Ana Carrigan: Colombia's guerrillas: between past and future
[Ana Carrigan is the author of The Palace of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy (Four Walls Eight Windows). Her reports from Colombia have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Nation, the Irish Times, In These Times and the Guardian. She is currently writing a book of Colombian memoirs.]
On 26 March 2008, in a remote camp somewhere in the central range of the Colombian Andes, an old guerrilla leader died. The news took two months to reach the outside world. When it did so, it arrived amidst a sea of troubles for the movement he founded and led.
His long life had personified the tormented history of his country's violent political struggles for sixty years. Few remember him by his real name - Pedro Antonio Marín Marín - for he was known worldwide by his noms de guerre. Tirofijo ("Sureshot") was the name he earned as a teenager in the 1940s on account of his phenomenal marksmanship when he fought in the first of Colombia's 20th-century civil wars. Later he would be known by the name he chose for himself when he became a member of the clandestine Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s: "Manuel Marulanda Vélez". "Don Manuel" the junior guerrilla leaders used to call him when he became old and vulnerable.
Perhaps for Marxists the "Don" was not politically correct, but then most of the rebels of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia / Farc) - the insurgent force that he co-founded in 1964 with his friend and political mentor, the Marxist intellectual, Jacobo Arenas - were Colombian peasants and Indians first and communists second. Besides, they didn't have many ways to express their respect for el Viejo (the old man) whose legendary career inspired their cult-like devotion.
The context
Marulanda's story, like that of a character in a Gabriel García Márquez novel, has haunted the imagination of Colombians - for good, and for evil - for decades. In the beginning he was admired or despised on either side of the polarising faultline in Colombian society: between city people and country people, between rich and poor, between conservatives and progressives. Then, in a fateful leadership conference in 1982 - the eighteenth year of the insurgency - his ideological partner, Jacobo Arenas persuaded Marulanda and the secretariat to change the Farc's direction: from building popular support for a mass insurrection, to creating an "army of the people" capable of taking power militarily before the millennium.
When Marulanda authorised kidnapping to fund this army (a practice he had previously rejected as anti-revolutionary) and later, when he decided the Farc should charge a tax on all the coca harvested by peasant coca-growers in guerrilla-held territories, the insurgency's status plummeted. It is reported that when other leaders among the ruling secretariat objected to the Farc's involvement in the drug business, Marulanda agreed to a compromise: they would give his plan a try for just one year, and when that ended the policy would be reviewed. But one year on, the Farc was too far in to get out.
Later that decade Farc leaders decided to charge landing-fees in exchange for protecting the pilots and the drug-planes that flew into Farc territory to collect the drugs for the traffickers. The Farc grew rich - and the military wing grew ever stronger at the expense of the political. The movement's relationship with the Colombian population became confused, then withered. The Farc's involvement with drugs, extortion, and especially kidnapping made them an easy target for the Colombian media and society. Today the Farc fills the role of national scapegoat for all the ills that beset Colombia; Farc-bashing has become a test of patriotism...
Read entire article at openDemocracy
On 26 March 2008, in a remote camp somewhere in the central range of the Colombian Andes, an old guerrilla leader died. The news took two months to reach the outside world. When it did so, it arrived amidst a sea of troubles for the movement he founded and led.
His long life had personified the tormented history of his country's violent political struggles for sixty years. Few remember him by his real name - Pedro Antonio Marín Marín - for he was known worldwide by his noms de guerre. Tirofijo ("Sureshot") was the name he earned as a teenager in the 1940s on account of his phenomenal marksmanship when he fought in the first of Colombia's 20th-century civil wars. Later he would be known by the name he chose for himself when he became a member of the clandestine Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s: "Manuel Marulanda Vélez". "Don Manuel" the junior guerrilla leaders used to call him when he became old and vulnerable.
Perhaps for Marxists the "Don" was not politically correct, but then most of the rebels of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia / Farc) - the insurgent force that he co-founded in 1964 with his friend and political mentor, the Marxist intellectual, Jacobo Arenas - were Colombian peasants and Indians first and communists second. Besides, they didn't have many ways to express their respect for el Viejo (the old man) whose legendary career inspired their cult-like devotion.
The context
Marulanda's story, like that of a character in a Gabriel García Márquez novel, has haunted the imagination of Colombians - for good, and for evil - for decades. In the beginning he was admired or despised on either side of the polarising faultline in Colombian society: between city people and country people, between rich and poor, between conservatives and progressives. Then, in a fateful leadership conference in 1982 - the eighteenth year of the insurgency - his ideological partner, Jacobo Arenas persuaded Marulanda and the secretariat to change the Farc's direction: from building popular support for a mass insurrection, to creating an "army of the people" capable of taking power militarily before the millennium.
When Marulanda authorised kidnapping to fund this army (a practice he had previously rejected as anti-revolutionary) and later, when he decided the Farc should charge a tax on all the coca harvested by peasant coca-growers in guerrilla-held territories, the insurgency's status plummeted. It is reported that when other leaders among the ruling secretariat objected to the Farc's involvement in the drug business, Marulanda agreed to a compromise: they would give his plan a try for just one year, and when that ended the policy would be reviewed. But one year on, the Farc was too far in to get out.
Later that decade Farc leaders decided to charge landing-fees in exchange for protecting the pilots and the drug-planes that flew into Farc territory to collect the drugs for the traffickers. The Farc grew rich - and the military wing grew ever stronger at the expense of the political. The movement's relationship with the Colombian population became confused, then withered. The Farc's involvement with drugs, extortion, and especially kidnapping made them an easy target for the Colombian media and society. Today the Farc fills the role of national scapegoat for all the ills that beset Colombia; Farc-bashing has become a test of patriotism...