COLOMBIA:COLOMBIA'S LARGEST rebel group has pledged to carry on in its decades-long war against the US-backed government after confirming that the group's legendary commander had died of a heart attack in March. The defence ministry said on Saturday that Manuel Marulanda, who led one of the world's oldest insurgencies in a brutal if quixotic battle against the state, had died in March.
Rodrigo "Timochenko" Londono, one of seven members of the guerrilla directorate, said in a video provided to a Venezuelan state television station, Telesur: "Our struggle continues without rest until we reach the objective of a new Colombia, a great Latin American fatherland and socialism."
The announcement closes a long chapter in the history of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, and raises the possibility that the new rebel leadership may consider peace negotiations in the face of a military offensive that has recently resulted in the deaths of top commanders and the desertions of thousands of fighters.
Some military analysts say the group, which has seen its forces contract from 16,900 fighters in 2002 to fewer than 11,000 today, has to seriously consider the possibility of engaging President Alvaro Uribe's government in peace talks.
"The Farc is going through a process of decomposition and defeat," said Joaquin Villalobos, who helped lead El Salvador's guerrilla movement in the 1970s and 1980s and is now a conflict resolution consultant who has studied Colombia's war. "They will fracture. You already see it in the command-and-control structures. Its option is to look for a way to bring the conflict to an end."
The Farc grew from a nucleus of several dozen peasants in 1964 into a rebel army with virtually nationwide reach, one of the largest and certainly the richest that has ever operated in Latin America. Contacts between it and the IRA, allegedly involving the latter's bomb-making expertise, and resulting in the arrest and charging of three Irishmen in 2001, caused considerable embarrassment to Sinn Féin.
Marulanda, whose life as an insurgent predates Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba by a decade, came to embody the ideals of a political-military organisation that considered all of Colombia's governments decadent and fought to overthrow them.
The son of a peasant farmer who was born Pedro Antonio Marin, Marulanda was inculcated with Marxist ideology in Moscow and spoke of how the group fought for land reform and income distribution in a country notorious for its inequitable distribution of wealth.
While the Farc did enter peace negotiations with three administrations, it was accused of using talks as a smokescreen while it fortified its forces to achieve the goal it set for itself in a 1982 conference: expand nationally beyond its rural roots and take power.
The group, though, has never been able to generate strong civilian support, political analysts and former rebels say, and in fact became despised by many Colombians for its close ties to drug trafficking and its use of what often appeared to be gratuitous violence. The Farc often attacks civilian targets, and its planting of mines kills hundreds of poor farmers every year.
Defence minister Juan Manuel Santos said that Mr Marulanda's death, along with the recent killings of several top commanders and the desertions of others, shows that the Farc is in an irreversible decline.
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)