Catatumbo, a resource-rich region in Colombia, has become a battleground where armed conflict has created a humanitarian crisis of poverty, displacement, and violence. This article examines how capitalist interests have fueled this conflict, the various armed groups competing for control, and the devastating impact on local populations caught in the crossfire. PL’ers in Colombia have been involved in this struggle, raising consciousness about this capitalist hellscape,  introducing workers to communist ideas using Desafio (CHALLENGE), our sharpest ideological weapon in the fightback against these vicious attacks.

Catatumbo is a region in Colombia marked by ongoing armed conflict. Its poverty and marginalization have surpassed any barbaric threshold, sparking political and electoral interest among opportunists. This region, rich in food and mineral production, is ravaged by the capitalist laws of war and profit. A population of 80,000 workers are caught in the crossfire of this escalating war, forcing 56,000 to flee the carnage in the region, in what is being characterized as the largest displacement crisis in the region in decades (Human Rights Watch, 3/27). The violence in Catatumbo underscores the urgent need for a communist revolution. Only when workers organize collectively to smash the imperialist and their local capitalist rulers, responsible for these destructive profit-driven wars, can the working class become the custodians of a world and guarantee a future free from war, displacement, and exploitation for all humankind.

Catatumbo: a capitalist battleground and hellscape for the working class

The workers of Catatumbo are mired in forced displacement, fleeing the confrontation and targeting of armed groups fighting for control of this area and dominating drug trafficking, natural resources, and slave labor. These groups include the The National Liberation Army (ELN acronym in Spanish), which emerged as a revolutionary guerrilla group with a nationalist ideology; The Popular Front for Liberation (EPI acronym in Spanish), a reformist guerrilla group; the Rastrojos paramilitary group; the Gulf Clan; and state repression through its military forces.

All of these armed factions seek to dominate land ownership and oil production. This contradiction has claimed the lives of 60 people in the last month and displaced more than 40,000 people who resisted the plunder and exploitation of imperialist capitalism.

The social crisis in Colombia is part of the economic crisis of global capitalism, which is why there is no solution to problems that have lasted for more than a century. In this region, conditions of marginalization and neglect have left its inhabitants living for decades in uncertainty and instability due to violence.

The current and previous governments have promised investments, peace processes, demobilization, and the implementation of alternative developments to remove the population from these activities, but everything remains promises. The inhabitants have no choice but to work for organizations that murder, rape women, and impose terror, with the complacency of politicians, corrupt officials, and all kinds of mafias fighting over the multimillion-dollar profits.

These profits are generated by the smuggling of weapons, people, supplies, and drug trafficking. The internal boss struggles generate terror and racist displacement. These are not limited to Colombia; in Palestine, Mexico, Peru, and throughout the world, many workers are fleeing wars, unemployment, droughts, sexism, police brutality, and economic exploitation.

From Catatumbo to Gaza workers need communism!

Workers in Catatumbo have long struggled to escape these situations, but the state bosses have not allowed residents to propose solutions due to the contradictions surrounding capitalist profits. Instead, they enable armed groups to stigmatize social leaders, putting their lives at risk. Due to the border position of the region, armed groups exercise parallel governance, which benefits companies such as Ecopetrol, Hocal, Drummond, 

Cerrejón, Cemex, Fedearroz, Alpina, and others.

These conditions also benefit corrupt rulers, public forces, and thugs, who demonstrate that wage exploitation and capitalist scourges are inevitable. Only the power and unity of the working class in the countryside and the city, students, and the dispossessed from all over the world, through struggle and organization for communist society, will we be able to put an end to the hell and dark night that capitalism has created.
Meanwhile, the current government makes deals with class enemies, speaks of total peace, saving democracy, and electoral politics to distance the working masses from the revolutionary path. Armed with our newspaper, DESAFIO (CHALLENGE), we are participating with different organizations in sit-ins, rallies, political discussions, and helping to paint murals in solidarity with displaced people.

The following letters are from PL’ers and friends who attended the rally

After the Hands-Off March on Saturday, an interesting debate sparked among our friends. Some people were so happy that people were standing up to Trump and can’t wait to get back to the way things were with the Democrats (who we call the Big Fascists. Please check out the glossary on page 6). Others were mad and didn’t go to the march because they saw that the march was actually sponsored by the Big Fascists in the Democratic Party and was supporting, among other things, the arch imperialists in NATO, and keeping the Gaza genocide on the sidelines. Some people now use the term “controlled resistance” for how the ruling class attempts to control the uprisings of the workers. They see the danger of this kind of event “quietly pushing people into trusting the same systems that cause harm.”

My wife and I, both in subsequent rallies and in online group chats, have been telling people that we don’t have to agree with everything we see and hear, and we think a lot about the reasons for the way things are, and the motivations of people. 

