On October 2 we published an article on the waves of killings and the protests in Colombia. Socialist Alternative also wrote a letter to the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and we have only received an automatic reply (the letter is at the end of the October 2 article).
Since then there have been another nine massacres taking the total for 2020 to 70 so far. On October 29, there was an assassination attempt on Senator Feliciano Valencia, an Indigenous land rights advocate. Still the Canadian government is silent.
We publish this poem for Colombia’s people, written when the number of massacres and people murdered were lower.
The Untitled
Pete Marlowe
As we the sacrificed of fifty five
Colombian massacres this year now brave
the journey northward from beyond mass graves,
let blood rise up! Let justice spring alive,
with death and darkness light and life’s new seeds!
As we, as one, two hundred and eighteen
each mourn each other’s nights in wailing keen,
Canadians! Join in our mutual need!
United, as we haunt the halls of power,
clutch tightened arm in arm with phantom limb,
their spectral and diaphanous excuses
shall vanish with the dawn’s unwitching hour!
We, quick and dead, have both one world to win,
and nothing but these ghostly chains to lose!
