The legacy of fragmentation and violence

Colombia's history of almost incessant violence and its pronounced political fragmentation have served as the backdrop for the country's assorted power plays. It is noteworthy that Colombia is the only country in the world to host the academic discipline of ‘Violentology’. Historians have pointed to the virtually interminable warfare between the indigenous populations of what is now Colombia during the pre-conquest period.Footnote ³ As was the case throughout Latin America, most of the indigenous population succumbed to disease once the Spanish arrived, rendering them as easy prey during the Conquest. After the initial carnage associated with the Spanish invasion, colonial rule generally minimised violence in what today is Colombia. Following independence, almost constant civil war between the Liberals and Conservatives led to the death of 35,000 Colombians during 1820–1879, a figure that would equate proportionately to about 5–10 million deaths during the last 50 years of the 20th century.Footnote ⁴

The culmination of violent feuds and civil wars between the Liberals and Conservatives during much of the 1800s was the renowned War of 1000 Days from 1899 to 1902, which marked the largest civil war in Latin America during the nineteenth century. Somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000 Colombians lost their lives during that imbroglio. That exhausting ordeal appeared to deflate the country's propensity toward violence until another horrific round of carnage slowly simmered and then boiled over with La Violencia during the period 1948–1958. At least 200,000 Colombians lost their lives in that final contest between the Liberals and Conservatives.

With La Violencia behind it, Colombia during the 1960s continued to witness the highest rate of violent deaths in the world. The country has remained near the top of that list into the new millennium. Although this remarkable level of violence has not altered significantly, there have been some important contextual shifts over the last few decades. One of these has been the acceleration of the war economy.Footnote ⁵ Propelled principally by the drug trade, and to a lesser extent by other crimes, continuous violence and warfare have been associated with the protection of immense economic bounties for belligerent forces.Footnote ⁶ Perpetually high levels of violence, the criminalisation of war, and the shifting spatialisation of armed conflict, together with the lack of popular support for belligerents, have contributed to flashes of terror in Colombia since the 1980s.

Fragmentation has been a hallmark of Colombian politics, though there is debate as to its causes. Among the key factors are the historical absence of a shared identity, the post-independence contours of the country's notoriously feuding parties, substantial geographical obstacles, assorted economic elements and epistemological themes. It is the synergy among these factors that have promoted Colombia's volatile cocktail of centrifugal forces. To begin, it was noted that what is now Colombia was populated by warring indigenous tribes during the pre-colonial period, in contrast, for example, to the centralising effects of Mexico's two Indian empires – the Aztecs and Mayans. Colombians, then, could not look back to a period of shared identity, as Mexicans have done, that could help offset the historic dispersion of power in the country.

In terms of party feuds, Colombia's Liberals represented agro-export and mercantile interests, while the Conservatives comprised the local agrarian and landed elite. Conservatives predominated in former colonial centres, while Liberals represented the upstarts from the peripheral regions that grew in economic significance during the post-colonial period. Neither party proved capable of achieving economic or political hegemony. The fact that neither party was able to defeat the other decisively was one of the factors that contributed to both fragmentation and endless violence. Rather than working to create a centralised state, the Liberals and Conservatives behaved as competing and exclusive governments, hoping in vain that the next civil war would provide them with a conclusive victory over the other. Nine civil wars marred Colombia's history from 1830 to 1902.

Geographical barriers underpinned political fragmentation. Three ranges of the steep Andean Mountains presented huge obstacles for travel. This retarded the construction of roads and railways that could otherwise have assisted in connecting and uniting the country. Riverine travel was highly hazardous. During much of the 19th century and into the first part of the 20th century, to arrive in Bogotá from the Caribbean, for example, one would have to embark on a trek of up to two months along the sometimes perilous Magdalena River, marked in parts by water too shallow for smooth sailing and in other areas by treacherous rapids. Insect-borne disease was rife on this sweltering journey. Once disembarking at the port near Honda, one had to climb more than 8,000 feet of the sheer Andean Mountains to reach Bogotá. Such geographical obstacles encouraged Colombia's towns to be largely self-sufficient, with little trade between regions. Within the predicament of necessary self-sufficiency, each town often produced the same things, further reducing prospects for trade.Footnote ⁷ Rather than uniting into a modern nation-state, Colombia's rival towns remained dispersed and isolated.

