Coral Wynter & Jim McIlroy, Caracas
The June 20 Diario Vea reported that more than 4000 campesinos (peasants) marched in the town of Guasdualito, in Apure state, near the border with Colombia. The protesters alleged that right-wing paramilitaries are infiltrating Venezuela from across the border and are responsible for a campaign of terror against campesinos.
In May, Luis Tascon, a deputy in the National Assembly, said that paramilitaries had been responsible for killing 1700 people in the country's south-west. Paramilitary forces in Colombia are backed by the country's armed forces, which receive millions of dollars of funding from the US government. Right-wing Colombian paramilitaries have been detained inside Venezuelan territory.
The march, which was organised by the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front, was against paramilitary violence; in defence of Venezuela's national sovereignty; and in support of the Bolivarian revolution, the radical process of social change that is gripping the country. This process has included an ambitious land reform program that is redistributing idle land from large landowners to previously landless peasants. This has angered large landowners, who have been accused by campesinos and the government of collaborating with the paramilitaries to defend their interests.
A protester claimed that the area the protest was held in was the "theatre of operations chosen by the Colombian paramilitaries, on behalf of US imperialism, in order to destabilise and overthrow the Bolivarian revolution ... We campesinos have decided to take this concrete action to confront this terrible threat."
From Green Left Weekly, June 28, 2006.
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