Small Wars & Insurgencies

ISSN: 0959-2318 (Print) 1743-9558 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fswi20

The FARC’s militaristic blueprint

Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín

To cite this article: Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín (2018) The FARC’s militaristic blueprint, Small Wars
& Insurgencies, 29:4, 629-653, DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2018.1497288

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2018.1497288

Published online: 10 Aug 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fswi20
SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES
2018, VOL. 29, NO. 4, 629–653
https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2018.1497288

The FARC’s militaristic blueprint

Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín
Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales, IEPRI, Universidad Nacional de
Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia

ABSTRACT
This article intends to explain the outstanding sequence of success and failure
exhibited by the FARC, the main Colombian guerrilla since the 1980s. It claims
that such sequence is unintelligible unless the adoption by the FARC of a
militaristic organizational blueprint at its 1982 7th Conference is taken into
account. By building itself like an army, the FARC could boost its combat
capacity, maintain its structural integrity, and develop powerful mechanisms
that held the whole structure together. At the same time, the militarization of
the FARC also entailed significant risks and costs like political isolation and
high personnel turnover. After describing the militaristic blueprint, the article
compares the FARC with other irregular forces that operated in the Colombian
context – a comparison which is important to understand the specificity of the
FARC trajectory, as well as the benefits and costs involved in it. The analysis
highlights the critical role of organizational dimensions in the explanation of
civil war outcomes, and suggests that at least for some problems organiza-
tional dynamics should be observed at a low level of granularity.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 2 January 2018; Accepted 10 June 2018

KEYWORDS Guerrilla; organization; FARC; militaristic blueprint; combat capacity; cohesion

Introduction
In the first half of the 1980s, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, the historical leader of
the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, by its acronym in
Spanish), declared that he was aware that his force did not yet constitute
a threat.1 But in 1996, the main weekly of the country, Semana, published
that the FARC was planning a ‘terrifying’ takeover of the capital Bogotá,
amid a wave of panic and the widespread conviction that it did indeed
constitute a major threat for the Colombian state, elites, and international
allies.2 Despite the measures they took to combat them, the FARC continued
growing in numbers and fire power for several years more.3 After
2002–2003, though, it took a downward path.
This article claims that the FARC adopted from 1982 on an army-like
structure, which I call here militaristic blueprint, and that such an

CONTACT Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín fgutiers@hotmail.com

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
630 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

organizational form is indispensable to understand this unique sequence of

success and misfortune. Thus, any explanation of the FARC trajectory that
does not take into account organizational dimensions is incomplete. Only an
explanation that includes organizational factors can account for the FARC
trajectory, and at the same time separate neatly the FARC from competitors
and peers which took quite different paths. I show this through a systematic
comparison between the FARC and other Colombian guerrillas, an analysis
of the micro-mechanisms upon which the FARC built its militaristic blue-
print, and an evaluation of the tradeoffs involved in the adoption of that
particular organizational solution – none of which has been done until now
in the academic literature.
By ‘militaristic blueprint’ I do not necessarily mean that the FARC decided to
concentrate on armed actions and forego popular support, though the evi-
dence suggests that with its fire-power and its financial resources it could
indeed operate competently in conditions of stark political isolation. What I
mean instead is that the FARC adopted some of the key structures, procedures,
and routines of a state army. Non-state armed groups can opt for a wealth of
organizational solutions, which may be mapped along a network-army
continuum.4 As will be seen below, the FARC – especially after 1982 – fell
very near the army-like extreme. Actually, if state armies are, or tend to be,
‘total organizations’ 5 the FARC went further in that direction than the majority
of them, building itself as an all-encompassing and self-contained structure,
through institutions like life-long membership, death penalty for desertion,
and intra-force ‘marriage’. No other guerrilla or paramilitary group ever came
near to sharing with the FARC these organizational characteristics.
If the above proposition holds, then it has the following analytical impli-
cations. First, it provides a (partial) answer to the very important Kalyvas and
Balcells6 ‘Marxist paradox’: highly structured entities (Marxist insurgencies)
which carefully train and form their members do not have a tremendously
high success rate as compared with others. I suggest in this article that
armed groups face tradeoffs which are context-specific, and that thus every
organizational solution should in principle be vulnerable. In particular, the
FARC militaristic blueprint boosted its combat capacity and structural integ-
rity, at the cost of weakening cohesion proper. Second, drawing of the
burgeoning literature on organizations within civil wars, I exhibit concrete
mechanisms that link organizational solutions to social, political, and military
outcomes. Third, I show that institutional designs that have not been
discussed explicitly in the analytical literature (like life-long membership)
can have far reaching implications. In consequence, the article may have as
well a methodological implication: at least for certain armed groups, orga-
nizational dynamics should be observed at a relatively high level of granu-
larity. In sum, I show that organization certainly counted for the FARC and its
competitors,7 and I try to show how and why.
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 631

The article proceeds in the following order. In the first section I discuss
the relevant literature. The second section sketches the trajectory of the
Colombian war. In the third part I delve into the organizational trajectory of
the FARC. I dedicate the next part to a description of the way in which the
FARC militaristic blueprint worked. The fifth section compares the FARC with
other, less successful, guerrillas, and with the paramilitaries. Section six
focuses on organizational tradeoffs in the Colombian context. In the con-
clusions, I discuss the evidence and alterative explanations, argue that the
variables that have been proposed to explain the FARC trajectory are not
sufficient (and some of them probably not necessary either), and identify
some analytical implications of the whole discussion.
Before starting, some caveats and observations are necessary. The article
uses – directly or as context – information and data from press, documents, and
in-depth interviews collected by me and my research groups during years, and
the already burgeoning literature on the FARC and the Colombian civil war. I
inevitably incur in some simplifications. The FARC militaristic blueprint did not
come to emerge like the goddess Athena, directly from the forehead of Zeus: its
process of discovery and implementation was gradual and was marked by
more zigzags than what I could possibly describe here. However, the main
point – the organizational distance between the army-like FARC and all other
guerrillas or counter-insurgencies, is big – remains. Following Gutiérrez and
Wood,8 I call the different participants in the Colombian conflict ‘force’, as it is
debatable if some of them can be called ‘organizations’ proper, at least in the
conventional sense of multiple people linked by a common goal and separated
as a distinct set from an external environment.

The militaristic blueprint and why does it matter

The explanatory challenge when discussing the path taken by an insurgency
or a category of insurgencies involves accounting for its trajectory and at the
same time spelling out why other ones took a different path. If my expla-
natory dimensions are common to all groups or categories, then I have
explained nothing. What is common cannot explain what varies. Many
hypotheses on the performance and behavior of insurgencies furthered in
the civil wars literature are based on variables that tend to be common to all
groups. The path taken by a guerrilla movement like the FARC, for example,
may be explained as a side effect of its access to major resources, like
narcotrafficking (see Bultman in this issue; also Collier,9 and more recently
Radha Sarkar and Amar Sarkar10). Guerrilla and counter-insurgent
strategists,11 instead, have frequently emphasized the key role that legiti-
macy plays in the survival or not of insurgencies: only by engaging key
sectors of the population in their rebellion can guerrillas survive and thrive.
Kalyvas’ model (2006), instead, stresses the quest for territorial control. All
632 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

