Changing the dynamic of the war, a major military development that started in Uribe’s presidency, and for which Uribe lobbied, was that the United States provided the Colombian Armed Forces smart-bomb kits via a then-covert joint Central Intelligence Agency-Pentagon “black op” that was eventually revealed in a Washington Post front-page story citing anonymous US and Colombian sources shortly before Christmas 2013 when I was in Havana meeting with the FARC leadership. The FARC was not happy with the news, and one of its peace negotiators, who came along with a FARC support member, asked me to translate the story to them, which he uploaded on his lap-top computer, and I did as I read it for the first time, aloud for them to hear my translation into Spanish.

While the article caused a media buzz in Washington DC, Colombia and other Latin American countries, it wasn’t surprising to the FARC, as one can deduce from the FARC memo I cited above. The FARC has known or assumed as obvious that the CIA, in conjunction with the Pentagon, for decades has provided weaponry, communications gear, intelligence intercepts, targeting, and advisers to help Colombian government forces. To the FARC, that is “old news,” But what the FARC leaders found of particular interest in the article was that it reported a “black ops” secret budget of an undisclosed amount operated outside US Plan Colombia funding. “Black operations, black operations!” exclaimed indignantly the FARC peace negotiator when I translated the term into Spanish.

While those pin-point air strikes have killed key FARC leaders, the FARC has a saying: “Guerrilla dead, guerrilla replaced.” And the FARC’s “collegial” form of leadership adapts where the killing or loss otherwise of any of its top leaders doesn’t decapitate it. The FARC’s central chief command, the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), of 25 members and 6 “suplentes” (back-ups) is the maximum decision-making body, presided over by a Secretariat of seven members and two “suplentes.” The leader of the Secretariat, elected by the EMC, is perhaps more accurately described as a chairman. “Timochenko” was elected the Secretariat head, after soldiers killed “Alfonso Cano” in 2011. “Alfonso Cano” had become Secretariat chief after FARC founder “Manuel Marulanda” died reportedly of natural causes in 2008. Votes either in the EMC, whose members are selected in a caucus fashion among FARC “fronts,” according to FARC rules, and/or in a “National Conference,” comprised of delegates from FARC “fronts,” make important decisions—such as regarding policy, doctrine, strategy, tactics, logistics, personnel, and local, regional, national and international relations. The FARC wants to have a new National Conference to discuss the peace process. The last was reportedly in 2007.

“The Colombian military has gotten cocky. It thinks that it has won the war. But they’re drinking the Kool-Aide,” a US military officer in Bogota told me, in the early part of my peace-process efforts. “The FARC can disperse its forces and bring them back together for attacks at its choosing. As long as it is surviving, it is ‘winning.’” Yes and no.

What does the FARC win by hanging out in the jungle? “They are just waiting for a bomb to fall on their head,” said in a newspaper interview Antonio Navarro Wolff, who was once a member of the now defunct M-19 guerrilla movement and who later was elected governor and senator.

Not denying battlefield reverses, the FARC, for its part, claims to have fought off Uribe’s and Santos’ offensives, that there are natural battlefield ebbs and flows, and that it can continue fighting another 50 years, if need be. However, the FARC insists that its desire for peace is “unbreakable,” as Pres. Santos insists, too.

In over a half-century of war, no Colombian warring group is clean of committing horrors, and there are ample examples to point fingers. Human-rights groups blame “paramilitaries” for committing the big majority of massacres in Colombia’s armed conflict. Up to some 60% to 80% of war-related killings in Colombia were imputed to “paramilitaries,” according to some human rights groups, while the guerilla groups were imputed with about 15% to 30% percent, and the government security forces rounding out about all of the rest.

Carlos Castaño, the leader of the AUC who was reportedly murdered by a handful of his own cohorts in a power struggle supposedly involving his own brother Vicente, justified killing civilians whom the “paramilitaries” viewed as dangerous guerrilla supporters or as guerrillas passing themselves off as civilians because, if not, they could give the FARC information to attack “paramilitaries.” “Why wait until they come to kill you and your people? I have a responsibility to protect my people,” he told me in rural northwestern Colombia in 2000, as I recall, when I was working as a producer on a TV project for the Discovery/Travel channel’s “Robert Young Pelton’s the World’s Most Dangerous Places.” Human rights activists say that this logic has been at times cited when guerrillas have carried out “ajusticiamientos,” executions, of their enemies and when members of security forces have taken the law into their own hands and “disappeared” suspected guerrillas.

