Book Reviews

Brittain, James J. (2010) Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia. The Origin and
Direction of the FARC-EP, Pluto Press (London and New York, NY), xvi + 336
pp. £24.99 pbk.

Why Colombia, a country of stable democratic institutions, is wracked by seemingly

intractable political violence is a puzzle for which James J. Brittain, Sociology Professor
at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University, has a simple answer – Colombia hosts a genuinely
popular revolution orchestrated by Latin America’s oldest insurgency, the FARC-EP.
That the FARC survived the collapse of the USSR and actually expanded in the
1990s offers testimony, he believes, to its ideological flexibility, uniquely adapted to
Colombian reality untainted by foreign communist strictures, and a genuine commitment
to ‘revolutionary social change’.
Brittain offers a tour d’horizon of Colombia’s harsh inequalities of wealth and land
distribution that he believes sustains the FARC, but fails to explain why the revolutionary
option has been abandoned as a mechanism of ‘social change’ in other Latin American
countries with similar indices of inequality, or why many of the most disadvantaged
areas of Colombia remain FARC-free zones. Counter explanations, like those offered
by the renowned French scholar of Colombia Daniel Pécaut in his 2008 history of the
FARC, which Brittain appears not to have read, that the guerrilla organisation is a
stubborn anachronism that survives in peripheral areas through criminal intimidation
and sponsorship of a new narco-peasantry of coca-growing urban emigrés, is the sort
of inconvenient reality check that Brittain dismisses as ‘false consciousness’ (p. 24).
Brittain’s fantasy FARC comes off as something between the Boy Scouts and médecins
sans frontières. He minimises FARC links to the cocaine trade, although Pécaut estimates
FARC drug proceeds since 1994 at half, and possibly as much as 70 percent, of the
FARC’s annual income, the rest coming from extortion and kidnapping (Pécaut, 2008).
‘Looting for individual personal benefit is nearly inconceivable’, Brittain assures us, fail-
ing to acknowledge that 37th Front Commander Martín Caballero for one, killed by a
military strike in 2007, was run to ground in part by tracing the investments he had made
with stolen FARC funds in various Barranquilla businesses. The FARC’s drug connec-
tions put them in daily contact with the criminal cartels, while theft from FARC coffers is
a capital offensive, an indication that it happens with enough frequency to list it in regula-
tions. He attributes only 4 percent of human rights violations in Colombia to the FARC,
while Washington’s Center for International Policy puts them at closer to 25 percent.

© 2011 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2011 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 4 515
 Book Reviews

In 2000, the FARC stood on the threshold of power, Brittain claims, but declined
to seize the opportunity for (unspecified) ideological reasons. Brittain spirals off into
hyperbolic language, self-deception, faux statistics and conspiracy theories to conclude
that the Colombian army is demoralised, shell-shocked and on the brink of defeat
when, in fact, the FARC has haemorrhaged its poorly trained and lightly indoctrinated
‘accidental guerrillas’ by the thousands since 2003.
While Brittain assures us that ‘discipline (in the FARC-EP) is not imposed; rather
it springs forth in the conscious combatant as a necessity of the struggle’ (p. 15),
he makes no effort to inform himself about combatant life in the guerrilla gulag he
apparently idolises. He might have begun with the accounts of Fernando Arajuo, Jhon
Pinchao and the three American contractors, all of whom conclude that their guerrilla
captors were treated hardly better than they. Excellent collections of interviews with
ex-guerrillas, beginning with those of José Armando and Cárdenas Sarrias, as well as a
trip to the Demobilisation Project in Bogotá, would have exposed the insurgency as an
undernourished, firepower challenged, totalitarian organisation which, rightly obsessed
with a fear of infiltrados and deserters, executes its largely illiterate peasant soldiers at
an alarming rate for a laundry list of infractions, including homosexuality and praying.
The FARC’s professions of gender equality offer a cover for sexual exploitation of
women and children (Herrera and Porch, 2008). Most die young, blown up on their
own landmines or are shot down in the FARC’s cynical cortinas tactics which positions
the youngest and least experienced guerrillas in the attack vanguard.
Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia presents a one-sided view of the FARC
and fails to consider the wider literature. An alternative perspective would suggest that
far from offering ‘an emancipatory transformation of Colombia’ (p. xvi) as Brittain
claims, the FARC simply proffers one more dreary example of how, in Colombia,
violence historically has been harnessed by a few to hold the majority hostage. Alas, the
FARC remains part of the problem, not the solution.

Douglas Porch
Naval Postgraduate School

References
Herrera, N. and Porch, D. R. (2008) ‘ ‘‘Like Going to a Fiesta’’: The Role of Female Fighters
in Colombia’s FARC-EP’. Small Wars and Insurgencies 19(4): 609–634.
Pécaut, D. (2008) Las FARC: ¿una guerrilla sin fin o sin fines? Grupo Norma: Bogotá.

© 2011 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2011 Society for Latin American Studies
516 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 4
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