The Worker, Vol. 40, Number 8

Contents: 

I. Statement of the Workers Party, U.S.A - Condemn the U.S. Military Occupation of Colombia Under the Pretext of “Humanitarian Aid”!

II. The Widening Chasm: Why Capitalists Can No Longer Contain the Positive Energy of the Masses

III. An Exposure of Speculative Capital and High-Voltage Torture in the United States​​

I. How Wall Street Bough Bogotá 

To understand the current crisis, we must look at the specific political maneuvers that U.S. imperialism executed during the recent Colombian presidential election. Frustrated by years of diplomatic friction under progressive President Gustavo Petro, the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and its intelligence networks actively intervened to swing the country back into the neocolonial fold.

Petro's administration had promoted a paradigm shift in the fight against drug trafficking, implementing a "total peace" strategy that focused on negotiating with armed groups and providing financial incentives for small farmers to substitute coca with food crops. 

However, U.S. and multinational interest groups launched a relentless campaign of threat inflation. When violence near the Colombia-Venezuela border displaced tens of thousands of people, the corporate press used the crisis to terrorize the public, claiming "democracy and free markets are under siege" and that Petro's peace negotiations had failed.

Emboldened by the CIA’s brazen daylight executions on the high seas and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, Colombian reactionaries turned to a U.S.-trained political outsider: Abelardo de la Espriella, known by his militarist nickname "El Tigre" (The Tiger). De la Espriella is a millionaire lawyer who holds dual U.S. and Colombian citizenship. Having never held political office, he ran on a campaign of anger and fear, adopting a military salute as his signature move. He openly aligned himself with Donald Trump, promising to cozy up to Washington, host U.S. troops, bomb jungle laboratories, and to build mega-prisons to house unpaid captive slave labor like the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador.

Trump endorsed de la Espriella during the campaign, declaring that the demagogic, openly pro-dependence leader had the "total support" of the United States. Following a close and highly contested runoff election, de la Espriella took office on Friday, August 7, 2026. In his first address at his inauguration ceremony—which he pointedly held at the Pichincha Battalion in Cali to signal a hardline militarist stance—he vowed "total war" on narco-terrorism and declared that "the option of dialogue is completely exhausted."

Within hours of his taking office, the U.S. State Department announced a massive $1 billion security assistance package for Colombia. Legally packaged as a "security package" to support de la Espriella's counter-terrorism campaign, the State Department claimed the funding would fight organized crime and "reduce illegal migration." In reality, this $1 billion was a direct geopolitical down-payment. It was the entry fee to formally enroll Colombia in the "Shield of the Americas"—a Trump-backed regional security alliance (including Ecuador and El Salvador) designed to integrate Latin American militaries directly under the command structure of the Pentagon.

II. The Chocó Earthquakes and the Palanquero Drones

While the political superstructure in Washington and Bogotá celebrated this new partnership, physical reality intervened. On Monday, August 10, 2026, a devastating 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck western Colombia. The epicenters were concentrated in the impoverished, majority-Black department of Chocó, severely damaging the major regional hubs of Cali and Pereira. The disaster left nearly 300 workers dead and 13,000 homes in ruins, leaving tens of thousands of families homeless, without clean water, electricity, or medical care.

Instead of organizing relief, de la Espriella’s comprador regime immediately mobilized the coercive power of the state to execute a planned campaign of neocolonial annexation and class suppression. Bypassing Congress under the cover of a declared economic emergency, the administration welcomed foreign occupation forces into the country, unmasking the cynical "humanitarian" banner of earthquake assistance as a direct, physical cover for imperialist military intervention and primitive accumulation. 

The deployment of these forces exposed the lie:

• The Chocó Devastation: U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) did not deploy engineering battalions, heavy transport helicopters, or medical supplies to the ruined, muddy villages of Chocó. While local peasants dug through landslide rubble with their bare hands, U.S. forces bypassed the disaster zone entirely.

• The Oil Field Deployment: SOUTHCOM forces were immediately dispatched to the Cusiana-Cupiagua oil fields in eastern Colombia, standing guard over the pipeline infrastructure of multinational energy corporations.

• The Palanquero Surveillance Canopy: U.S. military personnel reinforced the high-tech surveillance canopy at the Palanquero CSL (Cooperative Security Location) Air Base.

