----- Original Message -----
From: Jessica Sundin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 9:12 PM
Subject: [actioncolombia] THE EVOLUTION OF THE FARC: A Guerrilla Group's Long History
NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept/Oct 2000
THE EVOLUTION OF THE FARC: A Guerrilla Group's Long History
By Alfredo Molano
Colombia's largest rebel organization is deeply rooted in a legacy of
class conflict.
[Alfredo Molano is a book author, journalist and a weekly columnist for
the newspaper El Espectador. His writing on behalf of human rights,
peasants and marginalized Colombian communities earned him death threats
from the paramilitary United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC) He is
currently in exile in Spain but continues to write his column.
Translated from Spanish by NACLA.]
Fierce battles, often characterized by extreme cruelty, marked the early
twentieth century in Colombia, as land hungry peasants and their
reformist allies faced off against the country's landowning oligarchy,
which was backed by the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
The land owners and Church leaders, along with peasants under their
control, were organized as the Conservative Party; other, reform-minded
peasants and their allies were known as Liberals. On the rich and
violent soil of those conflicts lie the origins of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's most powerful present-day
guerrilla group.
>From 1930 to 1946, a series of Liberal Party-run administrations,
referred to in Colombian history as the Liberal Republic, inaugurated
land reform that restricted ancestral privileges and unleashed furious
political opposition from the Conservatives. After the internally
divided Liberals fell in 1946, a new Conservative government used
political violence to regain the oligarchy's lands and remain in power.
Then Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a charismatic Liberal and land-reform
movement leader, was gunned down in Bogota in 1948. In response, popular
insurrections broke out in the capital and in virtually every city where
the Liberals were strong. The assassination unleashed a decadelong
heightening of the old conflict. The new strife was known simply as La
Violencia. Between 1948 and 1958, La Violencia took the lives of more
than 300,000 Colombians.
To subdue the Liberal uprisings, the government gave weapons to
Conservative peasants throughout the country, as well as backing from
the National Police. At the same time, thousands of Liberal peasants
armed themselves against the Conservative government. On the eastern
plains, peasants backed by the Liberal Party, with assistance from
Communist Party activists, managed to form a 10,000-man army that
inspired the formation of small guerrilla groups throughout the country.
One peasant guerrilla who emerged from the Liberal uprising was Pedro
Antonio Marin Later he would come to be known as Manuel Marulanda Velez,
or "Tirofijo" ("Sure Shot"). Today he is chief commander of the FARC.
In 1953, an anti-Communist military strongman, General Gustavo Rojas
Pinilla, came to power by force, backed by elements within both
traditional parties and-significantly-by Washington. Once securely in
power, the General decreed an amnesty which was welcomed by the armed
peasants of the eastern plains and by many Liberals and Conservatives as
well.
In 1955, a military operation was launched against rural regions that
remained strongholds of agrarian guerrillas who had fought in the name
of Gaitan, and where Communist guerrillas were also concentrated. Backed
by Washington's National Security Doctrine and a $170 million U.S. loan,
Rojas Pinilla began bombing guerrilla and opposition peasant positions.
The guerrilla movement tried to dig in and hold out in the highlands,
but was ultimately forced to retreat to the jungles of the Andean
foothills. In those regions, Marulanda, joined by Jacobo Arenas, a
charismatic Marxist ideologue who described himself a "professional
revolutionary," organized a community based on economic self-management
and military self- defense. This was the first of the guerrilla bases
that later came to be known as "Independent Republics." When Rojas
Pinilla began flirting with the idea of prolonging his rule, however,
the Liberals, who had hoped to win the next elections, withdrew their
support. At that point anti-Rojas Pinilla demonstrations spread
throughout the country, and many were violently repressed as the
government accused the Communists of disturbing public order.
