History of the Colombian Guerrilla War

In this article, I give an overview of the Colombian guerrilla wars beginning in the early 20th Century. I’ve been intrigued by the difficulty presented by Colombia, a central nation in Latin America that resists falling into any simple narrative structure (as often happens with Chile, for example, as a victim of the US’s 1973 military intervention); as well as by the unprecedented possibility of a left-wing government winning the May 2022 elections behind candidate Gustavo Petro.

(I have been reconsidering the approaches to this sort of research and presentation, as well as its implications. How to break out of the atomization of blogs and individual bubbles, to create some collective forms of research, and practice? The growing permanence of Narcotrafficking as a para-legal power in Latin America belies the increasing impoverishment of experience under pandemic norms; where legal pharmaceutical manufactures openly influence government policy, experiential-altering and traditionally organic substances remain the province of notorious Public Enemies, masked cartel members as the constant bogey-man of the nightly news. The missing term here is politics, of the popular, directly-democratic sort; a kind of fulfillment of experience that implies neither the desperation of addiction, nor the puritanism of illegalization, but instead some flowering of experimentation and deepening of amateur research into the natural world and the unexplored lines of communication between humans and their environment.
With a full tilt to the left underway in Latin America, we will expectedly see more attention given and hope raised by activists in the US, along with predictable debates about the fetishization of the ethnic other and the false dichotomy that separates the US from Latin America. Galleano’s claim to the contrary is supported by the large latino working class that has always been inseparable from the US economy’s substrate. How to navigate these real abstractions? Celebrating the left victories might go hand in hand with undoing the lines of division and re-imagining what a Sanders-style US socialism could have in common with these movements, not to mention how it could lift the perennial military boot that has defined the last century in the region.)

On that note, we can see the late 19th Century civil wars in Colombia, as narrated in García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, fitting into a common story in the region with its role as a ‘banana republic’, the urgencies of United Fruit overpowering the Liberal demands for a constitutional republic. Ecuador’s liberal revolution sparked by Eloy Alfaro in 1894 broke with the Conservative Hegemony over a generation before the first Liberal government arrived in Colombia in 1930. At that moment, the Colombian Communist Party emerged out of the earlier Socialist Party, accompanying wide-spread union activity, strikes, and armed patriot and campesino movements. The Liberal Party would betray these tendencies and the clamoring for agrarian reform, leading to the mercurial rise of a populist splinter within the party behind the candidacy of Jorge Gaitán. His assassination in 1948 is the defining event of the century, marking a before and after by which the guerrilla path overtakes now foreclosed attempts at electoral reform. While not a Communist, his resistance to the formation of the US-controlled OAS (Organization of American States) appears to have been motivation enough for CIA involvement in his slaying in Bogotá in January of ‘48, just as the OAS was founded. A young García Márquez would be on-hand in a flat near the city center to see the rioting immediately unfold, his apartment burning down in the chaos that would lead to a takeover of the city known as the Bogotazo, where under the Liberal guerrilla Saúl Fajardo’s command, society would temporarily be administered under new forms of direct-democracy and socialist organized modes of distribution.

Also present that day was a young Fidel Castro, attending a youth summit opposed to the OAS, sponsored by Argentine president Juan Perón. Castro had met with Gaitán and their plans to speak again were cut short by the bullets. This experience parallels the events Che Guevara would witness in Guatemala in 1954, giving both men first-hand knowledge of their enemy’s methods, and the cataclysmic defeats earlier revolutionary and reformist attempts had suffered.

The chaos following Gaitán’s murder inaugurated a period known as La Violencia, seeing guerrilla groups take to the mountains and a vacuum in the capital’s administration of state power. A military commander-cum-dictator, Rojas Pinilla, would attempt to pacify the situation following a 1953 coup d’état, offering liberal guerrillas amnesty in return for agreeing to peace accords. However, Pinilla himself was removed in 1958, exiled, and then jailed, as a new pact by the ruling liberal and conservative cliques known as the Frente Nacional would consolidate a two-party power-brokerage that essentially froze out any democratic participation or other actors from the process. One of the leading communists to accept Pinilla’s amnesty, Jacobo Prías Alape, aka ‘Charro Negro’, would be betrayed and killed in 1960, leading the Communist Party to officially ratify the armed struggle and launch the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). At the same time, the ELN (National Liberation Army) and several smaller guerrilla groups were born, with large sections of the country, especially in the rural countryside, being taken over by armed campesino and worker defense militias. FARC leader Manuel Marulanda Vélez oversaw one such venture, the Republic of Marquetalia, which established the still-existing control the guerrillas wield over coca-producing regions.

