The death of Farc co-founder Marulanda could at last open the way to political dialogue in place of violence in Colombia, writes Ana Carrigan
ON MARCH 26TH, 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. His long life had personified the tormented history of his country's violent political struggles for 60 years.
Few remember him by his real name - Pedro Antonio Marin - for he was known worldwide by his nom de guerre. Tirofijo (Sureshot) was the name he earned because of his phenomenal marksmanship when he was a teenager in the 1940s, fighting 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 Velez. More recently, when he became old and vulnerable, the junior guerrilla leaders called him Don Manuel. Perhaps, for Marxists, the "Don" was not politically correct, but then most of the rebels of the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (Farc), the insurgent force that he co-founded 44 years ago 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. Like a character in a García Márquez novel, Marulanda has haunted the imagination of Colombians - for good, and for evil - for decades. In the beginning he was admired or he was despised, on either side of the polarising fault line in Colombian society running between city people and country people, between the wealthy and the poor, between conservatives and progressives.
Then, in a fateful leadership conference in 1982, Arenas persuaded Marulanda and the secretariat to change Farc's direction. Instead of building popular support for a mass insurrection, it would create an "army of the people" capable of taking power before the millennium.
When Marulanda authorised kidnapping to fund this army - a practice he had previously rejected as anti-revolutionary - and, later, decided that Farc should charge a tax on all the coca harvested by peasant growers in guerrilla-held territories, the insurgency's status plummeted. It is reported that when other leaders among the ruling secretariat objected, arguing that the Farc should have nothing to do with the drug business, Marulanda agreed to compromise: they would give his plan a try for just one year and when the year was up the policy would be reviewed. One year later, they were too far in to get out.
Later that decade, Farc leaders decided to charge landing fees for protecting the pilots and the drug planes that flew into Farc territory to collect the drugs for the traffickers. The Farc grew rich. The military wing grew ever stronger at the expense of the politicians.
Its relationship with the Colombian population became confused, then withered. Farc's involvement with drugs, extortion and especially kidnapping made it an easy target for the Colombian media and society. Today, Farc fills the role of national scapegoat for all the ills that beset Colombia. Farc-bashing has become a test of patriotism.
IT ALL BEGAN so innocently. Pedro Antonio Marin was born around 80 years ago (his father was never sure of the year or date). The eldest of five children of a poor farming family, he left school at 13, barely able to read or write, to become a street vendor. After a few years he started a small grocery store. Pedro had his life mapped out: he was going to buy a piece of land where he could build his own house, have some animals, and farm. He also dreamt of joining the army.
His family were liberals. He told his biographer, Arturo Alape: "it was like the sign of the cross, you wear it permanently on your forehead." But the Marin family were not just that - they were "gaitanistas", followers of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the populist liberal leader whose radical politics resonated with Colombia's excluded poor.
On April 9th 1948, Gaitán was shot dead in the centre of Bogotá. By nightfall Bogotá was in flames, and in cities and towns across the country his death ignited a violent insurrection. Gaitán's death changed the course of Colombian history, and among those whose destiny was changed and determined was Pedro Marin. In the small rural town of Ceilan, on that April day, Pedro watched, uncomprehending, as his father and his uncles led an assault on the police station and seized the town hall. One week later, when the conservative government's police and paramilitaries reached town, the Marin family were forced to flee. Farewell, Pedro Marin. Welcome, Tirofijo.
He was not yet 18 when he headed for the mountains and, with 14 of his cousins, organised his first liberal self-defence group to protect himself and his family against the conservative government's paramilitary and police who were on the rampage.
"We didn't call ourselves guerrillas, we didn't know what a guerrilla was," he told Alape. "The violence followed me, like a shadow, first to one village, then to another."
In the war he discovered he had what Colombians call don de mando (the gift of leadership.) He also had an intuitive grasp of guerrilla strategy. The war taught him about his country, he learnt about the nature of the Colombian political system; and he made friends who opened the door to an exciting world of serious ideas and revolutionary politics in the clandestine communist party.
In the early 1950s the liberal guerrillas divided into two camps, liberals and communists, and Tirofijo joined the communists. His group was led by a gifted, intelligent young commander, known as Charro Negro, who became Tirofijo's first mentor.
In 1958, the politicians united in a National Front government and sought to end the fighting by offering an amnesty. Most liberal guerrilla chiefs put down their guns. The government's regional negotiators sealed the peace, country style, with bottles of whiskey and aguardiente, feasting and dancing until dawn, and everyone went home. But after demobilising, several leaders and hundreds of their followers were murdered. The communists were cautious.
Charro Negro told Marulanda that everyone had forgotten what the war had been about. He wanted a political pact that could actually change things, and exorcise the reasons why the communists had entered the war. He and Marulanda drew up a list of requirements for a serious peace negotiation, which included: freedoms for political parties; an amnesty for fighters; the provision of schools, teachers, health workers and clinics in the war zone; and the construction of vital infrastructure.
Considered as a recipe for peace, their requirements remain as broadly relevant today as they were when Charro Negro and Marulanda set them down 50 years ago. But the Bogotá government was not interested in grappling with serious solutions to rural problems.
Two years later, in January 1960, Charro Negro was assassinated and so Colombia lost another potentially important leader, someone who, those who knew him believe, might have shown the way to healing the wounds of a horrific decade of fratricidal killing.