Colombia’s largest newsmagazine SEMANA asked the FARC’s “Timochenko” in a recent interview: “What is your opinion when more than 5 million Colombians dressed in white go out to shout no more FARC? Didn’t that raise a reflection in the FARC about the validity of its armed struggle?”

“Timochenko” is quoted as responding: “Reflection, yes, one reflects. Of how they [the Colombian state, “oligarchy” or other anti-FARC forces”] are capable of constructing in the imagination of the people from half-truths. I am not going to say from lies, but from half-truths. That is the part in which we in certain measure are at a disadvantage because it has been achieved to impose on the Colombian society and the world a distorted narrative of the conflict. Half-truths are grabbed, half-truths are magnified, and it stigmatizes us. That is the challenge that we have now in this process: try to arrive to an objective and realist reading of that which has been the confrontation. And the part that corresponds to us: we have committed errors, we have made mistakes. We never developed the war for generating terror at the population, at the society, we have developed the war as a political objective. Then, you are not going to find ever a guideline in that sense. There have been cases, but they have been punished.”

 

“Timochenko” acknowledged that the past FARC policy of “retention”/kidnapping resulted in a “very grave” political cost for the FARC. Said “Timochenko” in the SEMANA interview: “It is a method of financing that was justified in a determined moment. We needed to finance ourselves and found that instrument, which really isn’t the most humane, and we tried to correct it in the time of Belisario [during the FARC’s first peace-process attempt, with Colombian President Belisario Betancur, whose term was 1982-86)]. But as the process wasn’t developed as it was proposed, we returned to the confrontation. But there is a moment in which we said: it is necessary to stop this.”

“I hate that word ‘retention,’” says Fernando Almirez (a fictitious name used due to his fear of violent reprisal), almost crying, who tells a heart-wrenching story of how his farmer father was taken away and murdered in 2002. “It isn’t part of my vocabulary. It is just a cynical way to camouflage kidnapping. The FARC seized my father and killed him the same day, but the commanders of the area told my family he was still alive and had us deliver money to them. When the FARC started passing by our farm in 1988 or 1989, they would ask for a goat, and we would give it to them. The paramilitaries later came, and they were brusque, demanding that we give them things, like paying their tavern bills. We had no choice but to comply. Whenever armed people appear asking for favors, no matter who they are, it is coercion, right? A local politician falsely told the FARC that my father was a paramilitary collaborator, and that is why they killed him.”

Adding that atrocities have been committed by individuals of all warring groups, Fernando recalled that while he was once invited to an Army Reserve meeting years ago, he was horrified as an active-duty officer boasted that he unashamedly supported “paramilitaries” and had burned two captured guerrillas to death.

In 2013, I mentioned the case of Fernando’s father to FARC peace negotiator “Jesus Santrich” in Havana and that the victim’s son would like to see FARC leaders in jail for at least 10 years. Santrich replied that family members of the FARC had been killed, too, and that the FARC is open to review its actions for possible mistakes. “This is precisely why it is imperative to achieve peace and stop this terrible cycle of war. Because if everyone continues to take an eye for an eye, then we all become blind,” said “Santrich,” who is blind from genetic eye-degeneration, except for a point of light in his left eye, he said, not helped by years in the jungle.

The biggest single incident of killing attributed to a FARC unit was when at least some 70-plus civilians were reportedly killed in “collateral damage” in 2002 inside a church hit by a make-shift propane-cylinder mortar projectile launched by FARC guerrillas fighting “paramilitaries” in the village of Bojaya, in northwestern Colombia. The FARC called it a horrible accident. A FARC commission led by FARC Secretariat member and peace negotiator “Pastor Alape” was allowed by the government in 2015 to travel to the area to privately ask residents for pardon, and Pres. Santos says the Colombian government owes Bojaya an apology for not sending its troops there in time to protect it.

“If soldiers and paramilitaries weren’t shooting at us from civilian areas, there wouldn’t be mistakes like that,” said a guerrilla to me. The military and “paramilitaries” had also made that same argument when civilians were killed in cross-fire, blaming the FARC for using “human shields,” which the FARC denies.

Asked why the FARC didn’t hold a public ceremony to apologize in Bojaya, the FARC’s “Timochenko” replied in SEMANA magazine: “We have proposed that all the actors of the conflict come to agreement and do a great act of national contrition. Even more, we go further. We convene all sectors to make a pact of ‘never more.’ Never more the utilization of arms in the resolution of the political and social conflicts of Colombia. We are willing for that. What we are not willing for is to go to settings where they put us against the wall and take things which are given out of context.”

