Among the most important moments in my communication with FARC leaders was when we talked in-depth about the topics of a FARC possible unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire before one was declared—and to renew it after a resurgence of fighting—and of potential options which both the Colombian government and FARC could consider to deescalate the armed conflict. Driving factors were and are to save lives and foster a more conducive environment for the peace process.

Citing those reasons, in the second half of December 2014, the FARC declared a unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire. While there were at least some 14 reported small-scale skirmishes, which the FARC claimed where defensive on its part, resulting in the number of killed or wounded in double digits, Pres. Santos said that the FARC had been complying with its unilateral cease-fire, and he ordered a suspension of first-strike aerial bombing against the FARC, as a gesture toward the deescalation of the conflict.

But since early in the FARC’s unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire, FARC leaders were complaining to me about what they said were unnecessary, unrelenting, gratuitous “provocations” and incursions by the military into FARC areas—including some remote rearguard areas where the military had supposedly never gone before—and where they said the FARC was “not bothering anyone,” and that guerrillas had been killed. They said that if these “provocations” continued, they would be “forced” to fight back. The Colombian government view was different: With a Constitutional duty to uphold security in all Colombian territory and with a bilateral “definitive” cease-fire not in place, government troops were continuing (and continue) to go into FARC areas and respond to calls that the FARC was shaking down people (the FARC calls it “collecting taxes”), guarding drug-crops, or other complaints, as they would against any other outlawed group. And it wouldn’t be surprising if some gung-ho military officers wanted to get in their last punches at the FARC before the war ended, to try to burnish their own respective military careers.

Whatever the case, some 11 soldiers of humble origins were reportedly killed in a FARC midnight attack April 14-15, 2015 in the La Esperanza/Buenos Aires area of southwestern Cauca department. Why the attack? The FARC claimed self-defense, as if it were a case of a person firing on an intruder in his or her home. And self-defense, in FARC eyes, could mean that if the Colombian military is attacking FARC units in one location, then the FARC can “counterattack” in another location “to take pressure off” the FARC units being attacked. But the news and images of the dead soldiers, who were sleeping at the time of the attack, outraged public opinion, and the FARC unit’s premeditation of the attack was clear. Some wondered if coca farmers and others depending for their livelihood on the illicit drug trade in that area were wanting the FARC to “do something” to stop incursions by the Army and police against the drug cultivations and installations there, and if this might have had anything to do with the FARC unit’s attack.

Pres. Santos went to the airwaves to announce a resumption of first-strike aerial bombing against the FARC, and on May 21, 2015, a military air strike hit a FARC encampment near Guapi, Cauca, and reportedly killed 26 guerrillas, including FARC member “Jairo Martinez” who had participated in the Havana talks. The FARC responded by declaring an end to its unilateral cease-fire, which it said it had been continuing despite the FARC attack that had killed the 11 soldiers. During the next two months, the FARC launched at least 145 attacks comprising of harassment, ambushes and sabotage, killing some 22 government troops and two civilians, according to the Colombian think tank CERAC. Another Colombian think tank, IDEPAZ, reported 109 FARC attacks during that period, with 18 against the oil infrastructure and 16 against the energy grid.

As clamor grew nationally and internationally to deescalate the conflict, the FARC renewed its unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire July 20, 2015, which it has held to this day, and Pres. Santos re-suspended first-strike aerial bombing.

From reading my reports before the FARC attack that killed the 11 soldiers in Cauca, one would see the urgent, grave warning signs of the highly dangerous, explosive situation building.

In my report dated February 8, 2015, I wrote: “A big concern is how to preserve the FARC’s indefinite unilateral cease-fire. While the FARC has shown a high level of cohesion and discipline in maintaining it so far, it remains fragile in that a potential skirmish or other incident–even if accidental–could scuttle it. The FARC leadership has to keep its rank and file in mind, and as FARC peace negotiator [       ] told me, there is only so much (or so little) leeway that the FARC can take in being attacked by the Colombian military before the FARC’s rank and file–as well as the FARC leadership–get to a point of “enough is enough” and resume offensive operations “to defend themselves.”

What the FARC leaders were complaining about to me was a worry they had before they started their unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire. As I noted in the February 8, 2015 report: “The FARC’s peace negotiators had the worry back then [as they expressed to me before launching a unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire] (and even now to some degree) that if they did (and are now doing) an indefinite unilateral cease-fire, then it could expose FARC troops to being slaughtered, to losing ground militarily, to lessening the pressure on the Colombian government to take the FARC seriously in the negotiations, and eventually to causing atrophy in FARC ranks. (Keeping up offensive combat operations keeps a guerrilla movement sharp, they would say.)” I answered these FARC questions point by point, stressing the humanitarian benefits, the boost the peace process would get, and that facing risks for peace—in a sincere, thoughtful, responsible way—is an act of courage.

