The FARC's revolutionary failure
Description
Few armed revolutionary groups can claim to have emerged organically and almost exclusively from their nation’s peasantry, and much less to have waged an effective war on their state for sustained periods of time. Among these few lay Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Ejercito del Pueblo (FARC)-EP (1964-2016). Like many attempted social revolutions, the FARC emerged from the ruins of class-centered agrarian contention moving into the modern world. However, unlike other guerrilla groups in Latin America, the FARC was able to maintain an active military presence in 60% of their nation’s territory while providing state-like services in many of the spaces it occupied. To fund these initiatives, the FARC created an effective tax regime on virtually all productive assets under its control, allowing it to wage effective war on the state, rightwing death squads, and unaffiliated narcotraffickers that contended for control over the countryside. The FARC’s relative strength, helped prolong the conflict until 2016 when peace accords were finally drawn between the FARC and the Colombian government, representing the organization’s formal abandoning of revolutionary strategy. Considering this outcome, this dissertation seeks to answer two interrelated questions: First, if the FARC was considered such a strong revolutionary force with ample connections to the nation’s peasantry, why did it fail to develop a successful revolution? And second, if the most powerful, armed, non-state actor in the conflict disarmed, why does targeted violence against social movement leaders continue? This dissertation argues that the FARC was not afforded opportunities for revolutionary success due to class-based changes happening to the nation’s peasantry for the greater part of the 20th century. These include: (1) changes in class composition amid elite-led state consolidation; (2) typical rural to urban migration endemic to societies in transition; (3) state-led agricultural-export development projects; (4) violence stemming from the Colombian armed conflict, and (5) the coca economy, all of which helped transform the peasantry’s productive connection to subsistence/semi-feudal economic practices via commercial agricultural export-oriented labor and increased migration to urban centers. Continued violence is then posited as a product of many of the same class-based contradictions that hardened into custom.