Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army was a far-left Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group involved in the continuing Colombian conflict starting in 1964. The FARC-EP was officially founded in 1966 from peasant self-defense groups formed from 1948 during La Violencia as a peasant force promoting a political line of agrarianism and anti-imperialism. They were known to employ a variety of military tactics, in addition to more unconventional methods, including terrorism.
The operations of the FARC–EP were funded by kidnap and ransom, mining, extortion, and taxation of various forms of economic activity, and the production and distribution of drugs. They are only one actor in a complex conflict where atrocities have been committed by the state, right-wing paramilitaries, and left-wing guerrillas not limited to FARC, such as ELN, M-19, and others. Colombia's National Centre for Historical Memory, a government agency, has estimated that between 1981 and 2012 paramilitary groups have caused 38.4% of the civilian deaths, while the Guerillas are responsible for 16.8%, the Colombian Security Forces for 10.1%, and other non-identified armed groups for 27.7%. The National Centre for Historical Memory has also concluded that of the 27,023 kidnappings carried out between 1970 and 2010, the Guerillas were responsible for 90.6% of them.
The strength of the FARC–EP forces was high; in 2007, the FARC said they were an armed force of 18,000 men and women; in 2010, the Colombian military calculated that FARC forces consisted of about 13,800 members, 50 percent of whom were armed guerrilla combatants; and in 2011 the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, said that FARC–EP forces comprised fewer than 10,000 members. The Colombian Ministry of Defense reported 19,504 deserters, or individually demobilized members, from the FARC between August 2002 and their collective demobilization in 2017, despite potentially severe punishment, including execution, for attempted desertion in the FARC.
FARC made 239 attacks on the energy infrastructure; however, they showed signs of fatigue. By 2014, the FARC were not seeking to engage in outright combat with the army, instead concentrating on small-scale ambushes against isolated army units. Meanwhile, from 2008 to 2017, the FARC opted to attack police patrols with home-made mortars, sniper rifles, and explosives, as they were not considered strong enough to engage police units directly. This followed the trend of the 1990s during the strengthening of Colombian government forces.
In June 2016, the FARC signed a ceasefire accord with President Santos in Havana. This accord was seen as an historic step to ending the war that has gone on for fifty years. Santos announced that four years of negotiation had secured a peace deal with FARC and that a national referendum to ratify the deal would take place on 2 October. The referendum failed with 50.24% voting against. In November 2016, the Colombian government and the FARC signed a revised peace deal, which was approved by Congress.
On 27 June 2017, FARC ceased to be an armed group, disarming itself and handing over its weapons to the United Nations. A month later, FARC announced its reformation as a legal political party, later renamed the Commons, in accordance with the terms of the peace deal. However, about 2,000 to 2,500 FARC dissidents still take on FARC's original doctrine and continue with drug trafficking, though far smaller than the group at its peak.
A small faction of FARC leaders announced a return to armed activity on 29 August 2019, stating that the Colombian government did not respect peace agreements, a position Colombian officials disagreed with. The Colombian government responded with preemptive strikes, killing FARC members planning to lead rearmament activities. In October 2023, the Colombian government engaged in peace talks with the FARC splinter group and agreed to a ceasefire. In January, both sides agreed to extend the ceasefire to June 2024.
As of February 2024, the vast majority of former FARC members have honored the 2016 peace agreement. However, in August 2024 the government announced an end to a ceasefire with the smaller dissident FARC faction the Estado Mayor Central, EMC, who reject the 2016 peace deal. In October 2024, the EMC agreed to a new ceasefire with the government.
