Over the past two years, the FARC has
consolidated its presence in 622 of
Colombia’s 1,071 municipalities. This
resurgence of the guerrilla is the direct
result of the deep institutional crisis
facing Colombian politics today.
On June 15, 1997, Colombia’s oldest and most
powerful guerrilla army, the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), handed over
some 70 prisoners of war to the Colombian military. The
soldiers had been captured in two large-scale military
operations the previous year and the FARC conditioned
Ricardo Vargas Meza is a sociologist and philosopher He is a
researcher at the Center for Research and Popular Education
(CINEP), a nongovernmental organization based in Bogoti.
Vargas is co-author of Drogas, Poder y Regi6n en Colombia
(CINEP 1995).
Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
their release on the government’s
agreement to withdraw the army
from 5,000 square miles of territory
in the southern part of the country.
The government ultimately agreed
to the FARC’s demands. The
A FARC guerrilla escorts one of 70 soldiers released on June 22, 1997, fol-
lowing months of
negotiations with
the government.
much-publicized release of the sol-
diers-the outcome of complex negotiations mediated
by the Church-sponsored National Conciliation
Commission (CNC) and the International Red Cross-
gave witness to the growing political strength of the
FARC and reaffirmed its territorial control in southern
Colombia. The current strength of the FARC is reflected
in the high number of municipalities in which it main-
tains a strong presence-622 of the 1,071 municipalities
in Colombia. 1 The FARC’s political and military control
is strongest in southern departments like CaquetA,
Guaviare and Putumayo and in the Amazon region. Many
of its recent military operations have occurred in the cen-
tral and northern departments of Antioquia (20%),
Santander (14%), North Santander (6%), Meta (5%),
Cundinamarca (5%) and Bolivar (4%), reflecting the
guerrilla’s efforts to expand its influence. (See Table 1.)
While the FARC retains hegemony in the south, para-
military groups have sought to consolidate their presence
in the cattle-ranching and banana-growing regions of the
NACLIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22REPORT ON CHIAPAS & COLOMBIA
northern Caribbean coast, which are also traditional
zones of FARC influence. The paramilitaries have under-
mined the FARC’s presence in these areas by terrorizing
civilians thought to be guerrilla supporters. This is part
of a larger strategy through which the state is privatizing
its war against the guerrillas by delegating its counterin-
surgency operations to paramilitary groups. This has
proven quite favorable to the new class of narco-
landowners, who have used the counterinsurgency war
to impose an agrarian counter-reform in vast areas of the
Colombian countryside. Utilizing newly created private
armies to “cleanse” the countryside, the narco-landown-
ers have accumulated some eight million acres of land.
The intensification of guerrilla operations and para-
military violence has radically militarized the conflict in
Colombia, making political alternatives to the violence
increasingly less feasible. The situation has been com-
pounded by the existence of a thoroughly corrupt polit-
ical class which has proven itself both militarily and
politically incapable of resolving the conflict. In fact,
many observers blame the government and Colombian
armed forces for the guerrilla’s recent resurgence. Rather
than pursuing a strategy of limited warfare to slowly
undermine the regional power of the FARC, these ana-
lysts suggest, the military has adopted a strategy that has
sought the total annihilation of the insurgents. 2 This has
served to justify the indiscriminate use of violence on the
part of the armed forces and the paramilitaries, which has
in turn increased local support for the guerrillas.
While this strategy has clearly contributed to the
strengthening of the guerrilla’s presence in the provinces,
the FARC’s resurgence cannot be thoroughly explained
without looking at the deep institutional crisis facing the
current regime. This crisis is the result of revelations of
corruption within the current administration of President
Ernesto Samper and its ensuing loss of legitimacy. Nor
can the growth of the guerrilla be explained simply as
the result of its increasing capacity to amass economic
resources through extortion, kidnappings and threats.
Rather, the FARC’s current upsurge must be understood
as a product of its ability to take advantage of the fissures
in a highly deteriorated regime both politically and
militarily.
he origins of the FARC lie in the peasant struggles
of the 1920s and 1930s. The harsh working and
living conditions imposed on peasants by owners
of large coffee-producing estates as well as disputes over
property rights led to a process of peasant and indige-
nous organizing around labor demands and broader polit-
ical concerns. This process first took hold in the rural
areas of southern Tolima, a department in central
Colombia. It soon spread to ViotA, in the heart of the cof-
fee-producing Cundinamarca department, and then to the
rest of that region. These organizing efforts were met
with brutal army repression, setting the stage for the
emergence of armed self-defense strategies within the
peasant movement by the end of the 1940s. Such self-
defense strategies sought to protect peasant interests and
prevent external forces from disrupting social and eco-
nomic life.