Members in the Colombian Armed Forces had their own concerns, as an excerpt from my report dated April 9, 2015—days before the FARC attack that killed the 11 soldiers—shows:

“The FARC’s self-declared indefinite, unilateral cease fire is in serious jeopardy. I mentioned this in previous e-messages to you, but it is literally in the midst of even more fire now. I met with a Colombian Army [          ] colonel Easter Sunday afternoon, whom I have known for 17 years, and he directly handles combat operations. This colonel told me that there is still intense fighting between the military and the FARC in several regions of the country, and that the Army has suffered quite a number of killed and wounded (mostly from mines and snipers). Publicly, the Colombian Def. Ministry says that three soldiers were killed in the past month. The FARC’s peace negotiator [           ] told me that the FARC has suffered over 10 or 20 KIAs since the cease fire.

“The colonel says that the Colombian Army is, indeed, going into remote jungle areas to nail the guerrillas, and that that is the Colombian military’s Constitutional duty.  But he added that the FARC still takes what he described as ‘offensive’ actions against the Colombian security forces with FARC snipers shooting at and sappers laying mines ahead of government troops. (The Colombian government and FARC have agreed to do de-mining by joint-teams with independent observers/experts.) The FARC denies taking offensive actions and says that its actions are ‘defensive.’

“Whatever the case, the fighting is increasing, say separately the colonel and the FARC. The colonel says that while Pres. Santos has suspended first-strike bombing of FARC targets, if the FARC fires upon the Colombian government troops, then air support can be called in to attack the FARC. A possible upshot of this is that the Colombian military can use this clause (loop hole?) to try to draw FARC gunfire by the military or police using ‘recon by fire,’ and then calling in air strikes against the FARC.

“That said, just the suspending of the ‘softening up’ first-strike bombing has affected government military operations, says the Colombian colonel. ‘I am not going to risk the lives of my soldiers on some tough targets without bombing support first,’ he told me.

“Interestingly, the Colombian colonel, a hard-liner all his career, says that at this stage in the Colombian peace talks it would be preferable to have a well-defined, solid, verifiable, bilateral cease-fire, instead of the limbo of a FARC unilateral cease-fire where there is a gray area.”

In early August, 2015, about four months after I wrote that report, Colombian retired general and former chief of the Armed Forces Jorge Enrique Mora, who is a government peace negotiator, was quoted in El Tiempo as saying in a forum, “The unilateral cease fire is a gray zone that generates many worries, especially for our forces.” According to RCN-TV, covering the same forum, Mora said, “Personally, I prefer a bilateral cease-fire, which is what has happened normally in all conflicts…Yesterday, there were clashes, there were Army dead in those clashes with the FARC, which indicates the dangerousness of the unilateral cease-fire.”

So, why not a have a formal bilateral cease-fire now? The FARC has been calling for it, an “armistice,” since the start of the peace talks, to happen as the talks take place. But the government position has been for it to happen as a “definitive” act to end the conflict and hostilities. Pres. Santos’s concern is that if a bilateral cease-fire is not “definitive” to end the war, the FARC could abuse it to refortify itself for an “armed peace,” gain strategic advantage and drag out peace talks indefinitely; and if the talks were to fall apart, the FARC would be stronger to renew its fight.

Moreover, Pres. Santos would not want to see the political opposition trying to spin a non-definitive bilateral cease-fire as a kind of supposed follow-up to former president Pastrana’s failed peace talks’ Switzerland-sized “Distention Zone,” which Pastrana had ceded to the FARC from January 1999 to February 2002, when Pastrana ended the talks, citing FARC violations.

Pastrana’s job-approval ratings plummeted to among the lowest levels ever polled for a sitting president, as critics shouted that the FARC had constantly abused the “Distension Zone” and turned it into a safe haven to grow by up to some 60%, to refortify itself, to hold captives, to execute its enemies, to benefit from drug cultivations, to use as a staging ground for attacks, and to host freelance instructors who were reportedly active members of Spain’s armed separatist group ETA, former members of the Irish Republican Army, or other “internacionalistas” regarding urban combat and explosives training.

The FARC was fed-up with Pastrana, too, saying that Pastrana fumbled the FARC’s olive branch of peace and duplicitously used the peace talks for Plan Colombia to take root and expand and modernize the Colombian Armed Forces and police. The FARC cited an economic recession of historic proportions during Pastrana’s presidential term for helping the FARC to engross its ranks—although Pastrana denounced FARC attacks as undermining the economy. And the FARC blamed its enemies for sabotaging the talks.

The FARC’s late top combat strategist alias “Mono Jojoy,” who was killed in an airstrike in 2011, even singled out US president Bill Clinton in a parable he told me in the “Distension Zone” in 2000. “Mono’s” parable was like this: Pastrana was like a young lady enamored by the dashing FARC. She flirts with the FARC, and the FARC checks her out. However, it turns out that Pastrana has a “husband,” Clinton, who gets jealous of Pastrana getting too close to the FARC because Clinton doesn’t want Pastrana to do for the FARC what Monica Lewinsky did for Clinton, “Mono Jojoy” told me. Thus, Clinton puts his foot down and has Pastrana end his flirtation with the FARC, according to “Mono.”

