FARC: Terrorists or not?
First off, final in mid January? Weird. Secondly, Terrorism is define as "The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims." So this mean that any and all armed forces that have a political endgame are engaging in terrorism. Third, I found this article:
THE EVOLUTION OF THE FARC. By: Molano, Alfredo, NACLA Report on the Americas, 10714839, Sep/Oct2000, Vol. 34, Issue 2Which seems pretty unbiased and interesting, I will post it below:Section: REPORT ON COLOMBIA A Guerrilla Group's Long History Colombia's largest rebel organization is deeply rooted in a legacy of class conflict.
Fierce battles, often characterized by extreme cruelty, marked the early twentieth century in Colombia, as land-hungry peasants and their reformist allies faced off against the country's landowning oligarchy, which was backed by the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The land owners and Church leaders, along with peasants under their control, were organized as the Conservative Party; other, reform-minded peasants and their allies were known as Liberals. On the rich and violent soil of those conflicts lie the origins of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's most powerful present-day guerrilla group.
From 1930 to 1946, a series of Liberal Party-run administrations, referred to in Colombian history as the Liberal Republic, inaugurated land reform that restricted ancestral privileges and unleashed furious political opposition from the Conservatives. After the internally divided Liberals fell in 1946, a new Conservative government used political violence to regain the oligarchy's lands and remain in power. Then Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a charismatic Liberal and land-reform movement leader, was gunned down in Bogota in 1948. In response, popular insurrections broke out in the capital and in virtually every city where the Liberals were strong. The assassination unleashed a decade-long heightening of the old conflict. The new strife was known simply as La Violencia. Between 1948 and 1958, La Violencia took the lives of more than 300,000 Colombians.
To subdue the Liberal uprisings, the government gave weapons to Conservative peasants throughout the country, as well as backing from the National Police. At the same time, thousands of Liberal peasants armed themselves against the Conservative government. On the eastern plains, peasants backed by the Liberal Party, with assistance from Communist Party activists, managed to form a 10,000-man army that inspired the formation of small guerrilla groups throughout the country. One peasant guerrilla who emerged from the Liberal uprising was Pedro Antonio Marin. Later he would come to be known as Manuel Marulanda Velez, or "Tirofijo" ("Sure Shot"). Today he is chief commander of the FARC.
In 1953, an anti-Communist military strongman, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, came to power by force, backed by elements within both traditional parties and--significantly--by Washington. Once securely in power, the General decreed an amnesty which was welcomed by the armed peasants of the eastern plains and by many Liberals and Conservatives as well.
In 1955, a military operation was launched against rural regions that remained strongholds of agrarian guerrillas who had fought in the name of Gaitan, and where Communist guerrillas were also concentrated. Backed by Washington's National Security Doctrine and a $170 million U.S. loan, Rojas Pinilla began bombing guerrilla and opposition peasant positions. The guerrilla movement tried to dig in and hold out in the highlands, but was ultimately forced to retreat to the jungles of the Andean foothills. In those regions, Marulanda, joined by Jacobo Arenas, a charismatic Marxist ideologue who described himself a "professional revolutionary," organized a community based on economic self-management and military self-defense. This was the first of the guerrilla bases that later came to be known as "Independent Republics." When Rojas Pinilla began flirting with the idea of prolonging his rule, however, the Liberals, who had hoped to win the next elections, withdrew their support. At that point anti-Rojas Pinilla demonstrations spread throughout the country, and many were violently repressed as the government accused the Communists of disturbing public order.
In 1958, the Conservative and Liberal elites brought La Violencia to an official end with a National Front that allowed the two parties to share public offices and alternate in the presidency. But the arrangement did nothing to resolve the underlying land conflicts, and violence continued in the countryside. In 1964, the army attacked the "Independent Republics" of Marulanda and Arenas by land and by air with 16,000 soldiers, and captured the encampments. But they had already been abandoned: Some 43 guerrillas, including the two leaders, had fled and taken refuge in the mountains of the southwestern state of Cauca. Later that year, they founded the FARC in the same area.
Seeing that it would be impossible to break through the rigid political and agrarian structures using legal means, the opposition declared an armed rebellion. During the same period other guerrilla forces, the National Liberation Army (ELN) in 1964 and the People's Liberation Army (EPL) in 1967, were created, and the big landowners dominated the country's economy.
