The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) 

Abbreviation of Spanish Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (“Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”),  

arxist guerrilla association in Colombia. Shaped in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Colombia; PCC), the FARC is the biggest of Colombia's Rebel group, evaluated to have around 10,000  fighters and a great many supporters, generally drawn from Colombia's country zones. The FARC bolsters a redistribution of riches from the well off to poor people and restricts the impact that multinational partnerships and remote governments (especially the United States) have had on Colombia.

FARC  founded involved in bombings, homicide, mortar assaults, seizing, blackmail, and capturing, and also guerrilla and routine military activity against Colombian political, military, and financial targets. The FARC has all around reported binds to a scope of medication trafficking exercises including tax collection, development, and dissemination. The gathering thinks of us as persons to be true blue military focuses because of US backing for the Colombian Government. FARC's most broadly known operation was its grabbing of three US contractual workers—Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes, and Keith Stansell; together with French government official Ingrid Betancourt—in February 2002. The four were liberated by Colombian security powers in July 2008. 

The gathering had various difficulties in 2010 highlighted by the September 2010 Colombian military attack that brought about the demise of the FARC's senior military leader Victor Julio Suarez Rojas, otherwise called Mono Jojoy. What's more, Bogota baffled FARC endeavors to disturb the March 2010 congressional and May 2010 presidential decisions. Be that as it may, the gathering in June 2011 directed some little scale assaults and kidnappings to exhibit its proceeded with significance. 

Drug Trafficking Nexus

As described above, peasants began colonizing the Colombian Amazon in the 1950s following the violent displacement of peasants by large landholders. Completely neglected by the government, peasant settlers attempted to establish agricultural production in inhospitable jungle ecosystems. However, they soon found coca to be the only product that was both profitable and easy to market. The potential profit of coca cultivation, the relative ease of transport and marketing, and its comparative advantages relative to legal crops fueled a wave of immigration to the region. From then on, the Amazon was faced with unsustainable population growth, leading to environmental degradation.

In addition, large-scale, or industrial, cultivation directly linked to organized crime emerged in different areas interspersed with poor settlements. The authorities use the existence of industrial cultivation to justify criminalizing all coca and poppy production. Current counternarcotics policy does not distinguish between coca cultivation by peasant farmers as a result of the agricultural crisis and industrial coca cultivation administered by powerful drug traffickers.

Since the 1990s, Colombian coca plantations have covered an expanse that, according to residents of the affected areas, could be as large as 150,000 hectares. An estimated 300,000 people are directly dependent on the coca economy. These zones are, at the same time, controlled by guerrillas who derive significant revenues by levying taxes on medium- and large-scale farmers, intermediate coca products (base, further refined into cocaine), merchants, and, most importantly, processing laboratories and clandestine air strips for cocaine shipments. These funds are employed to strengthen the guerrillas' logistical and communications capacity for the war effort.

The army, therefore, perceives the settler-coca farmer as a direct guerrilla collaborator. The army's decision to engage in counternarcotics operations targeting illicit crop cultivation, justified by the "narcoguerrilla" theory, has led to the repression of peasants in those areas. This policy has serious human rights implications. For example, many instances of the army burning residents' homes to the ground and forcibly expelling them from lands have been reported in Guaviare since mid-1996. The insurgents themselves have provided justification for the army's allegations of links between the guerrillas and the small coca farmers by publicly declaring that the guerrilla attack on the army base of Las Delicias in Putumayo was an act of solidarity with peasant protesters. (8)

This region was particularly affected by decrees 0900 and 0717 establishing Special Zones in which the civilian authorities were stripped of their constitutional powers and control was transferred to government security forces. This set the stage for massive protests, beginning in 1996, of over 200,000 settlers and peasant farmers. These protests were organized in response to the mistreatment of rural workers and the lack of economically viable alternatives to coca. The Department of State itself acknowledged in its 1996 human rights report that "In the resulting confrontations, government forces generally abided by standing orders not to employ deadly force. However, soldiers did kill some protesters, and some abuses were alleged. Investigators sent to the region by a consortium of NGOs attributed 13 killings to the army, 1 to the police, and 4 to guerrillas. They cautioned, however, that the death toll may have been higher." (9)

In 1997, the Amazon region where the protests took place witnessed increases in massacres, violent deaths of agrarian leaders, and the formation of private paramilitary groups. As armed groups struggled for control, conflict escalated at a tremendous cost in terms of human life and the basic rights of the population.

This region also became a military target for the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia ("Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia", AUC), an organization that unites the largest paramilitary groups in the country. Following a paramilitary summit in mid-1997, the AUC declared a priority area for action to be "the country that the guerrillas colonized," namely, Amazon and Orinoco regions, including Arauca, Casanare, Vichada, Meta, Caquetá, Guaviare, Putumayo, Guainía, Vaupés and Amazonas. "It is time that we reconquer these zones," paramilitary spokesmen wrote in their minutes, "because it is there that the subversion has succeeded in creating a parallel government that imperils the Nation." (10)

This threat was carried out in the massacre of Mapiripán (Department of Meta) from July 14-20, 1997. Paramilitary gunmen, including some from Urabá, murdered more than 30 people. Three months later, similar events in Miraflores left six people dead, according to the witnesses among the civilian population. Twenty-three people were reportedly murdered in Puerto Alvira (Mapiripán) on May 4, 1998. This massacre is a clear case of the failure of civilian and military authorities to prevent paramilitary activity. Community leaders had alerted authorities in the area of impending paramilitary operations, but nothing was done to prevent the massacre. These incidents have provoked a peasant exodus of unprecedented proportions in the region, further exacerbating conflict and economic insecurity in the communities.

Paramilitary attacks are a terrifying result of combining illicit crop cultivation, and the financial benefits it generates, with a degenerated civil war. Members of the civilian population are considered military targets because they are forced to pay taxes demanded by the insurgency. Not only have government authorities failed to provide resources or infrastructure that would allow peasant settlers to profit from cultivating legal crops - or encourage civil society's role in such efforts - but they have also failed to defend the interests of this vulnerable population. Instead, the government treats the peasant settler who farms coca, poppy or marijuana as a criminal who must be punished through repression and the eradication of his illegal crops.

The government's failure to adequately address illicit crop cultivation contributes to civilian support of the guerrillas. Settlers in the area view the guerrillas as the only response to the attack on their lives and livelihood through aerial fumigation of coca and poppy fields and judicial proceedings. The government's perception of illicit cultivation as solely a source of funding for the guerrillas, and not also as the only means of support for large sectors of the peasant population, contributes to social conflict and polarization.

However, the FARC's response to coca and poppy cultivation has been very limited as well. The FARC lacks concrete proposals for development alternatives in the affected regions. Its presence in much of the region is restricted to specific actions including extortion and firing on fumigation aircraft. Given the lack of legal employment opportunities in rural colonization areas, coca eradication ultimately provides the guerrillas with an army of unemployed youth who have no prospects of future employment. This is partly responsible for the increasing numbers of recruits to the FARC since its founding in 1964.