In the ten-year period known as La Violencia, which
began in 1948 with the assassination of populist leader
Jorge E. Gaitin and quickly enveloped the Colombian
countryside, strategies of peasant resistance were
strongly influenced by socialist and communist ideas.
Peasant self-defense and guerrilla groups became the
central focus of the
Colombian Communist
Peasants who Party (PC) during this
were violently period, particularly as a result of the dismantling
expelled from of the workers’ move-
ment and the proscription
their lands settled of the PC. “At that
into new juncture,” in the words
of Colombian sociologist
communities with Eduardo Pizarro, “the
the assistance of
the Communist
Party. These
settlements later
became bastions
of support for the
FARC.
peasantry showed stronger
revolutionary resolve
than the working class.” 3
From that moment
on, peasant resistance
combined self-defense
strategies with guerrilla
warfare.
Over time, this dual
strategy created an accu-
mulation of historical
experience which led to
an important strategic
shift-armed struggle
became part of a broader political strategy to capture state
power. It was in this context that the FARC emerged in
1964. Between the years of La Violencia and the forma-
tion of the FARC, government attacks on peasant self-
defense organizations as well as the violent removal of
peasants from certain rural areas prompted a massive
process of internal migration. Displaced peasants, driven
by the promise of land and an escape from the violence,
travelled upriver into the jungle, where they resettled in
isolated and less productive areas in the foothills of the
Amazon regions of Caquetd, Guaviare, Meta and
Putumayo. Others resettled in the plains regions just
north of Meta like Sumapaz in Cundinamarca.
Those who were fleeing state violence travelled in
large groups protected by armed self-defense units, a
process known as “armed colonization.” The new settle-
VOL XXXI, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1998 23REPORT ON CHIAPAS & COLOMBIA
ments would become the most Table 1: Recent
important rural zones of influence
for the Communist Party, which Type of Action
was instrumental in the migration
process. The PC was in many ways Attack on a military b
responsible for transforming these to protect Ecopetrol
new settlements into cohesive Ambush in Perres (Na
communities. These areas later
Attack on Las Delicias
became bastions of support for the (Putumayo)
armed insurgency, and historical
sites of legitimacy for the FARC. Attack on La Carpa M
The consolidation of the (Guaviare)
Colombian state-achieved Assault on a mobile b
through the creation of a radically San Juanito (Meta)
exclusionary political system con- Assault on army patrol
trolled by the Liberal and
Conservative
parties-also con- Attack on transport h
tributed to the strengthening of the Attack on river convo
armed opposition. The political River (Caquet6)
hegemony established by the two Attack on Patascoy M
traditional parties resulted in the
proscription of the popular move- Total
ment and of all forms of dissent Sour
and legal opposition. This alliance,
known as the National Front, formally existed between
1958 and 1974, but the Liberal and Conservative parties
continue to dominate the political landscape today. Until
the promulgation of a new Constitution in 1991, these
two parties ruled under a permanent state of siege in
order to control rebellion, social protest and political
opposition.
A series of other factors also contributed to the emer-
gence of guerrilla activity. The dramatic urbanization of
the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the emergence of a
middle class, but all avenues of political participation
outside the traditional parties were closed for these
groups. As a result, a number of guerrilla groups soon
emerged, including the National Liberation Army (ELN)
which was formed in 1964, the Popular Liberation Army
(EPL), formed in 1964-1965, and the April 19th
Movement (M-19), formed in 1973. There were also
several small urban militias that captured the attention of
young activists at that time. By dismantling the possibil-
ities for the existence of a democratic left, the state cre-
ated conditions for the emergence of an opposition that
was almost entirely extraparliamentary in nature. 4
y the late 1970s, the FARC’s military presence
was marginal, with only nine fronts and great dis-
parities within its organization in different parts
of the country. The group had five fronts in the south (in
the departments of CaquetA, Putumayo, Huila, Cauca and
Tolima), two in central Colombia (in the Magdalena
Medio region and the department of Santander) and one
Guerrilla Attacks in Colombia
Soldiers killed Prisoners taken Date
ase assigned
22 0 7/15/94
riio) 35 0 4115/96
Military Base
29 60 8/31/96
ilitary Base
18 0 914/96
rigade in
18 0 2/11/97
l in Jurado (Choc6) 8 10 1/16/97
elicopter in Arauca 241 0 6/7/97
y on the Orteguaza
9 0 6/29/97
ilitary Base (Narifo) 11 18 12/21/97 – : ~i ~~~- ~ ~ —— ~ — – — ~B~——- ——- :i – – —
174 88
“ce: Elaborated by the author based on statistics provided by CINER
in the north (on the border between Antioquia and
C6rdoba). 5 But in the early 1980s, the FARC grew rapidly
as a result of a government crackdown on the legal oppo-
sition. The FARC’s strategy prior to this had been pre-
dominantly a political one. The organization had
articulated the seizure of power as its principal goal, but
it was not until this period of renewed growth that the
FARC began to see itself as the military vanguard of the
revolutionary process. During this period, the FARC
acquired the organizational structure of an army and
strengthened its strategic autonomy from the Communist
Party. By 1983, it had expanded its activities to 18 fronts.