In the 1970s, the National Front was still dominating political life, and on the economic front, the government of Misael Pastrana (1970-1974) adopted a rural development model that aimed to eliminate all obstacles to free investment in the countryside. This led to concentration of land ownership, the undermining of small-scale peasant producers and the rise of peasant proletarianization. Because of Pastrana's program, thousands of desperate peasants were propelled into both organized and spontaneous invasions of rural properties. On the Atlantic Coast, for example, peasants invaded the large haciendas common to the region and distributed the land among themselves. Property owners, backed by the area's aggressive political bosses, responded with public and private force, and succeeded in recovering their land. Pastrana's economic development model also drove many peasants to the cities, raising urban unemployment and setting the stage for the great National Civic Strike of 1977 and the Draconian Security Statute of 1978 that drastically reduced the right to protest and organize.
At the same time, there was repression of the peasant movement, expulsion of small tenants from the lands they cultivated and, in general, expansion of commercial agriculture to less populated parts of the country, as well as colonization of unused lands. Many of the most popular destinations lay in the same remote areas where the guerrillas were strong and where they constituted the only authority. During this period the FARC consolidated its influence, opened some new areas, and focused on training military leaders. These were the days when many students, intellectuals, workers and peasant leaders joined the guerrilla straggle.
Between 1970 and 1982, the FARC grew from a movement of only about 500 people to a small army of 3,000, with a centralized hierarchical structure, a general staff, military code, training school and political program. Meanwhile, in the areas of colonization, the colonizers' situation was desperate. Bereft of all institutional support, they lived as permanently displaced peasants. This is exactly what led them to embrace the profitable cultivation of coca. No legal crop offered them the advantages that coca still does: the ease and economy of growing an Andean-Amazon plant that needs no fertilizers or pesticides, a ready market of local traffickers, a fixed price, and constant demand.
At first the guerrillas tried to resist growing coca: They suspected that it represented a kind of underground "imperialist" invasion, and they worried that peasants who became prosperous would stop supporting the revolutionary struggle. But the guerrilla leadership soon realized that banning coca would mean losing peasant support to the authorities. This realization marked the birth of the infamous gramaje, a coca-trade tax that is nothing less than guerrilla-imposed extortion of drug traffickers and prosperous coca farmers. The guerrillas' rapprochement with coca also led to the belief that they are traffickers--narcoguerrillas. That notion is false, however. Cultivation of illegal crops was established in the colonization areas not simply because of weak army presence, but because the colonists were on the brink of ruin. And the guerrillas were in the colonized regions long before coca cultivation appeared. Their growth was due mainly to the repression unleased against popular protest, and by the growing impoverishment of the population--not to their participation in the drug trade.
Since the early 1980s, the history of the FARC has been a history of peace negotiations. At the beginning of his presidency, Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) named a Peace Commission, and talks began between the insurgents and the government. The government's strategy was to offer to legalize the FARC's political activity and to convert their military force into a political party. In 1984, the FARC renounced kidnapping, and the parties agreed to a general, verifiable ceasefire. This led to the formation of the Patriotic Union (UP), a legal political party originally affiliated with the FARC and supported by the Communist Party and other groups on the Colombian left. The UP gained significant parliamentary representation in the 1986 elections.
Meanwhile, the Sumapaz region, about 50 miles south of Bogota in the department of Meta, was cleared of the military and turned into an area where meetings could take place among representatives of the government, the guerrillas and civil society. The site of the meetings, La Casa Verde, became famous as a hopeful symbol of the peace process. Just as the rules and conditions of negotiation were being agreed to, however, the urban guerrilla group April 19th Movement (M-19) seized the Palace of Justice, leading to the killing of over 100 persons, including several Supreme Court justices. The disaster dealt a crippling blow to the talks, which continued, but in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination. The Palace of Justice debacle, pressure from business associations, and the tactic of carrot and stick--all came together to substantially change the nature of the negotiations.
At the beginning of Virgilio Barco's four-year presidency, in 1986, the government offered "an outstretched but firm hand" to the guerrillas. Unlike President Betancur, Barco tried to offer them full participation in civil and political life if they would lay down their weapons. The government called upon the guerrillas to demobilize and disarm in exchange for political guarantees and economic compensation. Barco wanted to restore the legitimacy of the state, which had been badly damaged in the peasant areas and the territories of colonization. As violence once again escalated, the rebel groups opted to unify as the Simon Bolivar Guerrilla Coordinating Group (CGSB).
