ColombiaChe Guevara era ends: FARC ratifies Colombia peace accord, ending 52-year war

Published 26 September 2016

Colombia’s FARC rebel group on Thursday voted unanimously to approve a peace deal with the government, officially declaring an end to the 52-year war. The insurgent group now prepares to transform itself into a new political party. The title of one article offering an analysis of the momentous even captured it all: “Che Guevara era closes as Latin America’s oldest guerrilla army calls it a day.” “This is an agreement with the last of the great guerrilla movements that emerged in the context of the cold war,” says one expert. “There might be other episodes, but strategically the armed project, the armed utopia, is closing its cycle with FARC.”

The iconic image of Che Guivara, inspiration to FARC and other Latin American rebel groups // Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Colombia’s FARC rebel group on Thursday voted unanimously to approve a peace deal with the government, officially declaring an end to the 52-year war. The insurgent group now prepares to transform itself into a new political party.

The title of one article offering an analysis of the momentous even captured it all: “Che Guevara era closes as Latin America’s oldest guerrilla army calls it a day” (Guardian, 25 September 2016).

“This is an agreement with the last of the great guerrilla movements that emerged in the context of the cold war,” Gonzalo Sánchez, director of the National Center of Historical Memory in Bogotá, told the Guardian. “There might be other episodes, but strategically the armed project, the armed utopia, is closing its cycle with FARC.”

FARC’s birth in 1964 was part of a broader trend seeing armed guerrilla movements springing up in Latin and Central America in the 1960s and 70s. Experts note that with the exception of Costa Rica, every country in Central and Latin America had suffered from assassinations, hijacks, kidnappings, bank robberies, and attacks on military and political targets by leftist guerrillas. The short list would include the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua; the 8th October Revolutionary Movement (MR*8) in Brazil; the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) in Venezuela; the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) and Montoneros in Argentina; the Tupamaros in Uruguay; the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in Chile; the Shining Path in Peru; the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico; and the Paraguayan People’s Army in Paraguay. There were many others.

These guerrillas were among the factors contributing to the bloody civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua – and to brutal repression by military juntas in Argentina and Chile.

The government of Colombia and FARC leaders two weeks ago concluded four years of negotiations in Havana, Cuba, under the auspices of the UN and with U.S. encouragement, to bring an end to the longest war in Latin America, a war which killed 220,000 people and forced eight million out of their homes.

For fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, FARC also collaborated with the notorious Colombian drug cartels, protecting their drug operations for a hefty cut of their profits.