Review of Global Democracy and the World Social Forums

Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (International Studies Intensives) 

by Jackie Smith, Marina Karides, Marc Becker, Dorval Brunelle, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Donatella Della Porta

Chapter One

Globalization and the Emergence of the World Social Forums

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The WSF process – by which we mean the networked, repeated, interconnected, and multilevel gatherings of diverse groups of people around the aim of bringing about a more just and humane world – and the possibilities and challenges this process holds.

Civil society has been largely shut out of the process of planning an increasingly powerful global economy.

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The WSF has become an important, but certainly not the only, focal point for the global justice movement. It is a setting where activists can meet their counterparts from other parts of the world, expand their understandings of globalization and of the interdependencies among the world’s people, and plan joint campaigns to promote their common aims. It allows people to actively debate proposals for organizing global policy while nurturing values of tolerance, equality, and participation. And it has generated some common ideas about other visions for a better world. Unlike the WEF, the activities of the WSF are crucial to cultivating a foundation for a more democratic global economic and political order.

(4) WSF seeks to develop a transnational political identity

The WSF not only fosters networking among activists from different places, but it also plays a critical role in supporting what might be called a transnational counterpublic. Democracy requires public spaces for the articulation of different interests and visions of desirable futures. If we are to have a more democratic global system, we need to enable more citizens to become active participants in global policy discussions.

The WSF… also provides routine contact among the countless individuals and organizations working to address common grievances against global economic and political structures. This contact is essential for helping activists shar analyses and coordinate strategies, but it is also indispensable as a means of reaffirming a common commitment to and vision of “another world,” especially when day-to-day struggles often dampen such hope. Isolated groups lack information and creative input needed to innovate and adapt their strategies. IN the face of repression, exclusion, and ignorance, this transnational solidarity helps energize those who challenge the structures of global capitalism.

Aided by the Internet and an increasingly dense web of transnational citizens networks, the WSF and its regional and local counterparts dramatize the unity among diverse local struggles and encourage coordination among activists working at local, national and transnational levels.

(7) WSF values protests over permanent deliberative political bodies

Depoliticization is driven by the belief that democracy muddles leadership and economic efficiency. This crisis of democracy is reflected in the proliferation of public protests and other forms of citizen political participation, which are seen by the neoliberals as resulting from excessive citizen participation in democracy

(8) Reports claiming democratic crisis

The crisis of democracy was a diagnosis developed by political and economic elites in the 1970s, a time when the WEF was first launched. Two reports had a profound impact on how governments came to refine their relations with their citizens and social organizations in the ensuing years. The first was a report made to the Trilateral Commission in 1975 [The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission] and the second was a 1995 Commission on Global Governance Report.

(10-11) Pre-WSF summits propose radical recommendations to empower NGOs via UN

The growing participation of civil society organizations in UN-sponsored conferences reflected the need for some form of global governance in an increasingly interlinked global economy.

…it was the second Earth Summit in 1992 that revealed the difficulties besetting world governance and eventually led to the Commission on Global Governance. The commission report, Our Global Neighborhood, acknowledged that national governments had become less and less able to deal with a growing array of global problems. It argued that the international system should be renewed for three basic reasons: to weave a tighter fabric of international norms, to expand the rule of law worldwide, and to enable citizens to exert their democratic influence on global processes. To reach these goals, the commission proposed a set of “radical” recommendations, most notably the reform and expansion of the UN Security Council, the replacement of ECOSOC by and Economic Security Council (ESC), and an annual meeting of a Forum of Civil Society that would allow the people and their organizations, as part of “an international civil society,” to play a larger role in addressing global concerns

(12) WSF on the need to influence transnational corporations

The report also stated that global governance cannot rest on governments or public sector activity alone, but should rely on transnational corporations – which “account for a substantial and growing slice of economic activity.

(13) WSF as a form of Revolutionary Rupture

The WSF… grows from the work of many people throughout history working to advance a just and equitable global order. In this sense, it constitutes a new body politic, a common public space where previously excluded voices can speak and act in plurality. …we propose to see the WSF not as the logical consequence of global capitalism but rather as the foundation for a new form of politics that breaks with the historical sequence of events that led to the dominance of neoliberal globalization.

(14) WSF Precursors were a Communist Uprising and Anarchist/Communist Direct Action

The WSF is a culmination of political actions for social justice, peace, human rights, labor rights, and ecological preservation that resist neoliberal globalization and its attempts to depoliticize the world’s citizens.

