Is the FARC Reforming?

Freedom coming? Guerrilla hostages in a jungle pen. 

 The FARC guerrillas' statement yesterday that they'd stop kidnapping civilians and release the ten soldiers and police officers they are holding in the jungles is either a landmark moment in Colombia's armed conflict or a cynical maneuver by a weakened guerrilla force.


El Tiempo newspaper opines that Colombians should wait and see whether the guerrillas actually fulfill their new vow. They're right.

It's hard to see the guerrillas truly giving up what is one of their most powerful tools for making headlines and extorting labor, resources and money from Colombian civilians. That's because behind the 'vacuna' which many ranchers and businesses in rural and small town Colombia pay to the guerrillas lies the threat of kidnapping. If that threat really disappeared, one of the guerrillas' big revenue streams could dry up.

A recent protest against the FARC guerrillas. 

Even the meaning of kidnapping is malleable in the FARC's world. I once interviewed a young woman who had been taken out of her apartment, together with her father, and held for several years in the jungle, until their relatives paid a ransom. Was that kidnapping? I expect the guerrillas would call it 'paying a war tax.' I once met a radio repairman who'd been forced by guerrilla threats to help them for weeks by building and repairing - unpaid - their jungle radio equipment. Was that kidnapping? I bet the guerrillas would call it 'collaboration.' I also met a woman whose sons had been carried away by the guerrillas to make them fighters. She had no idea whether they were alive or dead. Was that kidnapping? I'm sure that the guerrillas would call it 'recruitment.'

Still, the guerrillas' promise to end kidnapping of civilians and to free more kidnappees is a hopeful sign, if only because it seems to indicate an openness to making concessions in order to open dialogue with the government. But only time will tell whether or not this is a sincere step forward by a group which has caused tremendous damage to Colombia and its people.

FARC hostages, chained by the neck. 

The guerrillas' renunciation of what has historically been an important source of income for them might even be a negative sign if it means that they are earning so much from the cocaine business that they no longer require extortion and kidnapping income.

In any case, nobody should conclude from the guerrillas' renunciation of kidnapping that they have become a humane organization. Kidnapping is only one of the FARC's many human rights violations, which also include planting landmines, recruiting children, driving peasants from their homes and acts which can only be called terrorism, like the recent bombing in the small Pacific coast city of Tumaco. That bomb killed mostly poor, Afro-Colombian civilians - not exactly the country's traditional elite.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Lest they be Forgotten...

Universidad de la Sabana students with posters of kidnap victims who they have  'adopted.'

Over the past few days I've encountered two different demonstrations regarding kidnapping in Plaza Simón Bolívar.

Kidnapping is a long-running nightmare for Colombians. The nation's FARC and ELN guerrillas, as well as drug cartels and right wing groups, have long used kidnapping - and the threat of kidnapping - to generate revenue thru extortion and to try to pressure the  government for political concessions.

Caged guerrilla hostages. 

For years, Colombia was the unfortunate world leader in kidnappings, until the administration of Pres. Alvaro Uribe drove the guerrillas out of the country's main cities and away from its highways, and kidnappings dropped dramatically. In July 2008 the Colombian military tricked the FARC into releasing 15 high-profile hostages, include presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three United States contractors and police and soldiers. With those releases, kidnapping dropped out of the public's awareness. But that was a rare victory. In other rescue attempts, the guerrillas have massacred their hostages when they saw soldiers approaching. And hundreds of people remain in captivity, and according to Pais Libre the number of reported kidnapping soared 32% in 2010, to 282, from 212 in 2009. And those are only the reported kidnappings - many victims' families keep the crimes secret while they try to negotiate directly with the kidnappers.

A concentration camp? A FARC leader observes hostages in a cage in the jungle. 

Some kidnappees have been held for a decade by outlaw groups, confined in cages in the jungle while their children grow up, their wives remarry and their parents pass away. Kidnapping has become so institutionalized in Colombia that there are even all-night radio programs in which people broadcast messages of hope and encouragement to relatives who they hope are listening somewhere in the jungle.