In 1958, the Conservative and Liberal elites brought La Violencia to an
official end with a National Front that allowed the two parties to share
public offices and alternate in the presidency. But the arrangement did
nothing to resolve the underlying land conflicts, and violence continued
in the countryside. In 1964, the army attacked the "Independent
Republics" of Marulanda and Arenas by land and by air with 16,000
soldiers, and captured the encampments. But they had already been
abandoned: Some 43 guerrillas, including the two leaders, had fled and
taken refuge in the mountains of the southwestern state of Cauca. Later
that year, they founded the FARC in the same area.
Seeing that it would be impossible to break through the rigid political
and agrarian structures using legal means, the opposition declared an
armed rebellion. During the same period other guerrilla forces, the
National Liberation Army (ELN) in 1964 and the People's Liberation Army
(EPL) in 1967, were created, and the big landowners dominated the
country's economy.
In the 1970s, the National Front was still dominating political life,
and on the economic front, the government of Misael Pastrana (1970-1974)
adopted a rural development model that aimed to eliminate all obstacles
to free investment in the countryside. This led to concentration of land
ownership, the undermining of small-scale peasant producers and the rise
of peasant proletarianization. Because of Pastrana's program, thousands
of desperate peasants were propelled into both organized and spontaneous
invasions of rural properties. On the Atlantic Coast, for example,
peasants invaded the large haciendas common to the region and
distributed the land among themselves. Property owners, backed by the
area's aggressive political bosses, responded with public and private
force, and succeeded in recovering their land. Pastrana's economic
development model also drove many peasants to the cities, raising urban
unemployment and setting the stage for the great National Civic Strike
of 1977 and the Draconian Security Statute of 1978 that drastically
reduced the right to protest and organize.
At the same time, there was repression of the peasant movement,
expulsion of small tenants from the lands they cultivated and, in
general, expansion of commercial agriculture to less populated parts of
the country, as well as colonization of unused lands. Many of the most
popular destinations lay in the same remote areas where the guerrillas
were strong and where they constituted the only authority. During this
period the FARC consolidated its influence, opened some new areas, and
focused on training military leaders. These were the days when many
students, intellectuals, workers and peasant leaders joined the
guerrilla struggle.
Between 1970 and 1982, the FARC grew from a movement of only about 500
people to a small army of 3,000, with a centralized hierarchical
structure, a general staff, military code, training school and political
program. Meanwhile, in the areas of colonization, the colonizers'
situation was desperate. Bereft of all institutional support, they lived
as permanently displaced peasants. This is exactly what led them to
embrace the profitable cultivation of coca. No legal crop offered them
the advantages that coca still does: the ease and economy of growing an
Andean Amazon plant that needs no fertilizers or pesticides, a ready
market of local traffickers, a fixed price, and constant demand.
At first the guerrillas tried to resist growing coca: They suspected
that it represented a kind of underground "imperialist" invasion, and
they worried that peasants who became prosperous would stop supporting
the revolutionary struggle. But the guerrilla leadership soon realized
that banning coca would mean losing peasant support to the authorities.
This realization marked the birth of the infamous gramaje, a coca-trade
tax that is nothing less than guerrilla-imposed extortion of drug
traffickers and prosperous coca farmers. The guerrillas' rapprochement
with coca also led to the belief that they are
traffickers-narcoguerrillas. That notion is false, however. Cultivation
of illegal crops was established in the colonization areas not simply
because of weak army presence, but because the colonists were on the
brink of ruin. And the guerrillas were in the colonized regions long
before coca cultivation appeared. Their growth was due mainly to the
repression unleased against popular protest, and by the growing
impoverishment of the population - not to their participation in the
drug trade.
Since the early 1980s, the history of the FARC has been a history of
peace negotiations. At the beginning of his presidency, Belisario
Betancur (1982-1986) named a Peace Commission, and talks began between
the insurgents and the government. The government's strategy was to
offer to legalize the FARC's political activity and to convert their
military force into a political party. In 1984, the FARC renounced
kidnapping, and the parties agreed to a general, verifiable ceasefire.
This led to the formation of the Patriotic Union (UP), a legal political
party originally affiliated with the FARC and supported by the Communist
Party and other groups on the Colombian left. The UP gained significant
parliamentary representation in the 1986 elections.