At Palanquero, U.S. and Colombian officers do not coordinate food deliveries. Instead, they sit in air-conditioned intelligence fusion cells, staring at glowing computer screens tracking real-time coordinates. They launch MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drones that fly thousands of feet over local Colombian territories. These drones use high-tech target-identification sensors and infrared cameras to monitor extraction corridors and track local resistance coordinates, securing the flow of raw petroleum directly out of the ground and onto Wall Street’s tankers. The U.S. military is not there to rebuild homes; it is there as an armed guard for transnational extraction.

III. Exposing the World Bank’s "Miracle Fund" (Fondo Milagro) Debt Vehicle

While U.S. troops physically secure the oil fields, the financial arm of the empire executes a parallel heist. The World Bank dangled a $450 million "Miracle Fund" (Fondo Milagro) under the pretext of earthquake recovery. The corporate press and reformist politicians praised this "aid" as a vital lifesaver.

We must expose the "Miracle Fund" for what it actually is: a predatory debt vehicle of economic incarceration.

This fund is not a gift. It is bound to strict structural conditionalities. To access the money, Colombia was legally forced to dismantle capital controls, slash social services, and privatize public water and electricity grids. This turns vital municipal services over to Western corporate monopolies, driving up the cost of living for the already devastated working class.

Further, the debt is secured by a terrifying legal canopy. Under the jurisdiction of the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), if any future Colombian government attempts to nationalize these services or reclaim its sovereign oil fields, the ICSID stands ready to execute devastating financial judgments. These judgments freeze Colombian state assets and bank accounts abroad to enforce the neocolonial debt trap. The "Miracle Fund" does not fund recovery; it funds the permanent enslavement of Colombia’s economic base, showing how international finance capital subordinates local governments to Wall Street's stock exchanges.

IV. Our Anti-War Demands

For the anti-war movement in the United States, the lesson is clear: we cannot separate foreign policy from domestic class struggle. The same Wall Street banks that hijack our pension funds to finance global military speculation are the ones funding de la Espriella's military build-up. The same bipartisan ruling class that denies U.S. workers healthcare and affordable housing is the one sending $1 billion to secure oil fields in Colombia.

We must turn our contempt for both capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans who systematically vote to fund the Pentagon war machine—into mass organization. We do not beg the local comprador regime in Bogotá for "humane reforms." Instead, as a vanguard operating inside the borders of the United States, we organize the domestic working class to direct its struggle directly against our own ruling class.

We must organize to put forward three unyielding, anti-imperialist demands on the U.S. government:

1. 1. Immediate U.S. Arms Embargo: We demand the immediate and absolute termination of the $1 billion security assistance package, and the cessation of all U.S. arms transfers, training, and military coordination with de la Espriella’s militarist regime. Not a single bullet, helicopter, or dollar of American tax money should go to fund "El Tigre's" war on the Colombian working class.

1. 2. Absolute Withdrawal of U.S. Forces: We demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel, Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) "advisers," and private mercenary firms from Colombian soil, and the complete dismantling of the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone and target-acquisition operations at the Palanquero CSL Air Base.

1. 3. Cancellation of Neocolonial Debt: We demand the immediate, unconditional cancellation of all Colombian sovereign debt held by U.S. banks and international lending institutions, the complete rejection of World Bank "Miracle Fund" conditionalities, and the stripping of the ICSID's jurisdiction over the sovereign resources of the Colombian people.



Peace cannot be begged from the halls of Congress. It must be seized by organizing a mass, independent anti-imperialist front of the popular masses. By directing our collective energy straight upward to crush the home-grown war cartel, we break the back of the imperialist machine, enabling the workers of all countries to reclaim their own material bases of survival.

1. The Division of Worlds (The Objective Chasm)

The system is traversing a profound, widening gulf that cannot be bridged by reformist compromises. This is the absolute divergence between the social character of modern production and the private, high-frequency hoarding of its fruits.

The Polarization: On one side of the chasm is the capitalist "ninth heaven" of co-located Wall Street matching engines, automated volatility-harvesting siphons, and high-tech torture devices like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) G.L.O.V.E.. On the other side is the working-class "ninth hell" — the physical, material base where the living labor capacity of the people is ground down under the weight of 22-hour blackouts, withholding of earthquake relief, and declining real wages.