Epistemological factors also contributed to Colombia's notorious fragmentation. Spanish colonialism introduced a pre-modern Western system of thought. This meant, among other features, non-secular politics, political space conceived in terms of rival city-states, and feudal economic relations as manifested through the encomienda system (colonial sharecropping). During the Bolivarian era, for example, even classical works that laid the foundation for Modernity were unwelcome in Colombia, with Bentham's Principals of Universal Legislation banned as a university text in 1826 and afterward. Further, Bolívar himself strongly embraced pre-modern ideas, as evidenced by his endorsement of a fusion between the church and state – a notion perpetuated by Colombia's Conservative Party in its strong alliance with the Catholic Church during the post-Bolivarian period. It was not until well into the 20th century that Modern ideas began to appear in Colombia with any semblance of vitality, such as the notion of secular politics and the importance of an industrialised economy. As Gabriel García Márquez observed, ‘On April 9, 1948, the twentieth century began in Colombia’, following the assassination of the populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the stark realisation of Colombia's place within the globalised class conflict of the Cold War.Footnote ⁸ But many Modern ideas never took root, including the notion of political balance and equilibrium, linear progress, and especially the concept of a nation state complete with a Leviathan and conflict resolution mechanisms.

Colombia's geographical barriers and its relative isolation from the world economy that centred in the North meant that ideas associated with Modernity were not transmitted in any significant way to the country. That is, global economic contact helped to promote Modern ideas. Flashes of such contact appeared during the late 1800s and beyond. For example, the Escuela Nacional de Minas (National University of Metallurgy) opened in Medellín in 1880, incorporating Modern scientific ideas as foreign companies expressed interest in Colombian mines.Footnote ⁹ The booming coffee economy, and mounting US investments in the petroleum and extractive sectors beginning in the 1920s, also catalysed Colombia's global contact and exposure to Modern ideas. The coffee economy, in particular, provided investment capital that promoted the industrial sector, which in turn underpinned urbanisation – two key features of Modernity.Footnote ¹⁰ But the pace was sluggish. The industrial sector accounted for 8.9 per cent of Colombia's Gross National Product in 1930, rising to 16.5 per cent in 1945. All of this contributed to an odd patchwork of pre-Modern and Modern ideas, with neither system of thought predominating.

The amplified fragmentation of Colombian politics has resulted in some noteworthy effects. First, violence has been rife in the absence of a centralised state with a monopoly on the use of force – or a Leviathan in the words of Hobbes. Pécaut has referred to this as phenomenon as ‘the banality of violence’ in Colombia.Footnote ¹¹ Second, in the absence of a strong and centralised state, security historically has been privatised and dispersed. Examples include the private armies of encomiendas that were used to settle local accounts and that were also employed in inter-party warfare, the development of peasant and community defence organisations, the proliferation of forces hired to protect a wide assortment of economic enterprises, the private forces of criminal syndicates, as well as a slew of other manifestations. Third, in the context of a state that has been historically weak, illegitimate, or even completely absent in many regions, economic enterprise has often operated totally outside government structures – a phenomenon that would count as contraband trade in a strong and functional nation state.

