The comrades from the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) – Uruguayan Anarchist Federation, talked to our news agency about their local struggle in Uruguay and Latin America, how it understands and see the Kurdish Revolution and the praxis in Rojava as an example to their own struggles and how they analyze the conjectural differences among Latin America and Kurdistan:
Good evening, how are the comrades of the Kurdish movement. This is Nathaniel Clavijo speaking from the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation and I will answer the questions that have been sent to us.
The first point is the theme of what we have in common in our struggles, with colonialism, imperialism and how the Kurdish movement impacts the movements here in Latin America. We can say that there are general level structures of the capitalist system that are similar but expressed in very different ways, for example Latin America has a rich history and tradition of struggles, but it is a varied continent. There is a common colonial past and certain common popular struggles in some senses but also many particularities and differences with what occurs in the Middle East and with Rojava in Kurdistan. These historical processes are very distinct but still have their similarities, including the way of understanding the armed struggle, for example. The Kurds marked their differences with respect to previous processes and learned from these processes in our continent important popular uprisings and revolts have occurred and are still occurring as it happened in Colombia and Chile recently, also in Ecuador and Bolivia where there was the coup d’etat of Áñez and the continuous mobilizations there that put Arce in power again. And all of these are responses to the colonial situation and North American imperialism, especially that which operates here. Obviously the capitalist structures are dependent on this form which was formed in this part of the world and there are also similarities with the Middle East, where in that region oil is an important factor as it is here in Venezuela. One also have to take into account the geo-strategic position of the Middle East.
The important thing is to learn from the experience of the people, and for us, what is happening in Kurdistan is important from its historical and concrete experience to the fact that it has meeting points with the anarchist proposal, with the anarchist experience in popular processes of similarity as was the Spanish Revolution of 1936, where in some way the proposals of collectivization, communes, of popular power were put into practice in which we understand brings our struggles very close together.
First of all to say that we, the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), together with the organizations that make up the Latin American Anarchist Coordination, we are part of a current that is called specifism. Which revalues the space of the anarchist organization and therefore we are not looking for a practice that orthodox anarchism would have but which are specific to the need we see to organize ourselves politically in order to be inserted in reality not as a vanguard organization, but as a political organization that pushes popular processes and helps them with other visions, methods, and tools. FAU has played a process of armed struggle in the past, armed struggle linked to concrete popular struggles, this development that was the Popular Organization 33 Orientales which had its revolutionary practices in the 60s and 70s but with a conception exactly of construction of popular and to strengthen the popular organizations and also playing roles of other forms of direct actions as everyday popular direct actions but which were insufficient for class struggle. In this sense, the concept of popular power is a construct as a concept which intends to build the people’s capacity of construction, the capacity of action of a people is not a concept that is a power that is imposed, it is a power that is built in the communes, in the unions, in the grassroots organizations at the grassroots level and it generates the people’s capacity for resistance and action and also for struggle. Especially, at a stage that we want to develop here on the continent, a capacity to build new social organizations that replace the state and the withdrawal of the organisms of power, and in this way develop the question of popular protagonist according to the needs of the peoples. In this way, being the conductor of its own socialist and libertarian process – which we call anarchism, but can take other names other concepts included, but we understand that it goes this way.
The process that is taking place in Rojava and in all of Kurdistan, is of great interest to us because in some way it adds to this concept and the experience that anarchism has been trying to develop. Obviously from a different context, with its own historical and cultural orientations of the Kurdish people, but anyway it has a great richness and is fundamental. For anarchism, the theme of ecology has always been very relevant, not for the mere care of nature or, as we say, futile ecologism, but for human life and social life. This is the world we inhabit, that we live in, so for a new society this is a fundamental theme in the case of the organization we are part of here, it develops in different activities linked to the ecological theme, there are contacts and projects with peasant movements in Brazil like the Landless Movement (MST), the movement of small farmers, as well as the urban homeless movements in the neighborhoods. Also in Argentina with organic garden projects, and in Uruguay there is also experience in this style, a lot of fight against the contamination of the environment, and in Montevideo in La Teja neighborhood there is a great experience in this theme. About 20 years ago the issue of silver contamination was generated by the oil refinery in the neighborhood as well as the traditional buried silver dumps that have an influence on the health of children, saturnism as it is called. Nowadays the fights in Rosario, Argentina, against the burnings in the pastoral territory in the zone between rivers of Santa Fe and there are very relevant struggles also in Brazil, in the fight against the deforestation of the Amazon.
We understand that the change of general strategy of the PKK is very interesting this concept of the guerrillas united with the people that is somehow close to anarchism and the development of direct action we are not interested in an armed action disconnected from the people, on the contrary. We think of actions taking the characteristics of popular struggles, understood by the people, so that they participate. We understand that this activity is an inherent part of political organization for example, when he operated the armed arm of the FAU, he said it was a leg of the organization…it was not an organization with its own autonomy, it was an integrated part of the FAU and its decisions were taken collectively as an organization and it worked in a clandestine way where the organization decided which actions would be carried out and which not but there is a conception distinct from ours, the idea of military command and hierarchy, in our organization there were only those responsible for the action and he distributed the tasks among militants. FAU organized the concrete conditions that existed in Uruguay, its characteristics of struggle to establish this type of struggle and not just mechanically copy the experiences of the period in the 1960s, like what was happening in Chile, Vietnam, etc. We have our own peculiarities and the revolutionary struggle was based on this, but there were connections with the labor movement in other regions the other organizations that operated only on their own had a faster decline than the FAU (armed struggle). In this sense, the concept of self-defense is important. The taking over from the grassroots, from popular organizations and in the continent there are important experiences in that sense, of groups of self-defense of communities.
As it indicates in the question, the internationalism here in the continent we see it as the Latin Americanism and it has been a form of support of struggle between the struggles that take place on the continent, and secondly we think on a more global level here in Latin America, we are in solidarity with the struggles of other peoples, for example with the support of the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s, the Sandinista Revolution, also the support for the Cuban Revolution, there are many cases of comrades going to fight from one country to another, comrades who came from Europe because they were persecuted, and for us this conceptualization is fundamental lived out in practice. There is a fairly recent episode of support for international fighters, than in 1994 with all the solidarity with the Basque people, with political prisoners…that even ended with the death of two Uruguayans. It seems important to us to reinforce this conceptualize and internationalist practice and to feel other peoples’ struggles as our own. For example today in Rojava there are comrades from all over the world, supporting the Revolution and the struggle taking place today we here try to reproduce what we can from this experience and demonstrate our Solidarity and we will always be supporting the struggles here on the continent.
We understand that we are stopped under a cycle here in Latin America that began in 2019 that can develop into something concrete of major popular rebellions as the struggles that occur today in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, as well as in Panama, and that surely more countries will give example of rebellions and our duty is to support and extend a hand of solidarity to all the people who are fighting.