In 1970, Rojas Pinilla would for the second time challenge the Frente Nacional electoral monopoly, this time welcoming alliances with student and even socialist factions, in an all-out populist formation intended to break the de-facto ban on political participation. His loss was credited to fraud and manipulation of vote counting, backlash to which saw the formation of a new guerrilla group, the M-19, this one autonomous from the communist and rural battalions, formed of students and urban activists. Appealing to middle-class and liberal sentiments with media-aimed spectacles (García Márquez, the best-known Colombian in the world at the time, offered his support vociferously), they announced their arrival with the theft of Simón Bolívar’s sword and the words, “Bolívar, tu espada vuelve a la lucha,” and the takeover of the Bogotá City Council. Gustavo Petro would take the alias of Comandante Aureliano, from Márquez’s novel, anticipating a publicity-savvy sensibility that would serve him in the late 1980s as the movement transitioned into a legal-democratic reform party. While the group’s high-command had been systematically assassinated, Petro was imprisoned during the ‘hottest’ moments of action, thus emerging unscathed and rehabilitated for a legitimate political career.

The state during this time perpetrated further and further atrocities, with the increasing backing of a Washington rabidly intent on preventing socialist alternatives, and desiring military bastions against the proliferating socialist regimes in Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua. It is now known that the M-19’s seizure of the Palace of Justice in November 1985 sparked an intense backlash by the security forces, even hunting down and extrajudicially killing the escaped hostages in one of the many ‘magically real’ demonstrations of its violent excesses— as repeated more recently in the case of the False Positives, where state forces were found to have systematically murdered innocent peasants in order to augment body-counts later labelled ‘insurgents’ or ‘guerrilla-sympathizers’. In the 1980s the paramilitaries were unleashed onto the battlefield, eliminating communist-party members and union organizers in a genocidal campaign similar to Washington-backed purges at the time in Honduras and Indonesia.

M-19 would attempt to avenge the assassination of its leader Iván Marino Ospina in 1985 with a siege on the city of Cali, allying with popular militias and an amazing display of international confederation including the guerrilla group Movimiento Armado Quintín Lame (indigenous from Colombia), Eloy Alfaro Vive, Carajo! (one of the few endemic Ecuadorian guerrillas), the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (from Perú, linked to but distinct from Sendero Luminoso), and the Tupamaros of Uruguay. This formation, known as Batallón América, was one of several guerrilla coalitions undertaken amidst simultaneous splits from the FARC and ELN, who became linked with drug-trafficking and allegations of terrorism in their increasingly bloody struggle with state and semi-state forces. The FARC would finally disband and disarm during peace accords overseen by Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa in 2017, whereas the ELN absorbed hesitant dissidents, forewarned by the broken promises of yore, and has re-fortified in the present following the quick reneging of the agreements by Colombian president Ivan Duque and the removal of support by Correa’s right-wing successors.

The ELN now admittedly operate the coca-production areas of Colombia, as well as semi-autonomous border zones of Ecuador and Venezuela, in competition with other illegal groups and in partnership with the increasingly powerful Mexican cartels that exercise a monopoly force, far from their native territory, over ground-level operations of distribution and smuggling. Speaking in Havana in 2018 following the talks’ suspension, ELN representative Pablo Beltrán maintained that their operations merely encompass coca production and low-tech creation of coca-paste, at which point the chemically-complex cocaine processing and its compound distribution logistics are paid for and overtaken by the Mexican cartels.¹ Mexican professor Josué González Torrez recently articulated the evolution of two supreme, international multi-billionaire cartels that compete over and carve out these illegal operations across the hemisphere and around the world: the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartels. Smaller cartels and bands such as the Zetas, in decline due to decapitation, or Unión Tepito, locally concentrated, now act as subsidiaries or contracted operatives for the advanced corporate networks of the high-finance cartels.²

One of the platforms Petro has based his campaign on, successful so far in garnering a massive lead in the polls leading into May, has been the demand for a just legal system that would remove the toxic spike of drug-criminalization from the civil struggle, enforcing social democratic demands for health and education infrastructure, while undoing the state’s para-legal strivings on behalf of Washington against dissidents and peasants. Legalization and establishing of relations with Venezuela could dramatically alter the terrain of life here and give much needed breathing room to communities who live under the shadow of mafia impunity. However, with the Madero government tacitly allowing illegal groups like ELN to meet basic needs in hard-hit areas near the Colombian border, that reconfiguration would face direct hostility and persecution under the current policy and legal posture of the US. Disarming Washington’s decades-long rhetorical coup that it fights a ‘war on drugs’ is a necessary first step for a rethinking of what Colombia’s role in the world-economy, other than as an anti-communist, mafia-controlled beachhead, could be.

In the following video, I discuss the same events and topics, should you prefer that medium:

1. https://www.primicias.ec/noticias/sociedad/eln-colombia-ecuador-venezuela-narcotrafico/

2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAspr-gbD3c