The youth have been characterized as the most rebellious section of the population, those who are least willing to accept the injustices, abuse and repression on the part of the system, even if at particular moments in the history of humanity, they have not escaped the ideological assault of the ruling classes, considerably weakening their struggles for the construction of new, free and just societies.

At the present time, and for several decades now, imperialism and the classes that hold power have mounted a frontal offensive with the aim of confusing and distancing the youth from the class struggle.

Every day the ruling groups spend thousands of millions of dollars in what they call the entertainment industry, an overdeveloped and highly effective machine for manipulating the thinking of large sections of the population, in particular the youth. Every day they bring us prefabricated idols and fashions that in a short time come to define how to act and even how to think. With their superficial preoccupations they try to keep us occupied with silly things and shove to the side things that are really important.

They tell us to forget all about prehistoric ideas like revolution and justice and concern ourselves instead with who won the Grammy awards, that out-of-fashion things like exploitation and misery shouldn't matter to anyone anymore if this spring's fashion color is blue. They tell us that "history has ended and the end of ideology has arrived. And what a drag to talk about politics; in the end, the world has been, is and always will be that way and it's not possible to change it."

They want an apolitical and apathetic youth who don't care what happens around them. A youth submerged in the notions of individualism and consumerism. A youth that worships money like a god and whose highest aspiration is to be "masters over themselves" and then, being totally superficial, they talk about independence, that nobody should tell them what to do, as if it were possible to be independent by thinking with a brain that isn't yours!

The present system only offers the youth what they need to become complete automatons. Drugs, already a well-known method of the empire to neutralize those who are discontent, as well as bombarding us 24 hours a day with television programs, "light" movies and magazines that have nothing to do with our reality or our problems, have led a big section of the youth to fall into a state of social vegetation, where they hope to lead all of us.

The empires well know that the people's cultural identity represents a dangerous threat and is an active element of the "undesirable" concept of sovereignty. They want to make us forget our roots; they know that the history of our peoples is one of struggle and resistance, full of heroes and heroines who lived and died with dignity, defending the interests of those who were defenseless. In the bourgeois optics, this constitutes a threat; examples like this call out for a life and death struggle against the class enemy. That is, against them.

That is why they want to acculturate us now and completely convert us to the "American way of life." Fashion, music, the news and even food have been converted into pathetic gringo carbon copies.

Though the offensive may be aggressive and powerful and in spite of the tons of dollars invested into this project, there are also youth all over the world defying and contradicting what the empire says, resisting being absorbed by the bourgeois ideology that, without principles or scruples, thinks it can convert us into actual zombies, perfect customers, producers of riches for the big transnationals.

We men and women who make up the FARC-EP, the majority of us youths, resist and struggle against the model they want to impose. We feel we are a part of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement against globalization. We say it is not true that history has come to an end since it is the peoples, battling daily, who write history. We have the right to aspire to a better future; we firmly plant our dreams and hopes with the firing of our rifles, because they've left us no other way to do it.

And to those who defend the theory of Fukuyama about the end of ideology, the transnationals, landowners and all those who keep our peoples submerged in misery and ignorance, we repeat that Yes, revolution is possible! That we will build a new and better society on the ruins of this one that is already obsolete and inhuman. And all of us together - men, women, youth and old people, workers and unemployed, farmers and students will build the New Colombia that will be for everyone.

The youth of the world should be conscious of what is happening around them and stop being useful idiots. We have to take an active part in the anti-imperialist and liberation struggles. We must organize ourselves, prepare ourselves and study so as to fight consciously against exploitation and really win freedom, keeping in mind that although the present is a time for struggle, the future is ours.