Pastrana, whose image hasn’t completely recovered to this day, argues that his good-faith peace efforts unmasked the FARC as being triumphalist and not ready for peace in a reasonable way then, and that he bequeathed his Plan Colombia to his presidential successor Alvaro Uribe to push back the guerrillas.

Trying to spin a full bilateral cease-fire as a Pastrana-like “Distension Zone” would be like trying to fit squares into circles, because the “Distension Zone” was not a bilateral cease-fire, but an area demilitarized of government troops for the purpose of having peace negotiations.

But the FARC’s unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire now seems to have practically evolved into an undeclared “bilateral” cease-fire, though still precarious not having a panoply of verification and protective mechanisms that the United Nations via CELAC countries is set to provide upon the signing of an overall peace accord or shortly after. A Western official who interacts with the Colombian Armed Forces and follows the peace process told me that the Colombian military hasn’t been launching offensives now, and that to do so, an order has to come directly from Pres. Santos. “It is basically an undeclared cease-fire,” this official, who prefers to remain anonymous said, though Pres. Santos and his government officials may not view it that way, or at least not say so publicly, if they privately did.

While there may be an isolated, low-level, fortuitous, armed clash on occasion, such as when soldiers go after FARC guerrillas “taxing” civilians, a substantial resumption of fighting between FARC and government troops and more destruction are not in the interests of either the Colombian government or FARC because it could threaten the peace process. But if there were to be a renewal of heavy fighting and damage, like after the collapse of the first FARC unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire, numbers of Colombians wanting a “military solution” against the FARC would spike. As FARC attacks raged after it lifted its first unilateral “indefinite” cease-fire, a high of about slightly more than half of Colombians surveyed in one poll wanted the government to do a military solution. That number has often hovered around a quarter to a third of survey respondents over the three-plus years of the officially announced peace process, and dropping to as low as about a tenth on especially good news.

According to the Colombian Defense Ministry, there are more than 480,000 members of Colombia’s military and National Police, with modernized air power, against some 6,700 to 8,000 FARC combatants armed with basic infantry weaponry and home-made propane-gas-cylinder mortars and some 11,000 to 18,000 FARC “militia” in mainly non-combat active support roles. Those figures of FARC strength are down from Defense Ministry estimates of a FARC peak of about 16,900 guerrillas and 20,000 to 28,000 militia persons sometime between the years 2000 and 2002.

The Defense Ministry says that the ELN has about 1,300 to 2,500 combatants, down from about 4,000 to 6,000 in 2000. And military authorities mention that a dissident rump of the predominantly demobilized Popular Liberation Army (EPL) has about 200 or 300 guerrillas, and that there are some 3,000 to 5,500 members of independent BACRIM groups.

Speaking about a year and half or two after the official peace talks started, a Colombian mid-level intelligence officer tracking the FARC said, preferring to remain anonymous, that his non-public figures pointed to the FARC having as many as 14,000 armed combatants, though a Colombian military-intelligence general discarded that number as too high by double.

The FARC and ELN deny any decline and claim that they have more combatants and “militia” than the Defense Ministry estimates, that their combatant and militia forces can be interchangeable, and that they keep exact figures about them a “secret.”

Just tallying the FARC’s self-declared unit structures of at least 12 fighters called “guerrilleros” to a “squad,” two squads to a platoon-like unit called a “guerrilla” (not to be confused with the single guerrilla individual), two platoon-like “guerrillas” to a  “company” of at least 54 “guerrilleros” (including its two “company” leaders), at least two “companies” to a “column,” and more than one “column” to the next unit up, called a “front,” and the FARC’s affirmation of having more than 60 “fronts,” grouped into seven or eight regional “blocks,” that would add up to more than 12,720 FARC combatants, not including the up to 20 “mobile columns,” which the FARC claims to have. However, defense officials believe that many FARC “fronts” are short or practically “shells.”

Both the FARC and ELN have had significant numbers of guerrillas under the age of 18 in their ranks. But in February of 2015, the FARC upped its recruitment age threshold from 15 years old, which it said was the bottom age limit mentioned in International Humanitarian Law, to 17 years old. And on February 10, 2016, the FARC announced that it upped that age threshold to 18 years old. This announcement appears not to be retroactive to cover those under the age of 18 already in FARC ranks. However, February 21, the FARC reportedly delivered to a humanitarian commission in Arauca department a 15-year-old FARC member as part of the FARC’s stated start to return to civilian society a group of some 13 minors of age who the FARC’s “Ivan Marquez” said had entered the FARC when they were under the age of 15 in the condition of “refugees.” (It is unclear how many of the 13 are still under the age of 15.)

Others and I talked in depth with the FARC leadership about the minors of age issue and getting them out of the armed conflict—no matter in what organization the minors of age were—and FARC leaders explained that by bringing them into the FARC “family,” the FARC has been helping adolescents abandoned in circumstances of misery, some who are orphans, and that those younger than 15 years old were essentially camp followers. The FARC’s Secretariat member “Pablo Catatumbo” denounced the Colombian security forces for trying to “infiltrate” minors of age into FARC encampments to gather intelligence so that the Armed Forces could attack the FARC. The Colombian government denies this.