Universal Estrangement: Under capitalism, this chasm manifests as a universal estrangement of individuals from themselves and from one another. The two classes no longer inhabit the same social space, speak the same language, or share a common reality.

2. The Nascent Expression & The Will-to-Be

The people are positive. Despite the relentless bombardment of media-manufactured panic designed to induce a cringing, defensive subordination, the raw, biological will-to-be of the working class cannot be extinguished.

Spontaneous Rebelliousness: This positive energy is the spontaneous, instinctual reflection among human beings of what they are struggling against in society. It expresses itself every day in the raw, uncoordinated impulses of workers refusing to cross picket lines, communities organizing mutual aid post-earthquake, and youth rising up against state-sanctioned borders.

The Embryonic Stage: However, because the anti-consciousness of capitalist society projects the illusion that there is nothing to find out, this positive energy remains in a perceptual, embryonic stage of cognition. It is a "class-in-itself" — fully aware of its immediate, localized oppression and possessing an irresistible desire to react, but lacking the unified, three-dimensional conceptual framework to understand its own historical task as a "class-for-itself".

3. The Liquidating Role of Revisionism and Social Democracy

This is where the capitalist class deploys its most dangerous, highly specialized defensive mechanism. Because the capitalists cannot directly police every spontaneous outbreak of class struggle, they rely on the opportunist, revisionist, and social-democratic labor aristocracy to act as their primary fire-extinguishers.

When young, spontaneous organizations emerge from the positive energy of the masses, the social democrats and revisionists step in to liquidate them on command. 

They achieve this through three systematic operations:

Preaching Class Conciliation: They preach class conciliation, collaboration, and compromise, insisting that the fundamental, life-or-death contradictions of society can be resolved peacefully without striking at the root cause, without struggle and revolution against capitalism and its state power.

The "Lesser-Evil" Ruse: They function as the charlatan “healers of capitalism", telling the workers to abandon the "hopeless dream" of revolution and instead participate in the “safe” electoral circus. They attempt to subordinate the independent political movement of the working class directly under the wing of the so-called "progressive" section of the capitalists (the Democratic Party).

Dividing the Totality: They slice the unified, vertical struggle of the working class into a series of isolated, horizontal pressure groups and special interest silos. By pitting native-born workers against foreign-born workers, or trade union demands against community survival, they keep the masses locked in a closed-loop conflict. This drains the masses' revolutionary kinetic energy into a sterile vacuum, allowing the state's vertical extraction pipelines to continue siphoning wealth undisturbed.

Moving from Spark to General Conflagration

By identifying this precise contradiction — the positive, spontaneous energy of the masses versus the liquidating role of social democracy and revisionism — we realize that we cannot afford to let the workers' movement develop spontaneously. To do so is to hand our youth and our organizations over to the opportunist butchers.

If we lag behind the awakening of the masses, being unable to lead them forward, we commit the fatal error of tailism, which inevitably leads the revolution to defeat.

Our role is to act as the organic catalyst. The mass workers' press must function as an enormous pair of smith's bellows. We do not lecture the masses; we help them drop the heavy lodestone of absolute material facts directly onto the narrow-minded, reformist, and chauvinist illusions of the labor aristocrats. 

By unmasking the bipartisan cartel's oil thefts, exposing the G.L.O.V.E. as an instrument of state terror, and showing how the social democrats built the very legal scaffold for this plunder, we strip the revisionists of their "humanitarian" cover. We provide the conscious expression that fuses the scattered, spontaneous sparks of indignation into a single, unified, and vertical torrent of revolutionary action

The modern imperialist state operates on a carefully guarded delusion: that its high-tech, digital networks exist in a weightless, virtual cloud. This theater is a lie. The digital wire of Wall Street is connected directly to the conductive copper thread of the torture glove. They represent the twin terminals of the exact same circuit of state-monopoly capital.

Terminal A: The Superstructural Siphon (The Truth API)

If you open a Bloomberg Terminal, Reuters Eikon, or any institutional trading platform and pull up the one-minute candlestick charts for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) or Brent crude oil futures at exactly 10:04 AM Eastern Time on August 17, you will see a towering, vertical green spike. Within the first ten seconds of Trump’s threat to bomb Oman, early-access, high-speed trading algorithms harvested an estimated $1.3 billion in risk-free profits before the ink on the news was even dry. Checking these candlestick charts on institutional terminals provides the direct, verifiable coordinates of this heist.