And what's the point of all this suffering? The guerrillas' agenda, even if you believe in it, is lost. 

Universidad de la Sabana students on Plaza Bolívar with placards showing kidnappees they've 'adopted.'

This weekend I saw these students from the conservative and expensive Universidad de la Sabana, who are 'adopting' kidnap victims, as a way of demonstrating to their families, and hopefully, to the victims themselves, that they are not forgotten. The U. of the Sabana students' families are the kind of people who for many years feared kidnapping by the guerrillas and other outlaw groups, and who are now grateful to the country's law-and-order administrations.

Humanitarian Accord Now! 

Today, proponents of the proposed Humanitarian Accord, in which the guerrillas would release their hostages in exchange for the freeing of imprisoned guerrillas, held their monthly demonstration. But both the Uribe and the Santos administrations have opposed the idea, saying that it would constitute giving in to the guerrillas' demands, and that the freed guerrillas would return to fighting and kidnapping. I've found that many of the acuerdo's supporters sympathize with the guerrillas, who also support the idea.

In the end, the only people who can end kidnapping are the kidnappers.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

To the FARC

The other day's rescue of a group of police officers and a soldier held hostage for 12 years by the FARC guerrillas was yet another sign of the group's severe degeneration (and thankful) decline. The guerrillas had kept these men chained by their necks to trees.

Open letter to the FARC:

Give it up, you guys - it's over. You've lost. And your 'ideology' is bankrupt.

You say you're leading a revolution for the poor -

But for years, you guys have been a major reason why Colombia has the world's second-largest number of displaced people. You kill and maim many, many people every year - most of them poor campesinos. (And I've talked to many of your victims. People who lost husbands and sons and daughters to your violence, and many peasant families terrorized out of their homes by you.)

Even many of your members, who are generally poor people themselves, feel trapped inside the guerrilla.

You say that the Colombian state has committed terrible injustices, and that is true

but, you the FARC are no solution to that. Not with the wholesale killings and forced displacements of civilians you've committed. Not judging by the way that you finance yourselves by trafficking drugs, which poison and enslave poor people worldwide. Not judging by the way you kidnap children and plant landmines. Who gets maimed or killed by those landmines you leave behind? Some kid out looking for his lost goat. A poor kid.

You are doing terrible things to the people you claim to be fighting for, while that evil bourgeoisie government you denounce is - however imperfectly and corruptly - building roads, schools and hospitals.

And, while it's no justification, many of the state's abuses were spurred or rationalized by the existence of you guerrillas. 'No guerrillas' would mean 'no paramilitaries.' 'No guerrillas' would mean 'no False Positives.' That fact doesn't remove any of the moral responsibility from the government, but it's still a fact. In the rest of Latin America there are no guerrillas and therefore no paramilitaries, either. That's no coincidence.

Your fellow revolutionaries across the continent have all pretty much either died or seen reason and turned in their arms and carried on the fight from parliament and even the presidential palace. You guys are only hanging on in the jungles because your evil imperialist enemies have kept drugs banned - and thus tossed these huge profits into your bloody hands.

But, even if you guys were the heroic Marxist warriors you seem to think you are. And even if Marxism hadn't led nations into nightmares like Stalinism and North Korea, you should still give up. Because, face it, after more than a half-century of fighting, killing, dying and suffering, you're further than ever from siezing power. Colombia's got a stable government, a growing (capitalist) economy and is even becoming a tourist destination. You're irrelevent. And the recent, successful rescues of those people whom you've cruelly held hostage in the jungle only increase your irrelevence and demonstrate your weakness.

Far from having any chance of installing a communist government here, you're why Colombia is one of the few nations in Latin America to have a conservative president (and why Colombians are about to elect another conservative president).

You'd gain much more relevance by following the M-19's footsteps and entering politics.

Give it up. End the horror and the suffering.

Sincerely,

Mike