Meanwhile, the Sumapaz region, about 50 miles south of Bogota in the
department of Meta, was cleared of the military and turned into an area
where meetings could take place among representatives of the government,
the guerrillas and civil society. The site of the meetings, La Casa
Verde, became famous as a hopeful symbol of the peace process. Just as
the rules and conditions of negotiation were being agreed to, however,
the urban guerrilla group April 19th Movement (M-19) seized the Palace
of Justice, leading to the killing of over 100 persons, including
several Supreme Court justices. The disaster dealt a crippling blow to
the talks, which continued, but in an atmosphere of mutual
recrimination. The Palace of Justice debacle, pressure from business
associations, and the tactic of carrot and stick-all came together to
substantially change the nature of the negotiations.
At the beginning of Virgilio Barco's four-year presidency, in 1986, the
government offered "an outstretched but firm hand" to the guerrillas.
Unlike President Betancur, Barco tried to offer them full participation
in civil and political life if they would lay down their weapons. The
government called upon the guerrillas to demobilize and disarm in
exchange for political guarantees and economic compensation. Barco
wanted to restore the legitimacy of the state, which had been badly
damaged in the peasant areas and the territories of colonization. As
violence once again escalated, the rebel groups opted to unify as the
Simon Bolivar Guerrilla Coordinating Group (CGSB).
In early 1987, the army had unleashed a powerful offensive against the
Fifth Front of the FARC in the department of Uraba at the behest of the
banana companies, who felt that the guerrillas were backing the banana
workers union in its drive for higher wages. A few months later the
guerrillas destroyed a military convoy in Caqueta and killed 25
soldiers. The army bombarded the region and the government ended the
truce. The Defense Minister declared that it was time to do away with
the "myth of La Casa Verde" and that the cease-fire
could not be used as recourse for criminal activity. With national
negotiations stalled, the FARC, communicating through the Church,
proposed a regional dialogue in Caqueta, thus establishing a precedent
of using domestic locations for negotiations.
Meanwhile, the paramilitary forces had been growing dramatically, in
many cases financed by the head of the Medellin Cartel, Pablo Escobar,
especially around the northern region of the Magdalena Medio. With
Escobar's financing and the army's tolerance, paramilitaries began
decimating the leftist UP with impunity. It was during Barco's
subsequent administration that most of the UP's activists were murdered.
The final days of Barco's government were notably violent. Gunmen
assassinated four presidential candidates: Carlos Pizarro of the M-19
(who had just turned in their arms); Jaime Pardo Leal of the UP,
followed closely by his replacement, Bernardo Jaramillo; and the
Liberals' Luis Carlos Galan who would certainly have won the election.
Galan was replaced by Cesar Gaviria, a party hack who had been Minister
of Government, and who was elected president for the term 1990-1994. It
fell to Gaviria to advocate the writing of a new Constitution, a process
begun by Barco. The FARC had launched the idea, and public opinion
baptized it the "Peace Constitution." Yet the still mobilized guerrilla
alliance, the CGSB, was offered only six of 70 seats in the Constituent
Assembly charged with drafting the new document. This small guerrilla
representation had been the condition on which the military agreed to
permit the process of rewriting the Constitution. The virtual absence of
active guerrillas from what was called an "agreement on the
fundamentals" had two goals: to reduce their political prominence and to
make sure that the crucial theme of military-civilian relations did not
become subject to negotiation.
The peace negotiations themselves, which by now had been moved to
Caracas, advanced rapidly. Negotiators for both sides agreed to call for
a cease-fire and an end to hostilities. For the government this meant
placing the guerrillas within fixed geographical boundaries in order to
make verification of the ceasefire possible. It also meant that the
guerrillas must suspend kidnappings, extortion and bombings of physical
infrastructure. The guerrillas refused to confine themselves
geographically-since that would mean giving up their most effective
weapon - and they demanded that the paramilitaries be disbanded. The
government insisted on guerrilla demobilization as a condition for
participation in the Constituent Assembly. For its part, the CGSB
demanded radical political reform first, beginning with restructuring of
the Armed Forces.
