Encounters with FARC-EP in Toribio, ‘Caucagistán,’ Colombian
This is a marvelous and insightful piece on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army and where it stands today in the struggle to liberate Colombia from imperialism and the neoliberal oligarchy. Rough translation by redguard; read the original Spanish here.
By Valerio Tomassino
In less than three months a team of journalists traveled to several guerrilla camps in southwestern Colombia. This is a region where life is intense activity of the Colombian armed conflict. One of them wrote this story.
The news last night completed its ideological work: in a few minutes we will meet with a commander of the Joint Western Command of the FARC-EP, and despite knowing the capacity for deception of the Colombian mass media, we continually feel a certain fear that we will find a kind of Pancho Villa and a barbarian.
Upon arrival, the image disappears; RCN sold us immediately. Out of uniform, the commander is as much a Colombian peasant as any. Talkative and happy, he warmly welcomes us and tells us about his work as a guerrilla strategist that protects the Cordillera Central of a huge military operation. From his head emerged many of the stratagems of what a colleague called the “Stalingrad” of Colombia. His easy speech and friendly talk gives the impression of not being aware of the magnitude of his military responsibility — not abandonment, but the tranquility and humor with which he discusses the military adventures of the fighters under his command in this ice cream parlor.
The conversation is smooth and without difficulty: he is a man with over thirty years of guerrilla life, who does not hesitate to discuss with us national issues. The moment of internal conflict, rebuilding the capacity of the FARC-EP under blows, and the renewed ability to apply the tactics of guerrilla warfare are required in our discussion points.
The archetype of the rough and raw guerrilla subsidiaries that manufacture journalistic disinformation goes up in smoke when the “comrade,” as he is called, dramatically changes the conversation and asks opinions about movies and books. In his guerrilla company cinema classic Italian cinema is common during the camp’s social hours and cultural acceptance of films is extended. ”These are stories of ordinary exploited people, stories that look into the lives of the working rural background that most of our fighters came from.”
Comrade, a name reserved for all who take part in this story, returns to the previous course of the conversation and proposes his hypothesis that the military strength of the guerrillas has tended to rest in southwestern Colombia, in Valle, Cauca and Nariño. For him, the FARC- EP are interpreters of latent social unrest in the history of the region.
So it is not a military imposition within the strategic plans of the insurgency as stated by military officers, but the fusion of popular struggles that have acquired historic armed expression. The acceptance and popularity of the FARC-EP are due to its ability to confront the AUC paramilitary threat (which entered the region in 1999 under direct command of the military and landowning bourgeoisie) and its complete identity with the interests of peasants and workers.
The meeting was brief due to the proximity of military patrols in the area. We parted with our host after some anecdotes of the first guerrilla units which traveled the region. Armed with the authority of a true connoisseur of the area, he shows the route that [FARC-EP founder Manuel] Marulanda’s men travelled over thirty-five years ago, when the first committee of the 6th Front - the pioneer front of the Joint Chiefs - sailed across the Andean ridge to reach the coffee belt. A barren wasteland was the scenario in which the supreme commander of the FARC and his companions, armed with a few M1 carbines and shotguns for hunting, began to leave their mark in these rural areas.
“Unite the struggles” and “armed expression” are two phrases that we leave with from this distant wilderness. In the same range, but many miles away, a few wooden chairs under a leafy tree, is the stage where we discuss one of the main causes of the Bolivarian Movement in the region with a guerrilla commander, gentle and quiet despite the permanent overflight of intelligence aircraft and troops. The FARC-EP fight hard in two adjacent municipalities and the military have about 25,000 troops across the Cauca. The questions with which we left our previous visit are discussed here at length: how the revolutionary guerrillas grow in the region and how their actions, intense in recent months, does not contradict but instead seems to strengthen social movements in their struggle for a living. The commander highlights the importance of social mobilization in the region, and the negative effects — for the state — of spraying and recurrent arbitrary killings practiced by the army against civilians in Colombia called “false positives”.
In Cauca and in the giant spiral of economic and political demands of the popular sectors, the guerrillas are a natural response against an unjust order by the oppressed, an option for those who raise their voice. The southwest guerrillas have a reputation built on collecting input from all sectors in struggle: Indians, peasants, Blacks, oppressed of the city, unemployed and displaced settlers. The Colombian state has a difficult task, since its legitimacy is constantly challenged by a popular linked to ever more compelling mass movements.
Videos of marches show popular movements that are really massive, organized, and highly political. The Joint Western Command, which the State seeks to choke on all sides, like all the guerrillas of the FARC-EP, seems not to forget their political tasks and growth — to the extent that the commander confirms for us today that the command has leapt in the hierarchical structure of the FARC-EP, becoming the Block “Commander Alfonso Cano.”