Historical context: the Farc, the US and the prelude to Plan Colombia

The Farc can be analysed in four phases: from its inception in the 1960s until about 1980; from about 1980 to 1990; from 1990 to the formation of Plan Colombia in 2000; and the debilitation of the rebels since that time. According to its own literature, the Farc sprouted from an early fusion in 1950 between Liberal guerrillas and Communist ‘self-defense’ units.Footnote ¹² In 1964, Jacobo Arenas of Colombia's Communist Party joined with ‘resistance’ forces, which included former Liberal guerrilla Manuel Marulanda (born Pedro Antonio Marín). This formidable duo, which combined the strategic wit of Marulanda with the ideological command of Arenas, proved to be a crucial foundation of the Farc. The group existed in form by 1964, but did not officially assume its name until 1966. In terms of support base, the Farc represented peasant farmers in the tradition of ‘Colombian agrarian struggles’ that dated back to the 1920s.Footnote ¹³ As with other Latin American revolutionary groups of the time, land redistribution and a more equitable division of wealth were at the centre of its revolutionary objectives. Farc guerrillas concentrated in the departments of Huila, Cauca, Valle and Tolima.Footnote ¹⁴ From its inception in 1964, the nascent Farc was met with ferocious US rebuttals.Footnote ¹⁵

Until its recent crisis, perhaps the Farc's lowest ebb came within a few years of its formation. As the target of the US' Plan Laso and related Colombian military initiatives, the Farc lost 70 per cent of its armaments and a significant portion of its soldiers between 1966 and 1968.Footnote ¹⁶ To cope with that predicament, the Farc embraced at its third conference in 1968 a strategy to transform into a ‘mobile and very clandestine guerrilla’ group and refashioned itself over the next decade. By 1978, at the time of its sixth conference, Farc membership had swelled to 1,000 soldiers, and the rebels had extended their influence to both the countryside as well as urban areas. In the countryside, the Farc had been pushed by the Colombian military into the interior jungles of Guaviara, Caquetá and Putumayo. These were precisely the regions that would serve in the 1980s and beyond as the propitious economic base of coca growth and the narcotrafficking industry.

The Farc entered a new era of growth in the 1980s, when it experienced a major surge in power that was underpinned in part by the economic enrichment derived from participation in narcotrafficking and other crimes.Footnote ¹⁷ It was also bolstered by the tenure of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua from 1979 to 1989, which provided a glimmer of moral support and hope for revolutionaries throughout Latin America. The Farc's seventh conference in 1982 marked an official turning point for the increasingly empowered rebels. The Farc, in its own words, had now transformed into an ‘offensive movement’, with designs for a greater presence throughout the country and in major urban areas such as Bogotá.Footnote ¹⁸ Its soon-to-be-reached goals included the establishment of 48 fronts, the achievement of greater strategic adaptability, and the development of a more sophisticated means of communication to benefit economic, ideological and military objectives.Footnote ¹⁹ During this period, then, the Farc underwent a major transformation from a small, beleaguered, Cuban-styled guerrilla movement on the run, to a major belligerent force bankrolled by transnational crime. It was during this epoch that the Farc first used the nomenclature Bolivariana, harkening back to the ideas of Simón Bolívar. There was a particular focus on his nationalist dreams of forming a sweeping Latin American movement capable of resisting the influence of Northern powers.

In 1984, the Farc embarked on a major programme of political development with the creation of its political unit, the Unión Patriótica (UP). This occurred in the midst of what turned out to be failed peace negotiations with President Belisario Betancur. The UP scored well during its electoral debut in 1986, winning 14 congressional seats and numerous positions in departments and at municipal levels. It obtained about 350,000 votes in the presidential contest. This trend toward increasing popularity, especially in the countryside, continued into the early 1990s. Tragically, this electoral success translated into a major rupture for the country when about 3,000 to 4,000 members and supporters of the UP were assassinated by paramilitary forces between 1986 and 1992. The Farc interpreted this gruesome phenomenon to mean that the state was complicit in the assassinations through its failure to protect UP members, and also due to the impunity it afforded to paramilitary assassins.Footnote ²⁰

In tandem with the devastating experience of the UP, in 1990 President Gaviria launched a vigorous military attack against the Farc at Casa Verde, killing the group's ideological cofounder, Jacobo Arenas. For the rebels, then, there appeared to be no space for them in ‘legitimate’ or peaceful politics. The significance of this turning point cannot be underestimated, because it prompted to Farc to do whatever it took to transform into a major military machine designed either to topple the state or to form a parallel government in a territory it controlled militarily.Footnote ²¹ While half-hearted peace talks took place in 1992, the context was not ripe for any meaningful success. During the Farc's eighth conference in 1993, the rebels planned a major offensive to be launched in the last half of the decade and increased its number of fronts by 15.Footnote ²²

