EJÉRCITO DEL PUEBLO
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1999: 128). Jennifer Holmes, Sheila Amin Gutiérrez de Piñeres, and Kevin M. Curtin (2006: 178) have clarified how a “lack of economic opportunity contributes to leftist guerrilla violence.” The FARC-EP are bound to experience defeats, tactical reformation, and withdrawal, but to think that this implies the movement is over is indicative of a level of ignorance towards both guerrilla warfare and the material conditions that pervade Colombian society and class struggle. The suggestion that the FARC-EP has experienced defeat fails to comprehend the right of self-determination. The struggle in Colombia is far from over. It will continue to be waged through radical and antagonistic forms. As the US and Colombian dominant class continues to engage a war against the poor, so too will they exacerbate “Colombia’s internal conflict by robbing families of their livelihoods and leaving them with little option but to join the left-wing guerrillas, particularly the FARC” (O’Shaughnessy and Branford, 2005: 7). BECOMING THE PEOPLE’S ARMY: THE EVOLUTION OF THE FARC(-EP) In agreement with the writings of Che Guevara (2006: 13–14), Colombia offers an important example of “revolutionary optimism” and contests the premise that certain countries lack the immediate conditions for radical transformation. The FARC-EP has been applauded for consistently vindicating “the ideological roots of the revolution, with Martí and Bolívar, which moreover undoubtedly found echoes throughout the continent even in countries where conditions were not ripe for insurrection” (Raby, 2006: 105). For decades, the PCC – in accord with the USSR – proclaimed that Colombia was in no position of revolutionary upheaval (Livingstone, 2003: 206; Gott, 1970: 519; Pomeroy, 1968: 308).11 Yet in the early 1980s, the FARC-EP, independent of the PCC, argued that “for the first time … a revolutionary situation existed in the country,” and therefore, new strategies needed to be developed to take advantage of the sociopolitical situation (Pearce, 1990a: 173; see also Schulte-Bockholt, 2006: 110). After years of cooperation and struggle, at the Seventh Conference of the Guerrilla Movement (May 1982), the guerrillas announced that they had become the “People’s Army” (Ejército del Pueblo).12 Doing so meant moving from a solely defensive collective to a revolutionary guerrilla movement taking on “more offensive military tactics” (Simons, 2004: 52). This new method meant that the FARC-EP would no longer wait in ambush for the enemy. Rather, it would go in pursuit to locate, besiege, and surround the enemy and if the enemy were to change its method of operation, returning to its old concept, the FARC would attack with an offensive of mobile commandos. For the first time since the revolutionary guerrilla movement arose in Marquetalia, the Seventh Conference gave the movement a clear strategic and operational concept for a revolutionary army. (FARC-EP, 1999: 26)