More than any other global actions or transnational networking, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, beginning January 1, 1994, and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999 were perhaps the most direct precursors to the WSF.

(16) Convergence of interests between Western Environmentalists and Unionists

…in the global north, or the rich Western countries, citizens were organizing around a growing number of environmental problems. Environmentalists and unionists joined forces with each other, and across nations, to contest proposed international free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

(17) Rapid rise in the number of Transnational Organizations

…between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, the number of transnationally organized social change groups rose from less than 200 to nearly 1,000…

Growth of a Transnational Political Identity, Erosion of National Identity

These groups were not only building their own memberships, but they were also forging relationships with other nongovernmental actors and with international agencies, including the United Nations. In the process, they nurtured transnational identities and a broader world culture.

(18) National economic and political agreements supersedes the UN

Many environmental and human rights agreements were being superseded by the WTO, which was formed in 1994 and which privileged international trade law over other international agreements. Agreements made in the UN were thus made irrelevant by the new global trade order, in which increasingly powerful transnational corporations held sway.

(19) Organizational mode originated in Latin America

The model of the “encuentro,” a meeting that is organized around a collectivity of interests without hierarchy, on which the Zapatistas and later the WSF process built, emerged from transnational feminist organizing in Latin America.

The events of Chiapas and Seattle reflect not simply resistance to globalized capitalism, but rather they were catalysts to a new political dynamic within the global landscape.

Chapter Two: What are the World Social Forums?

(27) WSF is an Organizational Apparatus which claims to be without Leadership

The WSF was put forward as an “open space” for exchanging ideas, resources, and information; building networks and alliances; and promoting concrete alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Both open space and networks are organizational concepts used by the global justice movement to ensure more equitable participation than occurs, for instance, in traditional political parties and unions.

The WSF process emphasizes “horizontality,” to increase opportunities for grassroots participation among members rather than promote “vertical” integration were decisions are made at the top and reverberate down.

(28) WSF as a Segmented, Polycentric, Ideological Networks

Since its first meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, the WSF has reflected a networking logic prevalent within contemporary social movements and global justice movements in particular. Facilitated by new information technologies, and inspired by earlier Zapatista solidarity activism and anti-free trade campaign, global justice movements emerged through the rapid proliferation of decentralized network forms. New Social Movements (NSM) theorists have long argued that in contrast to the centralized, vertically integrated, working-class movements, newer feminist, ecological, and student movements are organized around flexible, dispersed, and horizontal networks.

(29) Technology links Transnational Activist Planning and Actions

New information technologies have significantly enhanced the most radically decentralized network configurations, facilitating transnational coordination and communication.

Rather than recruiting, the objective becomes horizontal expansion through articulated diverse movements within flexible structures that facilitate coordination and communication.

Self-Identification as Networking Organizations

Considerable evidence of this cultural logic of networking is found among organizations participating in the European Social Forum (ESF). About 80 percent of sampled organizations mention collaboration and networking with other national and transnational organizations as a main raison d’etre of their groups. Many groups also emphasize the importance of collaboration with groups working on different issues but sharing the same values. Some groups even refer to themselves as network organizations.

Furthermore, research at the University of California- Riverside found that “networking” as a reason for attending the 2005 WSF was more common among nonlocal respondents (60 percent) than Brazilian respondents.

(30) Social Movement Interaction defines Identity

Struggles within and among different movement networks shape how specific networks are produced, how they develop, and how they relate to others within broader social movement fields.

(31) WSF provided Marxists opportunity to network with NGOs

The WSF provided an opportunity for the traditional left (verticals), including many reformists, Marxists, and Trotskyists, to claim a leadership role within an emerging global protest movement…

(32) The WSF process conceived of as a decentralized organization

The WSF is not an actor that develops its own programs or strategies, but rather it provides and infrastructure within which groups, movements, and networks of like mind can come together, share ideas and experiences, and build their own proposals or platforms for action. The forum thus helps actors come together across their differences, while facilitating the free and open flow of information.

(35) The WSF is NOT a decentralized organization

A system and hierarchy persists within the forum itself.

(38) The WSF is NOT a decentralized organization

The WSF does have its pyramids of power. April Biccum, for example, contends that it would be naïve to assume “that the open space is space without struggle, devoid of politics and power.

