Toward a New Phase of Guerrilla Warfare in Colombia? The Reconstitution of the FARC-EP in Perspective

• Date: 01 September 2020
• Author: José Antonio Gutiérrez D.
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20939118
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20939118

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 234, Vol. 47 No. 5, September 2020, 227–244

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20939118

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

227

Toward a New Phase of Guerrilla Warfare in Colombia?

The Reconstitution of the FARC-EP in Perspective

by

José Antonio Gutiérrez D.

The August 2019 announcement by some top former commanders of the Fuerzas

Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo guerrillas in Colombia that

they were resuming armed struggle was a major shock after the peace agreement between

the rebels and the Colombian government in 2016. It was the clearest symptom of the cur-

rent crisis of the peace process. It was not, however, an unforeseeable development. The

government had brazenly attacked the content and the spirit of the peace agreement, and

the systematic murders of ex-combatants and social leaders remained unpunished. As a

result, increasing numbers of ex-combatants had decided to resume armed struggle. To

regard these groups as mere criminals underestimates the political content of their state-

ments and overlooks the reasons for this growing phenomenon. An exploration of the

causes of the growing FARC-EP dissidences sets the stage for a discussion of the likely

scenarios for conflict and peace building in the middle term.

El anuncio de algunos ex comandantes de la guerrilla de las Fuerzas Armadas

Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo en agosto de 2019 sobre su reanudación

de la lucha armada causó gran conmoción después del acuerdo de paz de 2016 entre los

rebeldes y el gobierno. Este fue el síntoma más claro de la actual crisis del proceso de paz,

pero no se trató de un acontecimiento imprevisible. El gobierno ya había atacado descara-

damente el contenido y espíritu los acuerdos, y los asesinatos sistemáticos de excombati-

entes y líderes sociales seguían impunes. Como resultado, un número cada vez mayor de

excombatientes se decidían por reanudar la lucha armada. Considerar a estos grupos como

meros delincuentes subestima el contenido político de sus declaraciones y pasa por alto las

razones de este fenómeno creciente. Una exploración de las causas de las progresivas dis-

idencias de las FARC-EP sienta las bases para una discusión sobre escenarios probables en

torno la construcción tanto de conflictos como de la paz a mediano plazo.

Keywords: Colombia peace agreement, FARC-EP dissidents, Guerrilla warfare, Peace

building

The announcement by some demobilized top commanders of the Fuerzas

Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary

Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army—FARC-EP), including Iván

Márquez and Jesús Santrich, that they were resuming armed struggle and

reconstituting the movement was one of the latest and most important signs

José Antonio Gutiérrez D. is a lecturer in sociology in the School of Law of the Universidad Santo

Tomás in Medellín and director of the Human Rights Center at that university. He is also a research

fellow of the Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction at Dublin City

University.

939118LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20939118Latin American PerspectivesGutiérrez / A New Phase of Guerrilla Warfare in Colombia?

research-article2020

228 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

that the peace agreement signed between this insurgent organization and the

Colombian state in 2016 is in deep crisis. The message, apparently issued from

the remote eastern jungles of Inírida, in the department of Guainía, outlined

their reasons for rearming: the systematic murder of demobilized combatants

and social activists (which they regard as the continuation of a longer tradition

of repression going back to the rebellions of the eighteenth century), the gov-

ernment’s unwillingness to fully implement the peace agreement, the judicial

insecurity faced by rebel commanders, and the efforts of sectors of the political

establishment to crush the agreement.1 “We were forced to go back to the

mountains. We were never beaten or defeated ideologically. This is why our

struggle continues. It will be recorded in history that we were forced to take up

arms again” (FARC-EP, 2019).

The message, read by Iván Marquez, also outlined this group’s proposed

military strategy and some of its political objectives. It mentioned a “new way

of operating” against the state—responding to offensive actions by the latter

and avoiding “fratricidal bloodshed” against honest policemen and soldiers.

The group’s focus was to be the defense of the territory and the environment

and the fight against corruption. It would pursue an alliance with another rebel

group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army— ELN),

and build links with the various dissident factions that exist throughout the

country. It promised not to engage in kidnappings, proposing instead to fund

its rebellion via the taxation of illicit economies and multinational corporations

operating in Colombian territory. Although the message also mentioned eco-

nomic contributions from national and local businesses, it was unclear what

mechanisms would be used to enforce such contributions or whether they

would be enforced at all (FARC-EP, 2019).

Of course, there were a few hundred FARC-EP guerrillas, concentrated

mostly in Colombia’s Southeast under the leadership of Gentil Duarte, Iván

Mordisco, and John 40, who had never demobilized. Far more significant,

numerically speaking, was the number of demobilized guerrillas who had

taken up arms again, many of them joining dissident factions or forming new

armed groups claiming to be carrying on the FARC-EP tradition, mostly in

northern Antioquia, in the Southwest, in Arauca, and in other regions that were

traditional rebel strongholds. Although important commanders such as

Rodrigo Cadete had already defected to the dissidents (Agencia EFE, 2019), the

coordinated decision of several high-ranking commanders from most of the

regions where the FARC-EP had a significant presence, including Iván Márquez,

a former member of the Secretariat (the highest commanding structure of the

old FARC-EP), was a qualitative change in the postagreement scenario.2

Those rearming were not operating in a vacuum. The driving forces behind

the FARC-EP’s expansion in the previous decades had been the ongoing

extreme agrarian inequalities and land-grabbing by rural elites, often exacer-

bated by free-market policies and leading to the emergence of an armed

response among the peasantry in particular regions; a political system per-

ceived as exclusionary, which seemed to some sectors of the left an insurmount-

able obstacle to political alternatives; and the persistence of official violence

and repression as the privileged response to social contestation, which had led

many to see armed struggle not only as legitimate but even as necessary