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Colombian Armed Conflict or '''Colombian Civil War''' are terms that are employed to refer to the current Low Intensity Conflict in Colombia that has existed since approximately 1964 or 1966 , which was when the FARC and later the ELN were founded and subsequently started their Guerrilla Insurgency campaigns against successive Colombian government administrations. =Historical Development= BACKGROUND The direct origins of the current conflict are usually dated to 1964 - 1966 , while the remote origins would at least go back as far as 1948 . The 1948 assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan lead to the '' Bogotazo '', an urban riot killing more than 4000 people, and subsequently to ten years of sustained warfare between the Colombian Liberal Party and Colombian Conservative Party parties, a period known as '' La Violencia '' ("The Violence"), which took the lives of more than 200,000 people. As ''La Violencia'' winded down, most self-defense and guerrilla units made up of Liberal Party supporters demobilized, but at the same time some former Liberals and active Communist groups continued operating in several rural enclaves. One of the Liberal bands was a group known as the "Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia", or FARC, formed by Dumar Aljure in the early 1950s, one of the largest Liberal guerrillas in 1958 . {Link without Title} This group eventually ceased to exist, but its name remained as a historical reference. Also in 1958 , an exclusively bipartisan political alternation system, known as the National Front, resulted from an agreement between the Liberal and Conservative parties. The agreement had come as a result of the two parties attempting to find a final political solution to the decade of mutual violence and unrest, remaining in effect until 1974 . 1960S Some of the guerrilla enclaves were attacked by Colombian Army units loyal to the National Front, and were driven from their mountain strongholds in the Marquetalia campaign of 1964 . {Link without Title} Inspired by the Cuban Revolution , members of the Liberal and Communist guerrillas reorganized as a communist insurgency. In 1966 , the modern incarnation of the "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia" ( FARC ) was formally founded. The Cuba n-backed ELN '' Foco '' began operations independently that same year as well. Unlike the rural FARC, which had roots in the previous Liberal peasant struggles, the ELN was mostly an outgrowth of university unrest and would subsequently tend to follow a small group of charismatic leaders, including Camilo Torres . {Link without Title} Both guerrillas remained mostly operational in remote areas of the country during the rest of the 1960s. The Colombian government organized several short-lived counter-guerrilla campaigns in the late 50s and early 60s. These efforts were aided by the U.S. government and the 's "Alliance for Progress", in a bid to resolve the longstanding conflict using a "carrot and stick" strategy, by bringing development to some of the areas that had been hardest hit by the conflict. The immediate results were mixed. In some areas the programs were relatively successful, but in others, psychological traumas resulting from the violence of the hunter-killer operations may have overshadowed any goodwill created by the civic action programs, which were eventually discontinued as well. Several analysts argue that, even today, much of Colombia's continuing violence can be traced to individual acts of revenge for the deaths of family members, both on the side of the guerrillas and that of their opponents. From the perspective of the Colombian government, the relative weakness of the guerrillas, especially after initial efforts appeared to be successful, would gradually lead to the end of most sustained operations against them by the end of the decade. 1970S By 1974 , another challenge to the state's authority and legitimacy had come from the 19th Of April Movement (M-19), leading to a new phase in the conflict. The M-19 was a mostly urban guerrilla group, allegedly founded in response to an electoral fraud during the final National Front election of Misael Pastrana Borrero ( 1970 - 1974 ) and the defeat of former dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla . Initially, the M-19 attracted a degree of attention and sympathy from mainstream Colombians that the FARC and ELN had found largely elusive. This was due to extravagant and daring operations, such as stealing a sword that had belonged to Colombia's Independence hero Simon Bolívar and its theft of thousands of weapons from a Colombian Army installation. At the same time, its larger profile soon made it the focus of the state's counterinsurgency efforts. Different presidential administrations chose to focus on ending the persistent Insurgencies , all of which claimed to represent the poor and weak against the rich and powerful classes of the country, demanding the completion of true land and political reform, from an openly Communist perspective. The ELN had been seriously crippled by military operations in the region of Anorí in 1974 , but it managed to reconstitute itself and escape destruction, in part due to the administration of Alfonso López Michelsen ( 1974 - 1978 ) allowing it to escape encirclement, hoping to initiate a peace process with the group. 