds in our lands. Let’s work for the right to peace with justice and the right to a country with a national project capable of embracing a Latin American bloc power that will allow us to confront this ethical crisis of capitalism, which prefers war as a model and fateful instrument to overcome the crisis.
Collective Organizations (for) “Another Colombia is Possible”
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