In early 1987, the army had unleashed a powerful offensive against the Fifth Front of the FARC in the department of Uraba at the behest of the banana companies, who felt that the guerrillas were backing the banana workers union in its drive for higher wages. A few months later the guerrillas destroyed a military convoy in Caqueta and killed 25 soldiers. The army bombarded the region and the government ended the trace. The Defense Minister declared that it was time to do away with the "myth of La Casa Verde" and that the cease-fire could not be used as recourse for criminal activity. With national negotiations stalled, the FARC, communicating through the Church, proposed a regional dialogue in Caqueta, thus establishing a precedent of using domestic locations for negotiations.
Meanwhile, the paramilitary forces had been growing dramatically, in many cases financed by the head of the Medellin Cartel, Pablo Escobar, especially around the northern region of the Magdalena Medio. With Escobar's financing and the army's tolerance, paramilitaries began decimating the leftist UP with impunity. It was during Barco's subsequent administration that most of the UP's activists were murdered. The final days of Barco's government were notably violent. Gunmen assassinated four presidential candidates: Carlos Pizarro of the M-19 (who had just turned in their arms); Jaime Pardo Leal of the UP, followed closely by his replacement, Bernardo Jaramillo; and the Liberals' Luis Carlos Galan who would certainly have won the election.
Galan was replaced by Cesar Gaviria, a party hack who had been Minister of Government, and who was elected president for the term 1990-1994. It fell to Gaviria to advocate the writing of a new Constitution, a process begun by Barco. The FARC had launched the idea, and public opinion baptized it the "Peace Constitution." Yet the still-mobilized guerrilla alliance, the CGSB, was offered only six of 70 seats in the Constituent Assembly charged with drafting the new document. This small guerrilla representation had been the condition on which the military agreed to permit the process of rewriting the Constitution. The virtual absence of active guerrillas from what was called an "agreement on the fundamentals" had two goals: to reduce their political prominence and to make sure that the crucial theme of military-civilian relations did not become subject to negotiation.
The peace negotiations themselves, which by now had been moved to Caracas, advanced rapidly. Negotiators for both sides agreed to call for a cease-fire and an end to hostilities. For the government this meant placing the guerrillas within fixed geographical boundaries in order to make verification of the ceasefire possible. It also meant that the guerrillas must suspend kidnappings, extortion and bombings of physical infrastructure. The guerrillas refused to confine themselves geographically--since that would mean giving up their most effective weapon--and they demanded that the paramilitaries be disbanded. The government insisted on guerrilla demobilization as a condition for participation in the Constituent Assembly. For its part, the CGSB demanded radical political reform first, beginning with restructuring of the Armed Forces.
While the two sides could not arrive at agreement on that point, they did concur on verification and on the role of international oversight, neither of which could be enacted without a cease-fire. The government and the guerrillas also named a public-order advisory commission, and the government further agreed to name a civilian as Minister of Defense--a position reserved for the military since the onset of the National Front--and agreed to outlaw the paramilitary "self-defense" groups. But these measures were more symbolic than real, and the government demanded that the guerrillas concentrate in 60 sites. For their part, the guerrillas demanded 200 demilitarized municipalities, as well as meaningfully verifiable measures against the paramilitaries.
At this point, a failed assassination plot by guerrillas against a prominent senator named Aurelio Irragori led the government to suspend the negotiations. Weeks later, however, the conversations resumed, but with less trust among the parties. Now, each arrived with proposals impossible for the other to comply with. The guerrillas had not ended their attacks against the oil pipelines, nor had they diminished their kidnappings or seizures of villages and police stations. The business associations attacked the negotiations and demanded that the government harden its bargaining position. In that context, both sides decided to again postpone the talks.
Four months later, however, the delegations resumed contact in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The government named Horacio Serpa as Peace Advisor and created a department of social policy mandated to make "social reinsertion" attractive to insurgents who wanted to give up their arms. In Mexico, the CGSB succeeded in placing a debate about the neoliberal model on the agenda, and the government's economic team came to the negotiations to justify the Washington Consensus of free trade and privatization. The guerrilla team questioned every aspect of the Consensus, even as business associations and the right complained that it was unnecessary and offensive for the government to have to justify its economic policies before a group of "gangsters." For their part, government spokespeople argued that significant economic changes were impossible, since Colombia was now part of a globalized economy that imposed its own obligatory rules.