1980S By 1982 , the perceived passivity of the FARC, together with the relative success of the government's efforts against the M-19 and ELN, enabled the administration of the Liberal Party's Julio César Turbay Ayala ( 1978 - 1982 ) to lift a state-of-siege decree that had been in effect, on and off, for most of the previous 30 years. Under the latest such decree, president Turbay had implemented security policies that, though of some military value against the M-19 in particular, were considered highly questionable both inside and outside Colombian circles due to numerous accusations of military Human Rights Abuse s against suspects and captured guerrillas. Citizen exhaustion due to the conflict's newfound intensity led to the election of president Belisario Betancur ( 1982 - 1986 ), a Conservative who won 47% of the popular vote, directed peace feelers at all the insurgents, and negotiated a 1984 cease-fire with the FARC at La Uribe , Meta , after a 1982 release of many guerrillas imprisoned during the previous effort to overpower them. A truce was also arranged with the M-19. The ELN rejected entering any negotiation and continued to recover itself through the use of extortions and threats, in particular against foreign oil companies of European and U.S. origin. As these events were developing, the growing Illegal Drug Trade and its consequences were also increasingly becoming a matter of widespread importance to all participants in the Colombian conflict. Guerrillas and newly wealthy druglords had mutually uneven relations and thus numerous incidents occurred between them. Eventually the kidnapping of drug cartel family members by guerrillas led to the creation of the 1981 ''Muerte a Secuestradores'' (MAS) death squad ("Death to Kidnappers"). Pressure from the U.S. government and critical sectors of Colombian society was met with further violence, as the Medellín Cartel and its hitmen, bribed or murdered numerous public officials, politicians and others who stood in its way by supporting the implementation of Extradition of Colombian nationals to the U.S. Victims of cartel violence included Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla , assassinated in 1984 , an event which made the Betancur administration begin to directly oppose the druglords. The first negotiated cease-fire with the M-19 ended when the guerrillas resumed fighting in 1985 , claiming that the cease-fire had not been fully respected by official security forces, saying that several of its members had suffered threats and assaults, and also questioning the government's real willingness to implement any accords. The Betancur administration in turn questioned the M-19's actions and its commitment to the peace process, as it continued to advance high profile negotiations with the FARC, which led to the creation of the Patriotic Union (UP), a legal and non-clandestine political organization. On November 6 1985 , the M-19 Stormed The Colombian Palace Of Justice and held the Supreme Court magistrates hostage, intending to put president Betancur on trial. In the ensuing crossfire that followed the military's reaction, some 120 people lost their lives, as did most of the guerrillas, including several high-ranking operatives and 12 Supreme Court Judges. Both sides blamed each other for the outcome. This marked the end of the Betancur's peace process. Meanwhile, individual FARC members initially joined the UP leadership in representation of the guerrilla command, though most of the guerrilla's chiefs and militiamen did not demobilize nor disarm, as that was not a requirement of the process at that point in time. Tension soon significantly increased, as both sides began to accuse each other of not respecting the cease-fire. Political violence against FARC and UP members (including presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal ) was blamed on druglords and also on members of the security forces (to a much lesser degree on the argued inaction of Betancur's administration). Members of the government and security authorities increasingly accused the FARC of continuing to recruit guerrillas, as well as kidnapping, extorting and politically intimidating voters even as the UP was already participating in politics. 