Commercial Insurgencies in the Networked Era

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

Oscar Palma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351175081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

This book examines the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as a commercial insurgency through the network-complex paradigm of insurgency.

Countering traditional perspectives of the group, it proposes new and comprehensive explanations for the FARC's presence in Latin America. Existing narratives have portrayed the FARC as a terrorist, narco-terrorist, or criminal organization – a narrative popularized by the government offensive conducted by the Colombian state during the last couple of decades. In contrast, this book goes beyond simplistic perspectives of the FARC and instead studies the group in relation to the network-complex paradigm of insurgency. It explains the organization as a 'commercial insurgency' with three dimensions – political, criminal, and military – and understands the Colombian insurgency not as a monolith, but as a system of individuals with diversified interests ranging from the highly indoctrinated to the profit-motivated. This examination allows for an analysis of some of the insurgency's most unexplored characteristics: an interest in urbanizing its actions and the increased 'invisibility' of combatants, the significance of its political institutions, and the construction of its transnational networks. The volume also discusses the future of FARC in post-conflict Colombia, not only within the country but as an actor in the region.

This work will be of much interest to students of insurgencies, military studies, Latin American studies, criminology, security studies, and IR.

1 What is FARC?

Every Colombian living today knows what it means to live in a country in conflict. It is true what people commonly say: Colombia is two countries in itself. One, the modern, thriving, and even cosmopolitan urban country in which daily routines are not different from those in London or New York. Wining and dining in top restaurants; enjoying the opera, the theatre, and the cinemas; admiring beautiful world-class art expositions; drinking a wide selection of beers in Irish- or British-style pubs; and, of course, passionately supporting the national football team, probably the only event which unites all Colombians. This is especially the lifestyle in Bogotá, but even in other major cities like Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, or Bucaramanga.

The other country is a grimmer Colombia. The rural and marginalised areas where violence has been more than a virulent condition, an almost historical endemic characteristic. It is the country of massacres, chainsaw killings, assassinations, gross human rights violations, drugs, extortion, and social control by armed actors. Since the 1930s, Colombians have been killing each other because of their political affiliations, their struggle to build a sustainable way to live; and, since the 1980s, to make money from the drug trade. In several of the most remote regions, the state has been absent, while, in others, it has actually triggered this violence. It is sufficient to look at the mid-20th Century; when in the midst of partisan violence, the National Police sided with the Conservatives against Liberals, or to the historical inexistence of state institutions in provinces like Putumayo, Guainía, or Guaviare where coca plantations spread through the 1990s.

But even in this ‘country of two countries’, every Colombian has witnessed the horrors of war, either through personal experience, as a victim, as a relative of a victim, or simply through the fear of falling in a sudden attack or an act of war. Whichever the case, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been an active party for more than fifty years in the Colombian conflict. It is true that sensitivity to violence is not the same in Bogotá as it is in Putumayo, Cauca, or Caquetá, but everyone knows that FARC exists and that it has caused a lot of suffering. Rejection of the violent acts of the insurgency reached a historical height by the end of the 2000s. Proof of this is the massive demonstrations staged in every major city in Colombia and overseas in 2008. Under a single slogan, ‘No more FARC’, Colombians demonstrated that they were exhausted with violence. The Colombian conflict has been the longest in the Western hemisphere, and by the dawn of the new century Colombians have had it with FARC and other violent actors.

Even though everyone knows about FARC and about their actions, not everyone actually understands the organisation in the same way. It is possible to find different explanations of what FARC is. Is it a guerrilla army? A terrorist group? An insurgency? Is it a group of anachronistic ideologists that are lost in reality? Is it a group of bandits, like generals and presidents have argued? Is it a form of employment for thousands of Colombians in marginalised sectors that don’t have another way of living? Is it a powerful criminal syndicate tailored to be part of the global criminal economy? Or is it now purely a political movement after laying down their weapons?