Many of the grassroots activists have criticized the International Council, as well as local and regional organizing committees, for acting precisely as a closed space of representation and power, limited to certain prominent international organizations and networks with access to information and sufficient resources to travel.

Chapter Three

Who Participates in the World Social Forums?

(49) Participatory Democracy

Social change requires that civil society influence other social actors, such as political parties and government officials, and therefore others believe that involving such actors in the WSF is essential.

(54) Network composition

A majority of WSF participants are intellectuals and professionals – 36%.

(56) WSF as a long term strategy for political change

The WSF’s desire and demand for a greater role for civil society in economic decisionmaking cannot quickly overcome the structural barriers that the global economy places on workers.

(62) Twenty percent of attendees in the Socialist/Communist movement

The majority of respondents in this sample expressed support for abolishing and replacing capitalism… 14 percent identified as active in the socialist movement, five percent claimed active involvement in the communist movement, and 3 percent in the anarchist movement.

(64) Political Parties play a role in the Party

Despite their formal exclusion from the WSF, representative of political parties and governments have played important and visible roles within it as well as local and regional forums. Some WSF participants are also beginning to explore issues surrounding the formation of global political parties.

(69) Latin American Leftist Parties Play Supporting Role in the WSF

Depending on the political context, parties can have very different roles and relationships within the social forum process. In many South American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia, leftist parties are on the rise, and many activists see them as vehicles for social change, even though these activists might be critical of the parties policies.

(70) WSF and link to Brazilian Communist Party

As the WSF grew, the necessity of its reliance on traditional state structures became increasingly apparent.

Lula announced that he was leaving the World Economic Forum “to demonstrate that another world is possible; Davos must listen to Porto Alegre.”

(72) Hugo Chavez’s positive assessment of the WSF

Chavez consciously contrasted his reception, his political positions, and the situation in Venezuela with those of his last visit in 2003. He also spoke of his dream for a unified Latin America, now made more real with leftist presidents Nestor Kirchner and Tabare Vasquez in power in Argentina and Uruguay. Chavez noted that the WSF was the most important political event in the world. Venezuelans, he noted, “are here to learn from other experiments.”

(73) WSF Advocates seek to link it to political parties

Other activists also argue for a closer relationship between social movements and political parties. According to Chris Nineham and Alex Callinicos, “it was a mistake to impose a ban on parties, since political organizations are inextricably intermingled with social movements and articulate different strategies and visions that are a legitimate contribution to the debates that take place in the social forum”. Bernard Cassen, a promoted of the WSF, argues pointedly: “We can no longer afford the luxury of preserving a wall between elected representative and social movements if they share the same global objectives of resisting neoliberalism. With due respect for the autonomy of the parties involved, such wide cooperation should become a central objective of the Forums.”

(74-75) WSF as an Incubator for a Global [Socialist] Party

Because of the negative connotations associated with political parties, some activists and intellectuals seeking to challenge the power of global governance institutions are calling for the creation and spread of new kinds of political agency, such as “political cooperative” or “political instruments”. Yet, political parties can take multiple forms and it is important not to reproduce false dichotomies between civil society organizations and parties given the historically variable and complex interrelationships between them.

…many activists in other parts of the world have actively contributed to the rise of socialist parties, and worked both inside and outside of electoral and legislative arenas to pursue social change.

Horizontally organized groups who are coordinating their political activities transnationally can be thought of as global networks, or even as world parties.

Since the nineteenth century, nonelites have organized world parties.

The contemporary efforts by activists to overcome cultural differences; deal with potential and actual contradictory interests among workers, women, environmentalists, consumers, and indigenous peoples’ and solve other problems of the north and south need to be informed by both the failures and the successes of these earlier struggles.

…the forum process does not preclude subgroups from organizing new political instruments, and there seems to be an increasing tendency for more structured and coordinated global initiatives to emerge from the forum process.

(76) WSF as a means for preparing activists to influence political institutions

While there may have been a number of criticisms made of the WST by activists, many see the WSF as an important instrument for preparing the public to participate actively within, and influence the decisions of, such institutions.

Smith argues that the WSF is a “foundation for a more democratic global polity,” since it enables citizens of many countries to develop shared values and preferences, to refine their analysis and strategies, and to improve their skills at international dialogue.

Chapter Four

Reformism or Radical Change: What Do World Social Forum Participants Want?

