| "What the FARC?" |
| by International Man |
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Doug Casey’s Note: What you’re about to read is something that makes me envious. My friend Kolija invited me on this expedition, but I got caught up in things that were urgent and dropped the ball on something important.
I rationalized missing the adventure because I’d been to the boonies in Colombia a half-dozen times over the years, when FARC was still quite active, and had my picture taken while I was holding an FAL surrounded by cammy-clad soldiers, but this is way better.
Kolija’s article is what we call a "long read" in today’s ADD world. It will probably take you 10 minutes or so. But how could it be shorter and still give you a flavor of a trek to a rebel republic in the middle of nowhere and of people like the Communist Lara Croft and a warrior who personally took out perhaps 800 of the enemy?
Let us know what you think…
My diary of the first foreign tourist trip to the former rebel Republic of Marquetalia, Colombia
By Kolija Spori
Had someone told me a while ago that I would meet all the leaders of FARC, the Latin American guerrilla fighters, in their hidden founding place deep in the Colombian jungle, I would have thought I had been caught in a daydream. Or perhaps it’s a nightmare, because over the last half-century, the FARC have gained worldwide notoriety for their never-ending kidnappings of civilians, their extortion of businessmen, and their endorsement of Marxism-Leninism. The latter constituted the biggest crime, in my book, as I am a thoroughbred Austrian School libertarian.
Here is a quick overview of the situation in Colombia. During the years of "La Violencia," following the murder of left-wing presidential candidate Jose Gaitan in 1948, armed opposition groups hid in the remote highland jungles, founding no less than eight quasi-independent republics south-west of Bogota with their resistance center known as the "Republic of Marquetalia." When the government raided the lonely mountain hut of rebel leader Manuel Marulanda in 1964 during the epic Battle of Marquetalia, 48 guerrillas managed to miraculously escape the 1,600 government troops and even shot down 2 government helicopters.
This founding myth created the communist "Bloque Sur," the precursor of FARC, that swelled from those 48 fighters to more than 20,000 members in the end.
In 1966, Manuel Marulanda officially founded FARC, the "Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia," together with his comrade Jacobo Arenas, who later published the influential "Marquetalia Diaries." Their main objective was to free the indigenous people from the foreign imperialists and to fight the notorious unequal distribution of agricultural land, ever since European conquistadores like Columbus, Ehinger, Belalcazar, and Balboa grabbed control of the continent half a millennium ago.
Fast forward. After 50 years of fighting for their "good cause" without any tangible results, FARC signed the Havanna ceasefire agreement with the Colombian government in June 2016, signed a revised peace agreement (after a failed referendum against them) in November 2016, laid down their arms to the United Nations by June 2017, and have officially been a legal political party called "Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Comun" since September 2017, with 5 seats guaranteed in the House of Representatives and 5 seats guaranteed in the Senate.
Over those 50 years, according to Wikipedia, the Colombian civil war caused about 220,000 casualties, three-quarters civilians, and more than 5 million internal refugees!
Official UN statistics attribute the vast majority of the killings, 80%, to right-wing paramilitaries, 8% to official government forces, and 12% to left-wing fighters, here mainly FARC (plus ELN and M19). My local contacts tell me that the UN numbers are heavily skewed in favor of FARC, and it presents them as lame ducks. However, the paramilitaries only came into the picture after 1984, while FARC was already killing 20 years prior to that.
At the moment, despite the formal peace, there remain renegades on both sides: about 10 to 20% of former FARC members chose to continue their armed fight, mainly led from Venezuela.
On the other hand, the paramilitaries and the government have been accused by FARC of killing almost 200 peaceful FARC members clandestinely (some may have been victims of FARC dissidents or standard crimes). An intelligent question to ask is why there have been no faces, heroes, diaries, or history books ever published about the right-wing paramilitaries in the Western media.
One of the answers is that the Colombian conflict is a triangulated conflict that is orchestrated by outsiders with geopolitical interests way above the Colombians’ heads. During the Cold War, the government and paramilitaries were openly supported by the US, and the FARC was visibly sponsored by the Soviet Union.
To date, the internal conflict is still kept alive because the reasons for popular discontent remain: cocaine money has replaced secret American or Soviet funding, and the paramilitaries don’t have to reveal their faces or disarm themselves (some are simple drug dealers, while others are influential farmers).
The left and right are usually agitated all over the world in a Hegelian dialectic fashion, or "strategy of tension." In the case of Colombia, the geostrategic reason behind the artificial tension is the Panama Canal.
This neuralgic choking point for world trade and naval military transport has to be safeguarded at any cost, by the powers-to-be. The cost of human life in their constructed conflicts is obviously considered cheap.
The US even built their School of the Americas for the training of conflict parties, paramilitaries, subversives, interrogators, drug barons, and so on, right on the Panama Canal. The former house of horrors nowadays hosts the recommendable Melia Hotel Colon. The same techniques continue to be taught at the so-called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Fort Benning, Columbus, Ohio.
Few scholars will remember that the Panama Canal project was taken over by the US in a questionable deal with the corrupt Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla around the turn of last century. Panama was then separated from Colombia in a covert operation by the US prior to World War I, similar to the current US-sponsored regime changes in South Sudan, Kosovo or Ukraine. Of course, they were taking advantage of the 1000-day war being fought between Colombian liberals and conservatives from 1898 to 1901.
After the illegal cessation and occupation of Panama was officially acknowledged by the US in the Carter-Torrijos Treaty in 1977, it became necessary to quasi-annex the small country once again through the US invasion in 1989, leaving Panama without an army of its own. And, of course, leaving control of the Panama Canal to the US.
To ensure that no one attacks the Canal from the South, all access has been blocked by the US, not only through apparently dangerous "guerrilla groups" or "drug cartels," but also by "forces of nature," allowing the previous road path connection between Panama and Colombia to be grown over by jungle, in the so-called "Darien Gap," the missing link of 70 kilometers, within the 22.500 kilometers of the "Panamericana Highway," which otherwise leads all the way north-south across the continent, from Dead Horse in Alaska to Ushuaia in Patagonia.
These missing 70 kilometers of asphalt are a pain for trans-continental overlanders who have to forward their vehicles or freight by container ship or by cargo plane, which costs a lot more money than building a road. Don't ask yourself, "Who builds the roads?" It is usually a private economic initiative; rather, ask yourself, "Who blocks the roads?" It is usually state actors, sometimes hiding behind false flags. (Why the US clandestinely leads the current refugee trek, more than 60,000 on foot through the Darien Gap since 2012, is a topic for another day.)
My trip to Colombia, on the "Peace Road to Marquetalia," under the supervision of the United Nations, together with FARC, police, military, and other Colombian government agencies, was a proverbial "road" built entirely by private initiative—and yet we operated not-for-profit. That must be hard to understand for friends of statism or other forms of non-voluntaryism.
