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http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/special/rebelheld/986468http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/special/rebelheld/986468
Aug. 4, 2001, 11:52PM
SPECIAL REPORT
Rebel Held
Inside Colombia's FARC, Latin America's oldest, most powerful guerrilla army
By JOHN OTIS
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle
LA CAUCANA, Colombia -- Invoking the name of the Father, the Roman Catholic priest barged through the doors of his church and into the street, where he beseeched the Marxist guerrillas to display a little compassion.
How could they torch his town on a serene Sunday morning, just hours before Mass, the Rev. Nelson Chica remembers asking the rebels. How dare they!
But the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which has been fighting to overthrow the Bogota government for 37 years, has always heeded its own moral compass, its own relentless timetable.
After marching into this hamlet of 5,000 people at dawn, about 100 rebels ordered the townsfolk from their homes.
As they herded the crowd to the edge of the village, the insurgents pulled aside eight men and accused them of belonging to the right-wing paramilitary groups that have long targeted Colombia's left-wing rebels and their supporters.
With bursts from their AK-47 automatic rifles, the guerrillas executed the eight villagers, one by one, the priest and others say.
Next, the rebels poured gasoline on supermarkets, pool halls and bakeries and set them ablaze. Then, as Colombian army troops approached La Caucana, the guerrillas loaded mules with looted food and medicine and disappeared into the Andean foothills.
As Chica recounts the attack two days later, soot-stained youngsters pick through the remains of the still-smoldering business district. In the town square, onlookers gawk while workers wrap plastic sheets around two decomposing corpses and haul them away in a dump truck.
The priest folds his arms and frowns as he ponders the longstanding claim of the FARC -- the Spanish acronym for the guerrilla group -- that it is fighting on behalf of the people.
"They defend the people by killing the people," Chica says. "What kind of a solution is that?"
The FARC, Latin America's oldest, largest and most powerful guerrilla group, also is its most perplexing.
After decades of armed struggle, the majority of Colombians view the FARC as rebels without a righteous cause, analysts say. Yet the FARC soldiers on.
Guerrilla leaders profess to be Marxists but often act like robber barons, demanding payoffs from businesses, kidnapping civilians for ransom and delving into the illegal drug trade.
To revolutionary purists, the FARC's cross-pollination with the criminal underworld is akin to mixing vodka with holy water. But the cash has provided a kind of steroidal boost, allowing the organization to almost triple in size over the past decade and balloon into an institutional rebel army that controls huge portions of Colombia.
Though there are other players in the civil war, analysts believe the conflict with the FARC must be resolved if this nation of 40 million people is ever to attain peace.
Yet the guerrillas' true endgame remains an enigma, which is why policy-makers vehemently disagree over what to do about the rebel group.
Many claim the FARC has mutated into a cartel of narco-guerrillas fighting for profits. They contend that the rebels have no interest in a truce and must be brought to their knees on the battlefield.
Others insist that the FARC remains a politically driven organization determined to right historic wrongs and should be dealt with at the negotiating table.
The Bush administration supports peace talks between the FARC and the Colombian government that began in January 1999.
At the same time, the United States is giving millions of dollars in aid to the Colombian army and police. The package has been described as assistance in the war against drugs, but critics point out that the guerrillas also are being targeted and caution that the United States is wading into quicksand.
"This is how it all began in Vietnam," warns Colombian Congressman Gustavo Petro.
Not that many years ago, the guerrillas were blithely written off by the powers that be. In the beginning, the FARC was a band of farmers and malcontents armed with homemade shotguns.
As he recalls those early low-tech days, FARC leader Manuel Marulanda smiles over lunch and says, "In one ambush, we used spears."
In Washington and throughout South America, the FARC is now viewed as a regionwide security risk. The rebels regularly cross Colombia's borders to run guns, treat their wounded and pull off kidnappings.
Over the past decade, the conflict has claimed an estimated 35,000 lives and has uprooted more than 1.7 million people. Many have escaped to Colombia's major cities or have left the country.
Most experts see the war as an increasingly violent stalemate.
Eduardo Pizarro, a Colombian scholar who has written several books on the FARC, calls the conflict a "chronic insurgency." Though the rebels may never win in the traditional sense, they have latched onto the nation like parasites and simply won't let go.
Other analysts fear that if the guerrilla group continues to expand and Colombia continues toward anarchy, the rebels could someday march into the capital of Bogota.