Let us step back for a moment and consider the interests of the US in Colombia during this period. With the withering of the Soviet Union and its allied leftist forces in Central America, President George Bush, Sr., devised the Andean Drug War in 1989. Leaning heavily on interdiction and eradication, rather than attempting to reduce US consumption, Washington militarised the Andes during this period. In fact, by 1992, the Andean region was receiving more US military assistance than any other region in Latin America. The US provided $104 million in military assistance to Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru in the fiscal year 1991, and $147 million in 1992. By the early 1990s, Colombia took the mantle from El Salvador as the largest recipient of US military assistance in Latin America.Footnote ²³

Washington's perception of Colombia as a strategic problem altered with the inauguration of the Clinton administration in 1993.Footnote ²⁴ Although Colombian drug production escalated, the US under Clinton largely ignored Colombia and the rest of Latin America except for its preoccupation with Mexico during the negotiation and implementation of the 1994 Nafta agreement. After the details for this watershed trade pact had been negotiated, the US and Mexican governments shifted into panic mode with the surprise appearance on Nafta's birthday of the Zapatista guerrilla movement and the $50 billion (US) peso crisis of 1994–1995. Thus, Washington largely ignored Colombia during the period 1992–1998. This was a result not only of foreign policy brushfires elsewhere, but also of Washington's repugnance toward the Colombian government's apparent complicity with narcotrafficking, epitomised during that period by the surfacing of audiocassettes that appeared to link President Samper (1994–1998) to leading Colombian drug kingpins.Footnote ²⁵

While the US looked away from Colombia until about 1998, a major strategic shift in the country took shape a few years earlier. A crucial first salvo of the Farc's new offensive occurred in 1996, when the rebels overtook humiliated Colombian military forces, including those stationed at bases in Las Delcias, La Carpa and de Patascoy.Footnote ²⁶ The group's zenith of power came in 1998, when the strategically inept government of Pastrana ceded to the Farc a ‘cease fire’ zone, or Zona de Distensión. The provision of this parcel was designed to placate the Farc and to establish the basis for re-establishing negotiations. Instead, and predictably, it empowered the rebels, who now wished to preside permanently over a swelling territorial enclave.

By the late 1990s, the Farc had mobilised an estimated 17,000 troops spread over 60 fronts.Footnote ²⁷ It secured political support from cocaleros (coca growers), destitute peasants, and student radicals scattered among the country's universities.Footnote ²⁸ In an attempt to distance itself from what some viewed as outdated Cold War communism, the Farc increasingly began using ‘Bolivarian’ rhetoric throughout the 1990s, essentially rhyming ideologically with dimensions of President Hugo Chávez's revolutionary platform in neighbouring Venezuela. In addition to local and regional support, the Farc had some limited success at courting European NGOs and even European governments, and hosted in its jungle zona the chair of the New York Stock Exchange.

This set the stage for Plan Colombia and the subsequent relative debilitation of the Farc. The first obvious problem for the US was a strategically preposterous decision by the fumbling Pastrana government to cede to the Farc, by then the world's largest and most powerful leftist guerrilla movement, a piece of territory about the size of Switzerland. Ostensibly, the parcel was to be used as a cease-fire negotiating region for peace talks with the government. This extraordinary development prompted Washington to bother to take a hard look at Colombia. The Clinton administration was rightfully alarmed by what it saw. Not only had the Farc grown enormously in terms of military and now territorial power, a process fed by its relation to narcotrafficking and other crimes such as kidnapping and extortion, but other Colombian insurgents had ballooned as well. The leftist Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) had multiplied significantly, but perhaps the biggest growth was in the case of the right-wing paramilitaries, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC).