This process of growth, however, was marked by a
persistent tension between political considerations and
military exigencies. Such tensions were at the heart of
the peace process initiated in January 1983, when the
government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) and the
Military High Command of the FARC jointly declared
a cease-fire, paving the way for the accords of La Uribe,
which were signed 14 months later. By incorporating
some of the FARC’s socio-economic demands and
extending the cease-fire, the accords opened the possi-
bility of a political resolution to the conflict. Betancur’s
position was a radical departure from that of his prede-
cessors, for he recognized that guerrilla violence was the
product of real social conditions and he understood the
relationship between those conditions and the demands
of the insurgents. In the context of the negotiations, the
FARC formed the Patriotic Union (UP), a political front
in which the Communist Party played a substantial role.
24 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON CHIAPAS & COLOMBIA
The UP sought to establish its presence in national poli-
tics by taking part in elections at the local, regional and
national levels. During the Betancur period, the FARC
fully embraced the possibility of a political solution
to the conflict, but it did not dismantle its military
capabilities.
Betancur’s initiatives were met with serious opposi-
tion. The Congress adamantly rejected the reforms pro-
posed in the accords. According to historian Jacobo
Arenas, “Legislators from the parties in power who rep-
resented the interests of the oligarchy opposed the
reforms and-as was to be expected-looked for sup-
port from the military.” 6 The newly elected government
of Virgilio Barco (1986-1990), moreover, quickly
reversed Betancur’s initiatives, reinstating policies which
framed the insurgency as a perverse and isolated distor-
tion of Colombian politics. Betancur’s recognition of the
structural causes of the violence was withdrawn as was
the official recognition of the guerrillas as a legitimate
political actor. Once again, the state’s discourse reduced
the guerrillas to a symptom of dysfunctions at the local-
level. In this context, the state unleashed a dirty war,
primarily against the Patriotic Union. During 1988
alone, close to 200 leaders of the Patriotic Union were
assassinated. A decade later, nearly 3,000 UP members,
including mayors, municipal council members and
senators have been killed. With this level of violence, it
is little wonder that the organization has been virtually
exterminated.
Four days before C6sar Gaviria (1990-1994) took
office, the FARC made a public declaration claiming that
the Barco Administration had “damaged a solid peace
process initiated by President Belisario Betancur.” 7 It
also demanded participation in the Constitutional
Assembly and a direct and open dialogue with the new
administration in the context of a bilateral cease-fire. On
the day of the elections for a Constitutional Assembly in
December 1990, the armed forces violently occupied
Casa Verde, the town where the directorate of the FARC
was located-a declaration of war that effectively
destroyed all possibilities for peace. Although the gov-
ernment and the insurgents had launched a new round of
talks in Caracas in mid-1991, there was a marked inten-
sification of the military conflict during the second half
of that year. The army’s offensive against the
FARC leadership and the guerrilla’s sabo-
tage of economic infrastructure resulted in a
growing militarization of the conflict. The
FARC blamed Gaviria for rejecting a peace-
ful solution and for “wasting the great
opportunity the country had to make the
National Constitutional Assembly the basis
for a peace process.” 8
ith the Samper Adminstration, the country’s political crisis has only
intensified. The dramatic deterio-
ration of state power, the political and mili-
tary resurgence of the guerrilla, and the
emergence of the paramilitaries as an armed
force with political aspirations have raised
serious doubts about the ability of the cur-
rent government to resolve the conflict,
either politically or militarily. Revelations of
Samper’s ties to the drug barons and the
decertification of Colombia by the United
States have further intensified the crisis of
his administration. The flagrant violation of
human rights, directed primarily against
noncombatant civilians, has eroded the legit-
imacy of the armed forces. In order to clean
up its image, the army has increasingly
turned to the paramilitaries to do its dirty
work. As a result of this “privatization” of
the war against the FARC, the state has lost
its monopoly over the use of violence. This
VOL XXXI, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1998 25REPORT ON CHIAPAS & COLOMBIA
has further damaged the credibility of both the army and
the state. The escalating conflict and the government’s
dirty war have had immense social costs in terms of lives
and property, and have led to a general deterioration of
the social fabric.
