Plan For Colombia: Day 3b

GUERRILLA LEADER IS FIGURE OF RUMOR, REVOLUTION

BOGOTA, Colombia - Manuel Marulanda, commander of the largest insurgent
army in Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
sometimes is billed as "the world's oldest living guerrilla."

"Tirofijo," or "Sureshot," as the shy, grandfatherly FARC chieftain is
nicknamed, has been a guerrilla so long that he began his insurgent career
on horseback. He has been engaged in peace talks - or refusing to attend
them - since the days when most of the government negotiators with whom he
bargains today were mere toddlers.

His life most clearly resembles that of obscure Colombian peasant rebels
who now are dead, a few from natural causes, most from years of combat. But
the person whom he most resembles, outside of Colombia, probably is the
early 20th-century Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

Like Villa, Marulanda was for years styled as a bandit, not as rebel, and
like Villa, his death has been erroneously reported many times, so often
that FARC troops sing that:

Ever since the 'Fifties, They've been killing Marulanda, Ever since the
'Fifties, They've been killing Marulanda. They don't know that he's still
to be found, As much alive as hope.

Like Pancho Villa, and unlike Mao and Lenin, Marulanda has not recorded his
ideas or the pattern of his life on paper, and much about him remains
unknown. No one can with certainty say, for example, whether or not
Marulanda ever has seen Bogota, the capital of the country that his forces
are sworn to rule.

Nor does anyone know for certain how old Marulanda is. Born on a farm to a
poor peasant family, no certificate attests to his birth. Marulanda has
said that he is 70 years old, born in May 1930. But his late father
maintained his son was born two years earlier, in 1928-a claim that would
make the man called Marulanda 72 years old.

Marulanda's name is subject to myth and rumor, too.

The first Manuel Marulanda, long really dead, was a communist leader in
Colombia before the FARC was formed. The man who now calls himself by that
name really is Pedro Antonio Marin; like Pancho Villa, who as a child was
Doroteo Arango, the guerrilla became a public figure under a nom de guerre.

One of the reasons Pedro Antonio Marin sometimes was reported as dead was
that, as he intended, officials confused him with the original Marulanda.

Many other details of his life are lost to obscurity and the guerrilla
leader's shyness, but Pedro Antonio Marin said that he went to school for
only five years, dedicating himself to family farm pursuits until, at age
6, he became a small businessman, a contractor of mule teams, a house
builder, and before he turned 21, the owner of a general store. Had it not
been for a 1948 event, Marin still might be known by his birth name - and
still might be tending a store.

On April 9, 1948, a Colombian presidential candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan,
was assassinated by persons unknown. Gaitan was a popular and very populist
candidate who promised agrarian reform that, perhaps because of his death,
never came to pass.

Colombian long has been dominated by its Liberal and Conservative political
parties, and upon Gaitan's death, rioting broke out in Bogota - and
marauding spread across the countryside.

Both the Liberal and Conservative parties had rural militias, and Liberals
took the death of their candidate as a call to war, a war that Colombians
refer to as "La Violencia."

Still the bloodiest chapter in the nation's history, some 300,000 people
died in fighting that lasted nearly 10 years, sometimes resembling the
exterminations from Old Testament scriptures, and sometimes, the shoot-outs
from Old West scripts, in which all of the combatants, because they were
neighbors, knew each other, perhaps too well.

Pedro Marin merely was keeping shop when the shooting started. "I didn't
pay much attention to politics back then," he told a would-be biographer
some years ago, "because when you're in business, it is business that's on
your mind."

But he claims to have witnessed the assault, burning and sacking of two
villages by Conservative militias, actions in which more than a hundred
villagers died. Before long, various members of his family, whose
patriarchs were identified with the Liberal cause, were uprooted from their
farms.

In 1949, acceding to a demand from his displaced relatives, Pedro Marin
formed a militia. Fourteen cousins and brothers were the first troops under
his command..

The undertaking led him into alliances and actions with other Liberal
militias, in crusades that, before "La Violencia" was over, sometimes took
vengeance as their goal.

Once describing an incursion from those days, Marulanda, always a man of
few words, recalled that his militiamen "destroyed" a village because "it
was a den of murderers who had savagely killed hundreds of peasants."

"We occupied the place for 24 hours," he said, "seizing everything that
could be useful for guerrilla activity."

The conflicts that occupied peasant militias in those days were not as
formal and dignified as those that make the headlines today, as is shown in
the memoir of Marulanda comrade-in-arms Jaime Guaracas.

The former guerrilla relates that during the early years of the armed
peasantry's revolt, three Conservative paramilitaries came up with a plan
to assassinate a Marulanda associate, "Charro Negro," during a barroom
dance. But the paramilitaries began boozing before Charro came in, and when
their machete assault got under way, one of the plotters pulled out a gun -
and in his confusion, shot the other two.

In 1953, military dictator Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla came to power,
offering peace and amnesty to the rural insurgents, whose forces now
included Communist as well as Liberal and Conservative militias.

Most of the Conservatives accepted the offer, and because they did not have
to surrender their arms, many units soon became counter-guerrilla forces -
paramilitaries - operating in view of the government, if not with its
explicit consent.

Their purpose was to attack militias, especially the Communists, who still
were under arms. Some Liberal militias joined the effort, but Marulanda's
group and a few other Liberal groups held back, becoming de facto allies of
the reds.

Not until four years later, when the dictator was gone from office, would
Marulanda accept a peace. On Christmas Day 1957, he, too, disbanded his
militia. But his pact with the government would last only three years.

By the time that his followers returned to war, concentrated in the border
region between the west-central states of Tolima and Huila, their leader
had visited a Communist stronghold called El Davis, whose fortress included
a hospital, a laundry and a school for 300 children.

Marulanda was impressed, not so much by the ideology taught there, as by
the self-government and discipline that its keepers observed. He promptly
joined the Colombian Communist Party.

Despite his membership, Marulanda never has been known as an ideologue, and
the few words that he has written refer to military encounters from the
distant past, not to political ideals. During the early 1960s, most Latin
American Communist parties were undergoing a split led by the Maoist
advocates of peasant war, and in Colombia, the turmoil produced what is
today the second-largest guerrilla force, the National Liberation Army, or
as it is known by its Spanish acronym, the ELN. But Marulanda stayed on the
sidelines of the debate.

In 1964, a congress of peasant guerrilla outfits from southern Colombia was
formed, with Marulanda as its leader. It defined its task in a new way, not
as peasant self-defense, but as overthrowing the Colombian government. Two
years later, and now numbering some 200, the same militias staged a second
conference and adopted the name of the FARC.

When the Colombian government opened peace talks with various guerrilla
groups in 1984, the FARC joined the process. Marulanda did not order his
troops to lay down arms, but in 1989-90, he did bless the efforts of a
left-wing political party called Union Patriotica , or UP. Some 3,500 UP
candidates and campaign workers were murdered during the electoral season,
and FARC's leadership drew an important lesson: that for them, peace is
more dangerous than war.

In the years since, thanks to sheer persistence, and since at least 1995,
to money from the drug trade, the FARC has grown with a rapidity no one
expected.

Even though Marulanda once again is holding peace talks with the
government, the FARC is threatening to extend its power into Colombia's
cities, in a final push for revolution. Kidnappings, bombings, and
selective assassinations are a part of the strategy. The legacy of
Marulanda and the ragtag militias of "La Violencia," for better or worse,
overshadows Colombian history today.

Continued: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n148/a05.html