AN OVERVIEW OF THE FARC-EP
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areas of southern Colombia that not only remained communist-based sociopolitically controlled regions, but were materially able to withstand – and in some cases intimidate – state forces while maintaining the subsistence needs of the local populace (Green, 2004: 60–1; Osterling, 1989: 296; Henderson, 1985: 318n.38; Gott, 1973: 280–1; 1970: 231–2; Alexander, 1973: 46; 1957: 252; Poppino, 1964: 5; Hobsbawm, 1963: 17). By the 1940s, the Party had “established a strong rural influence” in specific regions of the countryside (Wickham-Crowley, 1992: 145). Unlike most areas of Latin America, where communism gained strength in urban and labor-export enclaves, in Colombia the Communist Party developed its greatest influence in rural areas, particularly the coffee regions, and among landless peasants and small farmers. (Chernick, 2007: 432n.10) In 1958, the Colombian peasantry made up 40 percent of the members who attended the PCC Party Conference (Wickham-Crowley, 1992: 145-6).7 Less than a decade later, at the Tenth Congress of the Party (January 1966), the proportion of peasants had grown to 48 percent (Gott, 1970: 27). Historian Catherine LeGrand, demonstrating the uniqueness of the PCC and its relation to the countryside, noted that the formation of the Party occurred during a period of agrarian unrest in coffee regions in the eastern and central mountain ranges. Although numerically small, the PCC involved itself almost immediately in these struggles over Indian communal lands, the rights of tenant farmers, and public land claims. This early rural orientation of the Communist Party in Colombia and particularly its success in putting down roots in several areas of the countryside, some not far from Bogotá, is unusual in the Latin American context. (LeGrand, 2003: 175) The PCC illustrated an exceptional approach in relation to other CPs. Its uniqueness was in its method of organizing not only the industrial and marginalized urban working class, but also the growing mass of semi-proletarianized workers in the countryside.8 Colombian historian Gonzalo G. Sánchez (1985: 795) documented that the late 1940s and 1950s saw the PCC become the primary instrument for organizing peoples into politically motivated collectives (see also Marulanda, 2000; Gomez, 1972). Even critical scholars, bombarded by proof, acknowledged that “during the 1950s the Colombian Communist Party achieved what countless groups throughout the hemisphere would fail to do later: it created a mass base, with a significant peasant following” (Castañeda, 1994: 75). One leading scholar on Latin American communist influence and formation during the twentieth century highlighted the power of this strategy by commenting how the “renewed Communist activity in the rural parts of Colombia is even more important than growing Communist influence in the ranks of organized labour” (Alexander, 1963: xiv). Even Régis Debray