As for respective budgets of the Colombian Defense Ministry and FARC, before the US dollar soared during the past year or two from about 1,800 Colombian pesos for one US dollar to around 3,300 pesos for a US dollar in early February 2016, the Colombian military budget was about 15.5 billion dollars in Colombian local-currency pesos, and now it would be around 9.1 billion dollars at the time of this writing, with the devaluation, even though the Colombian defense budget received about a seven-percent increase in pesos this year. On top of that, a large part of the United States’ 10 billion dollars in Plan Colombia assistance since 2000 has been for Colombian security forces.

This swamps the FARC’s annual budget. I “guesstrapolate,” based on what I understand to be a FARC company-unit-sized budget that annual non-armament/non-combat operational outlays for the entire FARC may be now at around 109.1 million dollars in devalued Colombian pesos, whereas it would have been some 200 million dollars two years ago before the steep peso devaluation. A year or two ago or so, Forbes magazine estimated the FARC’s annual income at about 600 million dollars, and the FARC denies that.

The FARC keeps its overall budget secret and rejects as “ridiculous” estimates by some of FARC revenues from illegal activities like drug involvement, mineral-mining racketeering, contraband, extortion, and past kidnappings at billions of dollars annually.

The US State Department officially designated the FARC and ELN as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” (FTO) in 1997 and the rightist “paramilitary” United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) in 2001. The United States added the FARC and AUC to the list of “Significant Foreign Narcotics Traffickers” in 2003, citing the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act.

Despite many media stories and judicial charges by Colombian, American, European or other nations’ authorities–who cite what they see as evidence of testimonies, documents, drug seizures, forensics, accounting, photos or video–the FARC and ELN have always vehemently rejected accusations of drug-trafficking, saying that they only have charged “taxes” on coca and amapola crops (the materia prima for cocaine and heroin, respectively), as well as on other business activity of those who can afford it.

As I remember during one of my visits to the “Distension Zone” in 2000, the FARC’s late “Alfonso Cano,” who would eventually become the FARC’s maximum commander before being killed by Army soldiers in 2011, told me: “The illegitimate, corrupt, oligarchical state levies taxes, so why can’t a revolution do so to fight against it for the rights of the people.” FARC leaders have noted that American patriots rebelling against the British crown taxed the population, which the British monarchy and colonial loyalists saw as extortion by outlaws, although the American Revolution and Colombia’s internal armed conflicts have big differences and are not equatable.

The Colombian state and its allies “continue to repeat this lie that the FARC is drug-trafficking because they are enemies and use whatever false propaganda to attack us,” said the FARC’s Ivan Marquez, “and lamentably there are people who accept this lie out of ignorance.”

The FARC’s maximum leader “Timochenko” explained in a recent interview in SEMANA magazine: “In determined moment, yes, there have been cadres of ours [tempted by the drug business]…but I have said: our cadre that allows itself to be absorbed by drug-trafficking is a cadre that is lost. There are many cases of guerrillas of middle-level cadres of members of the FARC whom we have lost. I have always proposed at FARC level the need of much vigilance with the people who are in those zones of drug-trafficking, even moving them. That is a tremendous culture where the people allow themselves to get absorbed. Then, for example, when you say you [the FARC] are drug-traffickers, man, if we were drug-traffickers, then we would not be revolutionaries because it would be something incompatible. We take advantage of the money that moves through those parts, yes, but that we are linked to the business, no. Drug-trafficking is a culture, a vision of life. A drug-trafficker gets money, for the good life, for enjoying it. One as a revolutionary thinks completely distinct.”

The FARC publicly renounced what it calls “retentions” (kidnappings) of economic motivation against civilians, before the inauguration of the formal peace talks, a condition of the Colombian government. Some human rights groups think that the FARC may still be somehow engaged in it directly or indirectly in some cases, which the FARC denies. The FARC justified its taking captives as “retention” for their not paying “taxes,” or as the taking prisoners of war of soldiers, police, “paramilitary” vigilantes or others whom it associates as being part of a war effort against it. In the early 2000s, the FARC was imputed to have committed most of a peak of nearly 3,000 kidnappings reported in Colombia one year during that period, according to Colombian law-enforcement authorities. Official statistics show that reported kidnappings in Colombia have plummeted over 90 percent since then.

Some ask that given the Colombian state’s overwhelming military superiority, why even have peace talks with the guerrillas?

“In reality, if it weren’t for our military capability, the government wouldn’t be talking with us, as it is now,” said FARC peace negotiator “Jesus Santrich.”

A) Because the guerrillas still have a capacity to cause substantial, serious damage. Before its unilateral cease-fires, Defense Ministry reports noted that the FARC was killing most of the about 175 to 300 government troops killed annually (about 700 government troops were reportedly killed in 2002), and the FARC was hammering Colombia’s energy and oil infrastructure, blacking out some rural areas for days and causing serious collateral environmental harm.