1990S Early 1990s The Virgilio Barco Vargas ( 1986 - 1990 ) administration, in addition to continuing to handle the difficulties of the complex negotiations with the guerrillas, also inherited a particularly chaotic confrontation against the druglords, who were engaged in a campaign of Terrorism and murder in response to government moves in favor of their extradition overseas. The UP also suffered an increasing number of losses during this term (including the assassination of presidential candidate Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa ), which stemmed both from private proto- Paramilitary organizations, increasingly powerful druglords and a number of would-be paramilitary-sympathizers within the armed forces. Since 1987 , the ceasefire between the FARC and the Colombian government had gradually collapsed due to regional guerrilla and Army skirmishes that created a situation where each violation of the ceasefire rendered it null in each location, until it was rendered practically nonexistent. The M-19 and several smaller guerrilla groups were successfully incorporated into a peace process as the 1980s ended and the 90s began, which culminated in the elections for a Constituent Assembly Of Colombia that would write a new constitution, which took effect in 1991 . Contacts with the FARC, which had irregularly continued despite the generalized De Facto interruptions of the ceasefire and the official 1987 break from negotiations, were temporarily cut off in 1990 under the presidency of César Gaviria Trujillo ( 1990 - 1994 ). The Colombian Army's assault on the FARC's ''Casa Verde'' sanctuary at La Uribe , Meta , followed by a FARC offensive that sought to undermine the deliberations of the Constitutional Assembly, began to highlight a significant break in the uneven negotiations carried over from the previous decade. Both parties nevertheless never completely broke off some amount of political contacts for long, as some peace feelers continued to exist, leading to short rounds of conversations in both Caracas , Venezuela ( 1991 ) and Tlaxcala , Mexico ( 1992 ). Despite the signing of several documents, no concrete results were achieved when the talks ended. Mid-1990s FARC military activity increased throughout the bulk of the 1990s as the group continued to grow in wealth from both kidnapping and drug-related activities, while drug crops rapidly spread throughout the countryside. The guerrillas protected many of the coca growers from eradication campaigns and allowed them to grow and commercialize coca in exchange for a "tax" either in money or in crops. In this context, FARC had managed to recruit and train more fighters, beginning to use them in concentrated attacks in a novel and mostly unexpected way. This lead to a series of high profile raids and attacks against Colombian state bases and patrols, mostly in the southeast of Colombia but also affecting other areas. In mid- 1996 a civic protest movement made up of an estimated 200,000 coca growers from Putumayo and part of Cauca began marching against the Colombian government to reject its drug war policies, including fumigations and the declaration of special security zones in some departments. Different analysts have stressed that the movement itself fundamentally originated on its own, but at the same time, FARC heavily encouraged the marchers and actively promoted their demands both peacefully and through the threat of force. Additionally, in 1997 and 1998 , town councilmen in dozens of municipalties of the south of the country were threatened, killed, kidnapped, forced to resign or to exile themselves to department capitals by the FARC and the ELN. [http://www.cidh.oas.org/countryrep/Colom99sp/capitulo-1.htm [http://www.hrw.org/reports98/colombia/Colom989-05.htm In Las Delicias , Caquetá , five FARC fronts (about 400 guerrillas) recognized intelligence pitfalls in a Colombian Army base and exploited them to overrun it on August 30 1996 , killing 34 soldiers, wounding 17 and taking some 60 as prisoners. Another significant attack took place in El Billar, Caquetá in March 2 1998 , where a Colombian Army counterinsurgency batallion was patrolling, resulting in the death of 62 soldiers and the capture of some 43. Other FARC attacks against Police bases in Miraflores , Guaviare and La Uribe , Meta in August 1998 killed more than a hundred soldiers, policemen and civilians, and resulted in the capture or kidnapping of a hundred more. These attacks, and the dozens of members of the Colombian security forces taken prisoner by the FARC, contributed to increasingly shaming the government of president Ernesto Samper Pizano ( 1994 - 1998 ) in the eyes of sectors of public and political opinion. He was already the target of numerous critics due to revelations of a drug-money scandal surrounding his presidential campaign. Perceptions of corruption due to similar scandals led to Colombia's decertification as a country cooperating with the United States in the War On Drugs in 1995 (when the effects of the measure were temporarily waived), 1996 and 1997 . {Link without Title} {Link without Title} The Samper administration reacted against FARC's attacks by gradually abandoning numerous vulnerable and isolated outposts in more than 100,000 square km&2 of the rural countryside, instead concentrating Army and Police forces in the more heavily defended strongholds available, which allowed the guerrillas to more directly mobilize through and influence events in large areas of rural territory which were left with little or no remaining local garrisons. Samper also contacted the guerrillas in order to negotiate the release of some or all of the hostages in FARC hands, which led to the temporary demilitarization of the