Communist Party of Colombia

(CPC; Partido Comunista de Colombia), founded July 17, 1930, succeeding the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Colombia, which arose in the mid-1920’s. The CPC was admitted to the Comintern in 1935 and took an active part in founding the Confederation of Colombian Workers in 1936. The Communist Party was represented in the parliament from 1937 to 1946. The First Congress of the CPC (August 1941) called for the rallying of all the working people of the country in the struggle against anticommunism and for the democratization of domestic political life. During World War II (1939–45) right-wing opportunist tendencies began spreading in the CPC under the influence of the American revisionist E. Browder. A. Duran, general secretary of the party, was the chief exponent of these tendencies. The Fifth Congress, held in July 1947, expelled Duran’s group from the party and elected G. Vieira White general secretary. The party took an active part in the peasants’ armed struggle for land, which began in 1949. The repressions directed against the party in the 1950’s resulted in the death of many Communists, including eight members of the Central Committee.

After the fall of Rojas Pinilla’s dictatorship in May 1957, the party was legalized, although it was barred from participating in legislative bodies. The CPC began its struggle against the monopoly of state power held by a coalition of the Liberal and Conservative parties that had been imposed by the big bourgeoisie, and in December 1968 it won the right to participate in elections to local government bodies; in 1974 the political rights of the CPC were fully restored. The Eighth Congress of the CPC, held in December 1958, declared the party’s chief task to be the formation of a broad-based party that would become the vanguard of the working class and all working people. A party program was adopted at the Tenth Congress (January 1966), and amendments were added at the Eleventh Congress (December 1971). The program established that the party’s immediate strategic task was to carry out an antiimperialist, antilatifundista people’s democratic revolution, which would simultaneously be part of and the first step toward a socialist revolution. The program also provided for the formation, at this stage, of a patriotic government of national liberation that would establish a people’s democracy in the country.

Delegations of the CPC attended the international Conferences of Communist and Workers’ Parties held in Moscow in 1957, 1960, and 1969. The CPC approved the documents adopted by these conferences.

The CPC is organized along the principles of democratic centralism. The highest body of the party is the Congress; between congresses the party is headed by the Central Committee, which elects the Executive Committee and the Secretariat of the Central Committee from among its members. G. Vieira White is general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPC. The central organ is the weekly newspaper Voz Proletaria; the

theoretical organ is the magazine Documentos Políticos. (See Table 1 for a list of the congresses of the CPC.)