The Revolution in Military Affairs

Prior to a consideration of the Farc and Plan Colombia, let us briefly sketch the conceptual backdrop to the current Revolution in Military Affairs.Footnote ²⁹ Historically, some RMAs rested on the appearance of a primary but sweeping change, often a technological one, which further spawned transformations in the conduct of warfare.Footnote ³⁰ One example is the Infantry Revolution, which occurred during the Hundred Years' War. Perhaps its most important causal factor was the development of the longbow arrow, which rendered the cavalry vulnerable through its ability to pierce armour. Another example was the Revolution of the Sail and Shot, which, as one observer noted, had transformed the warship ‘from a floating garrison of soldiers to an artillery platform’.Footnote ³¹

An important reference point for the purpose at hand is the RMA that began with the Napoleonic Wars, the remnants of which stretched into the twentieth century. Particularly noteworthy is the breadth of radical change that transpired during this epoch. The development of industrial capitalism and the birth of the modern nation-state, complete with patriotism and a national army, marked truly fundamental shifts in social organisation and political space. Broad technological and industrial developments affected weaponry, exemplified by the reduction of the weight of cannons by 50 per cent. Some observers point to an analytical parallel between the proliferations in France of the printing press – such that periodical publications skyrocketed from 42 in May 1789 to 250 by the end of that year – and the appearance during the current RMA of the Internet and its role in the vast dissemination of knowledge.Footnote ³² Overall, crucial shifts in knowledge structures associated with modernity were fully apparent by the late 19th century – in terms of positivism and binary thought, as well as various notions of progress, human nature, linear development, and so on. These underpinned the RMA of the era.

There are a number of milestones associated with the current RMA. The concept's fuzzy outlines first appeared in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s, with Moscow's preoccupation regarding the consequences of the development of precision nuclear weapons. Ironically, the RMA did not take clear shape until the fall of the Soviet Union and the dimming of the global contest between capitalism and socialism. Shortly afterward, the 1991 Gulf War represented an RMA watershed due to its reliance on satellite reconnaissance, near-real-time surveillance, and lethal precision weapons. In the Americas, Mexico's post-1994 Zapatista struggle featured the advent of information warfare with a twist, as it was mastered by a small, indigenous rebel group rather than by a superpower. And in Colombia, backward guerrilla groups transformed into mega-military machines through lucrative adventures in transnational crime. Despite all that and more, doubts about the existence of an RMA lingered right up to the beginning of the new millennium. These all but dissipated, however, with Al-Qaeda's infamous attack on the US homeland in 2001, and with the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, which made use of real-time satellite images that allowed the US to direct the war from the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

The Napoleonic RMA is conceptually similar to the current RMA. This is because both cases exemplify a broad shift in strategic affairs that has moved in step with a sweeping social revolution. Just as the Napoleonic RMA appeared within the wider rubric of modernity, the current RMA rides the crest of post-modern security and strategy. It cannot be reduced to a single causal variable, but is the synergetic product of a number of key developments. That is, the context for the present RMA includes such features as transnational capitalism and globalisation, the dispersion of information and weapons, the appearance of new political spaces (trade blocs and other spaces based on ethnicity, for example), the advent of identity politics that transcends traditional patriotism, ecocide, and epistemological considerations. Within the context of a broader social revolution, the current RMA signifies a shift both in the array of actors and in the type of conflict apparent in strategic affairs. The new RMA can be exploited by a vast array of players – including transnational criminal syndicates, NGOs, labour unions, newfangled insurgents, autonomous communities, in addition to more traditional entities such as the state and international organisations. Further, the nature of conflict has transformed to include a focus on phenomenon such as asymmetric warfare, privatised war, epistemic fissures between combatants, and the blurring of war and crime.