Amid this less-than-promising atmosphere, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), a minority group in the guerrilla coalition, kidnapped and killed a former Conservative Cabinet minister named Argelino Duran. The talks had begun with an agreement to continue them "come what may." But in the wake of the EPL action, the government once again canceled the talks, and they collapsed in confusion.
The guerrillas emerged from the talks divided. On the one hand, two different guerrilla subgroups used the accords to reinsert themselves into mainstream politics. These groups, the majority of the EPL and a split-off of the ELN, gave up their arms as well as their areas of control. (Immediately after they relinguished their territory, it was promptly occupied by paramilitaries.) Now, divisions began growing within the CGSB. The FARC felt that the alliance imposed the interests of the minority over the majority, as when the EPL kidnapped Duran, which collapsed the talks at Tlaxcala. For the ELN and EPL, however, the problem was that the FARC wanted to dominate the coordinating group. These differences were dangerous. But they were kept under control, at least for a time, by the moderating influence of much of the guerrilla leadership.
The paramilitaries, meanwhile, had been growing and attracting the sympathy of the right, which argued that these "self-defense groups" should be recognized as the third actor in the conflict. The army continued to facilitate paramilitary seizures of the most important economic, political and military regions: Uraba, the banana plantation area; the Panama border; and Montes de Maria, an area of big farms near Cartagena. Ernesto Samper assumed the presidency in 1994, significantly weakened by the opposition's accusations that he had received campaign contributions from the drug cartels. His efforts at social reform, his attempted rapprochement with the guerrillas, and his proposed political changes were clouded over by these accusations throughout his four years in office.
Just a few days into his administration, the FARC placed conditions on the resumption of peace talks: a military withdrawal from the FARC-dominated municipality of La Uribe, in the department of Meta; the demobilization of paramilitary groups; and suspension of government rewards for identifying kidnappers--a weapon used almost exclusively against the guerrillas. Samper accepted the withdrawal, limiting it to the rural areas of La Uribe. He publicly recognized the political character of the conflict by denying that the guerrillas were simply a band of drug traffickers. And he suspended the kidnapper identification rewards.
The extreme right led an opposition to these concessions, publicizing statistics about guerrilla kidnappings and the guerrillas' links with drug traffickers. Six months later, General Bedoya, commander of the Armed Forces, threatened Samper with a military coup if the government ordered him to withdraw from La Uribe. The President, whose space for maneuvering was already sharply limited, backed down in the face of broad opposition led by the U.S. Ambassador, Colombia's Archbishop Primate, the Conservative hierarchy, retired military officers, followers of ex-President Gaviria, the business associations and even portions of the left.
The guerrillas then cancelled the rapprochement and resumed their attacks on the Armed Forces. In June and July 1996, guerrillas mobilized in the departments of Guaviare, Putumayo, Caqueta, Norte de Santander and Bolivar. At about the same time, nearly 200,000 peasants felt the effect of drug eradication policies on their illicit crops and thus their economic well-being. Recent aerial fumigations against legal and illegal crops, and government attempts to quell the circulation of inputs for processing coca leaves by declaring the so-called Special Zones of Public Order raised the peasant growers' costs of production, and therefore, of their survival as well. The protest was repressed by the Armed Forces in a highly publicized way, making conflicts in the areas of colonization visible and sensitizing the public to the reality of coca producers' lives. These events helped humanize coca farmers, especially when strike leaders told the media about the government's disregard of their precarious conditions.
Over the next year and a half, the guerrilla movement met with substantial military success, capturing many army bases and villages, and ambushing army patrols. These actions were increasingly ambitious and efficient; in August 1996 they culminated in destruction of the army base at Las Delicias in Caqueta and the capture of 60 soldiers. Immediately afterward, the FARC extended offensive actions through the territory, and Colombians began feeling that the state had lost control of public order. As the government withdrew, the vacuum was filled by the paramilitaries, who had transformed themselves into an unofficial wing of the Armed Forces.
Samper was paralyzed. The military growth of the guerrillas was public knowledge, and they proposed releasing the prisoners they held in exchange for the army's further withdrawal in Caguan. The government accepted. The soldiers were handed over in July of 1997 under the supervision of the Red Cross and international observers from 13 countries, mainly from Europe and Latin America. During this event, the FARC made several demands as a prerequisite for peace talks: that the army withdraw from five additional municipalities; that the guerrillas be treated with respect; and that popular protest be decriminalized. The government, losing prestige day by day, rejected the conditions and the army mounted a large military operation that--despite a massive propaganda effort-produced absolutely no results. In this small test of strength, the FARC did rather well. The government and the international community recognized their military strength, and the FARC's political presence in the country's interior began to seem as though it might be a decisive factor in upcoming presidential elections.
