A Bunch Of Crooks On The Run.(Point of View)(Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)

With the death of its leader, the band faces extinction. It would be high time. They've degenerated into criminals.

Early in 1964, a group active during La Violencia--a period of extreme violence and turmoil that wracked Colombia during the 1950s--launched a peasant uprising in what became known as the "Republic of Marquetalia," a rough-and-tumble backwater of western Colombia. Small farmers and day laborers rose up in arms against the government and rich landowners. Needless to say, the "Republic" didn't survive; Regis Debray, the French revolutionary and theoretician then affiliated with Fidel Castro, denounced it as a form of "passive armed self-defense," and the experiment didn't last long. Yet its founder--Pedro Antonio Marin, also known as Manuel Marulanda Vele and Tirofijo ("Sureshot")--lived on, until his death two months ago. The news, confirmed only last week, may well mark the beginning of the end of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the guerrilla movement he went on to found and the last Latin America rebel band linked to the glory years of Che Guevara, the Colombian priest Camilo Torres, the Nicaraguan intellectual Carlos Fonseca, the Argentine journalist Jorge Massetti, the Uruguayan union leader Raol Sendic, the Chilean martyr Miguel Enriquez and the Brazilian Communist Carlos Marighela. They all died long ago, but Marulanda made it to 78, finally felled by a heart attack (according to his comrades). With his death, the FARC may also be on the verge of extinction. It would be high time. The FARC has long outlived its era; as the years passed, it lost its revolutionary fervor and degenerated into a criminal band that finances its operations through the drugs and kidnappings, forcibly recruits child soldiers and uses mines and bombs against civilians.

The high point of Marulanda's career was probably in 1999, when Tirofijo was invited to a meeting with then President Andres Pastrana and Gabriel Garcia Marquez--a meeting the jaded peasant fighter decided not to attend. After that it all went downhill for Marulanda, especially after President Alvaro Uribe's accession to power in 2002. Uribe pursued a policy of "democratic security" during his unprecedented two terms in office. This campaign has done less than expected to reduce drug trafficking and the cultivation of cocaine, and has not always been waged with full respect for human rights. But Uribe has managed to disband the right-wing paramilitary groups that had been set up with the complicity of the Colombian Army. He's also forced the FARC to retreat from the center of the country toward regions bordering Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador, and may be on the verge of defeating them.