municipalty of Cartagena Del Chairá , Caquetá in July 1997 and the unilateral liberation of 70 soldiers, a move which was opposed by the command of the Colombian military. Other contacts between the guerrillas and government, as well as with representatives of religious and economic sectors, continued throughout 1997 and 1998. Altogether, these events were interpreted by some Colombian and foreign analysts as a turning point in the armed confrontation, giving the FARC the upper hand in the military and political balance, making the Colombian government a target of critics from some observers who concluded that its weakness was being evidenced, perhaps even overshadowing a future guerrilla victory in the middle term. A leaked 1998 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report went so far as to speculate that this could be possible within 5 years if the guerrilla's rate of operations was kept up without effective opposition. Some viewed this report as inaccurate and alarmist, claiming that it did not properly take into account many factors, such as possible actions that the Colombian state and the U.S. might take in response to the situation, nor the effects of the existence of paramilitary groups. {Link without Title} Also during this period, Paramilitary activities increased, both legally and illegally. The creation of legal CONVIVIR self-defense and intelligence gathering groups was authorized by Congress and the Samper administration in 1994 . Members of CONVIVIR groups were accused of committing numerous abuses against the civilian population by several human rights organizations. The groups were left without legal support after a 1997 decision by the Colombian Constitutional Court which restricted many of their prerrogatives and demanded stricter oversight. After 1997 , preexisting paramilitary forces and several former CONVIVIR members joined in creating the " Autodefensas Unidas De Colombia " ("United Self-defense Forces of Colombia") or AUC, a now illegal loose federation of regional paramilitary groups. The AUC, originally present around the central/northwest part of the country, executed a series of offensives into areas of guerrilla influence, targeting those that they considered as either guerrillas in disguise or their suspected collaborators. This resulted in a continuing series of massacres, such as a July 1997 operation against the village of Maripipán, Meta, which left between 30 and 49 civilians dead. After some of these operations, government prosecutors and/or human rights organizations repeatedly blamed officers and members of Colombian Army and Police units for either passively permitting these acts, or directly collaborating in their execution. {Link without Title} {Link without Title} {Link without Title} LATE 1990S / EARLY 2000S On August 7 , 1998 , Andrés Pastrana Arango was sworn in as the President of Colombia. A member of the Conservative Party, Pastrana defeated Liberal Party candidate Horacio Serpa in a run-off election marked by high voter turn-out and little political unrest. The new president's program was based on a commitment to bring about a peaceful resolution of Colombia's longstanding civil conflict and to cooperate fully with the United States to combat the trafficking of illegal drugs. While early initiatives in the Colombian peace process gave reason for optimism, the Pastrana administration also had to combat high unemployment (up to a high of over 20% ) and other economic problems, such as the fiscal deficit and the impact of global financial instability on Colombia. Additionally, the growing severity of countrywide guerrilla attacks by the FARC and ELN, and smaller movements, as well as the growth of drug production, corruption and the spread of even more violent paramilitary groups such as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia ( AUC ) made it seem increasingly difficult to solve the country's problems. Although the FARC accepted participation in the peace process, they did not make explicit commitments to end the conflict in the short term. The FARC suspended talks in November 2000 , to protest what it called "paramilitary terrorism" but returned to the negotiating table in February 2001 , following 2 days of meetings between President Pastrana and FARC leader Manuel Marulanda. The Colombian Government and ELN in early 2001 continued discussions aimed at opening a formal peace process, though no concrete agreements were reached. No single explanation fully addresses the deep roots of Colombia's present-day troubles, but they include limited government presence in large areas of the interior, the expansion of illicit drug cultivation, endemic violence, and social inequities. In order to confront these challenges, the Pastrana administration unveiled its Plan Colombia in late 1999, an integrated strategy to deal with these longstanding, mutually reinforcing problems. On September 10, 2001, the AUC were added to the US State Department's List Of Foreign Terrorist Organizations . Critics had long accused the US of hypocricy for labeling the FARC and ELN Terrorists , while ignoring the AUC, which was responsible for far more killings. After the eventual breakup of the peace negotiations in early 2002 , which had been stalled numerous times and finally ended due to a guerrilla kidnapping of a congressman and other political figures, the Caguán demilitarized zone was terminated by the Pastrana administration. Soon after that, in May 2002 , the former liberal politician of conservative leanings Álvaro Uribe Vélez , whose father had been killed by left-wing guerrillas, was sworn in as Colombian president. He immediately began taking action to crush the FARC, ELN, and AUC, including the employment of citizen informants to help the police and armed forces track down suspected members in all three armed groups. