The Colombian Armed Conflict
Colombia's armed conflict is conventionally dated from 1964, when the army attacked a communist peasant enclave at Marquetalia and the survivors founded the FARC. It ran for over fifty years and killed some 220,000 people, more than eighty per cent of them civilians, and displaced around seven million. Its roots lie in La Violencia, the civil war between Liberals and Conservatives from 1948 that killed perhaps 200,000, and in the National Front that ended it — a pact under which the two parties alternated the presidency and shared offices, which brought peace and excluded everyone else from politics. The FARC was Marxist and rural, drawing on land conflict and absent state authority. The ELN, founded the same year, was inspired by Cuba and by liberation theology. The urban M-19 followed in 1974 and seized the Palace of Justice in 1985, an assault ending with the army storming it and eleven judges dead. The cocaine trade transformed the war from the 1980s, funding every side through taxation, production and trafficking, and producing the Medellín and Cali cartels alongside it. Right-wing paramilitary groups, formed by landowners and cattlemen and often working with army units, committed the majority of the massacres recorded. Plan Colombia from 2000 brought several billion dollars of American aid and a decade of military pressure that broke the FARC's capacity to hold territory. A peace agreement signed in 2016 was narrowly rejected in a referendum, revised and passed by Congress. The ELN and dissident factions continue. The FARC disarmed under international supervision and became a legal political party with guaranteed congressional seats. A special tribunal was created to try the worst crimes on all sides in exchange for truth-telling. Implementation of the rural reform chapters has lagged badly, and hundreds of demobilised fighters and social leaders have been murdered since.
- Year: 1964 CE
- Category: Civil War