By 1998, in fact, despite furious opposition from the right and the army, the leading presidential candidates began to court the insurgents. The Conservative candidate, Andres Pastrana, had created channels of communication with the FARC. The Liberal candidate, Horacio Serpa, had participated in previous contentious negotiations, so he was a bit more estranged. But both candidates stressed two fundamental promises: to withdraw from the five municipalities, and to deal directly with Marulanda to establish bases for negotiation. That implied visiting with the FARC leader in his military encampments. Pastrana succeeded in tilting the balance in his favor, and as soon as he won his narrow victory, he kept his word and met with Marulanda. They agreed then on the bases for negotiation: withdrawal of military authority and police forces from the five municipalities, formation of an unarmed civic corps to keep local order in the demilitarized zone, dismantling of the paramilitary groups, decriminalization of popular protest, and convening of participation by the international community. Thus they began the process of negotiation. Once again, peace talks are underway.
An Interview with FARC Commander Simon Trinidad In January 1999, newly elected Colombian president Andres Pastrana ceded an area of southern Colombia the size of Switzerland to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas as part of an agreement to begin peace talks. Although there is no cease-fire agreement while the talks are being carried out, the Colombian Armed Forces and the National Police have withdrawn all their forces from the region known as the Zona de Despeje (Clearance Zone). On June 14, Garry M. Leech traveled to Los Pozos to interview Simon Trinidad, a FARC commander and a spokesman for the guerrilla organization. Trinidad was a professor of economics at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogota for ten years before joining the FARC 16 years ago.
Why do you think the United States is focusing on the FARC and campesinos that cultivate coca here in southern Colombia instead of the paramilitaries and the narcotraffickers?
Because the FARC is the only political organization that is in opposition to the Colombian oligarchy that keeps Colombians in poverty, misery and a state of underdevelopment. [The FARC] will make better use of the natural resources and provide jobs, health care, education and housing so 40 million Colombians can live well. Who are those that are opposed to these social, economic and political changes? They are the people who monopolize the riches and resources in Colombia. A small group that monopolizes the banks, industries, mines, agriculture and international commerce, including some foreign companies, especially North Americans. For these reasons we are the principal target in the war against narcotraffickers. But we aren't narcotraffickers and the campesinos aren't narcotraffickers. If the United States government really intends to combat narcotraffickers, all the people in Colombia know where they live: in Bogota, Medellin, Cali and Barranquilla. But [the police] confront the poor campesino with repression that hurts not only the illicit crops, but also legal crops tike yucca, bananas, and chickens and pigs because the fumigation kills everything.
Those responsible for making Colombia a producer of narcotics are the people who have become rich from this business: the narcotraffickers. Who else benefits? The bankers and those who distribute the drugs in the cities, universities, high schools and discos of North America, Europe and Asia. Who else? The companies that make the chemicals for processing cocaine and heroin. These companies are German and North American.
Last year, FARC spokesman Raul Reyes claimed that the FARC could eradicate coca cultivation in the regions it controls in five years. However, there have been accusations that the FARC is forcing campesinos to grow more coca here in the Zona de Despeje.
This is the police, army and narcotrafficker version of the story. [The FARC] live in the country, and it is in the country that the coca, marijuana and the poppies have been grown for 30 years. We know the campesinos grow illicit crops out of necessity. They are obligated to cultivate illicit crops because of a government that has neglected them for many years. We have made it clear that we will not take the food out of the mouth of the poor campesinos. We will not leave them without jobs. They work with the marijuana and coca leaf because they do not have any other work. This problem is caused by the economic model of the Colombian state, and it is the state that has to fix the problem. We are the state's enemy, not their anti-narcotics police. The state has to offer people employment, honest work, and social justice to improve their lives.
What will happen if the United States Congress authorizes increased military aid to the Colombian Armed Forces and they launch an offensive against the FARC here in southern Colombia?