these models see guerrillas as single-function maximizers – of resources,

territory, or legitimacy – black-boxing organizational factors and disregard-
ing the way in which each of these goods are obtained. Since neither
individual variable seems to explain the FARC sequence of success-misfor-
tune, typically a combination of two of the standard explanations has been
advanced to interpret it. For example, Marks12 and Ospina13 claim that the
FARC grew because it was rich, but eventually forced its hand focusing only
on greed, thus forfeiting its legitimacy, which brought its break down. As
will be seen below, this proposition does not separate well the FARC with
respect to other non-state armed groups (all of them had both access to
major rents and deep legitimacy issues). I will suggest that these and
analogous explanations beg more questions than what they answer and
are only usable inasmuch as they are grounded on organizational
mechanisms.
Precisely because of inadequacies like these the economic turn fell into its
‘distress’.14 Weinstein (2006) gave an interesting twist to the theory, which
dialogued both with the guerrilla classics15 and with Collier’s greed and grie-
vance framework. There are two types of guerrillas, and their motivational
origin produces a positive loop of self-selection: greedy ones, which have
access to extraordinary rents and ideological ones, which tap into grievance.
Weinstein flagged the existence of different organizational paths for insurgen-
cies (for a criticism of this, see Kalyvas16). But, as Bultmann argues, in Weinstein’s
theory organizations melt away, because only the characteristics of the indivi-
duals who join the force are analytically relevant. These characteristics, in turn,
are a direct result of the availability of resources.
The ‘organizational turn’ has already yielded relevant insights. Darah
Cohen17 linked cohesion to patterns of violence against civilians. Staniland18
powerfully showed how deeply embedded in society was cohesion and the
capacity of an insurgency to hold together. Gutiérrez and Wood19 showed the
fundamental role that ideologies play in wars (and also in organization build-
ing). From time to time principal-agent models have been used fruitfully to
understand some of the issues associated with insurgent organization-building
(Gates, 2002 is an early and highly interesting example). The ‘organizational
turn’ might be also useful to answer questions as those posed by Balcells and
Kalyvas20 in their seminal analysis of the ‘Marxist paradox’ (e.g. why highly
motivated and structured forces do not have such high comparative rates of
success). Their conclusion: to understand civil war outcomes it is necessary to
historicize the study of insurgencies. Such historicizing reveals that the ways of
war and of organization are intimately related, referring to Tilly’s famous motto
about the state.21 But there are a myriad of organizational solutions that can be
adopted by both regular and irregular forces when fighting and challenging
each other. A first stab at making this complexity tractable is to place it in an
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 633

army-network continuum,22 where army-like forces have more organizational

buildup while networks are more flexible.
How does a force look like at the army-end of the continuum? Based on
narratives and histories on the creation of national-states armies,23 I propose here
five dimensions to evaluate the degree of ‘army-ness’ of a group that exercises
collective and sustained violence. First, a clearly established and recognizable
hierarchy (different from the ‘natural’ hierarchies of the broader society), with
formally defined ranks and functions, a relatively rich division of labor (specialists,
soldiers, etc.) and stable, regular, standardized units. Second, massive recruit-
ment, through different mechanisms (conscription, motivation, etc.). Third,
impersonal discipline that spills over all aspects of life, and oriented toward the
development of key automatisms (for example through drilling) that contribute
to create immediate physical coordination, responsiveness to higher command,
self-control, and forbearance in critical conditions.24 Fourth, separation: members
of army-like entities are garrisoned, wear uniforms and insignias that make their
identity and sometimes rank easily recognizable, and have a daily routine of their
own which is meticulously regulated by the organization. The free time of
members is maximally reduced.25 Last but not least, the massive resources
necessary to fund war are administered in a centralized fashion. The rank and
file was paid a pittance, both for fiscal and moral reasons: greedy soldiers have
strong motivations to shirk, especially in life and death situations, precisely when
their effort is more necessary (e.g. Constant26).
Historically, these characteristics gave the modern army extraordinary power
and capacity, though its success – like that of any specific organizational form –
remained highly context-dependent.27 Because of this – plus ideological and
historically contingent reasons – some contemporary guerrillas (not only
Marxist but also nationalist) adopted at some point or another an army-like
blueprint. This adoption was necessarily imperfect. For example, it would not
be possible for any guerrilla formations to develop the administrative appara-
tus of a state army. Becoming army-like also entailed potentially big costs and
tradeoffs. Large and powerful forces can alienate critical stakeholders (a point
made cleverly a long time ago by Wickham-Crowley,28 see also Nagl29). The
tradeoffs can be well interpreted through Kenney’s30 analysis of the three key
survival variables for an insurgency. The first one is cohesion proper, defined as
the willingness of the members of an organization to remain within it. The
second is structural integrity – that is, the ability of the organization’s leaders to
avoid splits and factionalization. The third one is military effectiveness: the
capacity of a force to hold its own against enemies and challengers in the
field. As will be seen below, an army-like project can maximize its strength on
one of these dimensions, but at the cost of becoming vulnerable in others.
634 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

The Colombian conflict

Colombia suffered a ‘non declared civil war’ between the mid-1940s and the
early 1960s, known as La Violencia. Its protagonists were the country’s tradi-
tional parties, Liberal and Conservative. Peace was achieved in 1958 by a
consociational agreement. But before the partisan strife was completely sub-
dued, a new type of armed conflict developed. Throughout Latin America
revolutionary guerrillas, inspired by the Cuban revolution, were created.31 In
Colombia, this trend merged with the legacies of La Violencia. The FARC was
established in 1964 under the auspices of the pro-Soviet Communist Party.
Soon other forces appeared, of which the National Liberation Army and
Popular Liberation Army (ELN and EPL respectively, by their acronyms in
Spanish) were the more important and long-lasting ones.
The life of these guerrillas was relatively marginal – Walter Broderick
characterizes the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) activism as an ‘ima-
ginary war’ – until deep into the 1970s. It is difficult to establish if by then
the FARC was the main Colombian guerrilla, quantitatively or otherwise;
probably not. At the end of the 1970s it had less than 800 fighters,32 who
roamed in territories that were still politically, economically, and demogra-
phically quite marginal. Moreover, between the late 1960s and the late
1970s all the guerrillas experienced severe military setbacks.33
The country fell into civil war proper around the late 1970s and early
1980s. Several factors may have contributed to such an outcome. First, non-
state armed actors got access to fresh resources, through Colombia’s new
involvement in the global market of illicit drugs. Second, broad swaths of
territory that until recently had been uninhabited started to become eco-
nomically important for illicit crops but eventually also for mining. Third,
new guerrillas were created; the M-19 appeared between 1973 and 1974,
and became a key actor until its demobilization in 1990.34 Fourth, some
guerrillas – mainly the M19 – were able to summon a diffuse but not
negligible societal support.35 Last but not least, some other forces, unlike
their Latin American peers – many of which were rapidly crushed – counted
with skilled people, trained in the tough conditions of La Violencia; they did
not only have the will but also the know-how to fight. In this favorable
context, the FARC membership skyrocketed from less than 800 in 1978 to
near 20,000 in the early 1990s.36
In 1982, the FARC convened its Seventh Conference, where it issued its
Strategic Plan and declared itself a ‘people’s army’ (changing its name to
FARC-EP, FARC-People’s Army). The event has been reported in the aca-
demic literature, but its analytical implications (especially that from then on
the FARC started to try to build itself as an army) have not been taken on
board. Instead, the fact that the FARC also crafted a new military procedure,
the NMO (New Form of Operating, for its acronym in Spanish) has gone
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 635

