Pubdate: Sun, 05 Aug 2001
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2001 Houston Chronicle
Contact:  http://www.chron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198
Author: John Otis

SPECIAL REPORT: REBEL HELD

Fighting Among Themselves

Distrust and dislike have long divided Colombia's rebel factions, denying 
them the power to overthrow the Bogota government.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- During a brief visit to Colombia in 1948, Ernesto "Che" 
Guevara smelled trouble.

In a letter to his mother, the man who went on to become a hero of the 
Cuban revolution and a guerrilla icon noted "a tense calm which indicates 
an uprising before long."

Guevara was right.

An alphabet soup of guerrilla groups soon took up arms in response to the 
country's poverty and exclusionary political system.

But unlike the Cuban rebels, who marched into Havana in 1959 after just 25 
months of fighting, Colombia's guerrillas gained traction but never closed 
in on victory.

Analysts point out that internecine conflicts over ideology and strategy 
kept the Colombian rebels from forging a single, potent insurgency that 
might have threatened the Bogota government. On occasion, some of the 
guerrilla organizations even fought one another.

"Each group thought that they could go it alone and viewed the other 
guerrillas as wrong-headed," says Leon Valencia, a former commander with 
the National Liberation Army, Colombia's second-largest Marxist rebel 
group, known as the ELN.

The main cheerleader for revolutionary solidarity in the region was Cuban 
President Fidel Castro, a kind of godfather for the Latin American left who 
dispensed military aid and moral authority to fledgling rebel outfits.

"For Castro, the need for close cooperation of all revolutionary forces, 
preferably under a single command, was more important than ever," writes 
Jorge G. Castaneda, the foreign minister of Mexico, in his book Utopia 
Unarmed. "Where there had been unity, revolution had triumphed; where unity 
had been absent ... it had been defeated."

Although Cuba initially had close ties to some Colombian rebel groups, it 
never played a dominant role in the South American nation's war. Colombia's 
guerrillas sometimes trained or treated their wounded on the island, but 
they rarely depended on the Castro government for funding. Instead, they 
financed their movements through extortion, kidnappings and involvement in 
the illegal drug trade.

Autonomy created new problems, says Carlos Franco, a former leader of the 
People's Liberation Army, or EPL, a Colombian rebel group that largely 
disbanded in 1991.

"It degraded the conflict, since the guerrillas get their money by 
targeting civilians," Franco says. "And second, there is no overriding 
authority to give them advice."

As the country's oldest and largest insurgency, the FARC, or the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, has tended to dismiss its 
revolutionary brethren as misguided upstarts.

In turn, many of the intellectuals and university students who led rival 
guerrilla organizations considered the FARC a band of slow-witted peasants 
and pawns of the Communist Party, says Walter J. Broderick, a former priest 
and longtime Colombia resident who has written two books about the 
country's rebel movements.

FARC guerrillas sometimes attacked units of the EPL as well as those of 
other rebel groups. Founded in 1967, the EPL was made up of pro-Chinese 
Marxists who had split from Colombia's pro-Soviet Communist Party, which 
backed the FARC.

"We had to deal with a lot of aggression from the FARC," Franco says. "We 
always viewed the FARC as an arrogant force that wanted to impose its will 
over all the other rebels."

Among the reasons that FARC fighters Jaime Bateman and Carlos Pizarro left 
in 1972 to form their own guerrilla army -- the April 19 Movement, or M-19 
- -- was their frustration with the FARC's obsession with gaining control of 
the countryside and its refusal to take the war to the cities.

Nationalist but non-Marxist, the M-19 was the only Colombian rebel group 
based in the cities. It had a flair for publicity and cultivated a Robin 
Hood image by stealing dairy trucks and passing out milk in poor Bogota 
neighborhoods.

Similar to the way Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of Mexico's Zapatista 
rebels, has seduced many people with his poetic pronouncements, the M-19 
struck a chord with middle-class Colombians. Referring to several types of 
Latin American music, Bateman once compared the revolution to a fiesta.

"We have to nationalize the revolution, place it beneath the feet of 
Colombia, make it a pachanga, do it with bambucos, vallenatos and cumbias, 
singing the national anthem," he said.

Although the M-19 had about 1,000 fighters and wide support in Bogota and 
other big cities, it never managed to gain a foothold in rural zones. As a 
result, the M-19 proposed a merger with the FARC in 1988.