After Charro's death, Marulanda inherited the leadership of his group. Escaping an army encirclement, he brought the guerrillas and their families to safety in a remote valley of the Colombian Andes, an 800sq km area called Marquetalia, 6,000ft above sea level, so abandoned by the state that no one could remember ever seeing a public employee. They were some 200 people, of whom about 40 were armed. Inspired by Jacobo Arenas, who joined Marulanda as the group's ideologue, they attempted to replicate the ideals of the 1871 Paris Commune in the Colombian Andes, living and working collectively for social, economic and defensive objectives.
However, the idea of a self-sufficient commune, a "communist enclave" in the Andes, frightened Bogotá and Washington. In May 1964, after three years of intelligence gathering and planning by the CIA, the Colombian army launched a massive attack on the "Independent Republic of Marquetalia".
The Latin American Security Operation (Plan Laso) was the first US initiative designed to pre-empt the spread of communism after the Cuban revolution, and Colombia's "communist enclaves" provided the CIA and the Pentagon with their opportunity for a first foray into Latin America.
Operation Marquetalia deployed 5,000 Colombian troops, backed by US helicopters and fighter planes dropping napalm (not yet in use in Vietnam) to destroy Marulanda's guerrilla and civilian commune. Seemingly unaware that the guerrillas had survived, scattered and regrouped to fight another day, the army claimed victory.
Operation Marquetalia enhanced Marulanda's legend. The joint US-Colombian attempt to destroy him, and the government's refusal to give land to some 200 destitute, landless families, was the catalyst for Farc, which he and Arenas founded two years later. At its peak, in the 1990s, Farc's "army of the people" was a formidable force of 17,000-plus men and women in uniform, supported by thousands of civilian militias providing food, medical supplies and information, with an international network able to maintain communications with foreign countries and ideological allies.
The insurgents controlled 45 per cent of Colombian territory and were even seen as a threat to the capital city, Bogotá. But Colombia did not need another army on the march, seizing territory, shelling small rural towns to bits, displacing the population, and wrecking the rural infrastructure. Farc's army became hated and feared. The insurgency lost its most essential asset, the support of the people.
Today, Farc is in trouble. Militarily, the rebels have lost the initiative in their war with the state. Since 2002, Plan Colombia's $5 billion (€3.2 billion) counter-insurgency programme has transformed the conduct of the war. New fleets of helicopters and Brazilian Toucan bombers conduct ferocious bombing raids on guerrilla camps. New satellite intelligence systems have compromised Farc's communications, disrupting its supplies and balkanising the far-flung active fronts, isolating them from each other. American, British and Israeli special forces have trained elite mobile counter- insurgency commandos, to infiltrate Farc units, identify potential defectors and gather intelligence on the location of guerrilla leaders.
Politically, too, Farc is on the defensive, bogged down in a paralysing stand-off with the Uribe government over the terms of a hostage release and exchange of prisoners that is going nowhere. Internationally, though it continues to lobby for "belligerent status", it is isolated, accused of war crimes and placed on the terrorist list of the countries of Europe and Latin America with whom it most wants contact.
Most seriously, Farc is losing its own members through desertions. Responding to government programmes that offer freedom, a roof, a stipend and vast bounty payments for information leading to the arrest or death of Farc leaders, according to official sources, demoralised Farc fighters are deserting en masse, bringing valuable intelligence with them. Ministry of Defence figures claim that in recent years the rebel army and militias have lost more than 7,000 people.
MARULANDA'S CAREER personifies the complexities, the betrayals, the unresolved and tragic mistakes that have sustained and fuelled Colombia's unending political violence.
Only time will tell whether Marulanda's successor, the middle-aged, middle-class, bespectacled ideologue, Alfonso Cano, has the ability to impose his authority at this crucial moment. His task will not be aided by President Uribe's announcement that he has created a $100 million (€65 million) fund to recompense Farc leaders who desert and free the hostages, nor by reports that the Colombian army has deployed 6,000 combat troops to capture or kill him. But the reality is that Colombians need Cano: for if the hostages are to recover their freedom, if Colombia is to find peace, it is more important that Farc recovers its unity under Cano's leadership, so that it can confront the present reality, rather than continue to fragment under the pounding of the bombs.
For the first time since the collapse of the last two ill-fated peace processes, Farc has a new generation of leaders from its political wing. Two of the new seven-member secretariat are medical doctors, one is a veterinarian - at this moment of crisis, serious, university trained professionals have come to the fore. This cannot have happened fortuitously, or overnight. As in Cuba, the transition from the historic leader seems to have been carefully prepared. This means that a new leadership is in place which could offer Colombians their best chance yet of breaking through that "great mountain" of mutual ignorance and indifference which Marulanda defined as the most serious enemy in the war.
The need is for dialogue. But this presents a major challenge, not only to Farc, but to the Colombian government and to the international community. Military victory for Uribe will not resolve the underlying causes of political violence. Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez has got it right this time: guerrilla warfare in today's Latin America is history. It spells ruin for the progressive, democratic policies that all Colombians so desperately need. Interestingly, Chávez's words exactly echo the messages sent repeatedly to Marulanda by Fidel Castro in January and February 2002, when the last peace process was disintegrating. Surrounded by his military leaders, Marulanda refused then to listen. It was El Viejo's most tragic mistake.
A longer version of this article appears on the website www.opendemocracy.net