SOCIAL STUDIES 10 GRADE: Armed Groups In Colombia, FARC

FARC-EP

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo), also known by the acronym of FARC or FARC-EP, is a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary guerrilla organization.

FARC is a VNSA, considered a terrorist group by the Colombian government,[1] the United States Department of State,[2] Canada[3] and the European Union.[4][5] Other governments, including the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, are more sympathetic to FARC.[6] Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez publicly rejected their classification as "terrorists" in January 2008, considering them to be "real armies", and called on the Colombian government and international community to recognize the guerrillas as a “belligerent force”, arguing that this would then oblige them to renounce kidnappings and terror acts in order to respect the Geneva Conventions.[7][8]

FARC was established in the 1960s as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party and thus originated as a guerrilla movement. The group later became involved with the cocaine trade during the 1980s to finance itself,[9] but remained closely tied to the Communist Party even as it created the Patriotic Union in the early 1980s and later a political structure it calls the Clandestine Colombian Communist Party (PCCC).

FARC remains the largest as well as the oldest insurgent group in the Americas. According to the Colombian government, as of 2008, FARC have an estimated 6,000-10,000 members, down from 16,000 in 2001, having lost about half their fighting force after President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002.[10][11][12] However, in 2007 FARC Commander Raul Reyes claimed that their force consisted of 18,000 guerrillas.[13]