The concept of the RMA necessarily has as its centrepiece the notion of rupture. On the one hand, it is important not to exaggerate the extent of change or to minimise the elements of continuity. On the other hand, it would be highly perilous not to appreciate the strategic implications of the winds of change when they actually do appear. The concept of discontinuity is featured in various perspectives to global politics. It is prominent in classical Realist and Marxist approaches, but most recently had been associated with post-modernism. This is especially so in light of Michel Foucault's seminal work The Order of Things, in which he examined ‘change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge’.Footnote ³³ Despite the huge gap between post-modernism and Marxism, one quickly notices that Foucault points to the same ruptures as does Karl Marx. The prominent distinction between the two is that Foucault emphasises the epistemological elements of rupture, while Marx emphasises shifts in relations of production and class within the historical materialist framework. Long before Foucault and Marx, classical Realists celebrated the notion of rupture in relation to epistemology. Thucydides, some 2,400 hundred years ago, sought to tell the story of war and politics with objective facts as well as with reference to sequence and spatial location, in vast distinction from predecessors such as Homer, who told the same story in terms of epic poems that emphasises subjectivity, analogy, divination and so on.Footnote ³⁴

Overall, the RMA is one facet of a systemic change that entails an epistemological jump. The present shift is reflected, for example, in the appearance of social forces motivated by new social ‘truths’, in novel conceptions of political time and space, in conflicts linked to different systems of knowledge, in emerging types of social organisation such as the cell and the network, in unfolding manifestations of political identity, in newfangled conceptions of enemy and threat, and so on. The strategic realm or system should be considered in the context of dynamic interactions among a network of other social systems – economic, cultural, organisational, political, technological, scientific, etc.Footnote ³⁵

Plan Colombia and the Revolution in Military Affairs

Surveillance and intelligence

The notions of intelligence and spying have a solid foundation in strategic classics, such as Sun Tzu's Art of War, in which observed that only the best and brightest should be bestowed with the crucial task of spying.Footnote ⁵⁵ Further, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon signaled a new instrument of power over the human mind and body – the use of surveillance.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this section, we shall address the successes and limits of ultra-surveillance and the real-time transmission of information as reflected in Plan Colombia, and will also explore the utility of human intelligence.

In 1999, a year after the Farc received its Switzerland-sized Zona de Distensión that had been meant to promote dialogue with the government; real-time aerial surveillance began to be used extensively in the Colombian conflict. This intensified under Plan Colombia and involved the use of Plataforma aircraft that come equipped with heat sensors capable of detecting human activity even at night. PC's debut in 2000 also included $31 million from the US Department of Defense for aerial antinarcotics intelligence, land radar systems, command and control systems for radar, and translations of intelligence analyses; $17.4 million from the US Department of State for aerial antinarcotics intelligence, logistical support, and communications between operatives; and $5 million divulged to the Colombian National Police for better communication between the police and armed forces and for improved logistical support. Night-vision equipment have also been included in the PC package, because it is estimated that about 80 per cent of key Farc operations have occurred at night.Footnote ⁵⁷

PC has also included radar sites located in strategic regions, especially in the south of Colombia, which has been the heartland of the Farc's support. Among these are three ground-based radar systems in the Amazon basin near Leticia, a base at Marandúa, Vicharda, and two others at San José Guaviare and Tres Esquinas. A couple of other radar sties located in Colombia, which are part of the US Air Force Caribbean Basin Radar Network, also have been utilised for PC, including bases at Riohacha and the island of San Andrés (located off the coast of Nicaragua). Besides the ground-based systems, the US provided forward-looking infra-red radar systems for Colombian aircraft.Footnote ⁵⁸

Under ideal conditions, satellite surveillance can spot human activity on the ground at a resolution of between one and nine metres. But this does not mean it can see everything of strategic significance, all the time. For example, dense cloud and fog limit such surveillance, as does thick jungle foliage. Given the prevalence of both clouds and jungle in Colombia, the impact of this limit should not be underestimated. Under such circumstances, guerrillas are naturally drawn to cloudy areas and to leafy jungle terrain. Further, even under good conditions, satellite surveillance cannot necessarily distinguish guerrillas from other people, except for telltale signs. Prior to such surveillance, the Farc was able to travel in large units sometimes numbering over 100 troops. But groupings of that sizes have rendered them conspicuous to satellite surveillance, forcing them to travel in less obvious bands of 25 or so. Moreover, while aerial surveillance can detect human movement in wide open spaces and in parts of the countryside, it cannot peer into buildings. Thus, there has been a propensity for guerrillas to move more extensively into clandestine urban terrain, with universities evolving into favourite targets.