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS As Of 2004 , two years after its implementation began, the security situation of inside Colombia has suffered some measure of an improvement and the economy, while still fragile, has also shown some positive signs according to observers, but relatively little has yet to have been accomplished in structurally solving most of the country's other grave problems, possibly in part due to legislative and political conflicts between the administration and the Colombian Congress (including those over the controversial project to eventually re-elect Uribe), and a relative lack of freely allocated funds and credits. Some critical observers consider that Uribe's policies, while admittedly reducing crime and guerrilla activity, might be too slanted in favor of a military solution to Colombia's internal war, neglecting grave social and human rights concerns to a certain extent. They ask for Uribe's government to change this position and make serious efforts towards improving the human rights situation inside the country, protecting civilians and reducing any abuses committed by the armed forces. Two important FARC commanders are now on trial in Washington D.C., after being extradited due to drug-related offenses and other charges. One of them is Ricardo Palmera, aka " Simon Trinidad ", who has also been accused of "hostage taking" because of his alleged complicity in the capture of three U.S. contractors and/or CIA agents, who either crashed or were shot down while conducting surveillance over rural areas under FARC influence and control. Palmera has been related to this case due to his admission that he would allegedly have traveled to Ecuador , where he was arrested, in order to supposedly arrange for the negotiation of a prisoner exchange with the Colombian government. The defendant has argued that such efforts were made under the auspices of the UN. The other "co-defendant" in Palmera's case is the entire FARC organization. {Link without Title} The court will hear arguments on Palmera's status as a prisoner of war in mid-January. The other FARC commander is Nayibe Rojas Valderrama, also known as "Sonia", who is accused of drug trafficking and, if convicted, will be a landmark case tying the FARC to the drug trade. CONTROVERSY ABOUT THE TERM "CIVIL WAR" There is an informal yet relatively widespread controversy about what would be the most accurate term to describe Colombia's war {Link without Title} . A common argument would be that a Civil War would have started in 1964 as the result of the social, economic and political background of the country and thus current violence could not be considered an isolated phenomenon. This application of the term Civil War to the ensuing conflict that began in Colombia has been considered debatable by some, as another position held by several analysts would point out that the conflict's caracteristics, scale and intensity have not reached those of a full blown Civil War . Specifically, it is argued that the FARC and other guerrillas would not have become a powerful and relevant enough threat to the Colombian establishment until a couple of years in the mid- 1990s , if at all. There was a period of approximately two to three years ( 1996 to 1998 ) when the FARC executed a string of military attacks considered as impressive operations nationally and internationally, which were interpreted as a demonstration of its armed strength. Another of the arguments that have been employed by analysts would allege that Colombian society, as a whole, would not have noticeably and massively divided into organized supporters of both the insurgents and the government. Some have also pointed out that the label is not as often applied to past and present wars against armed insurgencies of some significance in the rest of South America , such as the Shining Path in Peru . It is additionally argued that such a label would give recognized legitimacy to the actions of the insurgents, something as of yet unclear in the international arena. Other observers would consider that the term civil war should also apply to those situations as well, as it would be suggested that, irrespective of the proportional strength of arms or numbers between the involved parties, several different social, political and ideological projects would be in conflict. By 2002 , President Andrés Pastrana, as well as certain