(79) Forum functions to bring together anti-capitalists

Despite disagreement on many issues, most participants share certain fundamental points in common, most notably the desire to help people take back democratic control over their daily lives. Whether this should happen through the destruction of the capitalist system, as radicals would argue, or through regulating the global economy, as reformists would content is a matter of intense debate.

(81-84) Four types of WSF participants

We divide forum participants into four political sectors: institutional movements, traditional leftists, network-based movements, and autonomous movements. These categories help provide a road map, but in practice the dictions we make are more fluid and dynamic than presented here.

Institutional actors operate within formal democratic structures, aiming to establish social democracy or socialism at the national or global level. This sector primarily involved political parties, unions, and large NGOs, which are generally reformist in political orientation, vertically structured, and characterized by representative forms of participation, including elected leaders, voting, and membership.

Traditional leftists include various tendencies on the radical left, including traditional Marxists and Trotskyists, who identify as anti-capitalist, but tend to organize within vertical organizations where elected leaders rather than a wider range of members make organizational decisions.

Network-Based Movements involves grassroots activists associated with decentralized, direct action-oriented networks… [and] are often allied with popular movement in both the global north and south that have a strong base among poor people and people of color.

Autonomous movements mainly emphasize local struggles. They also engage in transnational networking, but their primary focus is on local self-management. …[They] stress alternatives based on self-management and directly democratic decision-making. Projects include squatting land and abandoned buildings, grassroots food production, alternative currency systems, and creating horizontal networks of exchange.

(85) Majority of WSF want to Abolish Capitalism Rather than Reform It

Results from the 2005 University of California-Riverside survey indicate that a majority of, or 54 percent of, all respondents expressed the belief that capitalism should be abolished and replaced with a better system, rather than reformed.

(87) UN as a Constitutional Model to be Adopted by Revolutionaries

For many, the United Nations could provide an alternative institutional arrangement that is more democratic and more responsive to the needs of local governments and communities around the world… In this sense, current global political and economic institutions would be abolished and replaced with new kinds of thoroughly democratized institutions.

(89) WSF attendees desire a democratic world government

According to the survey of participants at the 2005 WSF, the majority of respondents (68 percent) think that a democratic world government would be a good idea.

Chapter Five

Global or Local: Where’s the Action

(108) WSF as Coordinator for Transborder Activism

Shortly after the first WSF in 2001, activists working at local and regional levels began organizing parallel forums that made explicit connections to the WSF process.

The networking among activists and the shared understandings that arise from transborder communications and a history of transnational campaigning allow action taking place at multiple sites and scales to contribute to a more or less harmonious global performance.

(115) WSF forums a small part of activism

Although activists actually gather for just a few days, they work together for many months prior to the event, and many also following up their participation in the WSF process by launching new campaigns, developing new organizational strategies, or joining new coalitions. The real action of the social forums is not in the meeting spaces themselves – although these gatherings are very important. Rather, the WSF process ripples into the ongoing activities of the individuals and organizers are part of the process.

(116) WSF enables Collaboration for Transnational Actions

As people gain more experience with the forums, they have learned to make better use of the networking possibilities therein. Indeed, more people are beginning to use the process to launch new and more effective conversations and brainstorming sessions about how to improve popular mobilizing for a more just and peaceful world.

(123) WSF as a process of idea dissemination

The process itself represents a collection of political and economic activities that have much broader and deeper significance. Understanding the impacts of the process requires that we consider the wider effects of the formulation of new relationships at forum events. It also requires that we see how the new ideas are dispersed within a context that supports and celebrates the unity in core values among the diverse array of forum participants.

(128) WSF helps strengthen transnational networks

Problematically, existing political systems provide no real space for citizens to engage in thoughtful and informed debate about how the global political and economic system is organized.

The WSF process contributes to the strengthening of transnational networks of activists that allow the stories of people in different countries to flow freely across highly diverse groups of people.

(129) WSF as site of knowledge transformation and network growth

By coming together in spaces that are largely autonomous from governments and international institutions such as the UN, activists have helped foster experimentation in new forms of global democracy, encouraging the development of skills, analyses, and identities that are essential to a democratic global policy… These activities model a vision of the world that many activists in global justice movements hope to spread.

Chapter Six

Conclusion: The World Social Forum Process and Global Democracy

 

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The WSF process seems to have responded to these tensions by becoming what might be called a form of polycentric governance, or a transborder political body with an organizational architecture that remains fluid, decentralized, and ever evolving…

Because the WSF is a process rather than an organization or an event, it is by intention malleable in ways other international bodies, like the United Nations, are not.