unreported. The NMO was based on the following reasoning. After years of
fighting the guerrillas, the state army had learnt a lot. Now, instead of
launching massive but clumsy attacks against the FARC, the state army
dispersed its forces across the territory, in some ways proceeding as the
guerrilla did. In the face of this, the guerrilla should also revise its tactics. The
NMO proposed the transition from a purely defensive, reactive guerrilla
formation, whose main weapon was the ambush, to an offensive one
capable of taking the initiative (but without clinging to territory) and even-
tually of smothering the state army operational units.37 The FARC was slow
in taking up the principles of the NMO – and the leadership was bitterly
aware of this38 – but, once put in practice, the NMO brought spectacular
successes. It must be noted that the NMO demanded of the FARC much
greater capacity for coordinated action than the previous, defensive/reac-
tive, mode. It was based on higher levels of specialization and division of
labor (units of explosive and communications experts, etc.), and required the
cooperation of several units to surround and overwhelm their dispersed
rivals.
Several guerrillas (the FARC, the ELN, the M19, and the EPL, among others),
created in the late 1980s a Coordinadora Guerrillera,39 which tried to follow the
Central American path of forming broad insurgent alliances. The effort was not
successful, among other things because in some regions the guerrillas were
already enthusiastically shooting at one another. In the meantime, pro-state
paramilitary groups had appeared and grown. Soon they spread throughout
Colombia and were able to evict the guerrillas from many regions.
In 1989, a number of weakened and/or relatively small guerrillas reached
peace agreements with the government. The remaining insurgencies (FARC
and ELN) were by then very strong, near their peak. But in the 1990s the
paramilitaries also went through the proverbial qualitative leap, growing in
size and fire power. They hit the ELN very hard, evicting it from some of its
key territories and reducing substantially its territorial reach and fighting
power. The FARC was able to survive the paramilitary offensive, in fact
continuing to grow. In 1998 it showed through a series of spectacular events
that it was already able to beat state army units. Then it started peace talks
with the government, which eventually broke down.
In the meantime, two important changes in the Colombian conflict had
taken place. First, the paramilitary created their national federation (AUC) in
1997. The AUC succumbed, however, to centrifugal forces. Internecine con-
flict, the problem of how to deal with the presence of narcotraffickers in their
leadership, and the perspective of returning to civilian life in favorable con-
ditions, prompted the bulk of the paramilitaries to start a demobilization
process in 2003, which ended in 2007.40 Second, from 2000 on, the state
army went through a strategic transformation supported by the USA under
the auspices of the Plan Colombia, producing a notorious upgrade in its
636 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

operational capacity, strengthening its air force and escalating its hardware
and skills.41 From 2002 until 2010, the Uribe administration declared an open
offensive against the FARC, which cut its numbers by one-half or maybe even
two-thirds. However, the ‘beginning of the end’ and then the ‘end of the end’
– proclaimed by military officers and security experts alike – never arrived. The
FARC resisted the offensive, and by 2008 it was probably back in business. In
2010, it once again started peace talks, now with the administration of Juan
Manuel Santos; this time, an agreement was reached (in 2016). During the
process the FARC displayed the same very high levels of discipline it showed
during war.

The FARC organizational trajectory

From the organizational point of view, the FARC evolved mainly through three
stages. It was created as a peasant self-defense. Then, it became a mobile
guerrilla formation. Finally, it built itself as an army. Let us consider each of
these phases separately.
The FARC was formally created in 1966, as a confluence of relatively small
Communist Party sponsored self-defenses, which operated in the territorial and
demographic periphery of the country. Organizationally, these were quite lax:
familial/territorial movements, whose separation from their peasant milieu was
unclear. Frequently fighters joined them with their spouse and children,42 hang-
ing out together with a spade in one hand and a weapon in the other, engaged
in rural production but ready to resist an attack from the government. The
overwhelming majority of its members were radicalized peasants who in the
period of La Violencia had resisted Conservative repression. During the process of
abandoning their original Liberal political identity they made a conscious effort
to differentiate themselves from ‘bandits’, that is, rogue Liberal guerrillas that
picked on civilians. In the process, they developed mechanisms like prohibiting
looting, transferring the spoils of combat (for example weapons taken from their
enemy) to the organization and not to individuals, and banning any individua-
listic capture of rents.43 These ground-rules, together with a mainly peasant
membership, persisted throughout the history of the FARC.
Since 1964, when the government launched a major offensive against
one of these peasant self-defense regions of influence,44 what would
become the FARC started to acquire the characteristics of a mobile guerrilla
army. Becoming a mobile guerrilla army involving increasingly sophisticated
military procedures, leaving behind families and non-fighters, and trans-
forming itself into a professional, basically all-male structure.
However, both because of conscious design and because as seen above
changes in the environment made it possible, by the late 1970s the FARC was
already hatching ambitious expansion plans. The decision of accepting coca
crops in the territories under its influence taken in 197845 provided the
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 637

resources for big scale growth. From the mid-1970s on the FARC had also
started recruiting women as combatants, a controversial46 but also very con-
sequential decision, because it made of the FARC a basically self-contained
project, as members could develop the whole of their personal and sexual lives
within the organization.47
Finally, at its 1982 7th Conference, the FARC proclaimed itself a ‘people’s
army’ (FARC-EP, that is, FARC-People’s Army), and launched an ambitious
plan to expand to ever new regions and surround Bogotá.48 By the late
1980s/early 1990s the FARC was already approaching a 20,000 strong mem-
bership, supported on a solid financial base and a significant fire-power. Its
growth and expansion from then on and until the early 2000s was
unrelenting.
As seen above, the NMO gave a boost to the FARC military capacity.
However, the escalation of the state army and air force that took place after
the Plan Colombia started to be implemented changed the military land-
scape. It was not possible to save FARC units after they had hit their target,
wreaking havoc among them and making NMO increasingly obsolete.

Core elements of the blueprint

In which sense was the organizational blueprint formalized at the FARC 7th
conference militaristic? For one, the change of name explicitly expresses the
aspiration of becoming an army: ‘FARC-People’s Army’. Indeed, the militar-
ization of the FARC started before 1982, but since then it advanced at a
much faster pace. From 1982 on, the FARC developed a sophisticated
hierarchy, a set of rules, and a training template that were intimately related
to the NMO and oriented toward army-building.49 Its hierarchy, headed by
its Secretariat, was based on an explicit comparison between the state army
and the FARC, in which there is a one-to-one correspondence of ranks.50 The
chain of command operated in army-like fashion.
The FARC was centralized in two other fundamental senses: decisions and
rents. As will be seen in the next section, no other force in the Colombian
context achieved such a high degree of centralization than the FARC. Although
FARC’s major units had a fair amount of operational latitude, they obeyed the
decisions of the Secretariat. The Secretariat issued a national plan, which was
mandatory for all its units. In the plan, the Secretariat established military and
financial objectives for each of its Fronts, which guaranteed both hierarchical
follow-up and operational flexibility. The national plan was replicated at the
unit and sub-unit level: Fronts and their subunits issued their own plans, and
evaluated them on a daily (at least ideally) basis. ‘Each unit’, says a commander,
‘from guerrilla upwards, has a command that acts according to the principle of
collective direction. . . this means that all decisions are discussed and made by
the majority. Each organism is subject to a plan, but its implementation is
638 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

collective, it has to be discussed and approved’.51 Some crucial decisions,

especially those that involved the life and death of its own fighters, could not
be taken by cadres at the lower levels; formal processes were established in the
statutes, and probably followed in the majority (though certainly not all) of the
units.
Something similar happened with financial resources. In 1982, the FARC
already captured massive rents, due not only to narco-trafficking but also to
kidnapping and extortion. The 7th Conference apparently further regulated
the taxing of illicit crops and related issues.52 Following cues that came from
its own history (see previous section), the FARC developed a set of rules to
prevent that its members had individual access to those rents. The rank and
file was not paid.53 Up to now, there is no evidence whatsoever about the
leadership of the FARC having become rich during the war, despite the fact
that the search for FARC individuals’ bank accounts was subject to careful
scrutiny in the aftermath of the signing of the peace accord.54 Social
differentiation within the force seems to have been modest, as comes across
from careful descriptions from unsympathetic and frequently unwilling
witnesses, like victims of kidnapping55 or infiltrated army officers.
The FARC was also highly separated from civilians, which contrasts starkly
with its origins as a peasant self defence, For the most part, FARC members
were interns. They were uniformed (common garments and footwear) and
wore distinctive insignias. They inhabited camps in which they, and only
they, resided. Even at the most basic operational level, physical separation
was enforced: for example, sentinels were instructed to not allow the pre-
sence of civilians at camps for no reason whatsoever.56 They risked their
necks for the FARC; and the bulk of their free time was dedicated to in-
house activities like drilling and planning. Their lives unfolded within the
organization. The whole of the social identity and expectations of its mem-
bers were resolved and negotiated within it. An explicit objective of every
day plans was to cut down leisure to a minimum: ‘Normally, we try that all
units and personnel participate in the order of the day and different chores,
that time is well distributed, so that there is not too much time for leisure’.57
These assertions apply to both rank and file and leaders. It is in this sense
that I call it an ‘all-encompassing’ organization.
All this was enabled by a set of key institutions that allowed the FARC to
go beyond the discipline of an army in the conventional sense (whose
structure, as seen above, the FARC wanted to mirror). Membership was for
life. The punishment for desertion was death (though the application of
death sentences was generally not discretional, and had to be hierarchically
processed). Discipline was very tough and meticulous. For example, senti-
nels who fell asleep on their watch could suffer dire consequences.
The FARC rapidly engaged in activities related to growth and NMO that
required a more or less sophisticated division of labor. In particular, given
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 639

