A Year After the Reyes Killing: Lessons Learned From the FARC
By Douglas Farah
Although a few days late, it is worth looking back at the year since Raul Reyes, the second in command of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) was killed in a permanent camp he had set up a few kilometers across the Ecuadorian border.
Not only was Reyes the first member of the FARC secretariat killed in more than 40 years of war, but he was well established enough to have 600 gigabytes of information on the hard drives and computers that were also captured. For an interesting look in Spanish at the international structure of the FARC see this interactive map in Semana magazine.
The result has been a severe weakening of the FARC, once the hemisphere's most feared guerrilla army that had, in recent years, drifted into terrorism, drug trafficking and kidnappings as its chief way of sustaining itself.
The documents provide an unprecedented look into the correspondence and inner workings of the FARC, its relationships with governments (Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Libya etc.), its business development and aspirations, its ties to specific drug trafficking organizations, such as that of the Norther Valley, its political strategy and the creation of its front groups, and much more.
The first lesson is that the FARC, as a prototype of self-financing, non-state actors, had used the drug money to greatly expand its influence across Latin America and into Europe. These groups almost always find ways to link up with other groups, both religious and secular, because they need the same "shadow facilitators" to operate. My full blog is here.