“We have responded to a war that they [the Colombian state, “the oligarchy,” and “paramilitaries”] have imposed on us, and obviously in a war there are collateral damages,” said FARC peace negotiator alias “Rodrigo Granda” in a British Broadcasting Corporation interview. “Look, for example, when the United States launched the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The criminal state of Colombia is responsible for the death and the mourning of our people. We have been victims of that attack and of that violence of the Colombian rulers.”

While the Colombian government and great swaths of the Colombian populace blame the FARC for widespread mourning, Colombian military officers, and separately, “paramilitaries” had also made references to the United States dropping atomic bombs on Japan in explaining, if not justifying, the “messiness” of war. “You Gringos like to talk self-righteously about human rights, but the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and is hypocritical,” said Carlos Castaño, raising his horse voice and waving his arms, as I recall from our conversation.

The FARC has made clear that its goal remains being to achieve power, though it says that its future is to try to do so via the ballot box in an electoral system it wants to be fortified with measures “to level the playing field” and make amends for what it sees as political impediments or disenfranchisement. FARC leaders know that “armed struggle” won’t achieve its goal of winning power and is figuratively and literally a dead end where a smart bomb could fall on them in the jungle at any given moment. The FARC doesn’t see this as a defeat, because it has always said that its quest for power is a journey that has multiple components—including social, political, diplomatic, public relations, and until now military.

States Article 1 of the FARC’s guiding statutes: “The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Army of the People, as the most elevated expression of the revolutionary struggle for national liberation, is a political-military movement that develops its ideological, political, organizing, propagandistic, and guerrilla armed action, conforming to the tactic of combination of all forms of struggle of masses for power for the people.”

Pres. Santos, who is from a wealthy family that once owned and is still connected to Colombia’s largest newspaper El Tiempo, calls the conflict “anachronistic” in a Colombia that in his view and that of many has dramatically improved since 1964 when the FARC’s late founder Pedro Antonio Marin, “Manuel Marulanda Velez,” and at least 40-some other peasants formed the FARC against what they denounced as an oppressive, abusive government and “feudal” system. In his 2014 reelection campaign Pres. Santos painted a rosy picture of an official inflation rate lower than three percent (now it is about 7.5 percent and felt higher on the streets with Colombia’s currency devaluation and the El Nino weather drought effects), and an official unemployment rate low by Colombian standards of between 7.8 and 9-something percent (still approximately in that range or a bit higher). But the FARC continues to underscore severe social injustice, especially for the marginalized “masses” of peasants and urban workers who eke out a miserable existence on a new 2016 minimum wage of the equivalent of about US 210 dollars per month, calculated at Colombia’s sharply devalued currency exchange rate at the time of this writing, and many earn less than that. According to the FARC, the peasants and lowest-wage urban workers have become “invisible” to most of the rest of Colombia.

The roots of the FARC germinated in an era known as “La Violencia,” when an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people were killed roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s as respective supporters of the politically dominating Conservative and Liberal parties carried out assassinations, massacres, and destruction against each other. As a FARC peace negotiator explained it to me, residual violence and abuses pushed the Liberal party-raised “Marulanda” and his coterie of campesinos to rebel. They complained of the stealing of their lands and livestock by large land owners in cahoots with Conservative party supporters and military and police officers, said the FARC peace negotiator.

The FARC adopted Marxism-Leninism and waged war against what it viewed as an oligarchical economic structure with huge disparity between rich and poor and against the political establishment that had formed the “National Front” in 1958 aimed to end La Violencia by alternating Conservative and Liberal parties in the presidency every four years until 1974 when the Liberal and Conservative parties faced off in general presidential elections. The respective party whose turn it was every fourth year of the National Front offered the general electorate a slate of presidential candidates from its own party from whom to choose, and third parties had to run their candidates through either the Liberal or Conservative parties.

While the state and varied segments of society branded “Marulanda” and the FARC as bandits, thugs, and subversives, the FARC made inroads in rural areas neglected by the state and eventually in some urban student associations and labor unions.

Born at the height of the Cold War, the FARC garnered solidarity from the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and other Communist-bloc countries, and the United States sent military and economic aid to the Colombian government. It is unclear how much material support the FARC came to receive from its international Communist allies, as the FARC prides itself on “self-sufficiency,” and by the 1980s, several smaller Marxist guerrilla organizations vied for international support. However, the FARC landed its greatest combat blows years after the collapse of Communism in Europe and while Cuba was reeling from the loss of Soviet subsidies.

Some observers note that the FARC doesn’t seem to be as publicly vocal about Marxism-Leninism as in the past. When I asked one FARC peace negotiator about the FARC’s Marxist-Leninist ideology in view of eventual FARC participation in elections, he replied, “If there has been anything that has kept the FARC unified and in existence for 50 years as a guerrilla movement against such great adversity, it is its Marxist-Leninist ideology.”

Said “Timochenko” to SEMANA: “What we are not willing [to do] is to renounce our ideas, our political ideal, the conception that we have of the world, of life.”

But revolutions can adapt and take different approaches, as seen in other Latin American countries, such as in El Salvador where the Marxist former guerrilla movement FMLN moderated after becoming a legal political party, eventually getting elected to the presidency. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, a retired officer of the Soviet KGB, has become publicly highly critical of the defunct Soviet Union’s founder Lenin.

Another FARC peace negotiator told me, “We are not asking for something unreasonable, we just want to see a civilized, fair country that functions well, where everyone can prosper.” He cited today’s Chile as an example, with its social and democratic opening since the end of the rule of military strongman Augusto Pinochet.

If one takes the time to read the FARC’s political statements, there are a number of things that mirror planks in the respective platforms of the US Democratic and Republican parties. Before I met with a Colombian former presidential candidate after the 2014 elections, I was asked to write a list of areas of apparent coincidence between the FARC and this candidate—and between the FARC and Uribe, for that matter–and my list had 13 points, including, for example: political campaign reform; fair access to state and public-sector media; safeguards against government misuse of funds; support  and incentives for private enterprise, especially for small businesses, with fair regulation; credits, financing, technology and training for rural development; the right to private property; promotion of foreign investment, with safeguards against rapacity; and no “mermelados” (no “marmaladed” or “sweet-greased” politicians).

Said “Timochenko” in his SEMANA magazine interview: “This is not a process that goes moving against the business community. It is not a process that goes moving to overthrow the Colombian state, it is a process that is trying to generate the conditions so that in Colombia some minimum transformations are produced so that we stop killing each other for the ideas that each one defends. That simple.”

But Uribe warns of the FARC potentially getting elected to power, then supposedly undermining democratic institutions to impose “Castro-Chavismo.” in reference to Cuba’s Castro brothers and Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez.

It would be antidemocratic to block the participation of peaceful political parties on the “what ifs” of speculation on possible usurpation (which theoretically could come from the Right, the Left or any political quarter), and Uribe isn’t suggesting blocking a FARC political party. But the FARC notes that Uribe’s proposal to bar from running for or holding public office guerrillas involved in war crimes or other forms of violence, apparently including the killing of soldiers in fighting, is a sophism to exclude FARC leaders and the predominant majority of its members from competing in elections.

Political scientists and historians say that Colombia’s own particular, idiosyncratic circumstances, social composition, history and culture have a number of differences from Cuba’s and Venezuela’s, and that “Castro-Chavismo” appears to be unlikely to emerge on Colombia’s horizon. And if there were well-founded worries about Constitutional, democratic institutions being at risk, that would be reason to pass laws, reforms or other measures to safeguard the Constitution, correct flaws and obsolescence, and strengthen democratic checks and balances and freedoms.

According to public opinion polls, the FARC favorability/approval ratings are in low single percentage digits–which the FARC disputes, citing questions of polling methodology and other variables—and pundits dismiss as highly remote the chances of the FARC being elected to the presidency in the foreseeable future. But Uribe was polling at around two-percent approval when he started his victorious presidential run for the 2002 elections.

When asked in opinion polls if one is for peace, the vast majority of Colombians consistently respond yes—though not necessarily via the Havana peace negotiations, with at least one recent poll showing a majority of respondents disapproving of the way Pres. Santos is handling them. When asked if one would support a peace accord if that meant impunity, a similar majority says no. Polls show that the predominant majority of those surveyed want FARC leaders to spend at least some time in jail and not be allowed to be elected to Congress, the presidency or any public office. The FARC rejects these premises as non-starters and dismisses the polling about these premises and other polls that put the FARC approval rating in low single percentage digits as being stacked against the FARC in a “rigged” context where people recoil at FARC war actions portrayed by “biased establishment media” which the FARC complains hasn’t reported fully and fairly the FARC’s side of the story.