About the Authors

Jackie Smith is Professor, Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburg. She is also the editor of Journal of World-Systems Research. Smith’s most recent books include Social Movements in the World-System: The Politics of Crisis and Transformation, with Dawn Wiest; Handbook on World Social Forum Activism, co-edited with Scott Byrd, Ellen Reese, & Elizabeth Smythe; Globalization, Social Movements and Peacebuilding, co-edited with Ernesto Verdeja, and Social Movements for Global Democracy (2008).

Marina Karides is assistant professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University. She is an active participant in the World Social Forums and Sociologists Without Borders. Her recent work considers gendered dimensions of globalization and the global justice movement. She has published articles in Social ProblemsSocial Development Issues, and International Sociology and Social Policy and multiple chapters that critically examine microenterprise development and the plight of informally self-employed persons in the global south. She is currently writing a book on street vendors and spacial rights in the global economy.

Marc Becker teaches Latin American History at Truman State University. His research focuses on constructions of race, class, and gender within popular movements in the South American Andes. He has a forthcoming book on the history of indigenous movements in twentieth-century Ecuador. He is an Organizing Committee member of the Midwest Social Forum (MWSF), a Steering Committee member and web editor for Historians Against the War (HAW), and a member of the Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD).

Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California–Riverside. Chase-Dunn is the founder and former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and author most recently of Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present (Paradigm 2013).

Donatella della Porta is professor of sociology at the European University Institute. Among her recent publications are Globalization from Below (2006); Quale Europa? Europeizzazione, identita e conflitti (2006); Social Movements: An Introduction, Second Edition (2006); and Transnational Protest and Global Activism.

Notes from Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization

Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization by Jeffrey S. Juris

 

Barcelona has emerged as a critical node, as Catalans have played key roles within the anarchist ­inspired Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) and the World Social Forum (WSF) process, both of which unite diverse movements in opposition to corporate globaliza­tion. Anti–corporate globalization movements involve an increasing conflu­ence among network technologies, organizational forms, and political norms, mediated by concrete networking practices and micropolitical struggles. Activists are thus not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also generating social laboratories for the production of alternative democratic values, discourses, and practices.

Computer ­supported networks, including activist media projects, Listservs, and websites, were mobilizing hundreds of thousands of protesters, constituting “transnational counterpublics” (Olesen 2005) for the diffusion of alternative information. Indeed, media activism and digital networking more generally had become critical features of a transna­tional network of movements against corporate globalization, involving what Peter Waterman (1998) calls a “communications internationalism.” Moreover, emerging networking logics were changing how grassroots movements orga­nize, and were inspiring new utopian imaginaries involving directly demo­cratic models of social, economic, and political organization coordinated at local, regional, and global scales.

 

Jeff : How is PGA going?
Laurent: It’s the most interesting political process I’ve ever been a part of, but it’s kind of ambiguous.

Jeff : What do you mean?
Laurent: Well, you never really know who is involved.
Jeff : How can that be?
Laurent: It’s hard to pin down because no one can speak for PGA, and the ones who are most involved sometimes don’t even think they are part of it!

 

 

I really wanted to study the networks behind these demonstrations during their visible and “submerged” phases (Melucci 1989). It seemed that if activists wanted to create sustainable movements, it was important to learn how newly emerging digitally powered networks operate and how periodic mass actions might lead to long­ term social transformation. After several days, I finally realized what should have been apparent all along: my focus was not really a specific network, but rather the concrete practices through which such networks are constituted. Indeed, contemporary activist networks are fluid processes, not rigid structures. I would thus conduct an ethnographic study of transnational networking prac tices and the broader cultural logics, shaped by ongoing interactions with new digital technologies, that generate them.

To answer these questions, I turned to the traditional craft of the anthropologist: long­ term participant observation within and among activist networks themselves.

“Anti-globalization” is not a particularly apt label for a movement that is in­ternationalist in perspective, organizes through global communication net­ works, and whose participants travel widely to attend protests and gatherings. Moreover, most activists do not oppose globalization per se, but rather corpo­rate globalization, understood as the extension of corporate power around the world, undermining local communities, democracy, and the environment.

they [anti-globalization activists] are specifically challenging a concrete political and eco­ nomic project and a discourse that denies the possibility of an alternative (Weiss 1998). In examining anti–corporate globalization movements, it is thus impor­tant to consider how globalization operates along several distinct registers.