the ever-increasing drive for expansion and the development of financial

and organizational capacities, the FARC dedicated significant efforts to
recruit new members.58 Some cadres actually specialized in recruitment.
Before formally joining, aspirants received a relatively tough, but short,
course, and warnings about the hardships of war and the implications of
life membership.59 As seen above, females eventually joined the organiza-
tion in a massive fashion. Though the FARC maintained several gender
inequalities and to a certain point sexual division of labor, women generally
acted as combatants or fulfilling mixed roles (e. g., as radio-operators AND
combatants)60; this was the rule rather than the exception. At some point,
the FARC leaders understood consciously that female recruitment allowed
them to reinforce the self-contained model that they were building, and to
prevent their cadres from searching partners within the civilian population,
which had become a serious information and security hazard. This in turn
triggered the issuing of an extremely draconian birth control policy within
the organization, which included abortion or, if worse came to worse,
ceding the child to relatives or other civilians after delivery. The FARC also
deconstructed marriage and stable couples within it. Relationships were
fixed term contracts. Men or women could take the decision to end a
relationship or simply change partners. Also, a hierarchical superior could
separate couples, sending for example each member to different places,
which gave origin to abuses and all kinds of heart-breaking situations.61 All
this strongly contributed to separation, and to the building of a sense of
identity and specificity: fighters were acutely aware of holding a ‘FARC
culture’ (cultura fariana). ‘Whoever wants to understand the FARC necessa-
rily has to talk about the cultura fariana, which is different from the tradi-
tional culture of our society’.62 Tellingly, fighters of different units referred to
civilians as a distinct entity, ‘La civil’.63

The militaristic blueprint compared to others

How specific was the FARC militaristic blueprint? If all, or at least the main,
forces in the Colombian war adopted it as well, then it can hardly explain
the specifics of the FARC trajectory. But, as will be seen in a moment, the
FARC was in a league by itself in this regard. Let us use the five criteria of
militarization advanced in section two to compare the FARC and the other
significant forces that participated in the Colombian war: the M19, the ELN,
the EPL, and the paramilitaries. The comparison focuses on the decade of
1980 (when all five forces were active) and 1990.
Let us start with hierarchy. The FARC had a formally established chain of
command and positional functions (the commander does this, the sub-
commander that), and stable, standardized units, of which the identity
reference point (somewhat like the early regiment in state armies64) was
640 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

the Front. Other units, as mobile columns, eventually also became key
organization reference points. The richness of FARC’s division of labor,
especially after the inception of the NMO, simply does not have any equiva-
lent paragon within Colombian irregular war. The paramilitaries were in the
other extreme: even during the period in which their federation existed,
they were an unwieldy assortment of localistic units. The ELN, which had
been basically destroyed in 1973 and hardly outlived its internal purges,65
was reconstructed over a set of rules and norms oriented toward the
prevention of such homicidal bouts. So, despite it still being a disciplined
armed apparatus, it hosted federal dynamics and frequent (tolerated) inter-
nal dispute. By contrast, the EPL was even more complex which included
civilians in its top leadership and was riddled by doctrinarian altercations.66
The M-19 was very flexible in its structure and also was not conceived as an
army; it was as explicit in this as was the FARC in its militaristic drive.67 The
interaction of its leadership with its units was fluid and changing. It did not
even have formal statutes. All these guerrillas developed special forces, and
at least the ELN was in the early 1990s on the verge of promoting highly
militarized units, but according to top cadres active at that moment its main
leader backed off on the grounds that doing so would cost too many ELN
lives.68
The FARC was a massive recruiter, at a scale that none of its rivals (save
perhaps the M19 at its best moment) could match. Massive recruitment was
associated to the drive to include ever new layers of the population.69 As seen
above, the process of joining the FARC was rather expeditious. It was not in
the ELN, which made aspirants go through long processes of study and
participation in social and political activities before having the possibility to
become a member proper (some interviewees report that such an involved
process was a reason for eventually preferring the FARC over the ELN).
Something similar can be said about the EPL. The paramilitary did recruit en
masse, but basically only male adults and children; women participated in
their force in small proportions, and by far and large as non-combatants.
From the point of view of separation and discipline, the post-7th
Conference FARC was also quite exceptional. FARC members lived in
camps, wore uniforms, and treated civilians like an army. Personal (not
political) interactions of members with civilians were distinctly discouraged.
At the same time, FARC’s discipline was extraordinarily harsh and systematic.
Its members could be brutal, but seldom were they not orderly (there are
significant exceptions70). Planning, as was seen above, was a powerful tool
to produce coordination between units, providing at the same time obedi-
ence and flexibility; but it was also a tool to develop coordination, socializa-
tion in common rules, norms and ideas, and automatic interaction. Planning,
drilling, camp chores, and ideological formation composed the bulk of the
members’ everyday routine. This, together with life membership, created the
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 641

conditions for permanent learning of highly organization-specific skills,

increasing decisively fire power and combat morale. The ELN also lived in
camps, but did not have the life-membership institution, and instead of
preventing, it promoted interactions between members and civilians. At
least in some units, it seems to have put much less emphasis on drilling.
Certainly, military superiority was a subordinate value to the preservation of
the members of the force, one of the reasons for which it never developed
specialized and highly militarized units, despite having at some moment the
real possibility of doing so. An ELN member who left the organization to join
the FARC remembers how the ELN had a more fluid relationship with
civilians, while the FARC ‘was more of an army’, not ‘a wandering. . .precar-
ious. . .guerrilla’.71 The EPL also combined camp life with mobilization of
civilians as a key part of its political program. A substantial part of M19
members did not live in camps, and the force cultivated a motivational and
non-hierarchical notion of discipline as a fundamental part of its identity.
Last but not least, the FARC did not pay its members nor gave them
individual access to rents. The Secretariat imposed on the Front financial
quotas, giving them latitude to gather money as they wished and could,
although politically costly procedures were frowned at.72 Certainly, the
exploration by some commanders (like the Negro Acacio) of extraordinarily
lucrative forms of interacting with the coca economy seem to have been
tolerated, but not adopted by the force as a whole.73 Rules regarding
austerity were strict and were constantly promoted, although transgressions
were not that infrequent. The paramilitaries, instead, paid and gave access
to special rents and sometimes dispossessed land to leaders and the mili-
tarily endowed rank and file. The ELN refused during a relatively long period
to establish a stable link with the coca economy, but it remained a rich
guerrilla formation, due to massive extortion of mining economies and
kidnapping. Both the ELN and the EPL also did not give their members
access to rents; the M19 might have been laxer.