Arguing that armed rebellion isn’t justified, the Colombian government and others say that there has been enough democratic opening in Colombia for the FARC to lay down its arms–as other leftist guerrilla and rightist “paramilitary” vigilante groups have done over the past 25 years–and that the “armed struggle” is only adding to suffering, poverty and social injustice in a country exhausted by violence.

“I say, those who don’t believe in the armed struggle, man, let’s help to create the conditions so that it isn’t necessary,” said “Timochenko” in his SEMANA interview.

Like many sectors spanning the Colombian political spectrum which don’t espouse “armed struggle,” the FARC complains that the political, social and economic playing-field is tilted steeply in favor of powerful big-money interests, elites, “political machines,” and entrenched clans at local, regional and national levels, which dominate media, institutions, and commerce. The FARC stresses that when it tried to participate in electoral politics in the 1980s as part of its first of its several attempts at peace negotiations, leaders and up to some 5,000 members of the Union Patriotica political party (UP), which it supported, were murdered by “paramilitary” forces and elements of the state security organs, and that there are still cases of government troops or bands linked to them killing civilians either suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers or simply as “false positives” passed off as “guerrillas” to get ill-gained rewards and merits.

The Colombian government retorts that over 1,000 “false positive” complaints were made to Colombian appropriate authorities during the past dozen years or so (the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch says there were as many as 3,000 cases between 2002 and 2008), that there have been over 100 convictions, and that the Colombian government condemns massacres and crimes on any strip and that it is pursuing justice. The Colombian government–along with victims’ rights groups and others–say that to this date the FARC, the ELN and an assortment of past demobilized left-wing guerrilla and right-wing “paramilitary” movements haven’t completely faced up to their respective killings and kidnappings of political figures and thousands of people. The FARC says that the time for that is in a Truth Commission and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace that it and the government have agreed to in the peace negotiations and which is to start taking effect after an overall peace accord is signed.

FARC guerrillas from bottom to top have an apparently deeply ingrained psychological dependence on their FARC-issued personal firearms as their ultimate self-protection, and this appears to be having a substantial influence on the issue of the FARC’s eventual “laying down of weapons” and incorporation into legal civilian society.

This evidently profoundly ingrained psychological dependence of the guerrillas on their own individual firearms is not surprising since it is taught to them from when they enter the FARC that their weapons are an extension of themselves, that a guerrilla’s firearm is like his or her spouse, and that it is his or her only real defense. I saw this to a large degree in the Central American guerrilla movements, but not to the apparent extent of the FARC’s very strong feeling on this.

The past decimation of the Union Patriotica feeds this FARC psychological dependence on its weapons, the FARC points out. The FARC doesn’t trust the Colombian state alone for the FARC’s security. The FARC leadership thinks that Pres. Santos (or a future Colombian president) could possibly double-cross the FARC, like former president/now Sen. Alvaro Uribe says that Pres. Santos did to Uribe, which Pres. Santos denies.

Observed “Timochenko” in SEMANA: “The permanent fear that accompanies one in this stage is that we are going to make a mistake, that is the fear. And that we don’t achieve an accord that stays well protected, and that puts at risk the implementation of the agreements. And the normal fears of any person is to arrive to a different setting. Independently, our activity has always been political, but always confined to the jungle, in the mountains. We have always thought that what’s important is to be right in the decisions we take. That is the principal fear. Because, well, the fear that suddenly they kill one, that is the fear of everyone.”

Being negotiated now is where and how FARC guerrillas will be gathered in route to the leaving the war behind. An example of danger is what happened in the hamlet of Chengue, Sucre department. In 1991, the small guerrilla group Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT) of some 200 militants signed a peace accord with the government in the neighboring village Don Gabriel, during a ceremony studded with speeches of a harmonious future. “The government made promises to develop the area and make it a model for peace and prosperity. But the government didn’t fulfill its promises and abandoned it,” said a one-time resident of Don Gabriel. In 2001, “paramilitaries” with long memories entered Chengue and massacred at least 28 residents suspected to be supportive of guerrilla groups.

And there is the case of members of the EPL who demobilized in 1991 and formed an organization called Hope, Peace and Liberty (Esperanza, Paz y Libertad). Up to 200 of them were killed, it was reported, from 1991 to 1995. An unclear number of their killings was attributed to the FARC. The FARC’s late “Raul Reyes” reportedly said that they had sold out to the “paramilitaries” and Colombian security forces “to betray their own revolutionary movement.”

