FARC

FARC, Marxist guerrilla organization in Colombia. Formed in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Colombia; PCC), the FARC is the largest of Colombia’s rebel groups, estimated to possess some 10,000 armed soldiers and thousands of supporters, largely drawn from Colombia’s rural areas. The FARC supports a redistribution of wealth from the wealthy to the poor and opposes the influence that multinational corporations and foreign governments (particularly the United States) have had on Colombia.

The FARC has carried out bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and other armed attacks against various political and economic targets in the country; it has also kidnapped foreigners for ransom, executing many of its captives. The FARC’s links to drug trafficking have brought hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the organization from taxes it imposes. The FARC has received some external support for its activities from other paramilitary organizations and sympathetic governments, such as the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. In 1985 the FARC and other left-wing groups, including the PCC, established a political party, Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica; UP), in a cease-fire agreement with the government. The UP participated in elections beginning in 1986 and won a large portion of the votes. In subsequent years, however, thousands of UP members, including three of the party’s presidential candidates, were killed by right-wing paramilitary groups. Many UP leaders were forced into exile. Political violence decimated the party, and it had virtually disappeared by 2002.

In 1998, in an effort to persuade the FARC to enter peace negotiations, Pres. Andrés Pastrana demilitarized a 16,000-square-mile (42,000-square-km) area of southern Colombia, effectively ceding control of the territory to the rebels. Although negotiations began in January 1999, the FARC soon withdrew. In 2002 Pres. Álvaro Uribe Vélez remilitarized the territory after the FARC hijacked an airliner and kidnapped a Colombian senator on board. For the next several years, Uribe employed intensive policing and military operations against the FARC. As a result, the FARC’s strength was reduced in urban areas, and the number of attacks and kidnappings by the organization significantly decreased. The FARC, however, rejected many proposals by the Colombian government as well as the international community that called for the return of hostages.

Political tensions in the region escalated in early 2008 when Colombian troops crossed the border into Ecuador to raid a FARC encampment. In March 2008 the FARC’s leader and one of the organization’s founders, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, nicknamed Tirofijo (“Sureshot”), died of a heart attack. Alfonso Cano (nom de guerre of Guillermo Saenz Vargas), who served as head of the organization’s underground political arm, the Clandestine Communist Party of Colombia (founded in 2000), became the FARC’s new leader in May 2008. In September 2010, FARC’s leadership was again rocked when another of its principal leaders, best known as “Mono Jojoy” (but also known as Jorge Briceño or Luis Suárez), was killed in a military air strike. Although FARC’s influence subsequently waned, the group launched several deadly attacks in Colombia in 2011. In November of that year Cano was killed during a raid by Colombian government forces. In 2012 the FARC announced that it would no longer engage in kidnapping for extortion and unilaterally freed the last members of the army and police forces it held (though nothing was said about its many civilian hostages). That year it also entered into direct peace negotiations with the government, which began in Oslo and continued in Havana.

Those talks yielded agreements on three of the five major points on the agenda set by the negotiating parties but were suspended by the government in mid-November 2014, when a high-ranking army officer was kidnapped (along with two other people) by the guerrilla group. Talks immediately resumed when the FARC released him some two weeks later. On December 20 the FARC initiated another unilateral cease-fire, which was still holding in mid-January 2015 when Colombian Pres. Juan Manuel Santos surprised many observers by directing negotiators in Havana to open discussions regarding a bilateral cease-fire (which he had previously refused to consider until a final agreement had been reached). In March Santos ordered a halt to the bombing of FARC camps. When FARC guerrillas killed 11 government troops in an attack on a patrol in April (in response to encroachment by the army, FARC leaders claimed), however, Santos reinstated air strikes, and on May 21 a combined air and ground attack by government forces resulted in the deaths of 26 FARC guerrillas. In response, FARC rescinded its cease-fire but said that it remained committed to negotiations.

In early July the FARC announced a new monthlong cease-fire to begin on July 20. In response the government pledged to scale back its military activities, and, by the end of the month, the military again ceased bombing. In August the FARC declared an open-ended extension to its cease-fire. The next development was momentous. Meeting in Havana on September 23, FARC representatives and Santos announced that they had pledged to reach a final peace agreement within six months. Important details remained to be ironed out, but major stumbling blocks in the ongoing negotiations had been resolved: the nature of the justice measures for conflict-related crimes on both sides and the deadline for completing a final agreement.

On June 23, 2016, Rodrigo Londoño (“Timoleón Jiménez” or “Timochenko”), the FARC’s leader since November 2011, joined Santos in Havana to sign a permanent cease-fire agreement, paving the way for the final peace treaty. The agreement was signed in the presence of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and the presidents of Cuba, Chile, and Venezuela, and it stipulated that within 180 days of the final treaty’s signing FARC fighters would turn in their weapons at concentration zones scattered throughout the countryside under the monitoring of UN officials. In July, with details remaining to be ironed out before the final treaty could be signed, Colombia’s constitutional court ruled that approval of the treaty could be put to the people in a referendum.

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On September 26, 2016, Londoño and Santos signed a historic final peace agreement, but just one week later, on October 2, that agreement was rejected by Colombians in a razor-close referendum vote (50.21 percent of those who went to the polls voted against the agreement, and 49.78 percent voted for it). The general perception of those opposed to the agreement was that it was too lenient on the FARC. Nevertheless, the government and the FARC both announced that they would maintain the cease-fire as they prepared to return to the negotiating table.

In late November a renegotiated accord was ratified by the House of Representatives and the Senate; however, it was rejected and denounced by the opposition because it failed to include some of their key proposals. Nonetheless, the process by which the FARC guerrillas were to relinquish their weapons was largely peacefully under way at the beginning of 2017.

On August 15, 2017, the FARC turned over the last of its accessible weapons to UN representatives (some 900 weapons remained in caches in remote areas), bringing the total of decommissioned weapons to more than 8,100 guns and about 1.3 million cartridges. With this action the Colombian government declared an official end to its conflict with the FARC. The FARC began its transition into a political party that was guaranteed 10 unelected seats in the Colombian legislature (five in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate).