Colombia
The Forgotten War
Army soldier on patrol in former FARC territory. January 2011, Santa Marta mountains, Northern Colombia.
Writer: James Jones. Former UN advisor for the Andes (Colombia, Peru, Bolivia) on rural development as a drug-control tool, James Jones is a social scientist (Ph.D. Social Anthropology, M.S. Economics) with over 40-years of experience in 19 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. He was awarded a two-year Global Security Grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the effect of U.S. aid on (1) the armed conflict and (2) drug control. Photographer: Laura Beltrán Villamizar, Photo and Art editor at Revolve.
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Among today’s numerous internal armed conflicts, few are as little-known as the one in Colombia. Yet it is among the world’s oldest. The main insurgency— of a dozen to emerge in Colombia in the second half of the last century—is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (a.k.a. FARC). Debuting as a peasant insurgency in 1964, its roots go back a quarter century to land conflicts on an agricultural frontier.
Governments have negotiated with these insurgencies since the mid-1980s, reaching settlements with all but FARC and the Army of National Liberation (ELN), founded in 1964 by Cuban-trained urban intellectuals. Illegal narcotics today partly fuels but does not explain the insurgencies. Right-wing paramilitaries and criminal bands have joined the weakened
yet resilient FARC and the smaller ELN, forming a hash of shifting alliances. All parties, including public security forces, egregiously violate human rights. Civilians are in the crossfire of three commingling wars — on insurgency, on drugs (led by the U. S.), and today on “terrorism.” The wars spill across national borders, threatening regional stability.