“When they [FARC members returning to civilian life] are back in their villages,” said an agricultural developer, “they will be killed here and there, because people don’t forget the bad things that they did.”

To address this potential of reprisal attacks, the FARC has talked of Campesino Reserve Zones, which a law passed in 1994 allows and a half-dozen have reportedly come into existence since (unrelated to the peace negotiations). The idea would be that these areas, which are designed to have campesinos develop state-owned rural land and wilderness, could put FARC members who return to civilian life and their families to work on reforestation and environmentally friendly agriculture development. But some worry that the FARC could abuse Campesino Reserve Zones to form autonomous “little republics” like little “Distension Zones,” which the FARC denies, saying that the state would have a presence.

“Regarding autonomy, this has been discarded clearly by the government delegation,” Colombian chief peace negotiator Humberto de la Calle wrote in an article published in El Tiempo newspaper April 19, 2015. Humberto didn’t discard the idea of FARC post-conflict presence in Campesino Reserve Zones and observed that the idea needs more study, but that the some nine million hectares of land mentioned by the FARC to be possibly made Campesino Reserve Zones goes way beyond the scope of land practical to develop as agriculture. But FARC peace negotiators say that Humberto, a lawyer and former Colombian vice president, isn’t a farmer and almost all of them have a farming background and that even deserts can be agriculturally reclaimed.

Whatever is decided, security has to be paramount.

Back in April of 2013, during my first trip to Havana, I asked the FARC peace negotiators about the FARC potentially leaving its weapons in some sort of custody of the United Nations or some other similar entity–which is how the issue is being talked about now–as well as receiving from the United Nations or a similar entity food, lodging and other transitional living-expenses support in an eventual demobilization and post-conflict.

An upper-middle-level guerrilla passionately, irritatedly took issue with both of those ideas back then, saying that a guerrilla’s rifle is attained through lots of sweat and blood, that many revolutionaries died for their right to bear arms and to rebel against tyranny (in the FARC view), and they won’t let go of them, and that guerrillas are self-sufficient and don’t want to lose their independence by becoming financially dependent on others. One of the other guerrillas interjected and said that “obviously” the use and need of weapons as an instrument for political aims would cease to exist in times of peace, and therefore weapons would be laid down. But he insisted, too, in the definite need for security guarantees in a post-conflict.

So, this is not like a United States soldier who is issued his or her weapon and who has no problem, nor hang-up, to let go of it when he or she leaves military service.

Whatever the technical mechanism is selected for the FARC’s “laying down of arms”—whether storing weapons in stages as benchmarks are met, or all at once, in the custody of a third party, such as the UN, in either Colombia or a third country—it should be designed to try to give peace of mind to everyone (including to those who oppose these peace talks), not only for physical security but that the accords will be implemented (after ratification) and that Colombia’s freedoms will not be violated.

And what about the Colombian military in a post-conflict? The FARC says that in a post-conflict, the Colombian Armed Forces should be reduced and that the military mentality of a “National Security Doctrine” originated during the Cold War be scrapped. The Colombian military rejects as “absurd” the assertions that the Armed Forces’ doctrine is used to repress the population and that the Armed Forces are living in the past. And Pres. Santos has said that the Colombian military will not be reduced in the foreseeable future because there are other outlawed groups to combat. Another reason in Santos’ calculus may be that reducing the Armed Forces in the early stage of a post-conflict could lead to unemployed soldiers perhaps being tempted into criminal activity, such as what happened to Central America’s combatant forces after their respective armed conflicts ended. Also, it would cause irritation among an officers corps that don’t want to see their budgets cut. What could be done is to employ those budgets for increased construction, development and civilian-support projects.

The FARC’s political-military structure has shown high levels of cohesion, due in great part to its “no-nonsense” Marxist-Leninist discipline. Evidence of this is precisely its unilateral cease-fires, which have been rated by independent or government entities of holding up over 95% in some categories. (Not covered by the unilateral cease-fires are what Uribe calls the “less visible crimes” of drug-involvement and extortion.)

That said of FARC cohesion, there is a varying degree of autonomy in the FARC ground units known as “fronts.” The “fronts” have to obey FARC Secretariat and Estado Mayor Central leadership orders and guidelines, but how the “fronts” carry out orders and guidelines can have some flexibility and creativity at times. And there have been cases where FARC “fronts” haven’t informed everything to the high command—whether unintentionally, or due to communications technical disconnects, or intentionally because they feel that the Secretariat could reprimand them over something. According to a FARC source, when the FARC’s late founder “Manuel Marulanda” ordered an investigation to find out what happened in the killing of Uribe’s father, FARC units responded that they couldn’t find out anything, in that area where a number of armed groups operated.