Beyond the high-tech wizardry of aerial and other electronic surveillance, it is important to emphasise that human intelligence is at least as important in the Colombian case. In fact, it is the mixture of high-tech and human surveillance that is key. There are a number of dimensions of human intelligence associated with PC. One of these is elite spying units, which have mixed US and Colombian personnel. Further, an intriguing component of President Uribe's extensive reliance on human intelligence is Plan Meteoro, whereby certain highway travellers have been equipped with panic buttons and other communications devices linked to satellites. This entailed the transmission of information regarding guerrilla activity on the country's highways, which have been notoriously perilous due to rebel control of large swaths of Colombian territory. The purpose was to render the roads safer for public and commercial use, especially during holidays. It was essentially designed to permit freer movement of people and goods and, at least in temporary instances, to reclaim space and transit ways for the Colombian population at large.

More troublesome is a novel intelligence system implemented during President Uribe's tenure involving the creation of what he claimed was 1.5 million informants throughout the country who could phone a toll-free number to report suspicious guerrilla activity. Uribe's plan was brilliant to the extent that it attempted to harness accurate local gossip and to transform it into priceless strategic intelligence. But much of this information appears to have been inaccurate. For example, approximately 3,600 people were arrested based on such information during July 2003 to July 2004, but 80 per cent of them were released after lengthy detentions. Further, the claimed amount of 1.5 million informants is likely exaggerated due to a lack of logistical capacity to deal with that much information. Moreover, suspicions have been raised that many such informants may have been members of paramilitary organisations, and have divulged information to suit their strategic interests such as control over lucrative territory.

A key strategic goal within the context of the RMA is to break the opponent's system of command, control and communications. While that broad goal has not been achieved in relation to Plan Colombia, there is no question that the Farc's mobility and communication system have been weakened by PC. Indicative of this was the surrender in May 2008 of Farc Comandante ‘Karina’, Eldaneyis Mosquera, who was the group's most senior female leader and director of Frente 47. At a news conference after her surrender, she indicated that she had been starving and had not been in communication with the group's high command for years. ‘The decision [to surrender] was made because of the pressure of the army in the area’, she said.Footnote ⁵⁹ Given Frente 47's pivotal position within the organisation, presiding over key operations in Antioquia and elsewhere, the group's apparent isolation that was underscored by ‘Karina’ presumably was a result of the weakening communication system of the Farc in the wake of PC. Beyond that incident, the bombing in Ecuador during March 2008 of the Farc's second-in-command, Raul Reyes, was exemplary of the government's increasing power of surveillance since the implementation of Plan Colombia. Overall, this facet of the RMA as manifested in Plan Colombia has strategically weakened the Farc.

The RMA and the 2008 Farc Crisis

The Farc is far from destroyed and likely possesses the military capacity to continue its armed struggle indefinitely.Footnote ⁸³ But Plan Colombia clearly has weakened the rebel group through its use of key components of the RMA, such as asymmetric warfare, the use of ultra surveillance and intelligence, its reliance on privatised warfare, and so on. Serious blows to the Farc became obvious throughout 2008. The March 1st attack by Colombian/US forces of a Farc base in Ecuador killed the group's second in command, Raúl Reyes, and 24 others. It relied heavily on PC's capacity for ultra-surveillance and heightened intelligence. It was perhaps the hilt thus far of the government's strategic offensive against the rebels, one that demonstrated important new wrinkles. The Colombian/US offensive against the Farc was now thrust into a neighbouring territory. Ecuador represented an easy target for such an attack given the negligible capacity for the country's military forces to hit back.Footnote ⁸⁴ It would be hard to imagine such a manoeuvre, for example, in the militarily formidable Venezuela. Overall, Reyes' death and the more aggressive tone of the Colombian/US forces signalled a debilitation of the Farc's relative power. This was compounded by the death on 26 March 2008 from natural causes of the group's ultimate leader, Manuel Marulanda (born Pedro Marín). Also that month, the youngest member of the Farc's Secretariat, Ivan Rios, was murdered by one of his own bodyguards in exchange for a monetary reward from the government – yet another manifestation of the privatisation of warfare. ‘Karina’ surrendered in May of that year, as observed above.