intellectuals and international organizations had often referred to the conflict as a "war against civilians" or a "war against civilian society", choosing to highlight the fact that most of the victims from guerrilla, druglord and paramilitary violence (as well as from any state abuses) are civilians irrespective of their specific political positions, as the result of the degeneration of a war that they considered currently devoid of any previous political and social meaning. President Pastrana also separately admitted that an armed conflict does exist in Colombia, but rejected its characterization as a civil war. Another side of the issue has to do with translation and interpretation concerns. In traditional studies and press reports written in the English language, the term civil war is often used to refer to the war in Colombia, while it is somewhat rarer to see this term employed with as much regularity in the Spanish -speaking Media , both inside and outside of Colombia. This has also become rare in some recent academic studies written in the English language as well, where the terms "armed conflict" or "internal conflict" are more common. After having desisted repeatedly from categorizing the FARC as terrorists, President Pastrana adopted that terminology in the speech that ended the peace process on February 20, 2002. This position had been stated by the United States administration since November 2, 2001, when the State Department included FARC in its "List of Terrorists and Groups Identified Under Executive Order 13224" {Link without Title} , after the September 11, 2001 Attacks . There are also several political and legal ramifications to the issue that have gained notoriety outside of academic circles. In recent years, an extra level of complexity has been added to the debate, as in different instances Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has said that he doesn't consider Colombia's war to be neither an armed conflict nor a civil war, rejecting both labels and instead focusing on what he calls the "terrorist threat". This new position had been considered increasingly controversial in Colombia itself, and this perspective initially had few outright defenders outside the circles of the Colombian administration. The use of this new term has been criticized or ignored by both national and international NGO s, several supporters and opponents of president Uribe's government policies, some of the mainstream Colombian media outlets and also by other Colombian government officials associations, such as mayors and governors. Most of these groups would consider that there is in fact an armed conflict in the country, though in turn they all still disagree among themselves as to the proper employment of the term "civil war". In September 2005 , President Uribe modified his previous stance, by stating that if the ELN was willing to declare a ceasefire and enter negotiations with the government, he was willing to set aside his personal beliefs (the existence of a "terrorist threat" in Colombia) and accept the existence of an "armed conflict". [http://noticias.canalrcn.com/noticia.php3?nt=23583 QUOTES
Poverty
Weak central government
Guerrillas and paramilitaries
STATISTICS: HUMAN RIGHTS
:::76% Paramilitaries (9,114 victims) :::19% Guerrillas (2,275 victims) :::5% State security forces (571 victims) ::::Total victims: 11,960
:::47% Paramilitaries (6,821 victims) :::25% Unknown (3,683 victims) :::25% Unidentified armed groups (1,406 victims) :::19% Guerrillas (2,246 victims) :::3% State security forces (486 victims) ::::Total victims: 14,642
::82% Other illegal groups ''(paramilitaries, social cleansing, private justice squads, drug cartels)'' (19,652 victims) ::18% Guerrillas (3,532 victims) Statistics:Refugees and Ex-pats
Statistics: Insurgency, paramilitary, and military
:This is nothing new; a weak military has been the historical pattern. Colombian elites historically have preferred a weak central government and a weak military. A vicious cycle developed: civilians preferred a weak military for fear that it would take political power, but then gave it missions it could not possibly fulfill because of lack of resources. Not until 1997 did the Colombian Army, for example, acquire an aviation wing.
Paramilitary and Guerrilla funding
Statistics: Colombia Economy and poverty
Statistics: Plan Colombia
Notes
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First |
Alfredo |
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Last |
Molano |
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Year |
2004 |
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Month |
February 18 |
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Title |
Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom : Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen |
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Editor |
James Graham (Translator) |
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Publisher |
Columbia University Press |
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Id |
0231129157 |
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