Colombia’s two main guerrilla movements, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), have been fighting the Colombian government for more than three and a half decades. Their struggle is in part an extension of a civil war which goes back to 1948. This sustained history of armed conflict is a product of Colombia’s historic social inequalites.
The assassination of the popular leftist leader of the Liberal Party, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, in 1948 sparked a civil war between the Liberal and Conservative parties. During the period from 1948 through the 1950s, known simply as La Violencia, various armed bands were formed identifying with either party though often tending toward simple banditry.
Bands supported by landlords were formed which intimidated, attacked and killed poor peasants. The practice of landlords violently taking land from poor peasants had, however, existed before and continues up to the present. Other bands, connected to the Liberal or Communist parties, saw their struggle as a defence of the rights of poor peasants.
Eventually the two parties of the oligarchy buried the hatchet and organised a power sharing arrangement, by then with little to differentiate between them after the Liberals’ small step to the left died with Gaitán. The armed paramilitary groups that had terrorised peasants diminished although they never completely disappeared.
Former guerrilla groups connected to the Communist Party became instead peasant self-defence groups. Peasant communes were created, protected from attempts by landlords to take their lands by the self-defence groups.
The government made a number of attempts to wipe out these communes. In 1964, after being forewarned of a massive military operation against the Marquetalia region, peasant farmers decided that mere self-defence was not enough to protect their lands and livelihood. They decided to form a mobile guerrilla army, the FARC, to fight the government. Other guerrilla armies formed in the following years.
This guerrilla war has continued to the present because the original causes of it have not disappeared: the vast majority of peasants have no or insufficient land on which to make a living and what they do have is often subject to being taken from them by large landowners with the acquiescence or even active support of the government and military.
The 1980s and 1990s has seen a dramatic resurgence of paramilitary groups, linked to large landowners, drug cartels and the military. Political assassinations and massacres of suspected guerrillas, unionists and human rights workers have become commonplace events in Colombia, particularly in the northern region where the paramilitaries are strongest. Ample evidence exists that they operate in collusion with the military.
In the last few years, there has also been a massive growth in the number of guerrilla troops and sympathisers and in the size of the areas of control of the FARC and ELN. Though they are able to operate almost anywhere throughout the country, the key areas controlled by the guerrillas are in the south and amount to a significant proportion of Colombia’s territory. The US State Department estimates that they have significant influence in 57% of Colombian municipalities. Their troop strengths are estimated at around 20,000 and 5000 respectively.
Operations carried out by the guerrillas include direct attacks on the military and police; destroying oil pipelines belonging to large oil multinationals which are widely believed to sponsor paramilitary groups; and sometimes the kidnapping of government officials or wealthy businesspersons to exchange for ransom.
Except for two incidents in the last year, the FARC has defeated the military in every encounter for the last decade. This has resulted in the realisation by both the Colombian and US governments that the military is not capable of militarily destroying the guerrillas. Hence, the new government approach of trying both peace negotiations and a massive injection of US military aid.
The demands of the FARC in the negotiations include democratic and human rights issues, but also many issues aimed at redressing poverty and social inequality. Both Colombia’s main parties are well connected to the wealthy elite who benefit from this social inequality and are likely to be reluctant to concede any demands of the latter type.
The Colombian and US governments probably hope the military aid will weaken the guerrilla’s bargaining power and make them accept some lesser concessions.
With the cold war over US intervention in Colombia is now being packaged as part of the “war on drugs”. General Barry McCaffery has labeled the guerrillas “narco-guerrillas” which legitimates making them targets of military aid ostensibly designed to fight drug trafficking.
The guerrillas deny that they are involved in trafficking in drugs but claim that they treat the peasants who grow coca in regions that they control just as they would those who make a living growing any other crop. These coca growers are not wealthy like the drug traffickers and their only alternative would be poverty and starvation.
The guerrillas readily admit they derive income from coca growing since in areas they control they have a taxation system which levies modest taxes on peasants’ produce (and significantly less modest taxes on wealthy landowners).
Many who grow coca are those who have been forced off better lands into remote, marginal lands where coca is the only crop from which they could make enough to live on. They would happily grow other crops were they viable. The poverty, inequality and violence against poor peasants which spawned the guerrilla movement also sustain the coca growing industry.
Extensive plans for substituting legal crops for coca have been put forward by the FARC. The FARC is hoping for these to be taken up by the government through the current peace negotiations.
As well as the guerrilla movement, the Colombian government is facing stronger challenges from the union and urban movements. Particularly since the FARC abandoned thoughts of entering the non-clandestine political movement, following the killing of thousands of left activists in the ‘80s, there has been little interconnection between urban and rural struggles.
Urban struggles have been much less advanced and threatening than the rural struggle. In the last one to two years, however, there has been both an increase in union militancy and some steps forward in rebuilding the left political movement.
Colombia is heavily in debt, with 45% of its budget going to debt repayments. This has also meant that it is under the thumb of the international lending institutions, which inevitably use their hold on Colombia to demand the imposition of neoliberal economic policies. These policies have led to a severe recession, with a 4.48% contraction in the economy during 1999 as well as an increase in the disparity between the wealthy elite and the poor.
Wages and conditions for workers have declined over the last decade. At the same time the official urban unemployment rate has doubled from around 10% to 20.4%, the highest in Latin America. The result has been a number of large-scale strikes in the last two years.
From August 31 to September 2, 1999, Colombia experienced its first indefinite national strike for 22 years. The strike also involved demonstrations and actions by peasant organisations and a blockade of two southern towns by 10,000 indigenous protesters. The strike forced the government to negotiate with unions and grant funds for the indigenous protesters to buy back traditional lands.
More recently, in August 2000, 700,000 public sector workers struck. At the same time indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities marched against US intervention, the spraying of herbicides on drug crops and for land reform.
The strikes have also been quite clearly political — aimed against neoliberal policies in general rather than simply their consequences in wages and conditions. During the August 2000 strike Wilson Borja, president of the National Federation of State Service Workers (FENALTRASE) said: “This is a protest strike, it’s a political strike, to call the Colombian people’s attention to the need to tell the government that we are not inclined to keep carrying the rich people of this country on our shoulders.”
In recent years the urban mass movement, structured around the National Strike Command (CNP), has moved from one mobilisation to another in protest against the wave of neoliberal attacks by the Pastrana government. The heart of the CNP, now renamed National United Command, is the three main union confederations, the most important one of which is the United Centre of Workers (CUT).
The CUT leadership are also at the heart of the Social and Political Front (FSP), an attempt to give a political voice to all the component parts of the opposition movement (unions, unemployed, women’s groups, human rights groups, shanty-town dwellers, small business associations, etc.)
The FSP held its founding conference on July 20-21, at which its central spokesperson, CUT secretary Luis Eduardo Garzón, said it was “not a project of the guerrilla movement, but neither is it against the guerrilla movement”.
The political declaration adopted said: “We call for dialogue and political negotiation on the basis of Colombia’s sovereignty and full right of self-determination. We call on the countries of Latin America and the people of North America to act to stop interventionism, militarisation, environmental destruction and war as a way of solving contradictions.”
