Sunday, June 1, 2008

Why the FARC's defeat looks to be only a matter of time

LAS FARC are a terrorist group, they are drug dealers and kidnappers.
The Economist 29/05/2008
Colombia
Peace for Colombia?
May 29th 2008 BOGOTá
From The Economist print edition
Why the FARC's defeat looks to be only a matter of time
AFP
PRESIDENTS have come and gone over the past four decades in Colombia but one man remained constant. Pedro Antonio Marín, better known by the noms de guerre of Manuel Marulanda or “Tirofijo” (“Sureshot”), led his FARC guerrillas through army bombardments, bogus cease fires and failed peace talks, never giving up his quixotic and destructive campaign to turn a large South American democracy into a clone of the long-vanished Soviet Union.
Mr Marulanda's death was always going to be of moment for Colombia. In the event, it has almost certainly coincided with the FARC’s demise as a serious military threat to the state.
A FARC commander announced that Mr Marulanda died on March 26th of a heart attack. Army chiefs believe that he might have expired as a result of their bombardments. In the same month, two other members of the FARC’s seven-man secretariat were killed, Raúl Reyes by a bombing raid on his camp across the border in Ecuador and Iván Ríos by his own bodyguard.
Mr Marulanda will be replaced by Alfonso Cano (real name: Guillermo León Sáenz), the FARC's chief ideologue. But there are reasons to suppose that the guerrillas will never recover from their March setback
Mr Marulanda was the last link to the FARC’s origins as a peasant self-defence force against landowners, an offshoot of a rural civil war in the 1940s and 1950s between Liberals and Conservatives. A man of peasant cunning and stubbornness, he was said never to have visited any city larger than Neiva, of some 315,000 people. Later recruits were middle-class Marxist students, such as Mr Cano.
The FARC survived the end of the cold war, but at the cost of its ideological purity, by turning to drug-trafficking and kidnapping. Mr Marulanda was by the mid-1990s leading a force of 19,000 operating in large units, overwhelming army garrisons and threatening Bogotá, the capital. That prompted the government to open peace talks, abandoned after three years in which the FARC carried on kidnapping, bombing and recruiting.
Colombians turned in despair to Álvaro Uribe, their tough president since 2002. He has expanded the security forces by a third, to 270,000, including a core of 80,000 professional soldiers, some of them in mobile brigades and special forces. They are backed by a large helicopter fleet, Brazilian-made Super Tucano tactical bombers and American advice, especially in intercepting communications.
This build-up transformed the war, driving the FARC away from the towns. Recent changes of government strategy are now bearing fruit. These involve encouraging guerrilla desertions and targeting the leadership. The FARC are now losing more deserters than they are gaining new recruits, according to General Freddy Padilla de León, the armed-forces’ commander. “They are reduced militarily, isolated politically, have a reduced social base and we are cutting their finance [by acting against their drug business]. It’s impossible for them to return to the cities,” he says.
What has worried Colombian officials most has been signs that Venezuela has been helping the FARC. But Venezuela’s government is likely to be more circumspect after evidence of ties emerged from documents on Reyes’s computers.
So what future do the guerrillas have? Mr Cano is sometimes portrayed as a moderate, in contrast to Jorge Briceño (aka “Mono Jojoy”), the FARC’s military commander. But in a two-hour interview with The Economist in 2001, Mr Cano showed himself to be a rigid Marxist, unprepared to accept democracy. “Our struggle is to do away with the state as now it exists in Colombia,” he said. The FARC wanted power and would not demobilise in return for “houses, cars and scholarships” or a few seats in Congress.
Mr Cano’s first task will be to prevent the FARC from fragmenting into its constituent “fronts”. Constant army pressure means the fronts now find it hard to communicate with each other. Some, including Mr Cano’s in the centre-south, are on the run; others, such as that in Nariño, in the south-west, are still awash with drug money. Yet others rely on havens across the borders in Venezuela and Ecuador.
By maintaining the pressure, the government hopes to force the FARC into negotiations. Relations of hostages kidnapped by the guerrillas hope that the death of the obstinate Mr Marulanda will speed their release. Neither may happen soon. “Marulanda’s death is not the death of the FARC,” says Camilo Gómez, who negotiated for the government during the peace talks.
Since perhaps 9,000 guerrillas are still under arms, that is clearly true. But defeat looks only a matter of time.

Labels: , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home