Wednesday's rescue of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt from a FARC enclave in southeastern Colombia is yet another nail in the coffin in Latin America's oldest insurgency. But the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) may not know it yet.
This past year has been an exceptionally bad one for the FARC. The guerrillas' second-in-command, Raul Reyes, was killed during the March raid in Ecuador and a big cache of intelligence was seized. Another leader, Ivan Rios, was betrayed by a fellow FARC fighter, who killed him for a million-dollar bounty placed on his head by the Colombian government, and brought Mr. Rios's severed hand as proof of his death.
The guerrillas' founder and commander in chief, Pedro Antonio Marin, whose nom de guerre was Manuel Marulanda, died of apparently natural causes. Finally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez condemned FARC actions after initially aligning himself ideologically with the FARC in opposition to the Colombian government.
“This is not a death blow, but they are reeling,” said Jorge Restrepo, director of the Colombian non-profit organization Resource Center for Conflict Analysis (CERAC).
Colombian soldiers escort captured Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas July 3, 2008 in Bogota. (INALDO PEREZ/AFP/Getty Images)
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Despite a relentless series of setbacks, it remains doubtful that the FARC will lay down their arms any time soon. “It's impossible that the FARC will not retaliate. It's the time not only to release the other hostages, but [for the FARC] to enter into a definitive negotiation process in good faith,” Ms. Betancourt said yesterday.
Ms. Betancourt, a scion of a prominent political family, had become a cause célèbre during her six-year jungle captivity. Although at the time of her kidnapping she was campaigning for president with less than 2-per-cent support in the polls, in a radio interview yesterday morning Ms. Betancourt said she would not rule out a future run for office. The Colombian press has suggested that the FARC may have inadvertently resurrected her political career.
The FARC are well-adapted to operating from the margins and have shown little indication of a desire to disband. The FARC is unlikely to quit fighting until there is no one on their side left to fight. “It's a matter of time,” said Philip Oxhorn, a political scientist at McGill University, “but no one knows how much. … The FARC will not disappear overnight, they will just become more and more politically marginal.”
The FARC, once welcomed by European heads of state during a negotiation process in the late nineties and considered legitimate participants in a peace process, more recently have topped the U.S. State Department's list of the Western Hemisphere's most reviled and sought-after terrorists.
From 1999 to 2002, the FARC was granted legal authority over a Switzerland-sized section of southwestern Colombia. Members of the U.S. Senate and Congress, international business people and ambassadors visited the FARC's territory and participated in a United Nations-approved peace process. Now, just several years later, they survive by staying on the move, hiding in the most remote parts of Colombia.
Most observers agree that the main factor in the FARC's decline is the total erosion of public support. By electing President Alvaro Uribe, Colombians have effectively expressed complete disillusionment in the FARC's political project. FARC fighters can no longer count on local protection.
At its founding in 1964, the FARC was part of a flowering of leftist Latin American guerrilla groups, which were widely seen as having legitimate grievances against repressive right-wing regimes. During the 1960s and 1970s, armed uprising was seen as a legitimate response to governmental policies of land seizures and forced migrations.
Today, peasants continue to be displaced, but it's often the FARC that's doing the displacing. Mr. Uribe enjoys ever-increasing popularity as he vigorously fights an open war against the FARC. There is widespread speculation in Colombia that he will seek a third presidential term.
Shortly before Mr. Uribe became President in 2002, the FARC was estimated to have more than 17,000 soldiers. They staged high-profile attacks against the government, including hijacking aircraft, routinely kidnapping high-profile politicians all over Colombia and firing mortars at the presidential palace. Today, the FARC's membership has been whittled down to 9,000. There have been reports of counterrevolutionary witch hunts, resulting in the FARC executing its own members on suspicion of insufficient fervour.
Observers have noted that the FARC's isolation encourages the group's persistence. FARC leadership tightly controls its membership's access to information, and troops undergo a thorough ideological conditioning.
On the one hand, the FARC's links to the drug trade financed their war and gave them access to smuggling routes. On the other hand, drug trafficking has de-legitimized them even further in the eyes of the Colombian public. Many consider them no different from an apolitical organized-crime group. And the fate of the FARC will not affect the country's cocaine trade; according to Reuters, 2008 has seen a 27-per-cent increase in cocaine production.
According to a report in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, pressure is building for Mr. Uribe to revamp the Colombian constitution yet again in order to run for a third presidential term. In 2006, he successfully changed Colombia's long-standing constitutional term limits and won re-election in a landslide victory. Some Colombian political analysts consider this dangerously close to a style of authoritarian democracy, already familiar from Mr. Chavez's rule in Venezuela, former president Vladimir Putin's in Russia, and President Robert Mugabe's in Zimbabwe.
“There was a mood of euphoria and ecstasy here in Colombia that the government of Alvaro Uribe has been able to capitalize on,” Dr. Restrepo said.
Even if the FARC decides to pursue a negotiated solution with Colombian authorities, it may not be in Mr. Uribe's best interest to participate because his tough stance on the FARC has garnered him considerable political capital. Although he has indicated that he is willing to consider a negotiated settlement, he has placed conditions on negotiations that effectively rule out the possibility.
He routinely refers to the FARC as terrorists and has called them a “throng of bandits” in the press.
The FARC may persist as a hybrid of political insurgency and organized-crime syndicate, but it may be doomed to irrelevancy. Military defeats, loss of leadership, internal strife and wholesale loss of political legitimacy, both at home and abroad, all suggest that the FARC is on its way to the dustbin of history.
Special to The Globe and Mail