Today, the multisided war is being fought by the Colombian army, the FARC and illegal paramilitary groups that arose in the early 1980s to battle the guerrillas. A much smaller and weaker Marxist rebel organization -- the National Liberation Army, or ELN -- also is fighting.
The conflict between the FARC and the paramilitaries produces the bulk of the bloodshed. Both groups resort to massacres of civilians suspected of collaborating with the enemy and often fight over drug crops and trafficking routes, says Alfredo Rangel, a consultant to Colombia's Defense Ministry.
Residents of La Caucana, for instance, say the FARC ravaged their town in northern Colombia to expel the paramilitaries and take over the nearby coca fields, which provide the raw material for cocaine.
"It has nothing to do with ideology," says Chica, the parish priest. Because of the FARC's many incongruities and tendency to deviate from the traditional guerrilla playbook, even experts who have spent years trying to distill the essence of the rebel organization remain more befuddled than enlightened.
"I've never quite managed to understand what it is that they believe," says a U.S. State Department official who monitors Colombia.
"The FARC is a mishmash of who the hell knows what."
A ZONE OF THEIR OWN
At precisely 4:30 a.m., still the dead of night in the Colombian jungle, a guerrilla struggles out of his mosquito-netted bunk bed and starts clapping.
Softly slapping his fingertips together, the rebel sets off a chain reaction. As his colleagues pop awake, they join in. Soon, a muffled patter fills the barracks, followed by the sounds of groggy young people as they pull on rubber boots and button camouflage uniforms.
The applause is an old war-zone habit, a stealth rendition of reveille to avoid tipping off the enemy.
But as dawn breaks, it's clear the rebels have nothing to fear. The nearest army patrol is at least 100 miles away.
The FARC outpost sits in a 16,000-square-mile zone in southern Colombia known as the despeje, Spanish for the "cleared-out area," that is under rebel control. In 1998, President Andres Pastrana withdrew all government troops from the region to create a safe haven for peace talks with the rebels.
The FARC uses the zone for recruiting and training. Fresh foot soldiers fill its camps.
For many, signing on with the guerrillas is a matter of economic survival.
"I wanted to be a doctor," says Freddy, 21, as he sits on the bottom level of a bunk bed next to his AK-47 rifle. "But things are different when you are from the lower class. If you don't have any opportunities in life, you don't have any aspirations."
As he adjusts the rebel armband on his left sleeve, Freddy, who, like many guerrillas gives only his first name, explains that he left school after the fifth grade to go to work and help his family. But he failed to find a decent job and enlisted in the FARC at 16.
Nearby, a young black woman named Olga Lucia, who commands a squad of 12 guerrillas, primps her dreadlocks and explains why she joined the FARC three years ago.
"There is no discrimination and more than enough food," she says. "This is real democracy. What I never had in my civilian life, I have here."
The guerrillas are quick to slam Colombia's ruling class. If the government created more jobs and provided better education for young people, says 19-year-old Esteban, "no one would rebel against the state."
But when asked about the tenets of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, the young rebels have little to say. Some sport T-shirts, pendants and tattoos depicting Ernesto "Che" Guevara but can't explain why the guerrilla icon who helped win the Cuban revolution is so famous.
Recruits "do not come here because they are convinced of the revolutionary process," says Carlos Antonio Lozada, a FARC commander wandering the camp with his 3-year-old daughter. "They come here due to some kind of crisis.
"Here is where they get their ideology," Lozada says.
The FARC provides daily political classes for rebels of all ranks. Guerrillas also can learn to read and write, add and subtract. But educational opportunities only go so far.
"We don't need great mathematicians in the trenches," says Simon Trinidad, a rebel negotiator who often stays at the camp. "If you can follow orders and show some initiative, you can be a great guerrilla."
Most FARC recruits come from the countryside, where living conditions are worsening.
Anti-narcotics operations have thrown legions of coca pickers out of work. Political violence and low prices for legal crops have forced peasants to abandon their fields.
"These people are looking for something else to do. If you give them a few dollars and boots to wear and three good meals a day, you can recruit them," says Walter J. Broderick, an Australian-born resident of Colombia and a former priest who has written two books on the nation's rebel groups.
