FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) — overview and history

The first fronts of the FARC-EP emerged in the context of the violent clashes in Colombia that had been going on since 1948, between supporters of Colombia's liberal and conservative parties (this unrest was called La Violencia) and some militants of the democratic or communist-Marxist organizations, such as the Communist Party of Colombia (Partido Comunista Colombiano) and other parties. During the unrest, members of the liberal or conservative as well as the communist parties organized self-defense groups and guerrilla units that fought against the units of the opposing parties as well as against each other in street fighting or guerrilla actions. During La Violencia, the so-called independent republics (repúblicas independientes) were created in 1949 by the Colombian Communist Party and leftist and radical peasants in remote parts of the country in order to achieve political autonomy and to repel enemy attacks by the opposing parties. In these republics, among which was the Republica de Marquetalia, the inhabitants often formed other paramilitary combat groups to fight against the opposing gangs, often financed by the other parties, or against the Colombian army. Some of these Marxist fighting groups were given the name Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas.

In 1964, the Armed Forces of Colombia, with the help of an American counterinsurgency team from the CIA, conquered the Republic of Marquetalia by capturing its main towns and killing several fighters from the rural-based defense groups during the fighting. The surviving residents gathered around the two main leaders of the rural fighting groups, Manuel Marulanda and Jacobo Arenas, and formed the guerrilla fighting organization Bloque Sur after the most influential and important leaders held a conference on July 20, 1964. The Bloque Sur was initially composed only of the surviving fighters of the Republic's defense groups, but the organization grew by recruiting volunteers, often young peasants and schoolteachers. By the end of 1965, American and Colombian authorities suspected that this association had more than 3000 members and fighters. In 1966, after an alliance with some splinter groups of the ELN and other guerrilla organizations, the Bloque Sur merged into the FARC.

The organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas was officially founded on May 5, 1966 by Marulanda and Arenas as the military arm of the Communist Party of Colombia. Marulanda himself rose in the FARC's Secretariat with Arenas a few months later, eventually assuming complete command of the FARC around 1967. The FARC described itself as a Marxist-Leninist fighting group of the Colombian people. Since the 1990s, the FARC also operated the underground radio station Cadena Radial Bolivariana, Voz de la Resistencia on FM and shortwave.

Activities 1966-1970

The FARC-EP's first fighting groups consisted mainly of peasants and rural schoolteachers. The FARC-EP's initial activities in the south of the country, especially in the Amazonas, Caquetá and Putumayo departments, were limited to military attacks against Colombian patrols or larger units, which hampered the Colombian army's operations in these areas. The poor infrastructure and dense Amazonian jungle in these three departments prevented rapid operations and attacks by Colombian troops, while FARC units were able to march faster and use guerrilla tactics against enemy formations. The high casualties suffered by Colombian troops during these attacks led to a crisis in these departamentos, during which a state of emergency was often declared. FARC-EP guerrilla fighters also used heavy weapons during the attacks, such as the shoulder-launched RPG-2 and RPG-7 rocket launchers, and sometimes mortars or captured small-caliber artillery pieces were also used by FARC fighters, primarily to shell enemy police stations or military camps for relatively short periods of time. At the same time, FARC fighters began attacks against police troops or right-wing paramilitary groups such as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia or Los Rastrojos. These battles also include mutual extortion, reprisals, revenge expeditions and hostage-taking. Reprisals against the families of enemy combatants were also often carried out by the paramilitary fighting groups. Because the activities of the FARC-EP were confined exclusively to the rural areas of Colombia until the mid-1970s and the organization was composed almost entirely of peasants, some senior members, including Timoleón Jiménez, combat name Tymoshenko, traveled throughout Latin America. The purpose of these trips was to obtain information regarding the strategies of other communist-oriented guerrilla organizations, to establish possible alliances, and to improve the training of FARC fighters by observing other guerrilla fighters. FARC members visited, among others, the particularly active guerrilla groups Sendero Luminoso, which operated in Peru, the Tupamaros, which were active in Uruguay, and the MIR, a guerrilla organization and political party that operated in Chile. In the late 1960s, a training school in revolutionary ideology was created for FARC officers and soldiers, and several schools and two military academies were established in FARC-EP-controlled areas. Nevertheless, until 1980 the political program did not go beyond agrarian issues and revolutionary ideology, while the military program focused mainly on guerrilla tactics and jungle communications. In 1973, the General Command, also called the Secretariat, and the General Staff of the FARC-EP were officially created, to which Manuel Marulanda, Raúl Reyes and Alfonso Cano belonged until their deaths.