It was really good that so many people turned out to these rallies all over the country. We should not take that fact lightly. Do they have our line? Not yet! But as much as we criticize the leadership of it , we can expect at all times that the ruling class wants to control the working class, even when we fight back! But we need to be there, in the heart of it, and struggling with our fellow workers to see the big picture, and distributing our literature and building for our events. “We gotta be in it to win it!” 

Going collectively helps us concentrate our forces for sure. In our small group of teachers, we were still able to lead chants with hundreds of people that sharpened the politics of the march and inspired many people around us. We also had deeper conversations with a bunch of people, and interested several friends to come march with Progressive Labor Party (PLP) on May Day! Being with so many folks who want change and who show up and march and chant in the street is powerful. That’s the collective power of the working class! 

This is a very exciting time to be alive. And truly, right now, EVERYTHING we do counts. We have the capacity to bend the arc of history. And there is also great danger that failure to act will have dire consequences for the international working class.  If we aim to change the world, now is not the time for pessimism; now is the time to step up, to lock into the struggle! We have a lot of work to do and not a moment to waste. Forward to communist victory!
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As a member of my Unitarian Church group’s Immigrant Rights Committee, we sent three cars of people to Raleigh North Carolina’s participation in Anti-Trump National Protest, in downtown Raleigh by state buildings. There were workers from every background, young, old, men, women, and multiracial. There was so much antiracism present. While the Party would disagree, (and rightly so) with the reformist, dead end politics of the speakers, the North Carolina workers know Trump is a fascist, but what many don’t know  (yet) is that capitalism produces fascism. North Carolina  is feeling the layoffs of federal workers; there are small groups of immigrant farmworkers in North Carolina who are afraid to work out of fear of ICE, and this is right out of Nazi playbook. ICE raids are racist. The working class now more than ever needs communism, and a fighting organization, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to lead to communist revolution to end fascism once and for all
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The wave of Hands Off rallies on April 5 confirmed that where there is oppression, there will be fightback. Across the country several hundred thousand people came out to shout No! to attacks on our trade union rights, our Social Security, our health care, on our fellow federal workers who make these programs work, and on the science that creates vaccines.

Demonstrators packed twenty blocks of Manhattan. They filled the plaza in front of Oakland, California city hall. They rallied in cities big and small. The anger no longer respects the usual political dividing lines. It has erupted in districts where voters tried Trump after suffering the Democrats’ inflation. Republican congresspersons have been shouted down at their town halls. In an Oregon county that went 68 percent for Trump, the crowd shouted, “Tax Elon,” “Tax the wealthy,” “Tax the rich,” and “Tax the billionaires.” When a representative in Indiana mentioned Social Security “adjustments,” a roar of protest silenced her.

Rallies in some smaller cities and around particular schools and workplaces were militant about fighting ICE raids. When people know each other in daily work, they see their common humanity and respond.

The April 5 events were called by Indivisible, a fake mass organization run by Democratic Party operatives. The executive director was previously a policy man for a Democratic congressperson. Indivisible did all it could to make “democracy” the theme of the rallies, the liberal capitalist alternative to open fascism. Its plan is to repeat rallies like April 5 until the 2026 elections.

But the capitalist republic of the last 250 years is broken for good. There is no going back. Whatever happens to Trump, the ruling capitalist class can no longer work out their problems with constitutional politeness. Their solution for working people is more suffering, more insecurity, and war against other imperialists. The only way out is forward to communism, a state of the working class, by the working class, and for the working class.Together we will replace capitalist oppression with communist liberation.
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As the international crisis of capitalism intensifies, the number of global immigrants, according to the United Nations, rose to 281 million in 2024. Around 28 million were from Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Ukraine, all countries at war, mostly as a direct result of U.S. and NATO interventions. Most of the rest, around 220 million individuals, were displaced by capitalist climate-related disasters. 

Displacing workers

Both war and environmental disasters are, of course, neither “natural” nor “acts of God.” They are the results of decades of political and economic decisions, based entirely on the self-interests of the rulers of the U.S., Russia, and Europe. The interests of these political states continually clash. 

The movie Green Border, a 2023 co-production from Poland, the Czech Republic, France, and Belgium, illustrates the awful toll on workers and their families as they try to escape the savagery of inter-imperialist rivalry.

In 2020, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on Belarus under President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. (This alliance would intensify after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.) The EU sanctions led to the Belarus–European Union border crisis of 2021, the subject of this movie.

Lukashenko orchestrated a crisis involving thousands of migrants and refugees attempting to cross into the EU, particularly through Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. By the summer and fall of 2021, thousands of migrants—most of them from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen—arrived in Belarus with the aim of entering the EU. The movie shows how these migrants were then dumped at the border, left in the Białowieża Forest, and told to head into Poland, a NATO and EU country. 