The Colombia Defense Ministry claimed that the annual drop from some 700 government troops dead to the low hundreds before the FARC’s unilateral cease-fires was an indication of the military beating the FARC. But an internal FARC document, titled “New Circular (12 Points)” dated February 14, 2010, included in a manual which the FARC showed to me, explains differently the decline in government forces killed: “The Military Forces have accentuated the modality of air bombardment to combat us, among other reasons, because of the enormous quantity of casualties that we have inflicted on the troops in their terrestrial operations. The systematic air bombing is a way of operating cowardly, particularly by military members impotent of confronting revolutionary guerrilla action, [the military air bombing] behind which the North American Pentagon is found, contributing doctrine, instructors, pilots, intelligence, pin-point technology, and great sums of dollars.”

The FARC landed most of its greatest blows from about 1996 to the early 2000s. During that period, when the Colombian Armed Forces was about two-and-a-half times smaller than today and had a fraction of their current airpower, mobility and resources, the FARC routinely interrupted major highways; carried out sabotage, bombings, abductions, and killings against state, military and “oligarchical” targets (including against civilians it saw as enemy collaborators) inside and outside cities and towns. Sometimes back then, the FARC battled government battalions in mountains on the outskirts of Bogota, Cali, Medellin and other cities; assaulted garrisons and outposts, and mauled company-sized army and police units. In November 1998, the FARC captured and held over days the town of Mitu (population census in 2012: 14,112), the capital of remote, sparsely-inhabited Vaupes department, the only departmental capital the FARC has ever seized. During those years was the height of massive “pescas milagrosas” (“miraculous fish catches”) where the FARC would stop traffic along highways, winnow out its catches and hold captive those whom it deemed pertinent.

As things seem now, the FARC would be hard-pressed to re-attain that scope and intensity from 1996 to the early 2000s. But a potentially “radicalized” FARC could conceivably step up its pace, go back to hitting major cities with sporadic bombings and other attacks, and even shift tactics to making a concerted effort to use shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). At least one SAM attributed to the FARC was fired (missing an apparent military aircraft) in western Colombia in 2013, as shown in a You Tube video cited by then-US Southern Command commander Gen. John Kelly in his testimony to a US Congressional committee. But there have been no more reports of fired SAMs. A possible reason for a SAM discontinuance: the missiles are too expensive for the FARC (some US $400,000 per SAM, according to one FARC source, who denied that the FARC had SAMs when I asked him), and that the FARC preferred to allocate that money for other things.

It is important to remember that the eventually killed drug baron Pablo Escobar waged his Medellin-cartel war against the state and enemy drug cartels essentially with a couple of dozen henchman, unleashing an unprecedented wave of terrorist bombings in Colombia’s major cities at a level similar to the Islamic State’s in the Middle East and Europe nowadays. Speaking of the FARC’s capacity for urban actions, while the Colombian security forces—and the “paramilitaries” in the past—have been effective at preventing urban guerrilla attacks and rolling up urban guerrilla cells, the FARC has had and still has significant clandestine urban networks. The FARC urban cells have helped organize protest marches and labor stoppages in major cities. That implies an urban network of substantial size and organization. So, it wouldn’t be far-fetched if the FARC were to have the ability to launch urban attacks of a significant level–even of a Pablo Escobar scale.

The reason that the FARC hasn’t ordered a Pablo Escobar-like wave of bombings is that it sees that it is not in its interests, because such a wave of bombings would kill a high number of civilians and receive national and international condemnation, and almost surely result in the Colombia government ending the peace process. But if the FARC decided that the only way to get the serious attention of the Colombian government and the “oligarchy” to make concessions on FARC “red-line” issues/conditions (like political participation and no jail time) were to take the fight to the cities and against the society “elites,” then the FARC would have the capacity to do it. Between its unilateral cease-fires, when fighting re-flared, the FARC insinuated that it could do this. Remember that in El Salvador, the Salvadoran government, then under the rightist ARENA party, didn’t really buckle down with the then-mostly Marxist FMLN guerrillas to end the war until after the FMLN launched its biggest offensive ever into San Salvador and four other major cities.

B) Colombian Army senior officers, as well as US military officers, have told me that the guerrillas cannot be completely wiped out because of their resilience and ability to replenish their ranks (via forced or voluntary recruitment) and because of the vast expanses in this South American country of approximately 47 million inhabitants and 1,141,748 square kilometers (about 1.75 times the territory of Afghanistan) covered substantially by dense jungles and difficult mountainous terrain, with thousands of kilometers of porous borders with Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. Year after year, over a couple of decades, the Colombian Ministry of Defense claimed that annual FARC losses—totaling killed, captured and desertions—would be several thousand per year. While the FARC doesn’t publicly release figures of its own annual total casualties, it scoffs at the Defense Ministry’s statistics. “Even a fool can see that the Defense Ministry’s numbers [on FARC casualties] are absurd,” one FARC peace negotiator told me. “If you just add them up, we wouldn’t exist, but we’re still here.”

