Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia; FARC) is a leftist Colombian guerrilla group whose troops currently control more than 40 percent of the country and present a grave threat to the Colombian government.

Between 1948 and 1958, Colombia saw its the two leading political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, engage in a civil war that plunged the country into near anarchy; the period is called La Violencia—the violence. During that decade and continuing into early 1960s, the Colombian Communist Party began organizing peasant militias to defend villages in the rural south. After the war was ended with the political parties agreeing to share power exclusively between them, the government began to act against the peasant groups, considering them to be a communist threat to their newly formed political hegemony. In response to the Army's crackdown, in 1964 the peasants formed a coalition guerrilla force, the FARC.

Throughout the mid-1970s, the FARC functioned primarily as a defensive force, providing protection for the peasantry from landowners and providing services such as schools and medical facilities that the state could not. During the late 1970s, the FARC began to expand aggressively and by 1984 had won the organization some concessions from the government, one of which was allowing members of the group to run for office under the FARC banner. The FARC formed a political party in November 1985, but attacks by another guerrilla group, the M-19, during that month, resulted in a crackdown by the Army; by 1986 this first attempt at peace had been abandoned by all sides. The FARC retreated to its southern jungle strongholds and began to regroup.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Colombia became one of the world's centers for the growing of coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived. While the FARC did not actually traffic in the drug, it allowed coca to be grown in regions under its control and enforced a “tax” on coca growers. The FARC also began providing a variety of services to drug traffickers, including protecting the jungle airstrips used by smugglers. Over the next 20 years, the FARC would see increasing profits from the drug trade. During the 1990s, despite the dismantling of the largest drug trafficking cartels, cocaine production in Colombia skyrocketed. The country now provides more then 80 percent of the world's supply. Currently, the FARC is thought to receive between $300 million and $1 billion annually from coca and heroin production.

[Page 313]Drugs are only one source of income for the group. The FARC is also heavily involved in kidnapping for profit, a tactic begun by the National Liberation Army–Colombia (ELN) in the mid-1970s, but one that the FARC uses extensively. Targets are often wealthy businessmen or government officials, although almost anyone is potentially at risk. Western executives from international corporations operating in Colombia often fetch the highest ransoms, sometimes millions of dollars. The FARC is also heavily involved in extortion—requiring an annual fee or “tax” from businesses operating in areas under its control.

These varied sources of income, particularly the huge drug profits, enabled the FARC to expand greatly during the 1980s and 1990s, transforming a force that in the early 1980s numbered a few thousand into one estimated at 18,000 today. (The FARC recently announced a recruitment drive, hoping to add 12,000 members.) The FARC's wealth, abetted by the collapse of communism, has made it one of the best-armed guerrilla groups in the world; its communications and surveillance equipment is significantly more sophisticated than that of the Colombian Army, and it employs heavy artillery and antiaircraft missiles against military helicopters. During the 1990s, the FARC vastly expanded its territory and now controls about 40 percent of the country, an area about the size of Switzerland.

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