The FARC: Are we at the story's end?

Résumé du document

The Fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo, more generally known under their shortest acronym: FARC, have been playing a great part in Columbia's political life since 1964. For more than forty years, it has been that the first guerilla involved in the Columbian armed conflict. Based on the Marxist theory, they have a strong communist ideology, as their founder – Jacobo Arenas – was commissioned by the Columbian Communist Party's leader to gather all the existing independent peasant guerrilla groups. Then, the FARC became the military wing of the Communist Party. After a period when their revolutionary activity was reduced, the FARC came back violently on the national and international scenes during the 1990's. Their numerous and violent actions – attacks, murder attempts, kidnappings – brought them in the American and European list of terrorist organizations in 2005.

However, these actions have also led to their current difficulties like strengthening the national and the international struggle against them, and turning the Columbians' opinion against them. Very recently, the organization's main leaders have been killed and the numbers of members have seriously decreased. Then, we can wonder if these difficult times for the FARC are announcing the end of a story that lasted nearly a half century.

First, we are going to see how and why FARC has been created and developed. Then, we will study the different stages that the FARC has known since 1964. To finish, different scenarios will appear for the FARC's future.

Extraits

[...] The FARC were part of that process which divided nearly the whole world from the end of the 1940's to 1991. However, we have seen that the FARC made a radical turn when the communist camp was defeated. They could have stopped struggling, as other Latino-American guerrilla bands did. But they chose to survive, and to focus on the armed struggle. Consequently, they needed more money and reinforced their involvement in new kinds of crime, questioning the whole Columbian society's stability. [...]

[...] Like all the Latino-American leftist movements, they consider the United-States as an enemy and they are strongly opposed to their influence on the continent and, more specifically, in Columbia. Their rhetoric is quite clear, simple and adapted to the peasants' issues. For instance, Marulanda's most famous speech, in 1999, still denounced the death of “chickens and pigs in Marquetalia”, referring of the famous attack that led to the FARC's constitution. However, the FARC's members are considered as rather moderate and reformist compared to most of the communist guerrillas. [...]

[...] That was an unhoped-for situation for the guerrilla groups that had survived so far. Since the 1980's, the strong resurgence of violence in the country let the guerrilla groups take an exceptional power Columbia has been suffering its greatest period of violence since 1980, with the coming back of massacres, homicides and kidnappings. Guerrilla groups have taken advantage of this very tense situation to recruit and develop, experiencing a brutal revival. Then, they do not hesitate to plan scale operations anymore. [...]

[...] The FARC have reached an impasse: they have gained a new international political strength since they have kidnapped famous hostages: consequently, it is very important to them to keep them. But, if they want to keep on their struggle, they need to remain attractive to new recruits and to preserve intern cohesion, which seems very difficult in a so tense climate and such isolation. For example, they are currently suffering from many desertions. The most emblematic one was “Karina”'s departure, for she is said to have been one of the fiercest FARC's combatants. [...]

[...] Thus, the new FARC's targets are Bogota, Medellin and Cali, that they try to surround but also to infiltrate thanks to street gangs. Besides, very strategic zones, such as the main communication gullies like the rivers Caqueta or Meta or the Middle-Magdalena valley for instance or land borders with Venezuela and Ecuador, remain among their priorities. They also closely watch the areas hit by social and economic crisis, for instance the former coffee culture zones. As the number of fronts and of combatants in the FARC's ranks have shown[2], the years 1990's have seen the guerrilla group spread and develop. [...]