Terrorism & Security
posted July 25, 2006 at 12:00 p.m.

Colombia's FARC rebels still undermine peace effort

Concerns rise that leftist guerrillas will move into areas formerly held by right-wing paramilitaries.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The killings last week of more than a dozen rural woodcutters in a rural region of Colombia mark the most recent move by the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) "to exploit the power vacuum left by the demobilization of 32,000 right-wing militiamen."

The Boston Globe reported over the weekend that this and other recent attacks by the rebel group show that peace will not easily come to rural areas that have been plagued by violence for decades.

The guerrillas accused the woodcutters of collaborating with right-wing militias that until recently controlled northern Chocó Province's lucrative corridor for transnational arms and drug smuggling. With the militias laying down their arms in a peace deal with the government, the guerrillas taunted the men, saying they would now rule the territory and exact their revenge...

For those who hailed the disarmament of right-wing militias over the last 2 1/2 years as the first step to diffuse Colombia's long-running conflict, the violent campaign by the FARC to recoup strategic zones now vacated by their rivals shows that peace will be more elusive. The critical challenges for President Álvaro Uribe as he starts his second term this week are to extend state presence to regions where it has been absent for decades, and to disarm or defeat a leftist insurgency.



Sign up to be notified daily: Find out more. Subscribe via RSS Feed: What is this?

But the Colombian military is not without its successes. Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports a military spokesman announced Monday evening the capture of a high-ranking rebel chief with the nom de guerre "King Kong." Carlos Ipia Dizu is the head of the 6th Company of the FARC and is best known for his kidnapping of three Germans in 2001. One of the men escaped and the other two were eventually released. BBC provides an overview of the conflict, including the US role in the region.

The FARC was founded in the early '60s by the Colombian Communist Party to protect what were at the time "autonomous Communist-controlled rural areas," according to the Federal of American Scientists website.

In late 2005, the BBC reported that President Uribe signed into law an amnesty offer, known as the Peace and Justice Law, that "reduced jail terms and protection from extradition for paramilitaries who turn in their arms." The first trials of some of the paramilitary leaders who accepted the terms will take place this summer in Colombia.

StrategyPage.com, a conservative website that provides news on military issues, reported last week that while some FARC factions are interested in a peace agreement, others want to continue to fight. But the site reports that the FARC is facing a "plague of walkers." As govermment operation push the FARC farther away from populated areas and easy supplies, "Hundreds of FARC members are quitting each month, some of them surrendering and formally accepting the amnesty, others just walking away."

Angus Reid Global Scan, a news service of the international polling firm Angus Reid, reports that while the Colombian government had high hopes for peace after the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known as the AUC) agreed to demobilize, both the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations recently warned about the creation of a new generation of paramilitaries, made up of men who had been demobilized under the peace agreement.

When the controversial process began in late 2003, one of the illegal militia's leaders participating in the dialogues, Ernesto Báez, warned of the consequences of failing to implement a comprehensive program to help demobilized combatants return to civil life. Báez declared, "If the government fails to help the demobilized, there will be a next generation of paramilitaries much more violent and bloody than the previous ones." Anyone familiar with paramilitary-related violence knows this prediction depicts the worse possible scenario for Colombia's future.

Paramilitary or "self-defence" groups were first seen in the early 1980s as a response to the state's failure to deal with leftist guerrillas.

The Angus Reid Global Scan article says many people fear a return to the violence of the paramilitary groups, who are "accused of perpetrating the [worst] crimes seen in Colombia's recent history." Paramilitary groups wiped out entire villages, kidnapped children, and brutally tortured captives before they killed them, often in barbaric ways.

Yet as violent as the history of the paramilitaries and rebels is, CBS News reports the groups are the subject of a whole category of music in the country, known as "narco-ballads."

"These songs are about what's happening in our country; we sing about the paramilitaries, the rebels and the drug-traffickers and they all love it," said Uriel Hennao, the king of the genre, responsible for such anthems as "Child of the Coca," "I Prefer a Tomb in Colombia (to a jail cell in the US)" and "The Mafia Keeps Going."

The music, which typically has a quick rhythm and is heavy on the guitars, is gaining new fans across Colombia and abroad. Still, it remains shunned by polite society here. Major radio stations refuse to play the songs, considering them coarse glamorizations of all that has kept this country synonymous with cocaine and violence.

CBS News reports that while mainstream culture ignores the music, it is incredibly popular in the slums of the big cities and poorer regions of the country. The songs also sell well - eight parts of a 10-part ""Forbidden Rhythms" CD series have gone gold in Colombia (5,000 copies). The most popular CD in the series has sold over 200,000 copies.

Finally, The Associated Press reports that the FARC rebels have said that they will fight for Venezuela if the US ever invades the country.

"Count on us if the hawks of Washington come to attack the brave people, those who embody the hopes of our continent in their revolution," said the FARC, in a statement addressed to the Venezuelan communist party's congress.

US and Colombian officials have often accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of aiding the FARC by not providing touger security along the border of the two countries. The Colombian army says the FARC has many bases just across the Venezuelan border which it uses as places of refugee when under heavy military attack.

Also...