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The TransBorder Project, directed by Tom Barry, is a program of the
Center for International Policy. As a senior analyst at CIP, Barry specializes in immigration policy, U.S.-Mexico border issues, and homeland security. He writes for CIP's Americas Program.

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Rethinking Politics – Ingrid Betancourt and the FARC

July 9, 2008
 
Tom Barry
 
The movie-script liberation of Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages by a Colombian military team last week not only boosted the popularity of conservative President Uribe to stratospheric levels – 91% by the last survey.

 

But the rescue also highlighted the moral bankruptcy of the region’s leading leftist leaders: Cuba’s  Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega – all of whom have expressed solidarity with the “leftist” FARC guerrillas. In late May, Ortega expressed his condolences over the death of FARC leader Manuel “Tirofijo” (Sureshot) Marulanda at a gathering of Latin American leftist leaders and parties, calling him “our brother.”

 

In the wake of the rescue, Castro and Chávez backed away from previous support of the FARC and called for the Colombian guerrillas to release all hostages. While their newly critical positions are welcome, it did little to improve their reputation. FARC’s terrorist tactics, involvement in narcotics trafficking, and cruel treatment of hostages are nothing new, yet Latin America’s leading leftists at best remained silent. FARC was part of the dwindling band of socialist revolutionaries – “brothers” all – and public criticism was reserved for the Right and the United States.
 
Ingrid Betancourt continues to define herself as part of Latin America’s left. “I always will be of the left,” she said in a BBC interview, “But not the left of fools and the naïve.”
 
What are the politics of the left?

“I believe that one should be where the people are suffering,” says Betancourt, “where one is able to make a difference.”

She contrasts her political approach with that of Uribe.

“From an analytical viewpoint, the problem continues to be the same in the sense that between Uribe and me there is a fundamental difference, which is that Uribe conceives of the Colombian problem as a crisis of violence, of security, and that security crisis, that violence is what produces social discontent

“I believe the opposite. I think that because there is social discontent, there is violence.”

Where is FARC situated along the ideological spectrum? Not rightist certainly since it arose as a leftist and rural response to a civil war that pitted the two main factions of the country’s elite against one another. After more than four decades its rhetoric has changed little, sounding much like other leftist forces in the hemisphere. Its violent response to the Colombian state is, it claims, a legitimate and necessary response to widespread social discontent and injustice.

But over the years, and especially since the 1980s, FARC has made a business of revolutionary struggle – supporting itself from kidnappings, expropriations, and taxing and participating in the drug trade. Although a spent ideological force, FARC may survive as bands of guerrillas living off of drug profits and ransoms.

Betancourt says that FARC has devolved into the “extreme right of some left of prehistoric times. But leftists they certainly aren’t.”

While FARC, like Peru’s Sendero Luminoso, is an extreme case, it is certainly not the only left-identified organization that seems now to belong to prehistoric times.

The challenge before the Latin American left is to redefine itself rather than stubbornly holding on to outdated and misguided ideologies and tactics. The FARC and its ideological brothers belong in the dustbin of history.