Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionario de Colombia Disarming, Demobilising, & Reintegrating the FARC-EP into Colombian Society

Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionario de Colombia: Disarming, Demobilising, & Reintegrating the FARC-EP into Colombian Society – Most of it Anyways.

By the early 1990s when we began working with the Quechua in the Andean Mountain, several confederations of Quechua had merged with those of the Amazon Basin tribes to form united indigenous political alliances, which over the years evolved into well-organized and influential Indigenous movements in Latin America. Their grassroots organisational work proved able to incite rural uprisings of indigenous communities on a national scale. Thousands of people in the three Andean Amazonian countries blocked roads, paralyzed the transport system, and shut down local, regional, and national governments in response to demands for bilingual education, agrarian reform, and recognition of their indigenous rights to land and autonomy plurinational state of Ecuador. The combined indigenous movements shut down and occupied parliaments in Quito and Lima, while forcing Bogota to accede to restoration of rights in the various iterations of the Colombian constitutions that the new president Gustavo Petro and his vice-president Francia Marquez, are busy enforcing. During our years helping the Colombian government battle the FARC-EP and related leftist organisations, my/our struggle was not over control of the physical terrain, but rather, the human terrain. We fought for the hearts and minds of the population who were vulnerable to the FARC’s recruitment messaging; for the attention and acceptance of the young people susceptible to the FARC

messaging of belonging to an ‘armed family’ fighting for their inclusion in an otherwise alienating superior elite. On one level, we fought the FARC messaging with direct counter messaging, such as in figure 23. On many more levels, we fought the FARC by emptying its ranks of fighters and supporters. By convincing the tens of thousands of tiny pueblecitos and the families within that their children and grandchildren would be better off in alignment with a nation that recognised itself as multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, and respecting of all citizens without regard to socioeconomic power. Most all the initiatives that our team developed in conjunction with Colombia’s indigenous communities and our host nation partner, Colombian Government’s Accion Social, were ultimately accepted by the civilian governance, the COLAR and lastly, the COLPOL. This acceptance by the security and administrative services of those Colombian states that we were advising allowed us to turn the aspirations of the indigenous and marginalised mestizo communities inwards towards a social construction of a multi-world cosmology that did not necessitate the destruction of the pre-existing society. Because Plan Colombia was embraced by Colombia’s Eurocentric elite as the best chance for avoiding revolution, agreements to rebalance power – social, political, economic, legal, and natural resources to include land ownership, were made and the plan’s western financial backers ensured compliance. Each act of societal rebalance saw the Eurocentric elite’s margins of economic control weaken in favour of indigenous and mestizo peasants. The resistance was tremendous, and encased in old arguments about morality, Christianity, and the essential correctness of postcolonial racial and social stratification of Colombia by the Eurocentric elite. The tipping point it seems was the election of Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez, a former leftist insurgent fighter and an Afro-Latino. We found that all the positive transformational change within the Colombian structure of society, participation, and governance under Plan Colombia, became unbearable to the other quarter of society. The graphic in figure 24 is one of the most ubiquitous messages of modern counterinsurgency ‘Hearts & Minds’ campaigns that we employ in our work and its focus was directed at the indigenous and Afro-Latino portions of the spectrum as those were the parts of Colombian society that were rebelling against the criollo led Eurocentric part of the country. But even before the last Eurocentric conservative government was voted out in favour of Petro & Marquez, renewed physical resistance by the remnants of the Eurocentric self-defence forces or militias, pushed back against these social rebalancing agreements, in attempts to prevent lands and resources from being removed from their control. Towards the end of Colombia’s last conservative president, Ivan Duque, millions of Colombians took to the streets to protest the conservative government of President Ivan Duque, for failing to follow through with reforms agreed to after the demobilisation, disarmament, and reintegration of theFARC and related

militant organisations. From the continuation of enforcement of policies that advantaged Colombia’s Eurocentric elites, allowing environmental destruction, police brutality, and rampant corruption to continue. The government’s over-reaction left 44 people dead and over 3,000 wounded. Close to 1,500 protesters were arbitrarily detained. The systematic killings of leftists, student activists, and community leaders, all of whom played a pivotal role in the popular uprising, continued unabated, leading to the sweeping election of Petro and Marquez. Once elected, the Eurocentric elite fell into a profound psychosocial crisis and all former public dissociations by mainstream criollo society of close ties to drug trafficking, paramilitary death squads, and the military, were abandoned.

In June 2022, Gustavo Petro made his final campaign speech from behind a wall of bulletproof shields and on June 19, he became the country’s first leftist-elected president in decades, after narrowly winning a runoff. His running mate, Afro-Colombian environmental activist Francia Marquez, also made history by becoming Colombia’s first Black vice president. Politicians on the right quickly laid fears of postelection disputes to rest by recognizing Petro’s win, and a

peaceful transfer of power ensued. Political observers and participants in support of Petro & Marquez accuse former President Alvaro Uribe of being a right-wing populist who concentrated power during his 2002–10 presidency, as well as his successor and defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos (2010 – 2018), who oversaw the final FARC-EP demobilisation, a half-century endeavour. Having worked with both President Uribe and Santos, we witnessed firsthand their actions to pushback against their own Eurocentric elite to rebalance Colombian society and end the leftist insurgency. Our professional opinion is that by the time former President Ivan Duque (2018 to 2022) assumed the presidency, the anger and frustration of the postcolonial Eurocentric elite boiled over and pushed his administration to backslide on too many of the promises made by Uribe and Santos, leading to a nationwide mobilisation that brought Petro & Marquez to power. What made their electoral win so amazing was that, in Colombia, in all sectors, there was a profound stigma attached to running as a leftist in a country long terrorized by left-wing insurgencies. The recently demobilised FARC had a brutal record of kidnapping and killing civilians and forcibly recruiting child soldiers. Prior to the 2022 election, many of the non-Eurocentric sectors of Colombian society saw left-wing parties and candidates as guilty of violence by association, even when they campaigned on platforms of non-violent change.