The next major dent to the Farc's national and global prestige came in July 2008, when Colombian forces with assistance from the US rescued from rebel captivity former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, kidnapped in 2002, and 14 other hostages including three American contractors. Given that these were hostages were prized trophies for the Farc, ones it hoped it could use as pawns to trade for leading guerrilla commandos in captivity, this represented a significant blow indeed to the rebels. Subsequent news reports were filled with related rumours, perhaps the most notable of which was that the US had paid $20 million for the release of the hostages.Footnote ⁸⁵ At any rate, a growing chorus of global forces now demanded that the rebels end its archaic and brutal tactics such as kidnapping. Fidel Castro argued that there is no justification for the Farc to retain an estimated 700 kidnapping victims.Footnote ⁸⁶ Hugo Chávez went further, asserting that guerrilla armies are ‘out of place’ in a Latin America where the Left should and has relied on the ballot box,Footnote ⁸⁷ a view echoed by Ecuador's Rafael Correa and by Bolivia's Evo Morales.Footnote ⁸⁸ What is especially important here is that such criticisms have emanated from Latin America's ‘hard left’, signalling the group's declining prestige and support regionally and globally.

A particularly worrisome possibility for the Farc is that it ‘has serious problems of command and control’, as suggested by Colombia's Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos.Footnote ⁸⁹ As we observed, a central strategic objective of the current RMA is to cripple the enemy's command and control in order to defeat them. But in the case of the Farc, even if its command and control have been debilitated, the group is so dispersed and so militarily potent that it has the capacity to exert punishing military force for years to come. For example, in the period immediately following the government's raid in Ecuador that killed Reyes and others, the Farc responded with several military attacks on pipelines primarily in Putumayo – they had attacked pipelines 27 times in the period January to May 2008, compared to 53 times for all of 2007.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the context of recent doubts about its power, the Farc promised in July 2008 to forge ahead with plans for armed struggle.Footnote ⁹¹ By August 2008, the group's new leader, Alfonso Cano, pledged to spend about $5 to $6 million (US) to reinvigorate the group's communication system and arms supply, and hinted it might consider forming a ‘legitimate’ political party.Footnote ⁹² A new strategy emerged during early 2009, whereby the Farc agreed to release hostages while apparently committing acts of public terror at the same time to demonstrate that such benevolent acts should not be equated with military incapacity. A case in point was a bombing attributed by Colombian authorities to the Farc of a Blockbuster video store in a crowded area of Bogotá that killed two and injured 20 just prior to the group's release in early 2009 of six hostages including the former governor of Meta, Alan Jara.

It is also important to emphasise that the Uribe government has worked diligently to churn out propaganda aimed at making the Farc look weaker than it is.Footnote ⁹³ The government has clearly attempted to amplify its own gains and to exaggerate losses for the Farc. Perhaps the most vivid and disturbing example of this is the recent ‘False Positive’ scandal. It meant the resignation of 30 military officers in the autumn of 2008 due to the army's apparent murder of at least 1,400 of innocent young people – many under 18 years of age – in order to make false claims that these cadavers were Farc soldiers.Footnote ⁹⁴ Thus, public government assessments of the Farc require the utmost scrutiny. Beyond this, the ‘Fasle Positive’ horror signals another crucial aspect of the Colombian war: all competing belligerent forces in Colombia, including the state, have committed horrific human rights abuses, and it is hard to count any of them as the ‘good guys’.Footnote ⁹⁵