Putting things into context, the government security forces’, “paramilitary”/BACRIM and guerrilla dead totaled altogether per year would range from the high hundreds to about 2,000 or 3,000—a fraction of the peak of Colombia’s homicides one year in the early 1990s when Colombia’s Instituto Nacional para Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses tallied the figure to be over 28,000, some 77 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, during the time of eventually killed Medellin drug lord Pablo Escobar. And that figure was 27,829 in 2002, some 68 homicides per 100,000 taking into account population growth. The peak of dead of all warring factions’ fighters in the late 90s/early 2000s is a fraction of Colombia’s 12,193 murders in 2015, according to police figures.

Colombian former president/now Senator Alvaro Uribe—a largely rightist hardliner whose support was a determining factor for Santos being elected president in 2010—is a fiery critic against these peace talks and feels betrayed by Santos, who was one of Uribe’s five defense ministers, on a number of issues since Santos took over the presidency. Uribe bitterly opposed Santos’ 2014 reelection. Constitutionally barred from running for a third presidential term due to term limits, Uribe and his rightist political opposition Centro Democratico party insist that if FARC and ELN leaders and members who Uribe says committed serious war crimes don’t accept sufficient, proportional jail time and prohibition from holding public office, then no peace accord should be signed with either the FARC or ELN.

The FARC and ELN reject Uribe’s position as tantamount to asking for their surrender and question Uribe’s past for what they (and a number of others who are not guerrillas) say are his alleged links to the world of drug-trafficking and paramilitaries, which Uribe vehemently denies and says are smears against him. While Uribe acknowledges that his family had a friendship with the Ochoa family—whose brothers Jorge, Juan David and Fabio were convicted of being in the cocaine business with the late Pablo Escobar of the Medellin cartel—Uribe stresses that his family only had a mutual interest in horses or cattle and that it didn’t know at the time that the Ochoas were involved in drug-trafficking.

“We cannot and shall not tell our own guerrillas that all of their blood and arduous sacrifice fighting for the people and the highest revolutionary goals is for only to surrender and go to jail. That’s absurd.” Ivan Marquez told me, as I recall. The FARC’s rank and file could end up lynching their own leaders, if they were told to surrender and go straight to prison. The way that the victims’/justice agreement is written, FARC members won’t go to jail if those who have committed serious war crimes confess fully and comply with alternative community-service sentences.

Pres. Santos’ position is that there has to be a “correct balance” where society’s supreme interest to achieve peace happens within the boundaries of a “transitional justice” tailored to the special circumstances of ending the armed conflict, and where restrictions on liberty while doing alternative community-service sentences, without jail time, for those who confess to serious war-related crimes don’t necessarily mean impunity, as Uribe and human rights groups say it does. Pres. Santos argues that it is an injustice to society and thousands of potential future victims and their families to permit war to continue, when its end can be negotiated. (See Section 17: “Smoke-and-Mirrors Impunity or an Historic Brilliant Balance between Peace and Justice in Victims’/Justice Agreement?”)

Ironically, Uribe supported blanket amnesty for the now-defunct M-19 guerrilla group, which demobilized in 1990 and whose former members eventually formed political parties electing former M-19 guerrillas as mayor of Bogota, department governors, Congresspersons and council members. Uribe says that he has changed his mind about blanket amnesty because he has come to the conclusion that its impunity could foment future violence. However, some wonder if Uribe’s blaming the FARC for killing his father has anything to do with Uribe’s change of position. The FARC’s “Pablo Catatumbo” recently publicly denied that the FARC killed Uribe’s father, presuming circumstantial indications against that conclusion. FARC leaders had privately told me before that they weren’t sure if FARC troops did or didn’t kill Uribe’s father. Uribe’s brother Santiago was witness to events of the death of Uribe’s father and blames the FARC.

But the FARC doesn’t deny having targeted Uribe in the past. During his first presidential campaign in 2002, Uribe narrowly survived a bus-bomb explosion against his motorcade in Barranquilla that killed at least four persons, and suspicion was cast on the FARC as being the prime suspect–though in Colombia it is often hard to know who is behind acts of violence. And Uribe’s presidency literally started with a bang. The FARC was attributed to firing home-made mortars at the Casa de Narino presidential palace and nearby Congress building on the day of Uribe’s presidential inauguration–about three rounds hitting the palace premises wounding some guards–and 13 people were reportedly killed and a couple of dozen wounded as landing projectiles burst blocks away.

So, does Uribe think that the guerrillas can be completely wiped out? No. But Uribe is convinced that his policy of “democratic security” during his two presidential terms from 2002 to 2010 was breaking the back of the guerrillas, and he said that if Santos were to have continued it the way Uribe wanted and not “give away the country to terrorism” in Santos’ supposedly mishandling of peace talks, in Uribe’s view, then the FARC and ELN ranks would be substantially fewer, and their leaders would almost all be driven into exile in Venezuela or elsewhere. Uribe argues that Santos had let the FARC resurge militarily, politically and diplomatically.

President Santos rejects this Uribe view. Santos insists that he has built on, expanded and strengthened Uribe’s defense policies and that the military and police during Santos’s presidency have struck the greatest blows against the FARC, killing the FARC’s then-maximum leader “Alfonso Cano,” top combat strategist “Mono Jojoy” and dozens of mid- to upper-level commanders, and that Santos was defense minister under Uribe for the controversial aerial bombing that killed FARC senior-level member “Raul Reyes” in a clandestine encampment just across the border in Ecuador. Uribe retorts that Uribe set the stage for the blows under Santos against the FARC’s “Mono Jojoy,” “Alfonso Cano,” and other FARC commanders.