Grounded tradeoffs
From the point of view of the three internal criteria for insurgent survival
advanced by Kenney,74 the militaristic blueprint allowed the FARC to excel
in two: structural integrity and fighting capacity. While the paramilitaries
were permanently haunted by brutal centrifugal dynamics and other guer-
rillas suffered splits and doctrinarian showdowns, the FARC was able to
maintain its unity.75 It also became a formidable war-machine. The FARC
was by far the most frequently fighting force in the Colombian context.76
After it adopted the NMO it showed it could hit the paramilitaries, the
police, and even the army at critical junctures.77 It also almost always out-
gunned other guerrillas in the midst of brutal territorial competitions.78 The
642 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

FARC discipline and fire-power were unmatched by any other non-state

force throughout the Colombian war.
The FARC militaristic blueprint provides us with the mechanisms to
understand such an outcome. Given its highly centralized, combat-oriented,
structure, the FARC avoided coordination and interest alignment problems
(wayward behavior at the unit level, ideological splits), which triggered
destructive dynamics in other forces. Its strict separation created a sense
of unity and indeed an identity and ‘culture’, allowing the FARC to socialize
its members through strong everyday routines and practices. Tools
like planning became an overarching organizational device, that allowed
the Secretariat to coordinate its units, but at the same time allowed each of
them to form its members through routines and interactions that strength-
ened skills and produced strong preference changes. Collective decision-
making, according to a commander, ‘provides stability’.79 But at the same
time they allowed for operational autonomy and ever increasing combat
prowess. An informant for the state who lived for a relatively long period
within the FARC assured in a report to his superiors that each unit was
autonomous enough to procure itself the resources to fulfill the objectives
established in the plans.80
In this closed world, organization-specific skills were built also on an
every-day basis, through division of labor, drilling, and mutual interaction
and control. Active, but also sometimes retired, FARC members highlighted
the fact that they had been involved in a learning process that went from
becoming literate to complex (and highly organization-specific) skills like
using communication and lethal devices.81 According to another member ‘I
learnt to make decisions, to be autonomous [valerme por mi misma], even to
cook’.82 Separation not only allowed identity formation and capacity-build-
ing but protected the FARC from paramilitary ‘take the water from the fish’
offensives, consisting of destroying the purported civilian constituencies of
guerrillas to critically weaken them. For example, the ELN, with its emphasis
on interaction with, and mobilization of, communities, was easy prey of this
strategy. The FARC was not a fish, but another kind of animal, so it could
persist and thrive at the height of the paramilitary power.
The FARC developed powerful subunits that enjoyed operational auton-
omy but fully complied with Secretariat orders (the main example being the
Mobile Column Teófilo Forero). Such units played a star role in the organiza-
tion’s successes. They were instruments of vigorous expansion, but also of
capacity building (creating specialized elite groups within the organization).
Functional instead of territorial specialization was a strong incentive for
horizontal cooperation between units, which in turn strengthened both
military efficacy and structural integrity. This contrasts with the experience
of other guerrillas, and of the paramilitary. The former had difficulties
fostering stable autonomous entities below the national direction. They
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 643

were hampered by ideological factionalism or by centrifugal forces. For

example, the top leadership of the ELN, the COCE, has had to coexist with
the semi-independent status of its strongest unit, the Domingo Laín Front,
which obtained already in the mid-1980s the right to adopt its own deci-
sions, and has its own resource-base, constituencies and policies.
Life membership, stiff discipline, and high levels of financial (at least in
the context of an irregular war) and decision-making centralization allowed
the FARC to tame centrifugal tendencies. The paramilitary, which grew in
parallel with the FARC and competed ferociously with it, are the best
illustration of the dangers of centrifugal dynamics in the Colombian context
and show that, contrary to Collier’s assumptions, offering salaries and rents
to members has costs well beyond the obvious (and non-negligible) finan-
cial ones. True: paying its members and allowing its leadership to become
rich gave the paramilitaries substantial advantages over other forces. For
one, the flow of desertions went mainly in one direction: from the guerrillas
(and also the state police and army) to the paramilitaries, which allowed the
latter to absorb desperately needed skills. On the other hand, allowing
access to rents ended surrendering territorial control to individual comman-
ders, who became the ‘owners’ of the territory under their influence, and
thus had very strong incentives to defend it savagely from any competitor,
including (or rather starting with) other paramilitaries. Besides fostering
permanent territorial feuds, the paramilitary network-like structure per-
mitted the open disobedience of the local leaders when and if they opposed
an order from the more powerful but distant center. Both factors triggered
brutal internecine confrontations.83 Allowing individual access to rents con-
stituted a very strong incentive for narcotraffickers – who were in constant
need of private security and violence to protect their laboratories, routes,
and persons to join the paramilitary leadership and even purchase units. But
this in turn created a major political costs and triggered strong centrifugal
dynamics. The paramilitary federation dissolved in 2002. From then on, the
paramilitaries engaged in a fractured peace process, amidst continuous
scandal and internecine warfare.
However, the FARC militaristic blueprint cost dearly in terms of what
Kenney calls cohesion. One effect of the FARC’s all-encompassing nature
was that the private life of its members was negotiated within the camp.
Rows, tensions, and fights related to private issues were relatively frequent.
Rank and sex interacted,84 sometimes with fatal consequences. Women who
got pregnant, rank-and-file males who perceived that the commander had
stolen their girl, or simply couples that were separated, could find they had
reasons enough to desert, or more banally to pick a fight with a comrade or
misbehave.
The main internal cost, though, came from the egregious demands the
organization placed on its members. Due to life-membership, the only way
644 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

FARC members could leave the organization was by deserting. They earned
no money, risked their lives on a daily basis, endured numerous hardships,
and were subject to severe discipline. Disciplinary excess came not only
from formal rules but also from the weak formation of Front commanders
and other mid-level cadres, who were nagged for years for their crude
manners vis-à-vis the rank and file.85 Female recruits – a large proportion
of the membership – faced additional misfortunes, due mainly to mandatory
birth control.
It is not contradictory thus that at least part of the FARC membership was
highly motivated during the first part of its cycle within the organization, but
finally got burnt out (a phenomenon well-known by members of this kind of
organization). For example, a retired female FARC member, after highlighting
the positives of her membership within it and her sense of sharing some of its
fundamental values and political views, explained in these terms her decision to
withdraw: ‘I got fed up of the life in the woods. . . Also I had a partner, he was a
company commander but they separated us. . . I fell asleep during guard and
they set up a martial court against me. . . I was not shot but I got a heavy
punishment’.86 This accumulation of unpleasant and potentially lethal experi-
ences was inevitable for many members, given the extremely harsh discipline
implied by the militaristic blueprint. Indeed, there was a core of members that
remained in the organization for years. But it is probable that a substantial
portion of new recruits burnt out and left only after a few months; this at least
seems to have been the understanding of the FARC itself.87
So the FARC – being a highly combative force88 with big-scale desertion –
suffered from chronic and massive personnel turnover. Figures here are not
particularly good, but putting together some of the most trust-worthy sources,
it becomes clear that the phenomenon was very significant. For example, in
2001, the year when the Plan Colombia started to be implemented, 339
members deserted, 1766 were captured,89 and 1028 were killed.90 This
amounted to almost 15% of the whole force, which by the time had around
22,000 members according to the same sources.91 Note that 15% is very high,
but that rates like these can coexist with a committed and stable core member-
ship. It may be the case that part of the FARC membership – by cohort, social
characteristics, etc. – was more stable than the overall membership. Be it as it
may, personnel turnover was a very serious threat for the FARC. For one, it
made it unsustainable if massive recruitment became unavailable. New and
rapidly promoted recruits became an informational and security hazard, the
problem that the FARC had tried to avoid with its carefully crafted endogamous
organizational design. Furthermore, the reproduction of organization-specific
skills, so fundamental for the FARC organizational strength, was also put into
question by such high rates of turnover. Forming good mid-level cadres, which
was critical for the FARC, implied a carefully crafted trajectory within the
organization. Note that for many other forces, in contrast, desertion was
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 645