In this context, the FARC has adopted strategies to
strengthen its presence at the local level that play upon
the weak mechanisms of accountability that exist in local
and regional government. For example, by kidnapping
or threatening municipal authorities, the group has
sought to establish “armed oversight” over the use of
municipal funds. The group also engages in elaborate
forms of information gathering about the handling of
departmental funds. Based on this information, the insur-
gents have targeted corrupt politicians in their kidnap-
ping and extortion campaigns, though they often utilize
public funds to finance their own activities. Local resi-
dents support these measures because corruption is wide-
spread in municipal and departmental government. But
the FARC’s strategy of armed oversight does not create
avenues for local participation that would allow the peas-
ants themselves to exercise such oversight. In these mat-
ters, the insurgents simply act on behalf of those they
claim to represent.
The ongoing crisis of agriculture-the result of the
liberalization of the Colombian economy–has also con-
tributed to the resurgence of the guerrilla. With the excep-
tion of 1995, when the sector’s total output grew by
4.4%, the past decade has been characterized by eco-
nomic decline, with a negative growth rate of 2.6% in
1996.9 This recession has had a notable impact on rural
employment, with the number of jobs decreasing from
2,285,000 in 1990 to 2,127,462 in 1996. Between 1990
and 1992, the poverty rate jumped from 26% to 31%.
The FARC has been astute in building support among
those sectors hardest hit by the crisis in agriculture. The
group has successfully attracted unemployed youth from
the poorest areas of the Colombian countryside and espe-
cially from the colonization areas, which constitute
approximately one-third of the nation’s territory and have
historically been abandoned by the state. This is partic-
ularly the case in communities that produce raw materi-
als like coca leaves and poppies, which are used in the
production of cocaine and heroin. The taxes imposed on
coca growers by the FARC as well as those imposed on
laboratories, roads and drug shipments, have become
important sources of income for the insurgents.
The state’s mishandling of this problem has contributed
to a situation in which the peasants see the guerrilla as
the only safeguard against government aggression and
eradication campaigns. In effect, coca and poppy pro-
duction have become an alternative to the crisis in rural
Colombia. By treating coca and poppy production almost
exclusively as an issue of the guerrilla’s finances, the
state is failing to deal
with the socio-economic In coca-growing roots of the problem and
regions, peasants is fomenting social
polarization. The highly see the FARC militarized tone of
as the only Washington and Bogoti’s
approach to the so-called
safeguard against “war on drugs” also
feeds into this logic of government polarization and ulti-
aggression and mately generates more
support for the guerrillas.
eradication At the same time, how-
ever, the FARC lacks campaigns. specific proposals and
has been incapable of
implementing alternative
development programs in these areas. The group’s
presence is based largely on a pragmatic alliance in
which they collect “taxes” from campesinos in exchange
for protection.
n contrast to the success of the FARC’s ongoing mil-
itary activity, its political strategies have been prob-
lematic and at times contradictory, thus resulting in
more ambivalent outcomes. Its call to boycott last
October’s local elections is a case in point. The boycott
built upon the massive protests of coca growers against
eradication programs that erupted in southern Colombia
in late 1996. The coca growers’ demands were simply
ignored by government authorities, generating wide-
spread discontent in a region where the FARC’s presence
was already well established. As a result, the FARC’s
boycott was much more effective in this region than in
other parts of the country. The guerrillas effectively
obstructed elections in Caqueti, Guaviare and Putumayo,
where mayors were elected with as little as seven votes.
Local communities have since organized popular assem-
blies to legitimize the rule of those elected under these
circumstances, or to choose new leaders.
