However, numerous Colombian politicians and military commanders stand divided over holding peace parleys with this terrorist outfit known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Locally, this militant group is called the “Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia” or FARC.
While a former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is known as a fierce opponent of the on-going talks, two dissenting Army generals were relieved of duty for the duration of the investigation quite recently in February 2014, according to the esteemed news agency “Reuters.” One of these two generals was the head of the Colombian Army intelligence.
According to a study by Colombia’s National Centre for Historical Memory, over 220,000 people have died in this conflict till date, most of them being civilians.From 1999 to 2008, the FARC, together with the ELN guerrilla group, was estimated to control up to 40 per cent of the territory in Colombia. This insurgent group, which claims to be a peasant army, has often said it was just striving to help country’s farmers get their due rights.
The FARC has been alleged by the June 17, 2002 edition of the BBC and the January 27, 2011 edition of a prestigious globally-prescribed American magazine “The Economist” to have been involved in kidnappings for ransom, illegal gold mining, killing innocent civilians, production and distribution of illicit drugs.
However, as history has it, the dispossession of Colombian farmland had produced 40,000 landless families by 1961 and by end 1969; their number had crossed the 400,000 mark throughout Colombia.
But these figures neither justify FARC’s claims of being a farmer-friendly revolutionary force, nor do these statistics allow it to wage a war against the state and play havoc with the lives of the local citizens and the law enforcement agencies.
While the violent FARC has been classified as a terrorist organization by the governments of Colombia, the United States, Canada, Chile, New Zealand and the European Union. It still derives a lot of moral support from the governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Nicaragua etc.
The extent of support that FARC enjoys from the neighboring countries can be gauged from the fact that in 2008, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had recognized it as a proper Army and a belligerent force that was fighting against the state for a right cause.
On the contrary, successive Colombian regimes have condemned this organization for kidnapping numerous government ministers, governors and senators etc, and killing many in captivity.
For example, in 2003, FARC had assassinated a governor called Guillermo Gaviria Correa, his advisor for peace and a former defense minister Gilberto Echeverri Mejia.In December 2009, another local state governor Luis Francisco Cuellar was killed by FARC.
And now, since November 2012, it is involved in yet another round of peace talks with the Colombian state.Research shows that for the last many decades, many talks were held between Colombian governments and the FARC militants, but then the dialogue process had somehow hit snags and communication had broken down.
As it is happening in Pakistan currently, numerous Colombian governments over the years and the FARC commanders have been agreeing upon the exchange of prisoners held in captivity on either side.
Just to cite one example in this context, in December 2004, the government of Colombia had announced to pardon 23 FARC prisoners in a bid to encourage a reciprocal move. Earlier in November 2004, the FARC had rejected a state proposal to hand over 59 of its captives in exchange for 50 guerrillas imprisoned by the government.
The year 2006 had seen FARC releasing a few civilian hostages including a German citizen, after holding him captive for five years.In November 2012, the FARC had released four Chinese oil workers. The hostages were working for the Emerald Energy oil company, a British-based subsidiary of China’s renowned Sinochem Group.
And in January 2008, former Colombian vice presidential candidate Clara Rojas and a former Congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez were freed after nearly six years in captivity.In February 2008, innumerable rallies were held in Colombia and across the world, whereby FARC was slated by the protestors and was pressed to release hundreds of hostages.
In November 2013, the Colombian government and FARC had announced that they had come to an agreement regarding the participation of political opposition and would begin discussing their next issue, the illicit drug trade.But talks continue to be held despite an acute shortage of trust and belief on both sides.
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