basically a non-issue. For example, it was never central for the M19; also not for
the paramilitaries.
Until now, I have discussed organizational tradeoffs from an internal point
of view. But organizational models also have external implications. As dis-
cussed in the theory section, the degree of legitimacy of an insurgency has
been plausibly proposed as an explanation of its survival likelihood.
However, as seen in sections three and four, the FARC was from the begin-
ning able to coexist with deep isolation and/or substantial legitimacy defi-
cits. The FARC contrast between fire power and national political power
became even starker after the adoption of the militaristic blueprint. There
are many mechanisms through which its implementation undermined
FARC’s legitimacy. Fulfilling Secretariat financial quotas to boost the FARC
war nationally could trigger a local increase in kidnappings and extortions
and the destabilization of delicate local arrangements, followed by deep
hate and alienation.92 In some regions the FARC behaved like an occupation
army.93 It bombed and attacked municipalities,94 and evaluated territories in
the light of their meaning and value for their national military plan.95 The
methods used for the funding of expansion – kidnapping, the involvement
in the coca economy, eventually the blowing up of oil pipes to extort
multinational companies- were deeply illegitimate for broad sectors of the
population and key FARC audiences, a point of which its leadership was
actually aware.96 These examples illustrate the acute contradiction between
the key FARC sources of funding and its sources of political allegiance, both
fundamental aspects of its army building project. Because of all this, the
FARC was already deeply isolated and rejected by broad sectors of the
population much before 2002, the date in which the FARC started to run
into problems.97 For example, in a 1991 poll, 78% of the respondents
demanded a stronger attitude of the government against the guerrillas –
of which the FARC was probably the most hated and/or feared already then.
At the same time, we should not take for granted that ‘greed’ or violence
against civilians is always and under every circumstance a cause of disaffec-
tion. The FARC, the paramilitaries and other guerrillas, for example, obtained
sustained regional support thanks to their ability of taxing and regulating
illicit economies.98 For example, the application of violence against some
categories of delinquents – typically rapists – was seen by members of all
these forces as a source of legitimation. And though the FARC was rejected
massively by broad sectors of the population, it could still count on different
forms of support and allegiance in the regions in which it operated. It
actually got a higher influx of recruits during its period of misfortunes
(2002 on): if in 2000 it received 1183, the figure grew to 6600 in 2002. In
2006, maybe FARC’s worst moment, more than 8500 persons joined it.99
The problem for the FARC was not illegitimacy in general, but illegitimacy
plus a specific pattern of growth – that is, the organizationally mediated
646 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

consequences of illegitimacy. On the one hand, the FARC was big and
relevant, so its illegitimacy had a major impact on the political system. It
was a main factor behind the election of Álvaro Uribe in 2002, who thus
arrived in power with the mandate of chasing down the FARC. The simulta-
neous and interrelated demobilization of the paramilitaries, implementation
of the Plan Colombia and Uribe offensive, changed deeply the Colombian
military landscape and further destabilized the FARC. For one, it technolo-
gically escalated the response of the state to insurgency. Though this
escalation already came from the Pastrana government,100 it only became
a fundamental variable when it was aligned with the presidents’ policies. As
seen above, this made the NMO – a key clog in the functioning of the FARC
as an army – obsolete: after the FARC forces converged upon an objective,
and moved back to their camps, they became easy targets of bombarding.
On the other hand, the Uribe offensive deepened the FARC organizational
tensions, as it weakened the belief of even part of its core members in their
capacity to win, and it simultaneously increased desertion, recruitment
demands, and security hazards. People left faster, which had to be patched
with more recruits, which increased the probability of receiving objection-
able personnel or undercover agents, which increased paranoia and disci-
plinary measures, which increased the likelihood of desertion. This dynamic
is illustrated in a gory fashion by the massive surrendering of the members
of the José María Córdova Front to the Army: they gave in not only their
weapons but the hand of their commander Iván Ríos, whom they had killed.
There was not a clear path out of this vicious circle. The FARC declared it
would qualify its recruitment process, and thus down the size of the orga-
nization, seeking some form of stabilization. Even then, the huge costs of
the militaristic blueprint had been exposed.

Conclusions
The FARC started as a small armed self defence group and then a guerrilla
formation. It eventually grew, had access to major sources of funding, and
became a tremendously powerful military actor in the Colombian war. But
after 2002 it entered a period of hardship. Why? I have suggested here that
any answer has to take into account organizational dimensions. An organi-
zational explanation has two advantages over alternatives: it fits better the
evidence (sometimes much better) and it exhibits the concrete mechanisms
through which inputs and variables were translated by the FARC into
success or failure.
In effect, greedy and legitimacy-based explanations overestimate both
the contributions of rents and their political costs. As seen in section six, all
Colombian forces had access to major rents, but their growth and military
fortunes were very different. Thus, those explanations do not separate well
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 647

between the FARC and other forces. They do not separate well either
between different FARC periods. The FARC continued to be rich even after
it started to receive heavy blows from the state. In the other direction, the
FARC was isolated/illegitimate vis-à-vis the Colombian population well
before its luck started to change. And the mechanisms that made the
militaristic blueprint highly costly in political terms were operating much
before Uribe came to power. Furthermore, the FARC continued to receive a
handsome influx of recruits after 2002, which suggests that at least in some
concrete operational senses legitimacy deficits did not have fatal conse-
quences for it. In other words, access to large rents is not a necessary or
sufficient condition for guerrilla success or survival; in some occasions, as
Weinstein (2006) already observed, it may even undermine it. Lack of
political legitimacy is not a sufficient condition either for guerrilla bank-
ruptcy. It is not of course that these dimensions do not matter. They do,
deeply. But they are organizationally mediated.
And this takes me to the second advantage of the organizational explana-
tion: it is endowed with plausible and empirically grounded micro-foundations.
This is precisely what greedy explanations in this case last, Typical greedy
mechanisms (the rank and file want an employment, leaders want to get rich)
are simply not out there: the bulk of the coca rents went to fund the war, not to
pay members or to feed foreign bank accounts. Of course, funds (coming from
coca, kidnapping and extortion, among others) played a fundamental role in
FARC’s expansion. But they seem to have been the proverbial necessary but
insufficient condition for military capacity. Ospina101 claims that lack of legiti-
macy led to guerrilla bankruptcy, but does not explain how and why. Here I
show that a change in the environment activated the high potential costs of
adopting a specific organizational solution (the militaristic blueprint), putting
the guerrilla in front of intractable dilemmas.
Furthermore, an organizational explanation of the FARC trajectory provides
a partial answer to the Balcells-Kalyvas Marxist dilemma, showing that organi-
zational solutions necessarily involve trade-offs. Describing and understanding
FARC’s cohesion is a good example of this. As Kenney shows,102 there are at
least three types of cohesion. The FARC militaristic blueprint boosted cohesion
in many senses. It allowed the force to sidestep destructive doctrinarian bick-
ering, to create powerful mechanisms of coordination, socialization and control
like planning, and to form a strong sense of identity (‘la cultura fariana’) that
was easily recognizable for members and civilians alike. The blueprint, with its
strong separation between civilians and force members, also had the obvious
advantage of limiting security incidents. At the same time, it triggered abusive
relationships, burnt out thousands of members, and created contentious focal
points (abortion, the killing of a friend or a relative, an unjust punishment) for
disaffection and desertion. In terms of personnel stability and turnover, the
FARC performance was poor.
648 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

Last but not least, going into the organizational dynamics of the forces
that participate in war reveals the existence of limited path-dependency. It is
not by chance that it was the FARC, and not other forces, which adopted the
militaristic blueprint. The ELN, for example, was marked by a history of
military defeat and internal homicidal conflict, so its leaders were very
aware of the dangers of extreme centralization; they could not possibly
embrace a militaristic solution. The FARC discovered its identity by differ-
entiating itself from ‘bandits’ and Liberal guerrillas, which gave fighters and
leaders individual access to goods; and so on. The rich texture of insurgent
path-dependency deserves to be explored further.