However, a FARC investigation into the execution-style killing of African-descendants rights activist Genaro Garcia last August 3—initially denied by the FARC’s “Comandante Alfonso Cano Western Block,” which had said in an August 16 communique that it wasn’t its organization’s policy to attempt against the life of social and political leaders—found that “the death of ethic leader Genaro Garcia disgracefully compromises our units,” tweeted FARC Secretariat member and peace negotiator “Pastor Alape” about eight or nine days later. Garcia had reportedly received alleged threats since October 2014 from elements of a FARC “mobile column” that if he continued his activism for peace zones free of combatant forces and against drug interests that he would be killed. “There will be justice,” “Pastor Alape” said in his tweet.

While there may be some degree of grumbling from time to time inside FARC “fronts” (which happens in about every military or guerilla organization), it is not “dissidence” per se.

The FARC’s response to internal dissidence or rebellion can be “the most drastic,” a FARC peace negotiator told me. Drastic measures could include execution after a FARC “war council” tribunal process. What if a FARC “front” were to try to go rogue? If that were to happen, then the FARC’s “mobile columns” could be dispatched to put the rogue “front” into order, this FARC peace negotiator said.

The Western official (cited above), who follows the peace process, doesn’t discard the possibility of potential FARC dissident groups continuing to fight against the government after an eventual overall peace accord is signed. But he says that he thinks that the FARC will remain cohesive at a high extent. Because if someone inside the FARC tries to get out of line, “he gets killed,” said this Western official, although FARC organizational statutes have an array of disciplinary measures. And FARC wartime “drastic” measures would by definition have to end in its peacetime mode.

The above doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be some splinters or individuals of the FARC who go into a “post-conflict” phenomenon of organized criminal activity, perhaps with some veneer of political motivation. And, given that society overall has a fractional percentage of common criminals, it is almost inevitable that some individuals of the FARC may peel off into individual criminal activity, not as part of any organization, in a post-conflict.

What percentage(s) of the FARC may splinter off into organized criminal groups or into individual common crime, or could be siphoned off by the ELN, if not continuing as a new guerrilla movement against the state, after the signing of an eventual overall peace accord between the Colombian government and FARC? It is impossible to put a precise figure on that because there is no comprehensive scientific surveying of this question—just anecdotal guesstimates—but one could surmise that it would be lower than that of demobilized Colombian rightist outlawed “paramilitary” groups, given FARC cohesion, discipline and ideological structures. According to reports of Colombian government reintegration agencies, up to 25% of demobilized “paramilitaries” had some kind of brush with the law after demobilization, and up to 10% were estimated to have “recycled” into BACRIMs.

The FARC’s “Timochenko” told SEMANA magazine that 100% of the FARC’s “fronts” would incorporate into civilian society, but that there could be one percent of guerrillas to fall away. “I don’t discard that one or another ‘muchacho’ may stray. That is normal,” he said.

There is no concrete evidence of particular FARC “fronts” being out of control of the FARC high command. But a rancher who sees FARC guerrillas pass at times through his properties in central or southern Colombia says that there is a bit of “uncertainty” among FARC rank and file about what will happen to them after an overall peace accord materializes. They are worried about their personal future. There is a bit of tough talk among some that they can continue to fight on, if need be. But that could just be natural bravado for internal consumption.

The rancher, who has lived through the Colombian conflict for decades, told me that if the peace negotiations produce a good, solid deal that takes care of FARC members to their satisfaction, or at least to an acceptable degree, then about all of them would follow their leaders on it. But if not, there could be significant splintering. The rank and file have confidence and hope in FARC leaders’ negotiating abilities, indicated the rancher, but the rank and file still await what the final result will produce.

If an overall peace accord wasn’t acceptable to them, some wonder if there may be a phenomenon of what could be called “FARCRIMs,” similar to BACRIM groups, even perhaps forming alliances with BARCRIMs.

