Colombia rebels mull political future if talks prevail

Colombia's oldest rebel group sees its future as a popular political movement if peace talks with the government manage to bring an end to Latin America's longest-running armed conflict. Founded in 1964 as a peasant-based army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia take up their fourth attempt in three decades to reach a negotiated peace in Oslo next month, raising questions about what's next for the organization. The FARC is now concentrated mainly in rural areas of the south, and boasts about 9,000 fighters, by defense ministry estimates -- half what it did in the 1990s after a series of setbacks inflicted by the army. But troop strength does not matter, said political scientist Leon Valencia, director of New Rainbow, a foundation specializing in studying the Colombian conflict. "The FARC's main emphasis now is not recruitment, but rather social support. They have a structure of some 30,000 people who are very close to it, supporters who are active in the project," Valencia said. The first time the FARC went to the negotiating table, in the early 1980s, several of its leaders demobilized and formed a political party, the Patriotic Union. But attacks, mainly by right-wing paramilitary groups, left some 30,000 of its leaders and members dead. "It is possible for the FARC to join society as an unarmed political movement, since this already happened in another context," Alvaro Villarraga of the Democratic Culture Foundation said, referring to that partial demobilization. That process, however, ultimately failed because there were no guarantees for the safety of leaders who laid down arms, Villarraga said. There is room in Colombian politics for a new movement rooted in the communist FARC if the peace talks yield some kind of security framework that can protect it, he added. Lessons were indeed learned during that first, failed peace process. Ivan Marquez, the FARC's second-in-command and one of the negotiators for the upcoming talks, had rejoined civil society as part of the process and even became a member of Congress for the Patriotic Union. But when the FARC's commander Jaime Pardo was killed in 1987, Marquez took up arms again. FARC rebels do have potential for fashioning a political message without weapons, said Juan Andres Casas, a rebel disarmament and rehabilitation expert at the National University. "They can manage to carve out a political position. They enjoy support," Casas told AFP. "The government has to guarantee their security. But there are many grassroots movements planning to prepare their incorporation into the political spectrum." This year, a far-left umbrella grouping of peasant and indigenous groups, along with students, burst onto the scene, holding a huge march that finished in Bogota. The Patriotic March of some 1,700 organizations renounces the violence that the FARC has waged. "We are convinced that the way to resolve the conflict involves resolving the social, economic and political causes that triggered it," said Marcos Calarca, a guerrilla commander. "We exist because of popular support, and that is our commitment." He said "the struggle for peace means resolving the problems that have us at war." In Colombian politics, the far left is a very small minority with only two parties that have few seats in the lower house of Congress and the Senate. One of them, however, boasts a former guerrilla fighter who was elected mayor of Bogota in January. That man, Gustavo Petro, belonged to another rebel movement, M-19, which laid down arms in 1990. But the scant formal representation of the left in Colombian institutions does not seem to discourage the FARC. "The true left is not limited just to the electoral scene. Rather, it has a living, moving and changing component in the bustling universe of social movements," Pablo Catatumbo, a member of the FARC's main leadership body, wrote last month.