Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 45

COLOMBIA

(Photo by Luis Acosta, Agence France Presse)

Cuban President Raul Castro (center) oversees a handshake between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (left) and FARC leader
Timoleón Jiménez (right) regarding an agreement in principle to negotiate an end to the FARC insurgency at a meeting held in Cuba,
September 2015.

Is there a chance that the current negotiations,
now four years old, are also a ruse? The FARC
leadership, through its secretariat (also known as the
Central High Command), is experienced and deft in
managing, or distorting, perceptions. Nevertheless,
evidence strongly suggests that FARC’s objective, to
which all FARC activity is directed, remains ideologically and politically to seize state power. For
many years, FARC leaders thought this goal could be
reached only through force and a protracted guerrilla
war funded through criminality, particularly the drug
trade—a connection, it is worth noting, that FARC
continues to deny.8 Yet, following its military defeat
during the Uribe years, FARC’s approach shifted to
the nonkinetic and focused upon altering the frame
and narrative of their fight through information
warfare, simultaneously recruiting Lenin’s “useful
idiots” in promising Colombian sectors: coca growers, marginalized members of organized labor, and
alienated left-wing elements such as radical professors
and students.9 Externally, the movement established
reasonably secure bases in Venezuela and Ecuador
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016

so that FARC could survive no matter what blows it
suffered on its own soil.
This has remained the FARC strategy and raises
questions about the organization’s nature and goals.
What, for instance, motivates FARC’s strict demand for several “peace zones” (it has asked for as
many as eighty), ostensibly disarmament zones, but
where the group will dominate until it volunteers
to give up its arms? Similarly, FARC has negotiated an end to aerial and even manual eradication of
coca crops, which is now to be undertaken by local
communities, but only if the provision of services
by an increasingly cash-strapped government is
deemed sufficient. In the meantime, coca cultivation
is skyrocketing, replenishing FARC’s coffers after
years of punishing counterinsurgency operations.
Finally, the truth and reconciliation process promises to shield most FARC leaders from prosecution;
so long as they admit to their crimes, the agreement
merely enforces various restrictions of liberty short
of jail time. It is difficult not to see the ongoing peace
talks as “war by other means,” allowing a group the
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