As Colombia’s “Democratic Center” ruling party and its liberal opposition intensify their capitalist dogfight to control the paltry $250 million (U.S.) from the World Bank to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of workers and their families have been left infected, jobless, and hungry. The masses lack access to the most basic medical services to detect and treat the coronavirus.  Nor are they getting the economic aid supposedly set aside for sickened workers. Instead, the money is stolen by organized crime organizations that terrorize the country with deadly violence against workers.
To protect the bosses’ profits, the government led by President Ivan Duque has ordered the reopening of production to stimulate the rulers’ economy. Meanwhile, the liberal and fake-left opposition backs the five-month, ineffective nationwide quarantine, demanding that people stay home while ignoring a growing wave of starvation. As workers hang red distress flags and rags from their windows, the government does nothing to solve “the food crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic” (Revista Semana, 4/13).
Against this panorama of corruption, neglect, brutality, and bald-faced lies, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is fighting alongside the working class in Colombia. We are constantly looking for ways to attack racism and sexism, hunger and slave labor, individualism and reformism—to eradicate the pandemic of capitalism. As the inter-imperialist rivalry for markets, natural resources, and cheap labor intensifies, the worldwide Covid-19 crisis is also an opportunity for the international working class to advance its struggle to organize a mass revolutionary communist movement, smash the bosses’ system, and establish an egalitarian society run by and for workers.
Vaccine, imperialism and cardboard coffins
According to official statistics, the pandemic has killed more than 18,000 people in Colombia, with more than 10,000 new cases reported each day (worldometers.info). Given the extreme shortage of testing, the real death toll is doubtless much higher. Funeral homes are so overwhelmed that a team of Colombian designers developed a cardboard hospital bed that converts into a coffin (guardian.com, 5/27). Many of the dead are migrant workers, who are even more vulnerable to the pandemic after losing their jobs. They are evicted and end up living in the streets, with no physical distancing, adequate nourishment, electricity, medicine, or even drinkable water.
 Despite the collapse of the country’s healthcare system, the U.S.-leaning government has rejected a Cuban medical mission, healthcare supplies from China, and the possibility of a future vaccine from Russia.  As the race to create a vaccine and control its distribution has created a new inter-imperialist battleground between the U.S., Britain, China, and Russia, deadly nationalism is moving the world closer to the next global conflict. As always under capitalism, there will be winners and losers. Poorer, super-exploited workers from poorer countries in Latin America and Africa will likely be left to fend for themselves. Since public health is a global proposition, and viruses know no borders, as Bollyky & Bown noted in The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism (2020), the competition “is not only morally and ethically reprehensible, but also contrary to every country’s economic, strategic, and health interests.” As long as capitalist science is an instrument for profit, the biggest losers in this race will be the workers of the world.
Liberals unleash killer cops
 The Colombian bosses’ knives are out—for each other as well as for the working class. On August 4, ex-President Alvaro Uribe, the Democratic Center party founder, was placed under house arrest for bribing witnesses in a case involving fascist paramilitary death squads (npr.org, 8/5). Uribe’s former right-wing allies, who defend the racist politics of U.S. President Donald Trump, are pushing the renewed militarization that recently killed more than 30 people in rural Colombia (El Tiempo). The latest atrocities echo the 50-year, U.S.-backed, anti-communist massacre of more than 220,000 people, most of them civilians (National Center for Historical Memory).
The opposition liberals, who call themselves the new “political center,” favor reformist environmentalism, empty rhetoric on human rights, and the European-style social democracy promoted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. They’ve shown their true colors in the capital city of Bogota, where Mayor Claudia Lopez, the open lesbian liberal who may be the second most powerful politician in the country, campaigned to put more killer cops on the streets (bbc.com, 10/28/19). Lopez has unleashed the paramilitary ESMAD, the notoriously lethal “riot” police, to attack hundreds of workers and students rebelling against the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic.
As in the U.S. and elsewhere, the most dangerous enemies of the working class are the Big Fascist liberals, with their phony promises to create a more just and equal society—an impossibility in a capitalist system driven by maximum profit. In Colombia, the liberals’ alliance with reformist environmentalists, feminists, and LGBTQ+ groups serves to discourage and mislead workers from fighting for communism—the only solution to their misery under capitalism. The fake left, represented by the central unions and parties like the MOIR (Independent and Revolutionary Workers Movement), are aligned with the capitalist bosses in China and Russia. Their focus is not to fight capitalism but to gain more influence—and a license to steal—within the government.
A world to win
In Colombia, in our collectives and in daily struggles with industrial workers, farmers, and students, we talk about the bosses’ traps to deceive us and dissuade us from fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat. We are organizing in the streets, the factories, and the homes to achieve the violent overthrow of the rotten capitalist system. Though the challenges are many, we have a world to win. Fight for communism! Join PLP!