Word: marulanda
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This was hardly the finale that Marulanda envisioned after so many years of armed struggle. He was still in his teens, the son of a poor farming family in Colombia's northwestern Antioquia province, when he went into the mountains in 1948 as a Liberal partisan fighting against Conservative paramilitary gangs. This was the start of Colombia's decades-long fratricidal slaughter, la violencia. When it ended in the early 1960s, revolutionaries like Marulanda found the new Liberal-Conservative establishment as corrupt and oppressive as the old guard; and so he founded the FARC in 1964. That sparked a bloody...
Through it all, Marulanda attracted thousands of disaffected Colombians with his talent for striking at the military and fleeing into harsh terrain that he knew better than any army commander. "If they drive us off one mountainside," he once wrote, "we counter immediately at two others." Like Castro, he was said to have escaped death repeatedly, and rarely stayed in one location more than a few days. But although Marulanda was originally inspired by the Cuban Revolution, he was never the committed communist Castro became, a fact that always kept relations between the two surprisingly cool. "Marulanda doesn't read...
...guerrillas aren't down for the count yet; but their membership, according to U.S. intelligence, has been halved to about 10,000 in recent years, and FARC's command structure is dwindling. Weeks before Marulanda died on March 26, his No. 2, Raul Reyes, was killed in a controversial Colombian army raid on a FARC camp over the border in Ecuador; and this month another top comandante, Eldaneyis Mosquera, alias Katrina, surrendered to Colombian authorities and called on her comrades to do the same. Over the weekend, Uribe claimed that other FARC honchos have offered to lay down their arms...
Aside from being a ferocious fighter, Marulanda also loved to dance and reportedly sired several children around the country. Like Colonel Aureliano Buendia (who himself sired 17 sons by 17 different women) in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombia's Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marulanda was a legendary rebel warrior. And like the fictional Buendia, Marulanda died of natural causes in old age as an enigma. In Garcia Marquez's classic, a character wonders if the colonel "had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought," but rather...
...most likely answer in Marulanda's case, as it was for so many Latin American guerrilla leaders, is that he was driven by both impulses. Despite the cynical thuggery his rebel army has become known for in its twilight, Marulanda's original struggle was heartfelt: Colombia was and remains one of the most socially unequal countries on a continent whose inequalities are still among the world's worst. Whether he fought for idealism or pride, the injustices he and all the other Che Guevaras targeted in the 20th century still have to be tackled before Latin America can enter...