Background
''La Violencia'' and the National Front
In 1948, in the aftermath of the assassination of the populist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, there occurred a decade of large-scale political violence throughout Colombia, which was a Conservative – Liberal civil war that killed more than 200,000 people. In Colombian history and culture, the killings are known as La Violencia ; most of the people killed were peasants and laborers in rural Colombia. In 1957–1958, the political leadership of the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party agreed to establish a bipartisan political system known as the National Front. The Liberal and the Conservative parties agreed to alternate in the exercise of government power by presenting a joint National Front candidate to each election and restricting the participation of other political movements.The pact was ratified as a constitutional amendment by a national plebiscite on 1 December 1957 and was supported by the Church as well as Colombia's business leaders. The initial power-sharing agreement was effective until 1974; nonetheless, with modifications, the Liberal–Conservative bipartisan system lasted until 1990. The 16-year extension of the bipartisan power-sharing agreement permitted the Liberal and Conservative elites to consolidate their socioeconomic control of Colombian society, and to strengthen the military to suppress political reform and radical politics proposing alternative forms of government for Colombia.
Accelerated Economic Development
During the 1960s, the Colombian government effected a policy of Accelerated Economic Development, the agribusiness plan of Lauchlin Currie, a Canadian-born U.S. economist who owned ranching land in Colombia. The plan promoted industrial farming that would produce great yields of agricultural and animal products for worldwide exportation, while the Colombian government would provide subsidies to large-scale private farms. The AED policy came at the expense of the small-scale family farms that only yielded food supplies for local consumption. Based on a legalistic interpretation of what constituted "efficient use" of the land, thousands of peasants were forcefully evicted from their farms and migrated to the cities, where they became part of the industrial labor pool. In 1961, the dispossession of farmland had produced 40,000 landless families and by 1969 their numbers amounted to 400,000 throughout Colombia. By 1970, the latifundio type of industrial farm occupied more than 77 per cent of arable land in the country. The AED policy increased the concentration of land ownership among cattle ranchers and urban industrialists, whose businesses expanded their profits as a result of reductions in the cost of labor wages after the influx of thousands of displaced peasants into the cities. During this period, most rural workers lacked basic medical care and malnutrition was almost universal, which increased the rates of preventable disease and infant mortality.History
PCC and self-defense communities
Communists were active throughout rural and urban Colombia in the period immediately following World War I. The Colombian Communist Party was formally accredited by the Comintern in 1930. The PCC began establishing "peasant leagues" in rural areas and "popular fronts" in urban areas, calling for improved living and working conditions, education, and rights for the working class. These groups began networking together to present a defensive front against the state-supported violence of large landholders. Members organized strikes, protests, seizures of land, and organized communist-controlled "self-defense communities" in southern Colombia that were able to resist state military forces, while providing for the subsistence needs of the populace. Many of the PCC's attempts at organizing peasants were met with violent repression by the Colombian government and the landowning class. U.S. military intelligence estimated that in 1962, the size of the PCC had grown to 8,000 to 10,000 active members, and an additional 28,000 supporters.In 1961, a guerrilla leader and long-time PCC organizer named Manuel Marulanda Vélez declared an independent "Republic of Marquetalia". The Lleras government attempted unsuccessfully to attack the communities to drive out the guerrillas, due to fears that "a Cuban-style revolutionary situation might develop". After the failed attacks, several army outposts were set up in the area.
In October 1959, the United States sent a "Special Survey Team" composed of counterinsurgency experts to investigate Colombia's internal security situation. Among other policy recommendations the US team advised that "to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature". In February 1962, three years after the 1959 "US Special Survey Team", a Fort Bragg top-level U.S. Special Warfare team headed by Special Warfare Center commander General William P. Yarborough, visited Colombia for a second survey.
In a secret supplement to his report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yarborough encouraged the creation and deployment of a US-backed force to commit "paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents".
The new counter-insurgency policy was instituted as Plan Lazo in 1962 and called for and civic action programs in violent areas. Following Yarborough's recommendations, the Colombian military recruited civilians into "civil defense" groups which worked alongside the military in its counter-insurgency campaign, as well as in civilian intelligence networks to gather information on guerrilla activity. Doug Stokes argues that it was not until the early part of the 1980s that the Colombian government attempted to move away from the counterinsurgency strategy represented by Plan Lazo and Yarborough's 1962 recommendations.