Neither Belarus nor Poland wanted these refugees; they were poor, and many were not white. Green Border shows these migrants being quite literally tossed back and forth over the border’s barbed wire fences. The guards on both sides of the fence are systematically indoctrinated with racist, anti-refugee ideas, much the same as the “training” for ICE and border guards in the U.S. The migrants are dehumanized as criminals, terrorists, and infiltrators. Most of the Polish police accept this racist ideology—but not all. 

Green Border is an example of how dialectical thinking—rather than one-dimensional propaganda, can make for great art. Despite their enormous ideological differences, Karl Marx admired the writings of Honoré de Balzac for his richly detailed and insightful depiction of French society in the early 19th century. Balzac illustrated the economic, social, and moral dynamics of his time. He showed how nothing stays the same, and that people change.  

In the film Green Border, ordinary Poles break the law by hiding refugees. A middle-class white family gives shelter to Black African boys. Medical workers risk being shot by their own border police to help wounded migrants in the forest. A Polish border guard refuses to carry out his orders to arrest or shoot at migrants.

These scenes gain even more power in a period when Donald Trump is promising to deport one million undocumented immigrants from the U.S. each year. On the one hand, Green Border shows the brutal effects of a racist, fascist system that incarcerates, deports, and shoots people fleeing war and poverty. But the film also shows that ordinary people will stand up to oppose capitalist brutality.

Schools: organize masses to fight attacks on educations

Montgomery County, Maryland, March 19, 2025 “We walk in today, we walk out tomorrow” said teachers at multiple schools in the suburbs of Washington D.C.. The National Education Association (NEA) had called for a “walk in for education” at the beginning of the school day for teachers to speak out for education and against the executive order closing the Department of Education (DOE). Teachers in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) jumped on this opportunity to build a base at their schools with short rallies and leafleting, knowing full well that the NEA’s initiative was simply performative posturing. Our leaflet demanded increased funding for the schools, even as the county council prepares a cutback budget. The county expects to lose nine percent of its funding from the federal government and even more as liberal governor Wes Moore and the Maryland General Assembly (MGA) slash public school budgets in this diverse county to offset a state budget deficit. 

Our rallies were a spark to the day! The leaflet and posters we brought about cutbacks and racism in our schools went way beyond the NEA’s plan and provided an excellent opportunity to get to know more of our fellow teachers. One teacher declared upon reading our leaflet, “We are walking into a burning building! We should be walking out!” Teachers led chants and children carried posters into their classrooms. Some posters prepared by PLP members attacked immigration threats while others called for more money for schools, smaller class sizes, and no cuts to the budget by the MGA. As a result of this action, a parent invited a PLP member to speak at her upcoming PTA meeting. 

In addition, other local PLP members joined teachers at nearby schools and made contacts with teachers and parents. The camaraderie built by even this small action is carrying over into aggressive advocacy at county budget hearings and is bringing more teachers closer to understanding that the PLP and revolutionary action are needed to secure lasting change.
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No such thing as good capitalism

Many people realize that capitalism (commodity production,  production for profit,  “free” enterprise,  market economy,  …) is a racist,  sexist, anti-working class,  police-terror way to organize society, BUT they also feel that capitalism can be changed to get rid of these supposedly “unwanted” aspects.  In a word:  This is false!!!  All of these characteristics of capitalism are exactly that:  They are just as much inherent parts of capitalism as money,  bosses,  and workers.  Why is this so?

The very object of capitalism is to make as much profit as possible so as to drive other capitalists out-of-business. This means that everything else must be subordinate to the goal of higher profits, even when that means things like building airplanes improperly or polluting lakes and rivers to “save money.” It is NOT a matter of greedy capitalists – even though the capitalists as a class certainly are much worse than greedy. Capitalists act the way they do because that is how capitalism works! Furthermore,  ALL politicians (Republicans and Democrats – including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) support capitalism so it is useless to count on them for anything except more capitalist oppression.

The liberal bosses’ trick is identity politics where a person’s gender, skin color,  or sexual orientation supposedly “determines” their political outlook. Nothing could be further from the truth.  The most that any of the phony so-called “working class politicians” do is make speeches and false promises.  None of these sellouts organizes even ONE worker to fight back.  And blaming it all on Donald Trump and Elon Musk is simply wrong!  Trump and Musk are trying to save U.S. capitalism from losing to Chinese or Russian capitalism.  Getting rid of Trump and Musk will NOT solve the fundamental contradiction that all capitalists MUST compete with all other capitalists!!! 

CHALLENGE Response: The writer is 100% correct! It’s not just Trump or Elon Musk— it’s capitalism in crisis! The crisis is being driven by inter-imperialist rivalry. The U.S. is in a life or death struggle to preserve its top dog status against rising rival imperialists in China and Russia.
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