Precautions by the FARC leadership to prevent any internal rupture or splits have included “educating” the FARC rank and file about the peace talks, with visits to FARC “fronts” by FARC emissaries and by continual radio, internet and other communications means. Commanders and political commissars of every FARC unit have a responsibility to keep FARC troops informed. FARC Secretariat member “Joaquin Gomez” flew with assistance of the International Committee of the Red Cross and permission of the Colombian government from Havana in January reportedly to make a two-week trip to his area of command in southern Colombia precisely to update the rank and file.

But Pres. Santos suspended these FARC visits, when on February 18, images circulated in Colombian media and social networks of the FARC’s “Ivan Marquez,” “Jesus Santrich” and “Joaquin Gomez” in the small town Conejo of some 7,333 inhabitants in the Guajira department in northern Colombia, where they and armed guerrillas were mingling with civilians and carrying out what the presidential palace said were political activities that supposedly didn’t comply with the government’s conditions to allow FARC peace negotiators to visit guerrilla encampments. Said the presidency’s communique: “By instructions of the President of the Republic, the visits of FARC delegates to their encampments to do pedagogy about the [peace] accords stay suspended. For the government, a fundamental rule of this agreement is that there will be no politics with arms and in that measure, this is an unacceptable violation.”

Colombian Interior Minister Juan Fernando Cristo said in El Tiempo newspaper: “This is a screw-up of the FARC in face of the confidence that the government and a good part of the Colombian population have generated toward it,” noting that the FARC had fulfilled government conditions in the four previous visits to other areas and that the “abuse” in Conejo feeds critics of the peace process. The mayor of the southern town of San Vicente del Caguan, Humberto Sanchez, reportedly said that the FARC’s “El Medico,” “Romana” and “El Paisa” had carried out proselytizing with armed guerrillas in the village Brisas del Diamante February 6, but that didn’t cause a government stir at the time.

The FARC leadership responded that it didn’t see talking with civilians about the peace talks as “armed proselytism” or as something prohibited in the protocols for such visits. The FARC called on the government to chill out and surmount this episode and condemned “an unjustified controversy raised by the most noted spokespersons of the war-mongering right-wing,” presumably referring to Uribistas and strong peace-process critic, Alejandro Ordonez, Colombia’s Inspector General (Procurador General) on public-service disciplinary matters, among others, who blasted the FARC visit to Conejo as a threat to Colombian institutionality.

Said an excerpt of the FARC communique: “After the manipulated argument of armed proselytism, it is being attempted to impose isolation of our delegation and the prohibition of interacting with different sectors of society interested in knowing the developments of the [peace] process. Inexistent commitments cannot be argued in agreed protocols by the parties [the FARC and Colombian government] for the moving of FARC delegates to Colombia, with the goal of socializing the advances in the [peace] process with guerrillas and the masses who have historically accompanied us, [and] not recognize the right of free information that all citizens have.”  (As of the date of this writing, days after Pres. Santos called on the International Committee of the Red Cross and representatives of “guarantor” countries Norway and Cuba to take the FARC delegates back to Havana, the FARC’s “Ivan Marquez” and other FARC peace negotiators are reportedly still in Guajira department as arrangements are still to be made on logistics of transporting them back to Cuba.)

Other FARC measures to prevent internal rupture are to keep FARC members active in political and cultural training and civic-action. One FARC peace negotiator told me that a big factor for the FARC to keep control of its members in a post-conflict is to canvass and register where they live and what they do and to harness them into productive activities to further FARC goals as a legal political/social movement.

According to a high-level international humanitarian diplomat, the rank and file and middle levels inside the FARC and Colombian government security forces are not prepared yet, for absorbing an eventual overall peace accord/”post-conflict. Changes of mindsets and attitudes, as well as extensive educational efforts, appear to be needed by the forces of all warring entities and Colombian society in general, said the humanitarian diplomat.

A US official, reflecting speculation I heard separately some time ago by Colombian high-ranking officers, thinks that the FARC, once entering the legal civilian world, could perhaps have some sort of surreptitious connection to “residual” armed or unarmed groups which would allow the FARC supposed access, with plausible deniability, to possibly benefiting from things like illegal drug revenues and maybe to pressure covertly for its political goals. The FARC leadership rejects this possibility as false speculation from recalcitrant elements in sectors against the peace process.

When the now-defunct M-19 guerrilla movement demobilized, a quite small fraction of its combatants apparently moved into the FARC or ELN. Maybe some FARC combatants who wouldn’t want to give up guerrilla life now could think of going into the ELN. But what would they gain starting anew in another organization, especially given that the ELN started its own preliminary, exploratory peace talks, even if the ELN talks are currently on the rocks?