America should stand alongside Colombia in once again defeating FARC.
I say this in light of the announcement by a group of former FARC officers on Thursday that they are resuming their fight. Led by former leader Iván Márquez, the terrorists pledge they will minimize risks to civilians but will not rest until Bogota yields to their demands.
In a typically absurd statement, Márquez declared that rather than extorting and kidnapping their fellow citizens, FARC will now engage in a “dialogue with businessmen, ranchers, merchants and the wealthy people of the country, to seek in this way their contribution to the progress of rural and urban communities.” FARC’s terrorist record, and the disgust with which most Colombians regard the group, mean that Márquez’s pledge must be regarded as a lie.
The simple point is that FARC must be defeated. Fortunately, the situation is better than it once was.
For a start, FARC lacks unity. On Twitter, another former guerrilla who heads up the group’s political wing (now separate from Márquez’s faction), explicitly distanced himself from the call to arms. “Our commitment today more than ever,” Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londoño said, “as a majority, as a party, as a country, is peace, defense and compliance with the agreement. Those who move away from peace are mistaken, as those who have always attacked it.”
President Iván Duque, who entered office last year, has partners in peace.
Duque also has a military and intelligence architecture that is highly effective at counter-guerrilla warfare. After decades of brutal fighting, Colombian counter-terrorism forces are now professional, creative, and, thanks in significant part to the U.S. government, highly-trained. They can take the fight to Márquez and his minions.
Still, the fighting will be tough.
The Colombian newspaper reports that Márquez’s forces say they are “somewhere in the Inírida river area, located in the Amazon region of the southeast of the country, near the borders with Venezuela and Brazil.”
Marking the northern Amazon Rainforest, that terrain is defined by extraordinarily hard-to-navigate forests. It also allows FARC to resupply via its Venezuelan benefactor, Nicolas Maduro. Detecting FARC positions will be greatly assisted by U.S. intelligence capabilities, especially those related to foliage-penetrating reconnaissance.
President Trump should be energetic in his provision of support. FARC is a despicable organization which threatens a thriving democracy and a close American ally.
In his book Imperial Grunts, Robert Kaplan records a FARC defector’s memoir, In Hell, which describes how the group operated. It tells of “forced recruitment of teenage boys and girls into guerrilla ranks, and their executions after they tried to desert and were caught. There is an account of a young girl defecating and menstruating while crying out for her mother as a noose is tied around her neck. The executions are carried out by other young recruits, who, under the watchful eyes of older commanders are made to cut of the limbs of the dead bodies and drink the blood.”
As one U.S. counter-terrorism official tells Kaplan, FARC are a “bunch of sadistic, crazed, chicken-s–t motherf—ers, it’s what you get when you marry Colombian energy and ambition to ideology and coke profits.”
So let’s help Colombia put them back where they belong: in the ground, or on their knees, begging for peace.