With the global war on terror launched by George W. Bush, governments facing threats from non-state actors all around the world emphasised the use of the word ‘terrorist’ to describe their enemies. The interest behind the construction of this discourse was to legitimise their position and to justify strong action while delegitimising their enemy’s agenda. Colombia was not the exception. With the government of Alvaro Uribe, the perception of FARC as a ‘terrorist organisation’ became widespread in Colombia and overseas. The organisation joined others like Al-Qaeda, Hamas, or the Taliban in the list of global terrorist groups.

Beyond the description as a terrorist organisation, which is understandable in the state’s interest in weakening its enemy, the concept of ‘commercial insurgency’ offers more elements of analysis to appropriately explain FARC’s nature. It is not my point to insist that FARC isn’t a terrorist organisation. The truth is, like other actors in the Colombian conflict, they have widely used terror against the population, killing innocent civilians, destroying the infrastructure, kidnapping, and extorting. If one believes that every agent who uses terror as a method of action is a terrorist by definition, then FARC would obviously classify as one. But this book is not about politics, about trying to redeem FARC as a group of ‘freedom fighters’, or strengthening state arguments to delegitimise the organisation. It is an effort to build a better understanding of FARC’s nature and its construction of networks.

The concept of commercial insurgencies

This discussion must follow with a differentiation of the concepts that have been traditionally used in the public arena to describe FARC as an organisation. Politicians, members of the Military Forces and common Colombians, have described it as a terrorist organisation, a guerrilla movement, a criminal group, and sometimes as an insurgency. With Alvaro Uribe, the use of the first two concepts became more common. The different use of these categories is not only a feature of the Colombian case; it is a consequence of the effects produced by each of the concepts. Some depict the organisation as a more benevolent actor; notions of guerrilla movement or insurgency generate a more romantic idea of the group, as freedom fighters struggling to achieve the good for all. Terrorism and criminality make combatants look perverse, with no consideration for people’s welfare. Al-Qaeda, for example, is described by several authors as a globalised insurgency, while western governments brand it fully as a terrorist organisation. FARC has also been described as a hypercartel, and even as a narco-insurgency, especially after the elimination of the Medellin and Cali Cartels (Guzman & Muñoz, 2004).

An insurgency is political by definition. It is different to conventional warfare in that it is not waged by regular military forces, but by groups of civilians, communities, or nations which raise arms against the established ruler. Insurgencies are violent insurrections conducted systematically and progressively over time to achieve political change (i.e. creating a new nation, transforming the political system, expelling a foreign power, seceding from an existing country).

Anthony Joes (2004) defines insurgency widely as “an attempt to overthrow or oppose a state regime by forms of arms” (p. 1). In a more detailed observation, Bard O’Neill defines it as:

[A] struggle between a non-ruling group and the ruling authorities in which the former consciously employs political resources (organisational skills, propaganda, and/or demonstrations) and instruments of violence to establish legitimacy for some aspect of the political system it considers illegitimate. Legitimacy and illegitimacy refer to whether or not existing aspects of politics are considered moral or immoral (or, to simplify, right or wrong) by the population or selected elements therein.

(O’Neill, 1980, p. 1)

In a simpler version, Julian Paget, one of the classical counterinsurgency scholars, defines insurgency as “a form of armed rebellion against the Government, in which the rebels have the support or acquiescence of a substantial part of the populace”.¹

Insurgencies have various strategic options to reach their goals. These might include guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and even conventional warfare. Guerrilla warfare refers to a form of conducting war, a type of tactic used by weak actors against strong enemies, simply because they do not have the capacity to fight them frontally through the same means. They include the exploitation of the environment in order to wear the enemy down, fighting it for a long period in order to exhaust it instead of defeating it directly, and conducting actions through a sequence of attacks and retreats (Navias & Moreman, 1994). Insurgency and guerrilla warfare are thus not the same thing.

Choosing one or another tactical approach does not define the nature of the organisation. Whichever the method selected, the agent will continue to be an insurgency. This means that rebels may resort to terrorist actions, but categorizing them as terrorists could be an oversimplification.

