Former FARC leaders announce new armed offensive in Colombia

Fernando Cutz: Ivan Marquez was certainly an important figure both for the FARC itself, of course, as one of their key leaders and key dignitaries who would represent actively the FARC internationally. But he was also a key figure for the peace process. He was one of the chief negotiators who was very involved in the negotiations. He was very public and involved when the deal was actually struck and a peace agreement was reached. So this is a very significant moment to have his publicly turning on this whole process.

He did. He cited specific examples of individuals that have been killed. He didn’t accuse the government of being behind that, but he said that the government turned a blind eye and was indifferent to the deaths of former FARC members. But I suspect that there’s more to it than that. I think there’s been a real difficulty on the part of everybody to figure out how to fold former FARC members back into the economy, how do you make them into productive citizens in the licit economy when a lot of these folks have lived their entire lives in the jungle with guns. That’s kind of all they know. 

Well, it tried to, but it is very controversial. Part of the problem is that in Colombia, if you talk to the average Colombian citizen, they would say, “well, yes, we probably need to spend some money to help these former FARC individuals’ to help train them, to help educate them, to help integrate them into society and provide jobs for them. But when there are millions of victims out there, Colombians who have suffered at the hands of these individuals, how can we prioritize giving money to the perpetrators instead of giving money to the victims. So it becomes this controversy where many Colombians are fundamentally opposed to helping the former FARC members in any way, which makes this whole process a lot harder. I think everybody knows deep down that unless you help the former FARC members and unless you provide them with economic opportunities, they won’t have much of a choice but to go back to some sort of illicit means. And I think, unfortunately, we’re seeing that play out to an extent today. 

The FARC group has been around for many, many decades and they are, according to the US government, and many others, a terrorist organization. They were fundamentally opposed to the government in the regions that they controlled. They controlled quite a bit of territory in their heyday and while they were originally founded as a means to stand up for workers rights, and to counter poverty and to look out for the forgotten rural folks, they became more of a pretty well-oiled machine and an operation that both controlled and ran large swaths of coca country, essentially a narco-trafficking organization in many ways. They certainly evolved over their decades of existence and it’s unclear exactly what they want to evolve into now with this new iteration that Marquez is calling for today.