While Santos boasts that his military blows have been a crucial factor why the FARC is seated at the negotiation table, the FARC responds that it has always been open to peace talks and that just the fact that the FARC has survived the military onslaughts by Santos, Uribe and other Colombian presidents proves that the government cannot impose a military solution. Moreover, the FARC says that it was Pres. Santos who originally sounded the FARC out through a confidential intermediary or intermediaries to initiate peace talks shortly after Santos was inaugurated President in August 2010, although Santos says that the FARC secretly initiated the peace overtures.

What do statistics indicate?

According to the Colombian think tank Corporacion Nuevo Arco Iris, which uses Defense Ministry figures, FARC war actions—including firefights, ambushes, harassment, sniper-fire, activated landmine fields, and attacks against the oil and energy infrastructure—spiked in 2002, coinciding with the end of Pastrana’s peace talks and Uribe’s assuming the presidency August 7 that year, to 2,063 from 825 in 2001. In 2004, that figure dropped to 949 and hovered a bit above 1,000 until 2008, when FARC actions rose to 1,353, and then to 1,614 in 2009, 1,947 in 2010 (Uribe left office August 7 that year), and 2,148 in 2011 during Santos’ first full year as president.

It is important to note, however, that these FARC actions predominantly were small-scale and comprising largely of a change of tactics by the FARC to increase laying landmines as much as tenfold during a decade, say experts, and not of the same intensity or scope of FARC attacks from 1996 to 2002.

In February 2015, Colombian government peace negotiator and former director of Colombia’s National Police, retired general Oscar Naranjo told El Tiempo newspaper that 688 of Colombia’s 1,101 “municipios” (a Colombian word more akin to counties) have some degree of landmines.

While it wasn’t clear in Naranjo’s comments if these included landmines in “municipios” that no longer have FARC presence, that number represents 62.5% of Colombia’s “municipios,” greatly above the statistic of FARC presence given by Colombian then-Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon in July 2012. Pinzon stated that while some 10 or 12 years earlier, guerrillas carried out violent actions in about half of Colombia’s “municipios,” that figure was about 37 predominantly rural “municipios” in 2012, affecting 4.6% of Colombia’s population. But according to think tank INDEPAZ the FARC in 2012 had a presence in 262 “municipios” in 28 of Colombia’s 32 departments. The FARC says it has a presence in all of Colombia’s departments.

In the face of a more than doubling of Colombian Armed Forces’ personnel and the expansion, modernization and enhanced technology of the Colombian Armed Forces’ air mobility, naval capability, infantry, special forces, communications, intelligence, logistics, equipment, night vision, surveillance, electronic intercepts, targeting, firepower and smart-bombs, FARC leaders say the FARC had to readapt and go back to operating in small units (instead of massing light-battalion-sized formations for attacks), and rebuild and expand cells and networks of support in communities. The FARC sees this as a natural cycle of revolutionary struggle where military action is just one component, and overall not the most important one.

What does the Colombian military say about the Uribe-Santos dispute on military status? Before the FARC’s unilateral “indefinite” cease-fires and the progress in the peace process, Colombian senior military officers told me that their orders and the rhythm of combat operations had been similar during both Uribe’s and Santos’ administrations. “We understand that Uribe is in a political campaign, and he is riding the pony that there has been a drop in security, but we are operating about the same as when he was president, and we continue to hit the guerrillas and other illegal groups hard,” said one high-ranking officer in 2014, who preferred to remain anonymous.

That said, Uribe’s perception or misperception (depending on one’s optic) of Santos supposedly allowing guerrilla in-roads seemed to be once shared silently by a large part, if not predominantly, of active-duty military officers, and it still seems to be shared at a significant level, if not by the majority of officers. And this Uribe view appears to continue to carry large sympathy among retired military officers, though some retired generals have been working quietly behind the scenes to try to see how the peace process can be improved and strengthened, from their standpoint.

Many in the military (active duty or retired) reminisce nostalgically of 2002 as what they see as a watershed year when Uribe entered to presidency and set in motion the highest intensity of Colombian military operations up to then, which led to driving main guerrilla forces further away from the cities (though a smattering of urban remnants remained), away from many rural traditional bastions, and deeper into jungle areas. Even so, Uribe’s steadfast rejection toward the current peace talks has cost Uribe some support inside the military, though it is hard to quantify. An Army retired combat enlisted man, who is hopeful for the peace process and says that many of his Army friends agree with him, told me, “It’s time to get this war over and move on. We’re tired of Uribe standing in the way.” However, Uribistas say that Uribe is standing in the way of a worse situation for Colombia and not in the way of a true peace.

