We are unyielding in our determination to continue the search for peace in Colombia and the continent, which means the establishment of true democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice and freedom.

 

We carried out this meeting while the deepest crisis is developing within the world capitalist system, characterized by an unbounded race to wars of invasion, plunder and overexploitation of the resources of nature, and more precarious working conditions that condemn millions of human beings to hunger and death on a planet subjected to the greed of imperialism and headed into chaos and destruction.

 

In our country the calamities generated by this system of inhuman super-exploitation and exclusion of the poorest people has exacerbated social inequalities and deepened class confrontation to a dimension never seen before, This arises directly from the massive and sustained implementation of neoliberal policies favoring large financial groups and transnational corporations, to the detriment of the national majority.

 

Within the international panorama of a systemic crisis of capital, which shows its multiple faces of a financial, economic, environmental, urban, energy, military, political, institutional, moral and cultural meltdown, Colombia is configured as a country whose economy is pushed to its lowest level and dominated by finance capital.

 

Those holding power have brought about this condition to allow the looting, which means unbounded extraction, financial speculation and the theft of natural resources. Millions of our compatriots have been hurled into misery and war, imposed by elites to quiet the discontent of the masses against this iniquity.

 

The government of Juan Manuel Santos was established to ensure the continuity of plans for the dispossession by plunder that imperialism imposes on the Colombian people. A new variety of Capital, accompanied by new legal provisions and militarist dispositions on security and defense arising from the old National Security Doctrine and state terrorism, has been strengthened in our country so as to shield the "rights" of capital and the welfare of the rich at the expense of the workers and the poorest people. Taking shape within this perspective is the new phase of dispossession of lands, which now masquerades under the false name of restitution. In practice, new legions of peasants, indigenous people, and ordinary people in general have now joined the millions of displaced persons and victims of the successive stages of plunder sponsored by the State; these people, who have had their land taken from them or have been denied land through misleading legal procedures, are further increasing the total living in poverty and destitution that place Colombia in third place of the most unequal countries in the world.

 

This is the cruel result of investor security and prosperity that President Juan Manuel Santos Is bragging about, while still imprisoning, killing and repressing opponents.

 

Faced with this reality there can be no other road for revolutionaries except unity and struggle, mass action in the streets, popular uprising in the countryside and cities, challenging the criminalization of protest and demanding from the government real actions to make peace, which can be nothing else than solutions to social and political problems faced by the majority, problems brought on by the state terrorism of the ruling caste, whose most warlike tendencies have determined the destiny of the country during the last decade.

 

It is not with demagoguery and threats of repression and more war that they will end the conflict. No more buying of military equipment or handing over the country to the Pentagon will bring peace, no warmongering and scorched earth plans, such as the "Patriotic Plan" or "Sword of Honor" will bring about the reconciliation of Colombians. Even less will giving an ultimatum to the insurgency, starting from the vain idea that peace would be the product of a chimerical military victory by the regime that brings the insurgency to its knees, exhausted and demobilized, before that absurdly named legal framework for peace.

 

Our desire for peace lies in the conviction that the fate of Colombia cannot be dependent on the loathsome interests of the oligarchy. The political and social participation and full decision of the people are a necessity and an inevitable requirement. Thus the unity and mobilization of the people in favor of structural changes to build peace based on justice are the real key to his conquest.

 

With firm steps of unity in thought and action, fraternally,

 

Central Command of the National Liberation Army (ELN)

Secretariat of the Central Joint Chiefs of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army.