I don't want to think about a war in this region. War will not resolve Colombia's problems. Colombia has 18 million people living in absolute poverty, [without] electricity, water, jobs, land, education or healthcare. Another 18 million Colombians [earn] a salary that doesn't cover all their necessities. We are 36 million Colombians living poorly out of a total of 40 million. Is the war going to resolve these problems?
There is an alliance between narcotraffickers and common politicians, both Liberals and Conservatives. Also, between paramilitaries and the narcotraffickers, everybody knows this. Wilt the war waged against poor campesinos solve these problems? The war won't resolve the problems for the hungry and unemployed in Colombia.
Many international human rights organizations have demanded that the FARC stop recruiting children. Where does the FARC stand on this issue?
We recruit 15 year olds and up. In some fronts there may have been some younger, but [recently] we decided to send them back home. But what is the cost? During the last year a girt arrived...14 years old and wanting to join the guerrilla.... In March she was sent back home because the FARC's Central Command said they would return to their parents all those younger than 15.
Two weeks ago I met this girl.... She said she was working in a bar from six p.m. until sunrise. I asked what she was doing and she said, 'I attend to the customers.' When I asked [how], she lowered her head and started to cry. She is a whore. She is 14 years old. A child prostitute. She was better in the guerrillas. In the guerrillas we have dignity, respect, and we provide them with clothes, food and education. There are millions of others like this girl in Colombia who are exploited in the coal mines, the gold mines, the emerald mines, in the coca and poppy fields. They prefer that children work in the coca and poppy fields because they pay them less and they work more.
It sounds beautiful when you say that children shouldn't be guerrillas, but children are in the streets of the cities doing drugs, inhaling gasoline and glue. According to the United Nations: 41% of Colombians are children, 6.5 million children live in conditions of poverty, another 1.2 million living in absolute poverty, 30,000 live in the streets, 47% are abused by their parents, and 2.5 million work in high risk jobs. These children meet the guerrillas and they don't have parents because the military or the paramilitaries killed them, and they ask the guerrillas to let them join. We are carrying out our rule that no children younger than 15 years of age join.
How many women are there in the FARC, and what happens when they become pregnant?
Approximately 30% of the guerrillas are women, and the number is increasing. Women guerrillas are treated the same as the men. Some FARC units have female commanders; the FARC office in San Vicente is run by a female. Some women have relationships with male guerrillas, and we provide contraceptives. But some do get pregnant. If they don't have an abortion, they have to leave the guerrillas.
GARRY M. LEECHThe Art of Negotiation
On June 24, 1988 Texas oilman Jake Gambini was kidnapped in Colombia by a group of guerrillas. For the next six months--during which time the guerrillas never revealed what political group they belonged to--Gambini's employees and his Colombian brother-in-law, Herbert "Tico" Braun, would engage in protracted ransom bargaining. By the time Gambini was kidnapped, guerrilla abductions of well-heeled Colombians and foreigners were so endemic that maneuvering for a captive's release had become as common-place and stylized as the give-and-take that occurs when one buys or sells a house or a high-end used car. Braun, a history professor at the University of Virginia, later wrote Our Guerrillas, Our, Sidewalks (University Press of Colorado), an account of the kidnapping from the point of view of those who represented Gambini's interests during the bargaining. Following are excerpts that illustrate a new institution in Colombia: the art and science of hostage negotiating.
June 24
Jake Gambini: I thought they were workers from a rig who were looking for me. Then I saw alt the guns and I knew. The leader, a bearded man, told me to huffy up. "This is a kidnapping" he said. "Quick. Nothing's gonna happen to you."
June 26
Tico Braun: Through the oil companies in Bogota [Gambini's wife] has learned about organizations that make a living out of negotiating with guerrillas and terrorists. They're located in Miami. It's a good thing that the Colombian government doesn't get much involved. This has to be kept within the family. It's a private matter, a financial transaction.
July 3
Braun: We are beginning to learn about the clearly defined steps and stages that families go through. What stands ahead is predictable. The guerrillas will ask for an astronomical sum of money, we'll make a counter offer, and so it will go. That's the way it works. It turns out that families apparently end up paying around 10% of the guerrillas' initial demand. Once a sum is settled on and the guerrillas have their money, they return the person.
July 4
Braun: Almost everybody we talk to wants to know whether Jake has kidnapping insurance. No, we answer. me insurance company would have paid everything, including ransom payment, all our expenses and even these, professionals whom [Jake Gambini's wife] is paying, [but] Jake had concluded that the insurance policy was too expensive, something like $100,000 per person per year. Jake figured he'd have to pay the guerrillas less for the ransom.