By signing up volunteers and forcibly recruiting teen-agers, the FARC's ranks have swollen to 17,000 uniformed soldiers and an estimated 5,000 part-time urban militia members. Those who join learn that life with the guerrillas is no easy option.
Rebel soldiers receive food and clothing but no salary. Many sport bullet and shrapnel scars as souvenirs from the front lines. Membership in the FARC also can be a life sentence. Deserters can be shot.
Trinidad points out that guerrilla life in the despeje seems like a vacation at a five-star resort compared with that at bivouacs in the rest of the country. With the enemy so far away, peace reigns here. Many guerrillas spend their time producing food for themselves and other FARC units.
After a breakfast of strawberry-flavored oatmeal, about 50 rebels march to a FARC cattle ranch to dig fence-post holes, telling jokes along the way. Others stay behind to feed chickens and pigs or tend to the watermelon, banana and sugar cane fields.
One young guerrilla tosses handfuls of Purina fish chow into a network of artificial ponds and watches as cachama, which resemble piranha, attack the pellets. By 9 a.m., the camp pharmacy opens, and classes begin in the photography lab.
Other camp amenities include concrete shower stalls, massive water tanks, field irrigation hoses and a parking lot that was recently paved with a thick layer of asphalt.
As the sun disappears, rebels crowd into a thatched hut that serves as the camp classroom. But tonight's lecture on politics is abruptly canceled. Instead, an American-made film will provide entertainment.
The guerrillas turn their attention to a widescreen television at the front of the room. Many might be hazy on the exploits of "Che" Guevara. But the video features a Hollywood action hero with whom they all seem familiar: Steven Seagal.
EARLY DAYS
They call him "Tirofijo" -- Spanish for "Sureshot" -- a nickname he picked up for his marksmanship.
But during a rare meeting with a small group of journalists in rebel-held territory, Manuel Marulanda seems more languid than lethal.
The FARC's founder and paramount leader shows up in a faded plaid shirt with a machete on his left hip and a yellow towel for swatting mosquitoes over his right shoulder. On his head sits a camouflage field cap with the bill sticking up at a goofy angle.
Countless times in the past 50 years, Marulanda has opened the newspaper to read his obituary amid claims by Colombian troops that they have shot him down. But Marulanda has outfoxed scores of generals. He has outlasted 13 presidents, and on May 12, he celebrated his 71st birthday.
Military analysts attribute the FARC's staying power, in part, to Marulanda's uncanny knack for survival. Now the world's oldest guerrilla, Marulanda would have you believe he is an accidental warrior.
"I never went looking for war," Marulanda says following a lunch of chicken stew washed down with shots of Chivas Regal whiskey. "The war came looking for me."
The eldest of five children, Marulanda grew up in Genova in the coffee-growing state of Quindio. He was born Pedro Antonio Marin, but he adopted his nom de guerre to honor a slain union leader.
Like many Colombians of modest means, Marulanda dropped out of school after the fifth grade. He sold lumber, meat, bread and candy and, while still a teen-ager, opened a grocery store. A math whiz, Marulanda also enjoyed tango dancing and playing the violin.
Marulanda claims he would have led a quiet life were it not for the events of April 9, 1948.
On that day, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a Liberal Party presidential aspirant, was shot down on the streets of Bogota. Gaitan was killed by a free-lance assassin. But the Liberals blamed the rival Conservative Party, which viewed Gaitan and the Liberals as part of a leftist conspiracy against Colombia.
The dispute led to horrific revenge killings, rapes, looting and land grabs that became known as La Violencia. Over the next decade, 200,000 people perished.
Among those targeted by the Conservatives was Marulanda's Liberal family. After gangs burned his store to the ground and killed one of his uncles, Marulanda and 14 cousins formed a rural self-defense force in 1949.
"They were going to kill me," Marulanda says. "It would have been crazy not to defend myself."
Other militias, with ties to the Liberal and Communist parties, sprang up. The mayhem was triggered by political events, but historian David Bushnell says it was stoked by backward living conditions.
"Only a semi-literate peasantry ... could be made to believe that members of the other party were somehow in league with the devil," Bushnell writes in his book The Making of Modern Colombia.
"And only in small towns of utterly grinding poverty would control of the local government, with a yearly budget of under a thousand dollars, be sufficient motive to go out and kill people."
Bruce Bagley, a Colombia expert at the University of Miami, says peasants in peaceful times usually are quite conservative. "It is when they have nothing to lose but their chains that they can be persuaded to rebel," he says.
