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The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are among the most prominent of the guerrillas in the Colombian conflict. In the media the FARC is often reduced to a group of ‘narco-guerrillas’ (drug-trading guerrillas), and of ‘terrorists’. This however obfuscates the political substance of the war fought by the FARC. Drug-trading after all does not have a higher political goal, and while terrorists might have one, being labelled a terrorist is it seems enough to have your politics dismissed without serious deliberation. To understand how the Colombian conflict came to be we must leave behind such easy obfuscations, so that we can really understand why the FARC fights.
Latin American countries in the mid-twentieth century, including Colombia, provided fertile ground for radical left egalitarian politics. For the continent suffered from widespread poverty, as well as highly unequal distributions of wealth. In 1960, just 1.7% of the landowners owned a little over halve of the Colombian farmland. On the other hand, 62.5% of all Colombian farmers possessed no more than 1% of arable land.
The FARC was formed in 1964 in explicit reaction to the concentration of wealth and power among the land-owning Colombian elite. In the FARC's founding programme, its members stated as their central objective to ‘eliminate the fetters of the large landholding system.’ The method through which to achieve this goal was guerrilla warfare.
The FARC's decision to pick up arms was not arbitrary. At the time of their founding, Colombia had witnessed several failed attempts at land redistribution, many of which ended in violent suppression. One of the instigators of land redistribution was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a liberal politician, who as a consequence of was assassinated in 1948. The assassination sent a clear message: going against the interests of the landowning elites could have deadly consequences.
The assassination of Gaitán ignited a ten year long civil war. The chaos of the civil war gave rise to multiple independent enclaves. One of the enclaves was the communist-inspired Marquetalia. The logic of the Cold War automatically placed Marquetalia on the side of the Soviet Union, making them as a matter of course an enemy to the United States. The US considered a dissemination of communist strongholds in their own ‘backyard’ unacceptable, especially after it had witnessed the successful revolution in Cuba. So on the advice of the US, the Marquetalia enclave was violently suppressed in 1964 by the Colombian government, aided by US military personnel.
The defeated inhabitants of Marquetalia hereafter fled into the jungle, where they laid the basis for a militant organization capable of fighting a protracted guerrilla warfare. In 1966 this organization adopted the name ‘Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia’, or FARC. The violent repression the FARC members had faced made them suspicious of the Colombian government, whom, as they thought, had shown they would side with the landowning elite over the agrarian poor on any given day. Guerrilla warfare was therefore considered a justified response.
Still, in the 1980s, the FARC tried to move in more mainstream directions by forming its own political party: the Patriotic Union. The Patriotic Union was unexpectedly successful. Their first presidential candidate won 4.6% of the votes in the 1986 presidential election, and the Patriotic Union even acquired 2 seats in the Senate and 3 seats in the Chamber of Representatives. This might not seem a lot, but a country traditionally dominated by the bipartisan politics of the Liberal and Conservative Party this was considered highly unusual; even upsetting.
The increasingly popularity of the Patriotic Union was received negatively by the Colombian elites. An alliance composed of landowners, businessmen, and representatives of the oil and gas company Texaco therefore sought to cleanse Colombian politics of its new left-wing element. Over a four-year timespan, between 4,000 and 6,000 members of the Patriotic Union were assassinated by its right-wing rivals. As a result the Patriotic Union fell apart, and the FARC returned to armed struggle.
The bloody history of the FARC has shaped its violent strategy. This strategy however was for a large part a reaction against violent suppression of the Colombian state, and against the rigid attitude of Colombian elites, who did not shy away from using force to maintain the highly unequal distribution of wealth. Notwithstanding, the recent signing of a newly adjusted peace deal, a deal considered by the Colombian president to be even better than the one rejected in the referendum, provides a new chance to put an end to the violence in Colombia. If this new peace deal is accepted one can hope it enables the FARC to continue its fight for the agrarian poor through peaceful political means.