Notes
1. Cited in Wickham Crowley, 293.
2. Revista Semana, 1996.
3. Aguilera, “FARC”.
4. Gutiérrez and Giustozzi, “Networks”.
5. Wickham-Crowley, “Guerrillas”.
6. Balcells and Kalyvas, “Rebels”.
7. Gutiérrez and Wood, “Ideology”.
8. Ibid.
9. Collier, “Rebellion”.
10. Sarkar and Srakar, “Rebels resource curse”.
11. Mao, “Selected”; Nagl, “Counterinsurgency lessons”.
12. Marks, “Criminal foundation”.
13. Ospina, “Was FARC”.
14. Ron, “Paradigm”. Miguel and Edwards, .
15. For example Mao, Selected.
16. Kalyvas, “Review”.
17. Cohen, “Rape”.
18. Staniland, “Networks”.
19. See above 7.
20. Balcells and Kalyvas, Rebels.
21. Tilly, Coercion, Giddens, Nation-State.
22. See above 4.
23. Tilly, “Coercion”, Giddens, Nation-State, Macgregor and Williamson, “Military
revolution, Tarrow, War.
24. This goes well beyond pitched battles.
25. Lynn, “Forging”.
26. Constant, Ecrits.
27. Keegan, History.
28. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas.
29. Nagl, Counterinsurgency.
30. Kenney, Integrity.
31. See above 28.
32. Ferro and Uribe, Orden.
33. Broderick, Guerrillero, Villarraga and Plazas, Reconstruir.
34. Villamizar, Guerrillas.
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 649

35. This would change drastically; by the 1990s the guerrillas had already become
hugely unpopular, and by 2000 the FARC was arousing sheer hate among
broad sectors of the population.
36. El Tiempo, Miembros.
37. See “Nuevo modo de operar – informe final central a la Séptima Conferencia”
at https://www.farc-ep.co/estrategia/nuevo-modo-de-operar-informe-central-
a-la-septima-conferencia.html.
38. See for example: “there is much talk about the NMO. But if we look deeply. . .it
is possible that only very few understand what does NMO mean”. Pleno
ampliado del Estado Mayor Dic 25–29 – 1987 at https://www.farc-ep.co/estrate
gia/pleno-ampliado-del-estado-mayor-dic-25-29-1987.html.
39. It was first the Coordinadora Guerrilla Nacional (without the FARC), and
then became the Coordinadora Guerrillera Simón Bolívar (with it). See
Villamizar Las guerrillas en Colombia. Una historia desde los orígenes hasta
los confines.
40. Though a substantial number of members remained active. There is a debate
about their still deserving the “paramilitary” tag or not.
41. The Plan Colombia was hatched in 1998, signed in 1999, and started to
operate in 2000.
42. Trujillo, Ciro.
43. Comisión Histórica FARC EP, “Resistencia”, Trujillo, Ciro.
44. Arenas, Diario.
45. See above 32.
46. Comisión Histórica, Resistencia,.
47. Gutiérrez and Carranza, “Organizing”.
48. Aguilera, FARC.
49. See https://www.farc-ep.co/estrategia/concluciones-generales-septima-confer
encia-nuevo-modo-de-operar.html.
50. So the Commander of the Staff would be equivalent to a three stars general,
Bloc commander would be brigadier general, his replacer coronel, and so on
until the platoon (escuadra) commander which would be the equivalent of
corporal, and so on. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estructura_militar_de_las_
FARC consulted February 13 2018.
51. Interview 2 – September 2004. Interview with FARC commander Jairo from the
Magdalena Medio Bloc.
52. Gaviria and Mejía, Políticas.
53. Based on judicial proceedings and analogous sources, not on what FARC
members said of themselves. See Gutiérrez, “Telling”.
54. Revista Semana, “Exclusivo”.
55. Betancur, Silencio.
56. See https://www.farc-ep.co/octava-conferencia/normas-internas-de-comando-
de-las-farc-ep.html.
57. Interview with company commander January 2006.
58. See https://www.semana.com/on-line/articulo/asi-reclutan-farc/79954-3.
59. See above 32.
60. See above 47.
61. Ramírez, Adiós.
62. Interview with a company commander, 2006.
63. Interview with a female guerrilla and radio specialist, 2006.
64. See Lynn, “Forging”.
650 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

65. See Villamizar, Guerrillas.

66. Villarraga, Reconstruir.
67. Villamizar,Guerrillas.
68. Interview with retired ELN military leader, 2017.
69. CNMH, Guerra. The M19 did not indulge in child recruitment, but it was
probably also a feminized force. See Villamizar, Las guerrillas.
70. Salazar, Fiesta.
71. Interview with demobilized ex ELN and ex FARC member, 2017.
72. Comisión Histórica FARC EP, “Resistencia”.
73. See above 52.
74. Kenney, “Integrity”.
75. Only one very small splinter group, which ended catastrophically.
76. Pinto, Vergara and La Huerta, “Diagnóstico”.
77. El Tiempo, “Miembros “.
78. Villarraga, reconstruir, Villamizar, Guerrillas; Salazar, Fiesta.
79. Interview with a Bloc commander, 2004.
80. Juzgado 5to de Ejecución de Penas (1996): “Continuación”.
81. Interview with female column commander, 2004.
82. Interview with female member, 2007.
83. Civico, Guerras.
84. Molano, Trochas.
85. The theme appears frequently both in interviews and in official FARC docu-
ments. An early classic of FARC internal life, “Don de mando” (probably from
1989) by Jacobo Arenas, already highlights the need of self-control by mid-
rank cadres.
86. Interview with retired female guerrilla, 2007.
87. See Marulanda, “40 puntos por donde entran las indisciplinas”, FARC internal
document, June 21 1996, among others. During the Plan Colombia, the FARC
asserted that its experience would serve only to steel its members, and shed
away new, inconsistent and bland, recruits. Naturally, if the data are available,
this purported relationship between proneness to leave and time of member-
ship can be evaluated quantitatively.
88. See above 76.
89. Of which an unknown but not negligible percentage gave themselves volun-
tarily to the authorities in a combat context.
90. This particular figure is not trustworthy, as the Army engaged in the horrid
figure of “false positives”: assassinating young civilians completely unrelated
to the conflict, to exhibit their corpses as guerrilla or paramilitary casualties.
However, the main of the “false positives” took place after 2002. See for
example Cinep, “Falsos”.
91. Otero, “Cifras”.
92. Gutierrez, “Telling”.
93. Peñaranda, Guerra.
94. Aguilera, Vargas, Marulanda, Sánchez, Tomas.
95. See above 92.
96. Comisión Histórica FARC EP, Resistencia.
97. See for example Ospina, Was FARC?.
98. See for example Vásquez, “Territorios”.
99. Otero, Cifras; Isaza, Consideraciones.
100. Pastrana, “La palabra”.
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 651