Modernisation and internationalisation

Influenced by the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, from this time onwards left-leaning students from the larger cities were also increasingly recruited as members of the FARC-EP, and military alliances were also concluded with smaller guerrilla movements. As a result of the new recruitments, the FARC-EP's restriction to exclusively agrarian demands receded into the background, and the movement's ideological foundations were expanded by the Secretariat and the FARC-EP Political Commissariat. In addition, FARC fighters began an infiltration of the larger Colombian cities to recruit new volunteers, mostly students or young workers, who often came from the slums of Bogotá as well. Most of these new fighters had become aware of the FARC-EP through the political activity of many left-leaning school and university teachers. At the initiative of Jacobo Arenas, the Seventh Guerrilla Conference of the FARC-EP was held in 1982. This conference was attended by several important members of the General Staff of the organization, as well as all the members of the Secretariat and also some observers from the other military guerrilla groups in Latin America. During the conference, a new strategy was adopted, which included the incorporation of all types of struggle (political and military) to achieve the revolutionary goals of the FARC. As part of this strategic reorientation, the FARC finally renamed itself the FARC-EP (EP: Ejército del Pueblo, People's Army); it no longer used only tactics of guerrilla warfare against Colombian troops, but also conducted larger-scale military-style operations. The most famous of these is probably the attack by 700 FARC-EP fighters against troops of the 52nd Battalion of the Colombian 3rd Brigade at Peñas Coloradas, which left some 60 Colombian soldiers dead and 43 captured. The FARC-EP's links with other Latin American guerrilla organizations expanded, and as a Marxist group, the FARC-EP received financial support from Cuba and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union.

Drug Cartels

In the 1980s, Colombia became one of the largest cocaine producers in the world. It was also during these years that the first drug cartels began their activities, most notably the Cali and Medellín cartels. Most FARC-EP fighters and commanders were not directly involved in drug cultivation or smuggling at this point, but the FARC-EP was gaining new supporters among many of the left-leaning, smaller coca growers. Some of the larger cartels, on the other hand, used some FARC-EP fighters as bodyguards or armed escorts in exchange for payment in U.S. dollars. The FARC-EP formed alliances with powerful cartels while fighting others. In some areas of the country, from the mid-1980s, FARC commanders performed almost state functions, for example by collecting taxes. In addition, the FARC-EP broadened their financial base by providing security services, transportation, secure storage, and infrastructure for drug traffickers. The drug cartels, on the other hand, often provided fresh fighters, local mercenaries or contractors, weapons, ammunition, and money at their disposal. In 1984, the FARC expressed itself for the first time with more general political demands in the form of an Open Letter. That same year, Secretariat commanders entered into negotiations for the first time with then Colombian President Belisario Betancur. The negotiations lasted several months and eventually led to a ceasefire that lasted until 1987, despite several interruptions and armed attacks by both parties.

Unión Patriótica

In 1985, a few senior members of the FARC-EP and the Communist Party of Colombia founded a new political party, the Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica), in order to legally implement their revolutionary goals instead of continuing the armed struggle of the FARC-EP. In 1986, the UP was recognized as a legal political party in Colombia. That same year, it contested parliamentary elections and won 1.4% of the vote. In the presidential elections, its candidate Jaime Pardo Leal won 4.5% of the vote. The UP also participated in the 1988 gubernatorial elections.

In the following years, 2,000 to 3,000 of the UP's members (the FARC-EP, on the other hand, speaks of up to 5,000), especially those with public or more important functions, were systematically murdered or kidnapped by the paramilitary groups and death squads of the AUC or other right-wing combat groups. Former UP presidential candidate Pardo Leal was killed by a 14-year-old AUC militant in 1987. In April 1988, the NGO Amnesty International drew attention to possible involvement of some units of the Colombian military in these killings and kidnappings. The government of Virgilio Barco Vargas, however, vigorously denied these allegations. However, most of the murders of UP political officials were never officially investigated by Colombian authorities. However, after the new presidential candidate of the Unión Patriótica Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa was murdered by AUC combat groups on March 22, 1990, the UP entered the 1991 elections in a severely weakened position. It continued to exist officially as a Colombian political party until 2002, but by the early 1990s at the latest it had become completely irrelevant. After the adoption of the new constitution in 1991, the FARC-EP and the Colombian government resumed peace negotiations under Venezuelan and Mexican mediation; however, the talks remained inconclusive. On September 4, 1996, in a major coordinated military action, the FARC-EP attacked a base of the Colombian military and some local police forces in Guaviare. More than 130 people died in the fighting, which lasted three weeks, most of them civilians, but about 50 Colombian soldiers were also killed in the course of the action. In the early 1990s, the FARC-EP consisted of an estimated 8,000-18,000 armed combatants and numerous noncombatants, often teenage guerrillas still in training. The FARC-EP was divided into 7 blocs organized into 60 regional fronts and hundreds of companies or columns.

Targets

In 1993, as part of the Platform for a Government of Reconstruction and National Reconciliation, the FARC-EP drew up a ten-point plan to serve as a basis for talks with the government, which included the following demands:

1. Resolution of the conflict by political means;
2. The Colombian military is not allowed to perform domestic political functions;
3. Enforce the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive, freedom of the press and democratic participation at all levels;
4. Strengthening domestic consumption, protecting domestic industries from foreign competition, and state control over the energy sector;
5. Allocation of 50% of the state budget to social spending and 10% to the promotion of science;
6. Introduce a progressive tax system;
7. Development programmes for rural areas;
8. Revision of energy policy and renegotiation of mineral extraction contracts with multinationalcompanies;
9. Establish sovereign relations based on the right to self-determination with all countries of the world;
10. Non-military solution to the drug problem.