So, if the guerrillas cannot be wiped out in current and foreseeable circumstances, then what would be the military strategy to try defeat them (if there weren’t an overall peace accord)? A Colombian Army general told me about a couple of years ago that along with keeping the military pressure on them and keeping them pushed-back to remote areas, “show that they [the guerrillas] are bad and turn the people away from them, so that nobody is with them”—in short psy-ops, public diplomacy and “winning hearts and minds.”

Pres. Santos made a public invitation to Uribe and Pastrana to set aside political and personal differences to join Pres. Santos at the February 4 Plan Colombia commemoration with Pres. Obama in Washington DC. Pres. Santos had been hyping the commemoration as it approached, touting Plan Colombia as one of the world’s great successes, a view echoed by a number of US officials (present and past), some who had a hand in Plan Colombia, and by Democratic and Republican members of the US Congress. According to the White House, the 15-year commemoration of Plan Colombia, which is reported as beginning in July 2000, had to be held in 2016 for scheduling reasons, coincidentally in the midst of the US presidential race and as the Colombian peace process approached the March 23 date aimed by Santos for signing an overall peace accord.

Pastrana showed up to the ceremony and received an honorable mention by President Obama. But Pastrana has been very critical of how Plan Colombia has fared under Pres. Santos, who was a treasury minister during Pastrana’s presidency. While giving himself credit for starting Plan Colombia in conjunction with the United States to help save Colombia from the brink of total collapse, Pastrana lamented in a piece in El Tiempo days before the White House ceremony with Presidents Santos and Obama, saying: “Nevertheless, bent down militarily and taken to be seated at a dialogue table, the FARC obtained the impossible. In Havana, it agreed with the government on the laundering of its business. It agreed on the ceasing of military actions and the end of the eradication of its [illicit] crops. And they crowned it with a declaration of drug-trafficking as a pardonable political crime. The consequences were immediate: The UN reported annual increases of 42% in coca leaf and cocaine. In the time of the talks of Havana, the initial levels of the plan [Plan Colombia] when Colombia globally predominated the drug market returned.”

When Pastrana left office in 2002, there were 102,071 hectares of coca crops identified by the United Nations Office of Drug Control, down from 144,807 in 2001. In 2013, that figure was 48,189, but it increased to over 69,000 hectares in 2014. According to experts, the rise is due to a variety of reasons–including the suspension of aerial-spraying eradication of illicit crops because of court orders over potential environmental and health concerns.

Pres. Santos and the FARC reject Pastrana’s characterization of their partial agreement on the drug issue and respond that what has been agreed to is a more sensible approach (in their eyes) toward the drug problem, whereby the government would put more focus on the transnational drug-trafficking and money-laundering parts of the chain and give local communities more responsibility at their own level to handle the matter themselves, with the national government supervising and keeping its right to intervene, if deemed necessary. Critics worry that allowing communities whose economic life-blood derives heavily from the illegal drug industry could be like putting a cobra in a mice bin.

Pastrana was once on Pres. Santos’ council of external peace-process advisers, before resigning from it citing differences. But some wonder if Pastrana’s stepped-up criticism of Santos’ approach on the peace process may be inspired in part by other reasons. Perhaps an unsaid reason of why Pastrana is critical of Santos’ handling of the peace process may be envy or ego because Pastrana’s efforts of peace negotiations with the FARC during his presidency failed in bitter fashion—whatever one thinks of the Santos-FARC peace process or disputes the reach of its advances. “Pastrana had his 15 minutes of fame, and he failed,” one FARC peace negotiator told me.

While Pastrana’s differences with Pres. Santos didn’t stop Pastrana from accepting the invitation to attend the honoring of Plan Colombia and to hob-knob at the White House, Uribe declined the invitation, saying that there is nothing to celebrate, citing Pastrana’s same criticisms of Plan Colombia.

A senior adviser to Uribe during Uribe’s first presidential term summed things up to me about the Uribe-Santos situation by saying that, in his view, the problem isn’t so much about whether or not to talk with the FARC, but that there is such bad blood between Uribe and Santos, whom Uribe detests as a “vile traitor” and doesn’t want to see getting a Nobel peace prize for what Uribe sees as selling out the country. And Pres. Santos has stuck it to Uribe at times. This former senior adviser, who says that he still meets with Uribe occasionally, thinks that the relationship between Uribe and Santos is irreconcilable, at least now and as far as he can see. In a way, Uribe seems to detest Santos perhaps more than Uribe seems to detest the FARC.

The FARC issued a statement before the White House commemoration of Plan Colombia, calling Plan Colombia a disaster that had aggravated the conflict, ruined countless lives and didn’t solve the drug issue. The FARC statement was no surprise, since Plan Colombia has negatively affected the FARC war chest, and since Plan Colombia’s military component was initially allowed by the US Congress to attack FARC units deemed to be involved in direct drug-involvement, and later widened to attack FARC units not deemed to be directly involved in narcotics involvement.

One area where the FARC, Pres. Santos, Pres. Obama, and US Congress members agree is that Plan Colombia assistance pivot toward peace-process and eventual post-conflict assistance programs, with a heavy social and developmental element. As the FARC’s peace negotiator “Santrich” told me, “Instead of spending 500,000 dollars for a bomb, spend that money for helping a village.”