Chavez and the FARC-The Unveiling
By Douglas Farah
This weekend Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez publicly defended Colombia's FARC rebels as a "true army with a political project that must be respected and negotiated with.
Coming on the heels of his belatedly successful efforts to free two hostages (leaving 750 or so still in hands of the group), Chavez unveiled his role as defenders of an armed group that primarily lives off of drug trafficking and kidnap-for-ransom.
"They are insurgent forces that have a political project," Chavez said in a marathon speech to lawmakers. "I say it even though someone could be bothered by it."
He demanded that the outside world stop referring to the FARC as "terrorists" and embrace them as rebels with a cause.
It is a Marxist-Leninist cause that has long-since run its course. Even when I was spending time with the FARC in the late 1990s, they had, in a pragmatic and capitalist way, abandoned any pretense of Marxist egalitarianism or ideology in the field.
I have covered many insurgencies in Latin America, including the FMLN in El Salvador; the Contras in Honduras/Nicaragua; M-19, FARC, EPL and ELN in Colombia and the Tumpac Amaru in Peru. There was indeed a time when, whatever you thought of their ideologies, there were ideologies and principles impelling the revolution (or counter-revolution) forward.
Those days are gone, and have been for decades in the case of the FARC, which largely refuses to recognize the historic reality of the collapse of the world-wide Marxist movement. My full blog is here.