While the two sides could not arrive at agreement on that point, they
did concur on verification and on the role of international oversight,
neither of which could be enacted without a cease-fire. The government
and the guerrillas also named a public-order advisory commission, and
the government further agreed to name a civilian as Minister of Defense
- a position reserved for the military since the onset of the National
Front - and agreed to outlaw the paramilitary "self-defense" groups. But
these measures were more symbolic than real, and the government demanded
that the guerrillas concentrate in 60 sites. For their part, the
guerrillas demanded 200 demilitarized municipalities, as well as
meaningfully verifiable measures against the paramilitaries.
At this point, a failed assassination plot by guerrillas against a
prominent senator named Aurelio Irragori led the government to suspend
the negotiations. Weeks later, however, the conversations resumed, but
with less trust among the parties. Now, each arrived with proposals
impossible for the other to comply with. The guerrillas had not ended
their attacks against the oil pipelines, nor had they diminished their
kidnappings or seizures of villages and police
stations. The business associations attacked the negotiations and
demanded that the government harden its bargaining position. In that
context, both sides decided to again postpone the talks.
Four months later, however, the delegations resumed contact in Tlaxcala,
Mexico. The government named Horacio Serpa as Peace Advisor and created
a department of social policy mandated to make "social reinsertion"
attractive to insurgents who wanted to give up their arms. In Mexico,
the CGSB succeeded in placing a debate about the neoliberal model on the
agenda, and the government's economic team came to the negotiations to
justify the Washington Consensus of free trade and privatization. The
guerrilla team questioned every aspect of the Consensus, even as
business associations and the right complained that it was unnecessary
and offensive for the government to have to justify its economic
policies before a group of "gangsters." For their part, government
spokespeople argued that significant economic changes were impossible,
since Colombia was now part of a globalized economy that imposed its own
obligatory rules.
Amid this less-than-promising atmosphere, the Popular Liberation Army
(EPL), a minority group in the guerrilla coalition, kidnapped and killed
a former Conservative Cabinet minister named Argelino Duran. The talks
had begun with an agreement to continue them "come what may." But in the
wake of the EPL action, the government once again canceled the talks,
and they collapsed in confusion.
The guerrillas emerged from the talks divided. On the one hand, two
different guerrilla subgroups used the accords to reinsert themselves
into mainstream politics. These groups, the majority of the EPL and a
split-off of the ELN, gave up their arms as well as their areas of
control. (Immediately after they relinquished their territory, it was
promptly occupied by paramilitaries.) Now, divisions began growing
within the CGSB. The FARC felt that the alliance imposed the interests
of the minority over the majority, as when the EPL kidnapped Duran,
which collapsed the talks at Tlaxcala. For the ELN and EPL, however, the
problem was that the FARC wanted to dominate the coordinating group.
These differences were dangerous. But they were kept under control, at
least for a time, by the moderating influence of much of the guerrilla
leadership.
The paramilitaries, meanwhile, had been growing and attracting the
sympathy of the right, which argued that these "self-defense groups"
should be recognized as the third actor in the conflict. The army
continued to facilitate paramilitary seizures of the most important
economic, political and military regions: Uraba, the banana plantation
area; the Panama border; and Montes de Maria, an area of big farms near
Cartagena. Ernesto Samper assumed the presidency in 1994, significantly
weakened by the opposition's accusations that he had received campaign
contributions from the drug cartels. His efforts at social reform, his
attempted rapprochement with the guerrillas, and his proposed political
changes were clouded over by these accusations throughout his four years
in office.
