AFTER A string of defeats at the hands of the military, Colombia’s two largest Marxist guerrilla groups say they are to form a common front against the government.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN, after its initials in Spanish) said they were on their way “to working for the unity to confront with firmness and belligerence” the government of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe.
Both movements have been forced to retreat deep into the country’s mountains and forests in recent years as the Colombian military, boosted by $6 billion (€4.2 billion) in US aid since 2000, has cleared them from the main population centres, killed or captured many of their leaders and broken up dozens of their military “fronts”.
Farc, the oldest of Colombia’s rebel groups, is estimated to have lost almost half its fighters since Mr Uribe ordered the military on the offensive after taking power in 2002 and is now thought to number just 9,000 combatants.
The smaller Cuban-inspired ELN has no more than 3,000 fighters though, unlike Farc, it has a political presence in urban centres. Both movements fund themselves through drug trafficking and kidnapping.
The new pact is designed to put an end to a rivalry rooted in ideological differences that has resulted in violent clashes between the two groups.
The stronger Farc once tried to forcibly absorb ELN, which the latter fiercely resisted, and as recently as June their fighters clashed in the oil-rich department of Arauca.
But in a statement datelined “the mountains of Colombia, November 2009” and posted on a pro-Farc website on Wednesday, their commanders ordered their units “to stop the confrontation between the two forces” and said the “only enemy” was “North American imperialism and its oligarchic lackeys”.
The Colombian government downplayed the announcement. Colombian vice-president Francisco Santos said the administration would not comment on the news. “You do not respond to terrorists, you respond to them simply with the state’s forces,” he said.
The government instead announced on Wednesday that it had killed the commander of Farc’s ninth “front” along with 10 of his men in an air raid.
Rubén Antonio García Gómez, alias “Danilo”, was described by the country’s defence minister as “one of the hardest, bloodiest leaders of this narco-terrorist group”. García is the latest in a string of Farc leaders either killed by the military or betrayed by colleagues eager to collect generous government ransoms.
Last year, Farc’s second in command was killed in an air raid on a rebel base in Ecuador.