This can be more easily understood through Michel Wieworka’s differentiation between violence as a method and as logic of action. An organisation may use terrorism as a method to achieve its political objective, but this does not imply that its entire nature, its logic, is to perform terrorist acts (Griset & Mahan, 2002, p. 10). In this sense, not all insurgents are terrorists as not all terrorists are insurgents. Terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is as instrumental for rebels as it is for other actors.

The concept of terrorism is a contested one. There is no agreed definition and, even less, no generalised idea about who is or isn’t a terrorist. This categorisation is subjective and politically motivated. As a pejorative term, it tends to delegitimise the actions of the agent. When it is used to describe a non-state organisation, it presents the idea that the group acts against the population, and that its struggle is an unfair and illegitimate enterprise. The ‘critical school’ of terrorism studies very well argues that it is through the discourse, through this categorisation, that what we conceive of as terrorism actually comes to be. Ronald Reagan presented the Taliban as the moral equivalent of the US founding fathers for Afghanistan when they were fighting the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But, since George W. Bush’s government, it is undeniable that the United States recognises the same group as nothing more than a terrorist organisation. In a similar case, the Syrian rebels that have been fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime since the Arab Spring are portrayed as terrorists by the Syrian, Russian, and Iranian government, but for the United States and its allies, they are rebels waging a legitimate fight. The political interest, the perspective on the enemy, and the discourse are the real elements through which we conceive an actor as a terrorist organisation.

This is also why it becomes so difficult to achieve a single definition of terrorism. In the political arena, in law, and even in academia the debates around the concept are endless. In the need to explore a definition that would allow us to discuss matters on this subject, we can resort to the definition proposed by Georgetown Professor Bruce Hoffman (2006, p. 43), which has gained considerable acceptance in the academic world. He includes the following elements as part of the definition:

• ineluctably political in aims and motives;

• violent – or, equally important, threatens violence;

• designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target;

• conducted by an organisation with an identifiable chain of command or conspiratorial cell structure (whose members wear no uniform or identifying insignia);

• perpetrated by a subnational group or non-state entity.

Regarding the final point, the concept of state terrorism is a contested one itself. This discussion needs to be observed from three different perspectives: legalistic, academic, and popular/political. In legal terms, states do not incur acts of terror. They have, of course, committed an incredible amount of atrocities throughout history, but the legal international order, especially after the enactment of the Rome Statute, recognises these acts as crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide, and not as state terrorism. Academic approaches to the subject vary. Some, like in the case of Hoffman, refer only to terrorism as committed by non-state actors; but others, like Annette Hubschle (2006), a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Cape Town, considers state terrorism as she describes the evolution of the concept. But it is in the popular/political arena where its use is more intense. Many states around the world are criticised for resorting to terrorism. From the United States and Israel to Libya, Iran, and Syria, atrocities committed by states, directly or indirectly, are qualified by many as state terrorism. Israel’s military actions against Gazans, the United States’ system of rendition in Guantanamo, Bashar al-Assad’s use of violence against Syrians, and Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Iraqi Kurds, are all examples of this terror.

Colombia hasn’t been the exception. Claims about state acts of terrorism are abundant. Right-wing paramilitary organisations, or death squads, emerged to fight insurgencies, given the state’s incapacity to act against them. As these groups evolved, they found support on sectors of the Colombian Military Fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: why another book on FARC?
• 1 What is FARC?
• 2 A different kind of insurgency
• 3 FARC’s networks within Colombia
• 4 Placing militants beyond borders
• 5 A regional revolution?
• 6 The impact of the Havana Agreement
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Number of FARC combatants
• Appendix 2: FARC guerrilla conferences
• Appendix 3: FARC–s militias
• Appendix 4: Structure of networks developed by the Cominter
• Appendix 5: Members of the campaign for the liberation of Manuel Olate
• Index