| Colombia
Primer
 Author:
Cristobal Campos
Posted: Feb 8, 2003
This article is the
first of three in a series that will attempt to provide a background
on the ongoing events in Colombia. It is by no means exhaustive.
There is no way a 40-year civil war can be summed up in a few pages.
It is much more complex than that. This will only be an attempt
to enable the reader to speak more intelligently on the subject
and to explain a few of the players involved in this multi-sided
conflict.
Colombia is a nation
steeped in violence. Almost since inception, her people have been
quicker with the sword than the pen. Unfortunately, this trend continues
even today. To fully understand the violent situation in present-day
Colombia, one must go back in history to the 1930s.
The Colombia of the 1930s
was something more typical of Spain and the Old World, than that
of the New World. Laws regarding land ownership particularly were
still patterned on the ancestral system with peasants working for
land barons. These peasants stood little chance, if any, of one
day having a plot of their own to work and cultivate their own profits.
The political situation
at this time consisted of two primary groups, the Liberals and the
Conservatives. However, as the seeds of Communism began to germinate
in enclaves around the world, the Colombian peasants, hungry for
any ideology that would help raise them up in status a notch or
two, embraced it immediately. As a result, two offshoots of the
Liberal Party quickly emerged. The Communist Party was founded in
1930 and three years later arrived the National Unity of the Revolutionary
Left, both eagerly awaiting all the prosperity this new Communism
would bring.
With these new organizations,
the notion of land reform spread like wildfire, quickly encompassing
the entire country. As one can imagine, however, these newfangled
ideas weren't so readily accepted by the elite and a power struggle
ensued, rather peacefully at first.
But by the 1940s, it was readily apparent to those with great dreams
of a quick re-distribution of land titles, that mere talk just wasn't
going to cut it. In 1946, the Conservatives regained power after
a long and rather lackluster career of Liberals in power. What little
land reform gain that was made was quickly erased by the new laws
of the Conservatives, putting land and power solidly back in the
hands of the elite. Protests began in earnest. These same protests
turned to demonstrations, which turned to violence. And, as violence
so often does, it polarized the various unions and political parties
until sides were drawn up. Territories were being disputed and the
whole political pot was headed for the proverbial boil.
And boil did it ever.
In 1948 liberal land reform leader Jorge Eliazer Gaitan was gunned
down in Bogotá and horrendous riots began before his body
even hit the ground. What began that day was one of the most violent
periods in the history of the Western Hemisphere as a civil war
erupted between the warring factions. La Violencia lasted officially
from 1948 to 1958, although some historians consider the period
to last until 1964 and the birth of the guerillas. However it is
figured, upwards of 300,000 Colombians died during this bloody political
and geographical war.
In the midst of the senseless carnage of La Violencia, there were
several noteworthy events. In the early 50s, the Colombian government,
in an effort to get a handle on the wild liberals, began issuing
arms to the Conservative peasants and other citizens. The Liberals,
eager to flex their might against the government quickly founded
an army of 10,000 men in the eastern plains of Colombia as a response.
A William Wallace-like wave of inspiration spread like wildfire
across the country and, within months, small anti-government militias
had sprung up, much to the government's dismay.
Those in power saw the
potential ruin of their country as imminent and in 1953 elected
General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to the presidency. It was during this
time that the violence had reached proportions large enough to pique
the interest of the till-then quiet Uncle Sam. The U.S. was deep
in the anti-communist phase of its history and, hot on the heels
of McCarthy's allegations, was eager to back Rojas in Colombia.
It was a simple way for the US to display its dogged determination
to defeat Communism while at the same time not disrupting the sensitive
political environment back home. The US rained money on Rojas and
he used every penny in an attempt to bomb the liberal militias back
to the proverbial stone-age. Instead, they ran deep into the jungles
of the south and east to avoid the planes overhead. There they formed
small communities and began to eke out an existence and cultivate
their hatred for the establishment. (Not too different from what
was beginning in the US.)
The 1960s arrived and
with it the counterculture - Colombian style! The small militias
began to refer to themselves as guerillas. Castro took over every
square inch of his island and the Cuban Revolutionary wave was in
full swing. It was swallowed whole in the jungles of Colombia. Marxist-Leninist
ideas began being adopted as an ideology by which to guide the Colombian
revolutionary groups.
It seemed General Rojas
could read the writing on the wall and didn't like what he saw.
In 1964 he launched a particularly hellacious bombing attack on
a few guerilla encampments and followed that up with a 16,000-man
ground force. It was almost as if Rojas feel victory slipping away
despite his best efforts and he fought with one last dying push.
The army did take the guerilla camps but after they had all but
been abandoned. About 43 of the die-hard guerilla fighters and two
of their very young leaders escaped, and headed for the safety of
the state of Cauca. This unsuccessful attempt by the government
to annihilate the guerillas would be a watershed event in the sad
history of the Colombian government's ineffectiveness in dealing
with the guerillas. From that point until today, the government
has been fighting an increasingly uphill battle with the guerillas.
The two young charismatic
fighters that fled that day were Pedro Antonio Marin and Jacobo
Arenas. Marin took the name Manuel Marulanda Velez. Due to his alleged
prowess with firearms in battle, he earned the nickname "Tirofijo"
or "Sure Shot". With Tirofijo now a seasoned veteran of
several battles and the established leader of the main component
of the guerilla forces, he began to think of the future, of organization
and, some day, of legitimacy. It was from this thinking that he
decided to name his rag-tag bunch of soldiers as the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. It was the first time the
guerillas had any semblance of organization and the beginning of
the biggest thorn in the side of the Colombian government that they
have ever known. Although much fighting had taken place, war had
now been officially declared and Colombia was pushed into a new
and bloodier phase of its history.
Author: Cristobal Campos
E-mail: expatriated@hotmail.com
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