While such grassroots initiatives echo the FARC’s call
for “popular power,” they do so in a way which gives a
measure of legitimacy to the very state institutions which
the insurgents seek to undermine. The paramilitaries,
meanwhile, have been successful in neutralizing previ-
ous attempts at the direct exercise of power on the part
of campesinos by implementing a brutal dirty war in
areas considered “red zones.” This campaign was inau-
gurated last July with the massacre of some 30 peasants
in Mapiripdn, a coca-growing town located in the cen-
tral department of Meta, for which Carlos Castafio’s
United Self-Defense Units claimed responsibility. For
the paramilitaries, there is already sufficent reason to
NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26REPORT ON CHIAPAS & COLOMBIA
declare these areas “red zones,” and there is a danger that
new grassroots political initiatives, regardless of their
relationship to the FARC, will only intensify an already
brutal dirty war against campesinos and the local-level
officials who chose to participate in them.
Indeed, recent months have seen an intensification of
the dirty war in southern Colombia. Paramilitary strate-
gies first implemented in the northern provinces are now
being extended into other regions. Reflecting the lethal
combination of the so-called “war on drugs” and
counterinsurgency, an economic and military blockade
has been imposed on the region of Cagudn in Caquetd.
While the FARC’s recent military operations have been
primarily concentrated in the central region of the coun-
try, paramilitary forces have been making regular incur-
sions into FARC strongholds in the south. They have
been active in Solita, Curillo and Valparaiso in Caqueti,
and there has been sporadic paramilitary activity in
Putumayo. Within this scenario, the prospects for polit-
ical initiatives like the FARC’s Bolivarian Movement
for a New Colombia–a clandestine political front mod-
eled along the lines of the Patriotic Union-will remain
tied to the context of a deteriorating conflict in which
guns and massacres predominate over any prospects for
a peaceful solution.
As the war in the Colombian Two FARC
countryside expands, even small guerrillas sit
spaces within which political dia- at a road block
logue could take place are rapidly with a young girl in the department disappearing. The armed actors are of CaquetJ in preparing themselves for a larger June 1997.
confrontation that will not bring the
conflict to an end-despite the opinion of some who
believe that the armed forces could defeat the guerrillas
if they only had more fire power. But few argue that
even a military defeat of the guerrillas would allow the
Colombian state to regain its monopoly over the use of
force and the administration of justice, much less bring
peace to Colombia. The problem goes much deeper. As
long as the war is not recognized as an expression of
the structural crisis of Colombian society and of the vir-
tually nonexistent legitimacy of the Colombian state, it
will be impossible to take serious steps toward institu-
tional restructuring at both the regional and national
level which could in any way provide a framework for
a resolution of the conflict. Until this changes, the coun-
try will continue to oscillate between justifications for
the war and a choreographed dance of peace, all the
while ignoring the underlying problems that plague
Colombian politics.
The FARC, the War and the Crisis of the State
1. Jos6 No6 Rios and Daniel Garcla-Peha, Building Tomorrow’s
Peace: A Stategy for National Reconciliation, Report by the
Peace Exploration Committee (Bogota), September 9, 1997.
2. Alfredo Rangel, “Colombia: La guerra irregular en el fin de
siglo,” Anblisis Politico, No. 28 (May-August 1996).
3. For an historical account see Eduardo Pizarro, “Los origenes del
movimiento armado comunista en Colombia,” Anblisis Politico,
No. 7 (May-August 1989).
4. Eduardo Pizarro, “Los origenes del movimiento armado,” p. 24.
5. See Eduardo Pizarro, “La insurgencia armada: ralces y perspecti-
vas,” in Gonzalo Sanchez and Ricardo Peharanda, eds., Pasado
y presente de la violencia en Colombia (Bogota: CEREC, 1991).
6. Jacobo Arenas, Las vicisitudes del proceso de paz (Bogota:
Editorial Oveja Negra, 1990), p. 23.
7. El Tiempo (Bogota), August 3, 1990.
8. William Ramirez, “Las nuevas ceremonias de la paz,”
in Gonzalo SAnchez and Ricardo Peharanda, eds., Pasado y pre-
sente de la violencia en Colombia (Bogota: CEREC, 1991), p.
463; and Mauricio Garcia, “Tranc6n en Caracas,” Cien Dias,
Vol. 4, No. 16 (October-December 1991).
9. Coyuntura Colombiana, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1997).