101. Ospina, “Was FARC”.

102. See above 30.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Bibliography
Academic works
Aguilera, M. “Las FARC: Auge y quiebre de su modelo de guerra.” Análisis Político 26,
no. 77 (2013): 85–111.
Aguilera, M., A. Vargas, L; Marulanda, and L. Sánchez. Tomas y Ataques Guerrilleros
(1965–2013). Bogotá: CNMH, 2016.
Arenas, J. Diario de la resistencia de Marquetalia. Bogotá: Ediciones Izquierda Viva,
2015.
Balcells, L., and S. Kalyvas. “ Revolutionary Rebels and the Marxist Paradox.” 2015.
http://cpd.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/MarxIns_4_15.pdf
Betancur, Í. No hay silencio que no termine. Bogotá: Aguilar, 2010.
Blattman, C., and M. Edward. “Civil War.” Journal of Economic Literature 48, no. 1
(2010): 3–57. doi:10.1257/jel.48.1.3.
Broderick, W.J. El guerrillero invisible. Bogotá: Intermedio, 2000.
Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Una Guerra sin edad. Bogotá, 2017. Centro
Nacional de Memoria histórica.
Civico, A. Las guerras de Doble-Cero. Bogotá: Intermedio, 2009.
Cohen, D. “Explaining Rape during Civil War: Cross-National Evidence (1980–2009).”
APSR 107, no. 3 (2013): 461–477. doi:10.1017/S0003055413000221.
Collier, P. “Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44, no.
6 (2000): 839–853. doi:10.1177/0022002700044006008.
Comisión Histórica FARC EP. “Resistencia de un pueblo en armas. Insurgencia beli-
gerante 1980–1997.” In Tomos 1 y 2, Teoría y Praxis. Bogotá: Teoría y Praxis, 2017.
Constant, B. Ecrits Politiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
Ferro, J., and G. Uribe. El Orden de la guerra. Bogotá: CEJA, 2002.
Gates, S. “Recruitment and Allegiance. The Microfoundations of Rebellion.” Journal
of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 1 (2002): 111–130. doi:10.1177/
0022002702046001007.
Gaviria, A., and D. Mejía, eds. Políticas antidroga en Colombia: éxitos, fracasos y
extravíos. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2011.
Giddens, A. The Nation-State and Violence. Berkely and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1987.
Gutiérrez, F., and F. Carranza. “Organizing Women for Combat: The Experience of the
FARC in the Colombian War.” Journal of Agrarian Change 17, no. 4 (2017): 770–778.
doi:10.1111/joac.12238.
Gutiérrez, F., and A. Giustozzi. “Networks and Armies: Structuring Rebellion in
Colombia and Afghanistan.” Studies In Conflict & Terrorism 33, no. 9 (2010): 815–
835.
652 F. GUTIÉRREZ-SANÍN

Gutiérrez, F., and E. Wood. “Telling the Difference: Guerrillas and Paramilitaries in the
Colombian War.” Politics and Society 36, no. 1 (2008): 3–34. doi:10.1177/
0032329207312181.
Gutiérrez, F., and E. Wood. “What Should We Mean by “Pattern of Political Violence”?
Repertoire, Targeting, Frequency, and Technique.” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 1
(2014): 20–41. doi:10.1017/S1537592716004114.
Gutiérrez, F., and E. Wood. “Ideology in Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and
Beyond.” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 2 (2014): 213–226. doi:10.1177/
0022343313514073.
Isaza, J., and Campos. (2007). “Algunas consideraciones cuantitativas sobre la
evolución reciente del conflicto en Colombia.” Documento de trabajo,
Universidad Santo Tomás. Bogotá http://www.dhcolombia.info/IMG/pdf_
ConflictoColombiano.pdf
Kalyvas, S. “Book Review: Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence.”
Comparative Political Studies 40, no. 9 (2007): 1146–1151. doi:10.1177/
0010414007303093.
Keegan, J. A History of Warfare. New York, NY: Vintage, 2012.
Kenney, P. “Structural Integrity and Cohesion in Insurgent Organizations: Evidence
from Protracted Conflicts in Ireland and Burma.” International Studies Review 12,
no. 4 (2010): 533–555. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2486.2010.00959.x.
Lynn, J. “Forging the Western Army in Seventeenth Century France.” Chap, In The
Dynamics of Military Revolution, 130–-2050, edited by K. MacGregor and M.
Williamson, 35–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Marks, T. “FARC, 1982–2002: Criminal Foundation for Insurgent Defeat.” Small Wars &
Insurgencies 28, no. 3 (2017): 488–523. doi:10.1080/09592318.2017.1307612.
Molano, A. Trochas y fusiles. Historias de combatientes. Bogotá: Santillana, 2011.
Muñoz-Mora, J.C., S. Tobón, and J.W. d’Anjou. “The Role of Land Property Rights in
the War on Illicit Crops: Evidence from Colombia.” World Development 103 (2018):
268–283. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.10.021.
Nagl, J. Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup
with a Knife.. Westport Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2002.
Ospina, C. “Was FARC Militarily Defeated?” Small Wars & Insurgencies 28, no. 3 (2017):
524–545. doi:10.1080/09592318.2017.1307613.
Otero, P. Las cifras del conflicto colombiano. Bogotá: Indepaz y Uniciencia, 2008.
Pastrana, A. La palabra bajo fuego. Bogotá: Seix-Barral, 2006.
Peñaranda, R. Guerra propia, guerra ajena. Conflictos Armados y reconstrucción identi-
taria en los Andes colombianos. El movimiento armado. Bogotá: Quintín Lame
CNMH-IEPRI, 2015.
Pinto, B., Vergra, and La Huerta. “Diagnóstico del programa de reinserción en
Colombia: mecanismos para incentivar la reinserción voluntaria individual”,
Archivos de Macroeconomía Departamento Nacional de Planeación -
Documento 211, 2002. doi:10.1044/1059-0889(2002/er01).
Ramírez, G.W. Adiós a las armas. La historia de vida de ‘Teófilo González’. Bogotá:
Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios, 2017.
Rojas, J. Timochenko, el último guerrillero. No volvemos a la guerra. Ediciones B Grupo
Zeta: Bogotá, 2017.
Ron, J. “Paradigm in Distress? Primary Commodities and Civil War.” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 49, no. 4 (2005): 443–450. doi:10.1177/0022002705277519.
Rosen, J. The Losing War: Plan Colombia and Beyond.. USA: SUNY Press, 2014.
 SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES 653

Rueda, C. Resistencia armada y conflicto político en Colombia. El caso de las FARC-EP.

Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2005.
Salazar, A. No hubo fiesta. Crónicas de la revolución y la contrarrevolución. Bogotá:
Penguin-Random House, 2017.
Sarkar, R, and A. Sarkar. “The Rebels’ Resource Curse: A Theory of Insurgent–Civilian
Dynamics”.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40, no. 10 (2017): 870–898. doi:10.1080/
1057610X.2016.1239992.
Staniland, P. Networks of Rebellion. Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse. Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Tarrow, S. War, States & Contention. A Comparative Historical Study”. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Tilly, C. Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990 – 1992. Malden Massachussets,
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
Trujillo, C. Ciro: Páginas de su vida. Bogotá: Ediciones Izquierda Viva, 2015.
Tung, MT. Selected Military Writings. Seattle, Washington: Praetorian-press.com, 2011.
Vásquez, T. Territorios, conflicto armado y político en el Caquetá: 1900–2010. Bogotá:
Universidad de los Andes, 2015.
Villamizar, D. Las guerrillas en Colombia. Una historia desde los orígenes hasta los
confines. Bogotá: Penguin-Random House, 2017.
Villarraga, Á., and N. Plazas. Para reconstruir los sueños. Una historia del EPL. Bogotá:
Fundación Cultura Democrática, 1994.
Weinstein, J. Inside Rebellion. The Politics of Insurgent Violence. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Wickham-Crowley, T. Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America. A Comparative Study
of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Press
Semana, R (1996): “Bogotá Sitiada.”Accessed February 13, 2018. http://www.semana.
com/nacion/articulo/bogota-sitiada/30364-3
Semana, R (2017): “Exclusivo: el listado completo de los bienes de las farc.” http://
www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/bienes-de-las-farc-lista-completa-de-fincas-
ganado-y-vehiculos/537903
Tiempo, El. 2012 December 27. “Miembros de las Farc y el Eln se han disminuido,
asegura Gobierno.”Accessed October 24, 2015. http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/
documento/CMS-12478164
Tiempo, El. 1992 December 5. “Más dureza pide opinión pública.” http://www.
eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-252638
Tiempo, El. 1998 May 3. “LA ENTRAÑA DE LA DERROTA EN EL CAGUÁN.” Accessed
October 24, 2015. http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-835775
Cinep. “La marca indeleble de los falsos positivos”, by Alejandro Angulo Novoa.
Accessed June, 2018. http://www.cinep.org.co/publicaciones/PDFS/20111201i.fal
sos_positivos74.pdf