Colombia’s National Center for Historical Memory estimates that guerrilla groups kidnapped twenty-five thousand people between 19. Other notable incidents include the FARC’s assassination of a former culture minister in 2001 and its hijacking of a domestic commercial flight in 2002, during which rebels kidnapped a senator. military contractors until 2008, when Colombian forces rescued them and twelve other hostages. In one of its most high-profile kidnappings, the FARC abducted presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt in 2002. The FARC and ELN long used violence, kidnappings, and extortion as sources of leverage and income. The group formally disbanded in 2006, but splinter groups, known as bacrim(short, in Spanish, for criminal gangs) remain. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations until July 2014. The largest paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), was on the U.S. Right-wing paramilitary groups with links to the state military emerged in the 1980s as landowners organized to protect themselves from the guerrilla groups. Historically they have cooperated in some parts of the country and clashed in others. Both oppose the privatization of natural resources and claim to represent the rural poor against Colombia’s wealthy. State Department has designated both groups as foreign terrorist organizations.Īlthough some say the ELN is more ideological than the FARC, the two have similar programs.
The FARC was composed of militant communists and peasant self-defense groups, while the ELN’s ranks were dominated by students, Catholic radicals, and left-wing intellectuals who hoped to replicate Fidel Castro’s communist revolution. Excluded from a power-sharing agreement that ended the fighting, communist guerrillas took up arms against the government.
The FARC and the National Liberation Army (known by its Spanish acronym, ELN) were founded in the 1960s after a decade of political violence known as la Violencia (1948–58). The U.S., Muslims, and a Turbulent Post-9/11 World
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