In Colombia in the 1950s, Bagley adds, "the peasantry was at its wits' end." "They had little alternative but to turn to people who could protect them. And Marulanda was one of them."
By 1955, Marulanda had set up a guerrilla encampment on the remote Andean slopes of southern Tolima state, an area known as Marquetalia.
Olinda Losada, whose brother and boyfriend at the time were guerrillas, learned to read at Marquetalia and sewed clothes for the rebels.
"It was very well organized," says Losada, 67, who now lives in the nearby town of Planadas. "We had bullfights and beauty pageants."
The rebels rarely clashed with the army. But in the wake of Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba in 1959, fears grew of a communist takeover in Colombia.
Ironically, the revolutionary fervor was fueled by government efforts to pacify the nation. To end La Violencia, the Liberals and Conservatives formed a power-sharing pact in 1 called the National Front. From city council slots to the presidency, political spoils were evenly divided between the two parties.
But by shutting out all other political organizations for the next two decades, the National Front created a constitutional straitjacket.
Frustrated activists trudged into the mountains to join Marulanda's rebels or to launch their own guerrilla armies.
In Bogota, alarmed politicians denounced Marquetalia and other rebel redoubts as "independent Red republics." Cooler heads argued that the impoverished rural zones controlled by the guerrillas required development aid.
Hard-liners prevailed. In May 1964, the army sent thousands of troops into Marquetalia. Most of the rebels escaped through a network of trenches, but historians describe the fallout as profound.
The military operation is widely deemed the beginning of Colombia's modern-day civil war.
Before the raid, Marulanda had never been much of an ideologue. But as his guerrillas regrouped, Marulanda, who had teamed up with a Communist Party member named Jacobo Arenas, decided to scrap his self-defense doctrine and create a more aggressive insurgency that would fight to install a Marxist regime.
First called the Southern Bloc, the rebel army was officially baptized in May 1966 as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Its initial strength: 350 men.
GRIP ON RURAL COLOMBIA
Today, in the ravishing green canyon of Marquetalia, there are no roads, no grocery stores, no telephones. A trip to the nearest hospital requires a bone-rattling, two-hour trek over Andean ridges on the back of a mule.
Seemingly consigned to oblivion, Marquetalia doesn't even show up on national maps. The only clue that the village is formally part of Colombia is the red, yellow and blue flag that flutters above the two-room primary school.
After dismissing two dozen youngsters from their morning classes, teacher Jairo Bermudez surveys the valley, which has hardly changed since Marulanda lived there in the 1960s.
"There is nothing here," he says of the hamlet where the FARC was born.
The rebels, rather than government security forces, provide law and order to the community of 27 families. The guerrillas levy stiff fines for infractions such as fistfights and inspect the identity papers of strangers at checkpoints.
Just about everyone in the village, which lies in the shadow of the snow-capped Nevado del Ruiz volcano, is crushingly poor.
Many peasants supplement meager incomes from corn and yucca crops by growing opium poppies. The bright red flowers produce a gum that can be sold to drug traffickers, who turn it into heroin.
The combined forces of geography and official neglect have helped the FARC take control of out-of-the-way places such as Marquetalia in nearly every corner of Colombia.
The nation's three Andean mountain ranges and dense Amazon jungle have isolated countless communities, making it costly and difficult for the Bogota government to provide roads and public services. That has allowed the rebels to move in and cultivate support.
Ana Teresa Bernal, national coordinator of Redepaz, an independent Bogota group promoting peace, says Colombia's leaders have never implemented effective land-reform programs or other initiatives that might have reduced the guerrillas' appeal to hardscrabble peasants.
Today, the rebels maintain a presence in all of Colombia's 32 states except San Andres, a Caribbean island 450 miles offshore.
In guerrilla strongholds, the FARC raises money for the war effort by taxing cattle ranching, coal mining, oil exploration and the cultivation of drug crops. Threatening kidnapping or death, they also force local officials to hand over parts of their budgets.
By contrast, the Colombian military has always had to scrimp.
Because of the oligarchy's longstanding contempt for the army and fears of military coups, analysts say, the institution has been deliberately underfunded and undermanned. Even today, with about 146,000 troops, the armed forces are considered small. Instead of taking on the guerrillas in combat, thousands of soldiers guard power stations and oil pipelines against sabotage.