"The idea was to form a single guerrilla army, like they did in El 
Salvador," says Congressman Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 leader, referring 
to the way five rebel groups united in El Salvador in the 1980s to form a 
tenacious fighting force that nearly seized power.

"Both the FARC and M-19 would have benefited. We could have launched larger 
offensives, and victory would have been much closer," Petro says. But the 
FARC would have none of it.

A few years earlier, the charismatic Bateman had been killed in a plane 
crash, and the M-19's image had been tarnished by its disastrous 1985 
takeover of the Palace of Justice in Bogota. When police SWAT teams tried 
to retake the building, fires broke out, and more than 100 people, 
including 11 Supreme Court justices, lost their lives.

"We came to the conclusion that we were going to die of old age in the 
guerrillas and decided that it wasn't worth it," says Antonio Navarro 
Wolff, a former M-19 commander who now serves as a congressman.

In an effort to make peace with the government, various rebel groups formed 
unified negotiating committees in the late 1980s and early 1990s, even as 
they continued to fight on their own. After several rounds of talks, 
however, the negotiations broke down.

In the end, Franco says, each guerrilla group pursued separate peace 
initiatives.

The rebel organization that made the most successful transition to legal 
politics was the M-19, which abruptly disbanded as a guerrilla group in 
1990. In elections that year for a special assembly charged with rewriting 
the Colombian Constitution, the M-19's party won 28 percent of the vote, 
more than any other political group. Navarro Wolff ran for president and 
finished in a respectable third place. He was later appointed health minister.

A year later, the main body of the EPL, weakened by the deaths of several 
top commanders and reduced to 2,000 fighters, signed a peace treaty with 
the government. A handful of its members later won mayoral elections in 
former rebel strongholds.

Today, a few hundred EPL dissidents continue to pull off kidnappings in 
northern Colombia but rarely engage in combat.

The FARC also tried its hand at politics. In 1984, the FARC agreed to a 
cease-fire and helped found a leftist party called the Patriotic Union, 
which won hundreds of local and national offices.

But unlike the M-19, which disbanded before jumping into politics, the FARC 
refused to disarm. Thus, the extreme right viewed the party as a Trojan 
horse for the guerrillas.

Suddenly, says Bruce Bagley, a Colombia scholar at the University of Miami, 
former FARC fighters were making decisions about budgets and road 
construction that directly affected conservative ranchers and businessmen.

The backlash was furious. Funded by drug traffickers and landowners, 
illegal right-wing paramilitary squads assassinated as many as 3,000 
Patriotic Union members between 1984 and 1992. The dead included two of the 
party's presidential candidates.

Today, FARC leaders point to the demise of the Patriotic Union as proof 
that Colombia's political establishment will never allow the emergence of a 
strong leftist party. They say the M-19's party has adopted centrist 
positions in recent years and has lost much of its support.

On a secluded mountain farm in southern Tolima state, a FARC commander who 
gives his name only as Geronimo dismisses the M-19 and EPL as ersatz 
guerrilla groups that sold out the revolution.

"Those other guerrillas never had a real military strategy," says Geronimo, 
as he leans back on a chair and clips his fingernails with a Swiss army 
knife. "We are the only opposition left, because everyone else has been 
liquidated." Not quite. Now 36 years old, the ELN fights on.

Inspired by the Cuban revolution, the ELN was founded by university 
students and Roman Catholic priests who espoused liberation theology, the 
radical church doctrine that the poor have the right to rise up against 
their oppressors.

In the early 1970s, the Colombian army nearly routed the ELN, reducing the 
movement to a few dozen members.

The rebel organization regrouped in the 1980s by pulling off kidnappings 
and extorting oil companies. It now has about 3,000 fighters.

The ELN and FARC have long viewed each other as rivals and have 
sporadically clashed over territory. Last year, there were reports that 
FARC fighters had executed some ELN commanders in Antioquia state.

At times, however, units from both groups have fought together.

Now, the ELN is attempting to launch peace talks with the government.

Some of its members have already given up the fight.

"I realized that, through armed struggle, we couldn't change anything," 
says Valencia, the former ELN rebel who disarmed in the early 1990s. 
"People feel the effects of the war but see no possibility of a guerrilla 
triumph. The revolution no longer has any prestige attached to it." 
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