Just a few days into his administration, the FARC placed conditions on
the resumption of peace talks: a military withdrawal from the
FARC-dominated municipality of La Uribe, in the department of Meta; the
demobilization of paramilitary groups; and suspension of government
rewards for identifying kidnappers - a weapon used almost exclusively
against the guerrillas. Samper accepted the withdrawal, limiting it to
the rural areas of La Uribe. He publicly recognized the political
character of the conflict by denying that the guerrillas were simply a
band of drug traffickers. And he suspended the kidnapper identification
rewards.
The extreme right led an opposition to these concessions, publicizing
statistics about guerrilla kidnappings and the guerrillas' links with
drug traffickers. Six months later, General Bedoya, commander of the
Armed Forces, threatened Samper with a military coup if the government
ordered him to withdraw from La Uribe. The President, whose space for
maneuvering was already sharply limited, backed down in the face of
broad opposition led by the U.S. Ambassador, Colombia's Archbishop
Primate, the Conservative hierarchy, retired military officers,
followers of ex-President Gaviria, the business associations and even
portions of the left.
The guerrillas then cancelled the rapprochement and resumed their
attacks on the Armed Forces. In June and July 1996, guerrillas mobilized
in the departments of Guaviare, Putumayo, Caqueta, Norte de Santander
and Bolivar. At about the same time, nearly 200,000 peasants felt the
effect of drug eradication policies on their illicit crops and thus
their economic well-being. Recent aerial fumigations against legal and
illegal crops, and government attempts to quell the circulation of
inputs for processing coca leaves by declaring the so-called Special
Zones of Public Order raised the peasant growers' costs of production,
and therefore, of their survival as well. The protest was repressed by
the Armed Forces in a highly publicized way, making conflicts in the
areas of colonization visible and sensitizing the public to the reality
of coca producers' lives. These events helped humanize coca farmers,
especially when strike leaders told the media about the government's
disregard of their precarious conditions.
Over the next year and a half, the guerrilla movement met with
substantial military success, capturing many army bases and villages,
and ambushing army patrols. These actions were increasingly ambitious
and efficient; in August 1996 they culminated in destruction of the army
base at Las Delicias in Caquet and the capture of 60 soldiers.
Immediately afterward, the FARC extended offensive actions through the
territory, and Colombians began feeling that the state had lost control
of public order. As the government withdrew, the vacuum was filled by
the paramilitaries, who had transformed themselves into an unofficial
wing of the Armed Forces.
Samper was paralyzed. The military growth of the guerrillas was public
knowledge, and they proposed releasing the prisoners they held in
exchange for the army's further withdrawal in Caguan. The government
accepted. The soldiers were handed over in July of 1997 under the
supervision of the Red Cross and international observers from 13
countries, mainly from Europe and Latin America. During this event, the
FARC made several demands as a prerequisite for peace talks: that the
army withdraw from five additional municipalities; that the guerrillas
be treated with respect; and that popular protest be decriminalized. The
government, losing prestige day by day, rejected the conditions and the
army mounted a large military operation that - despite a massive
propaganda effort - produced absolutely no results. In this small test
of strength, the FARC did rather well. The government and the
international community recognized their military strength, and the
FARC's political presence in the country's interior began to seem as
though it might be a decisive factor in upcoming presidential elections.
By 1998, in fact, despite furious opposition from the right and the
army, the leading presidential candidates began to court the insurgents.
The Conservative candidate, Andres Pastrana, had created channels of
communication with the FARC. The Liberal candidate, Horacio Serpa, had
participated in previous contentious negotiations, so he was a bit more
estranged. But both candidates stressed two fundamental promises: to
withdraw from the five municipalities, and to deal directly with
Marulanda to establish bases for negotiation. That implied visiting with
the FARC leader in his military encampments. Pastrana succeeded in
tilting the balance in his favor, and as soon as he won his narrow
victory, he kept his word and met with Marulanda. They agreed then on
the bases for negotiation: withdrawal of military authority and police
forces from the five municipalities, formation of an unarmed civic corps
to keep local order in the demilitarized zone, dismantling of the
paramilitary groups, decriminalization of popular protest, and convening
of participation by the international community. Thus they began the
process of negotiation. Once again, peace talks are underway.