Government troops who venture into remote areas often spread themselves too thin, becoming easy targets for ambushes.
"From the very beginning, we didn't deal with the FARC the way we should have," says a high-ranking army official speaking on condition of anonymity. "The guerrillas were never confronted with the full power of the state."
The officer, who enlisted the same year the army occupied Marquetalia, says troops tried to bring improvements to the community.
Soldiers built a base on a hillside overlooking the village and installed a generator that supplied electricity to a few homes. But the military pulled out a few years later, and Marquetalia once again became unplugged.
A dairy farmer and his family now live on the abandoned base. Cows and rabbits wander in trenches dug by troops long ago. Partway down the hill lies the rusty wreckage of an army airplane.
At a FARC encampment on the edge of Marquetalia, two twentysomething guerrillas in faded camouflage emerge from beneath a tarp. Neither was born when the army laid siege to the village, which may explain their shaky version of history.
"They attacked with atomic bombs," declares Giovanni as he leans on his rifle and smokes a cigarette. "It was just like Vietnam."
'A PEASANT VIEW'
Mexico's Zapatista rebels haven't fired a shot in years, but they have inspired a large and loyal following at home and abroad.
Former Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador run the country's fastest-growing political party.
Next door in Nicaragua, former head of state Daniel Ortega is cashing in on his Sandinista rebel past and making a strong run for the presidency.
For most Colombians, however, the FARC lacks any glimmer of revolutionary mystique.
In the mid-1980s, surveys indicated that 40 percent to 50 percent of university students in Bogota thought the country's rebel groups were fighting for worthy principles.
In recent years, the FARC's poll numbers have dropped even as its troop numbers have jumped. Today, most surveys put the guerrillas' public approval rating at less than 5 percent.
Even many leftists are deeply critical of the FARC. They complain that rebel violence cripples the peaceful struggle for progressive causes because it provides an excuse for paramilitaries to target all activists.
"I have more friends in the cemetery than anywhere else," says Javier Munera, director of a rural-development organization in Bogota.
Pizarro, the Colombian academic and author, points out that revolutions usually take hold in rural nations. In Colombia, however, 70 percent of the population lives in the cities, where the FARC has never managed to drum up much support.
"The FARC is made up of peasants and has a peasant view of Colombia," says Alejo Vargas, a political science professor at the National University in Bogota. "They have no ability to speak to the urban world. When they talk about land reform, what does that mean to some kid from the city?"
One reason the FARC fails to reach the masses, says Colombian Congressman Petro, is that some of its brightest thinkers are gone.
In the 1980s, right-wing paramilitary groups slaughtered many of the FARC collaborators and fighters who had disarmed to form a political party called the Patriotic Union. And in 1990, the FARC's chief ideologue, Arenas, died of a heart attack.
"We tried politics, and everyone was killed off," says Trinidad, the FARC negotiator. "We'll never do that again."
After the assassinations, a 3-year-old cease-fire broke down, and the FARC returned to war.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the nation turned its focus from guerrilla groups to the fight against narco-terrorism and drug cartel kingpins such as Pablo Escobar.
When the Soviet bloc collapsed, many people mistakenly assumed that the FARC would be forced to disband. Instead, it was the Colombian government that teetered on the brink.
In the mid-1990s, revelations that then-President Ernesto Samper had been elected with the help of $6 million from the Cali drug cartel turned his government into an international pariah. Samper clung to power, but the institutional crisis emboldened the FARC.
"It's not that the rebels became so strong," says Francisco Thoumi, a Colombian academic at Florida International University in Miami. "They are strong relative to a very weak state."
The FARC's true coming-out party -- the moment when its military might and political influence became glaringly obvious -- occurred during Colombia's 1998 presidential campaign. It is widely believed that by endorsing Andres Pastrana in a tight runoff election, the FARC helped him win the presidency.
The payoff was immediate. The new president agreed to create the despeje -- the zone for the FARC in southern Colombia -- and to start peace negotiations there.
Jan Egeland, a U.N. special envoy to the peace talks, believes the on-again, off-again negotiations will eventually provide the way out. But after 21/2 years of meetings, there has been almost no progress, and all sides appear to be gearing up for a wider war.
"We are not going to give up tomorrow just because the war has lasted 37 years," says Lozada, the FARC commander. "In the course of history, 37 years is nothing."
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