This microsecond robbery is executed through a predatory, parasite-infested Pension Hijack. Under capitalist law, the retirement savings of typical working people—teachers, firefighters, and factory workers—are held hostage by financial administrators. The system legally compels these pension funds to pay an extortionate $100,000 monthly fee for early-access WebSocket feeds of the "Truth API" just to prevent high-speed bots from front-running and draining our retirement savings. These co-located machines—physically situated inside the stock exchange’s brain to eliminate internet lag—execute trades in 2 milliseconds. This is over 150 times faster than the 300 milliseconds it takes for a human eye to blink in reflex to danger. Wall Street is literally using working-class retirement funds as speculative ammunition, forcing domestic workers to become involuntary, old-age financial accomplices in the millisecond-by-millisecond slaughter of families in the Global South to line the pockets of the finance aristocracy.

Terminal B: The Physical Base (The DHS G.L.O.V.E. and the Geography of Raids)

While the financial superstructure siphons wealth, the base-level enforcement machinery relies on raw physical terror. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has posted a $20 million no-bid solicitation to equip officers with the CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E. (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter). Delivering a massive 380-volt electric shock directly to bare skin, this device forces absolute physical compliance in under three seconds without leaving burns or scars, enabling unmarked physical torture under the cover of administrative custody. Just as the bankers sanitize microsecond robbery as "Best Execution mandates," the state sanitizes high-voltage torture as a "conductive distraction and de-escalation device."

The border is not a natural physical feature; it is a violent reification—a historically contingent class relationship turned into a physical "thing" of concrete, razor wire, and high-voltage gloves to enforce class division. The state uses this reified barrier to execute a violent, legal abstraction on physical human bodies. The moment a worker crosses this line, they are stripped of their concrete class identity and abstracted into a legal zero—the category of "illegal alien." Reduced to this abstraction, specific workers (highly concentrated by national identity in poultry plants, agricultural fields, and construction sites) can be subjected to targeted ICE raids and 380-volt shocks with complete administrative impunity.

This loop is currently tearing itself apart in systemic chaos. The capitalist economic base demands the physical importation of migratory labor to depress wages, but the political superstructure demands their violent exclusion to maintain social control. Unable to manage its own legal abstractions, the ruling class is locked in a frantic congressional debate to dismantle birthright citizenship. This is an engine of planned instability, aiming to codify a permanent, stateless, intergenerational caste of workers on the very soil of the empire.

The Closed-Loop Flow of State-Monopoly Capital

These two terminals form a single, self-regulating circuit of exploitation. The bipartisan state manufactures geopolitical crises to harvest billions in speculative profits via the Truth API. These superprofits cycle through the state treasury, where the legislature appropriates millions to fund repressive police contracts like the CTG-5 torture glove. In turn, these shock gloves are deployed inward to terrorize, discipline, and disenfranchise the pre-emptively criminalized domestic labor pool. This state-enforced terror depresses wages universally, bloating the corporate profit margins that fuel the speculative bubbles that the HFT algorithms and the Truth API exploit, seamlessly closing the loop of capital extraction. The digital siphon and the electric glove are structurally indivisible; to destroy the glove, we must smash the siphon.

Overcoming the Social-Democratic Vise

When the masses witness this violence, social-democratic leaders perform their systemic task: liquidating spontaneous resistance on command. Reformists like New York Attorney General Letitia James demand "civil rights lawsuits" or "officer recertification" to divert working-class anger into the sterile channels of the capitalist election circus and the "lesser-evil" trap of the Democratic Party.

Liberal reformists like Senator Tim Kaine are already stepping into the vacuum to sell their toothless constitutional illusions, attempting to channel the workers' spontaneous anger into harmless legislative reform rather than active class resistance. By parading his War Powers resolution through Congress, Kaine attempts to redirect the righteous rage of the working class into a harmless legislative swamp, pretending that a paper vote in a capitalist senate can tame a war machine that both parties systematically fund.

The working class cannot regulate, reform, or lobby this system. The only path to survival is to smash the bipartisan war cartel, reject all class-collaborationist coalitions, and fight for Democratic Renewal—constituting our own independent, mass public authority that vests sovereignty directly in the people themselves.