July 11
Gambini: I tried to figure out what the company was worth. They said they usually took 50% of a family's net worth: The guy with the beard told me that. I wrote a note authorizing [my employee] to do the negotiating.
July 30
(Gambini's employee's first meeting with a guerrilla representative):
Guerrilla: I have been assigned to negotiate this matter. Don't worry, this is a purely economic thing, we're a group that has suffered a lot, and this is a struggle that we must continue.
Gambini's employee: Yes, sir. We understand your position and we know that this is a business. We also want to solve this quickly. Please keep in mind that the company is not a multinational, as the newspapers reported. It's a small company.
August 2:
(After the second negotiating meeting) Braun: The phone rings. It is [Jake Gambini's employee].
"Five," he says.
"Five what?"
"Five big ones."
Five million dollars.
"Don't worry," Nelson [a hired professional from the hostage-negotiator company] says, almost nonchalantly. "It's only their opening gambit."
August 4:
(Third negotiating meeting)
Guerrilla: What are your people offering?
Gambini's employee: "Eighty million pesos."
Guerrilla: "No, that's very little. I told you not to start so far down. Our new petition is three million dollars. Verdes. Greenbacks.
Braun: I'm ecstatic. I feel as though we've made two million dollars.
August 13:
Braun: We go up ten million pesos, to three hundred thousand dollars.
August 30
Braun: They wouldn't budge from the three million [dollars].
September 23
Braun: They are not moving an inch [from the three million dollars]. I go up to 105 million [pesos]. That, I tell him, is as far as we can go. And I want a quick response. I'm not here to waste my time. I have my job [at University of Virginia] to return to.
September 29:
Braun: A note arrives, and .a Polaroid photograph of him. Their note insists on "the three" [million dollars]. Nelson, the professional hostage negotiator] lets us now that we should be glad it's a picture. He knows of a case where the fatuity received a finger in a box through the mail.
October 4:
Braun: We try everything in today's call.
Guerrilla: Well, look, we are going to go down to 2.8 million [dollars].
Braun: Those figures are so unreachable for us that the difference between one and other is nonexistent. I let him know that we might be able to go up to 115 million [pesos] ...[The professional hostage negotiator] keeps saying that they'll come down suddenly, out of the blue. They have to, They need us.
October 20:
Guerrilla: We want this to be settled at 150,
Gambino's employee: 150. We're talking in Colombian, right?
Guerrilla: Yes. Yes. Yes. But of those 150 we want 300, ah, 300,000 dollars and the rest in pesos.
Braun: The rest was somewhere between 46 and 53 million pesos, depending on the exchange rate. There is no question, about it. They want to close a deal. It takes eight calls to work out all the details. We continue to negotiate, we can't just suddenly agree to what they want. But the differences are not substantial, They know they will get close to their 150 million pesos--460,000 dollars or so.
November 7:
Gambini's employee: We flew to this small airport. It wasn't an airport exactly, but a pretty good runway with a hut next to it. This was their place, and you could tell they used it a lot. One of them came up to me. Just a kid, not more than 20 years old. I carried the suitcase, He opened the zipper. The kid smelled the bills. He rifled through them like he was the most experienced bank teller in the world. He had done this many times before. He knew exactly what he was doing. He put the bills back in the suitcase and closed it. He smiled.
Hours later, after the family learns that the guerrillas have freed Gambini)
Braun: Boy, luck had been with us....No. It wasn't luck. The rules had worked. We did everything the way we were supposed to. We had gotten him back. Everything was fine.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Commander Simon Trinidad.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): A FARC guerrilla stands at a checkpoint near San Vicente de Caguan in southern Colombia.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Commander Manuel Marulanda, "Tirofijo," who with Jacobo Arenas founded the FARC in 1964.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): FARC guerrillas washing their uniforms. The woman's scars are from a bomb blast.
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By Alfredo Molano
Alfredo Molano is a book author, journalist and a weekly columnist for the newspaper El Espectador. His writing on behalf of human rights, peasants and marginalized Colombian communities earned him death threats from the paramilitary United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC). He is currently in exile in Spain but continues to write his column. Translated from Spanish by NACLA
Garry M. Leech is the publisher of Colombia Report, a web-based magazine that provides analysis of the Colombian civil war. See http ://www.colombiareport.org