The transition to block results from the consolidation of a larger structure of fronts and columns by the FARC-EP in Narino, Cauca and Valle. Under a huge tree we depart the Cauca Commander on expectations that this change gives it its activity. About the name of Alfonso Cano, the guerrillas recognized that it was a deserved tribute, the result of consensus of the southwest fighters and approval of the National Secretariat, for a leader was one of the main drivers of guerrilla work in the region, its distinguished commander and trainer of a whole litter of political and military cadres.
During our return up the steep mountain our guide, a young guerrilla, tells us about his life fighting in the southwestern mountains. He ended up in these lands because of the intense persecution mounted against him by authorities for urban social movement activity. Interestingly, his accent does not create discord in the FARC since all accents seem to be welcome.
To our fatigue, Paisita recalls his early days in the mountains, where the weight of urban life had to be buried with the commitment to cross the moors of the Colombian Massif. The guerrilla school seems to be not only a melting pot of peoples’ struggles, but a kind of mechanism and RAISED overcome diseases caused by the routine of city life. A testimony of transformation that has nothing to do with an exercise in propaganda: the life of that persecuted and the partisans in their refuge and healing. The young fighter unwittingly shares with us his own script of the Russian social-realist novel.
More than 25,000 soldiers of the regime are scattered through valleys and mountains, manning permanent checkpoints every twenty minutes’ journey by road and feeling the sting of permanent success of an insurgency.
Against the background of “Andanza Cauca” by Cristian Perez, the guerrilla singer who died in combat in the mountains of Buga, we met with members of one of the guerrilla structures most feared by the army’s officials: Mobile Column “Jacobo Arenas”. The venue: a warm North Glen Narino where time seems to be frozen in a permanent slumber.
This guerrilla column was founded by the National Secretariat at the Eighth Conference of the FARC-EP from prominent members of fronts across the country as a tribute to the late communist leader. During its historic action the column has had to cross vast distances of the intricate geography of Colombia, achieving a long history of fighting with the military, police and paramilitaries. The war adventures of these men and women were immortalized in another song by Cristian Pérez.
In the first half of 2012, these women and men were responsible for the guerrilla takeover of the military communication antennas of El Tambo, numerous ambushes of security forces in two ranges, and more recently, the downing of an Air Force Super Tucano plane in Jambaló, Cauca.
The men of Jacobo Arenas are hard men, men of war. But that does not make them lazy or macabre. Instead they gladly share their life story and war experience. They are aware of having to face the barrage of a huge military apparatus, not only against the army of Santos, but against the war machine which the United States, NATO and Israel have provided. But they stand with pride in the success and solidarity with civilians in their operational area.
Jacobo Arenas is not in the region by accident. Since coming to the southwest, the column has earned the trust and respect of Indigenous people and peasants. We saw it in the faces of the combatants with whom we talked: Nasa indigenous and Misak, peasants of the Colombian Massif, Black faces the Pacific and Patia River. They speak slowly and deliberately on topics thoroughly known: war and peace, the possibilities of dialogue, state terrorism, the social problems of this overlooked part of Colombia, the situation of political prisoners and the recent ban of the Secretariat on holding civilians for financial purposes.
In our opinion, these do not look anything like the drug bandits the “liberal” newspapers portray in their pages, much less terrorists. Of the famine, rickets and social unrest that the government is responsible for in large rural areas of the deep southwest, nobody in the media speaks. But paradoxically, the “horrors” of these men of the Jacobo Arenas and the entire FARC fill entire columns.
The guerrillas say the downing of the Air Force aircraft, by another company in the same column and the Sixth Mobile Front, was the result of the sagacity and boldness of their peers. This action hurts and will hurt the military hierarchy for many years.
With the sun just rising in vast fields of corn and coca we say goodbye to the Spartans of Jacobo Arenas. A few days later the same rebels with whom we met effectively led a military action that dealt heavy losses to the Colombian State. Men and women of the FARC in the West seem to rest.
I reached these personal conclusions, of which I apologize to my colleagues and travelling fellows:
The first: that despite the massive militarization of the region and having suffered huge blows, the Western Bloc “Commander Alfonso Cano” have kept their structures intact, operating and scoring victories in the war guerrillas.
The second: that there is neither a smoldering guerrilla bandoleriles, nor demoralized on the verge of disappearance.
And third, that these kind men who opened the doors to present our concerns are the lifeblood of an organization, not only military, but a political project that undoubtedly will have impacts and across the country and the region.