At the broadest level, globalization refers to a radical reconfiguration of time and space. It is thus a multidimensional process encompassing economic, so­cial, cultural, and political domains.8 With respect to the economic sphere, the current phase of globalization features several defining characteristics.9 First, there has been an unprecedented rise in the scope and magnitude of global fi­nance capital facilitated by digital technologies and market deregulation. Second, economic production and distribution are increasingly organized around decentralized global networks, leading to high ­volume, flexible, and custom commercialization. Finally, the global economy now has the capability to op­erate as a single unit in real time. More generally, contemporary globalization generates complex spatial patterns as flows of capital, goods, and people have come unbound, even as they are reinscribed within concrete locales.

globalization also provides a concrete enemy and symbolic framework, generating metonymic links among diverse struggles. In this sense, anti–corporate globalization networks such as PGA or the WSF help forge a global frame of reference. As the PGA slogan de­clares: “May the struggle be as transnational as capital!”

Neo­ liberal projects have facilitated the penetration of corporate capitalism across space, bringing new areas into global production, consumption, and labor circuits while commodifying healthcare, education, the environment, and even life itself.

 

At least since the Zapatista uprising against the Mexican government on January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, activists have forged an alter­ native project of “grassroots globalization” (Appadurai 2000), combining placed ­based resistance and transnational networking (cf. Escobar 2001). Anti–corporate globalization movements have mounted a highly effective symbolic challenge to the legitimacy of neoliberalism. As the former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz (2002) suggests: “Until protesters came along there was little hope for change and no outlets for complaint. . . . It is the trade unionists, students, and environmentalists—ordinary citizens— marching in the streets of Prague, Seattle, Washington, and Genoa who have put the need for reform on the agenda of the developed world” (9).

Stiglitz is not alone among global elites in supporting activist demands. The international financier George Soros has consistently denounced “market fundamentalism” while the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs has been a vocal critic of the Bretton Woods institutions. Moreover, leftist political parties in France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and elsewhere have embraced the popular slogan of the World Social Forum: “Another World Is Possible.”

this book is not about the politics of globalization. Rather, it ex­plores emerging forms of organization among anti–corporate globalization movements, particularly in light of recent social, economic, and technological transformations. Although the activists explored in this book seek to influence contemporary political debates, they are also experimenting with new organi­zational and technological practices.

The rise of new digital technologies has profoundly altered the social movement landscape. Activists can now link up directly with one another, communicating through global communications networks without the need for a central bureaucracy. In what follows, I examine how activists are building local, regional, and global networks that are both instru­mental and prefigurative, facilitating concrete political interventions while reflecting activists’ emerging utopian ideals.1

the world and regional social forums and other grassroots networking processes have increasingly come to the fore. Although not as spectacular as direct actions, these projects have provided relatively sustainable platforms for generating alternative ideas, discourses, and practices, allowing activists to pursue their strategic and prefigurative goals in more lasting ways.

Technology, Norm, and form

Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian anarchist Voline outlined a bold vision for an alternative, directly democratic society: “Of course . . . society must be organized. . . . the new organization . . . must be established freely, socially, and, above all, from below. The principle of organization must not issue from a center created in advance to capture the whole and impose it­ self upon it but on the contrary, it must come from all sides to create nodes of coordination, natural centers to serve all these points.” What strikes today’s reader about this passage is its resonance with the contemporary discourse of activist networking. Although the top­ down Leninist model of organization won out in the Soviet Union, consolidating a revolutionary paradigm that would be exported around the world, the past few decades have witnessed a resurgence of decentralized, networked organization and utopian visions of autonomy and grassroots counterpower. As we will see, these emerging network forms and imaginaries have been greatly facilitated by the rise of new digital technologies. Shaped by the networking logic of the Internet and broader dynamics associated with late capitalism, social movements are in­creasingly organized around flexible, distributed network forms (Castells 1997; cf. Bennett 2003; Hardt and Negri 2004). Observers have pointed to the rise of “social netwars” (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001) or an “electronic fabric of struggle” (Cleaver 1995), but such abstract depictions tell us little about con­crete networking practices.

This book outlines a practice­ based approach to the study of networks, linking structure and practice to larger social, economic, and technological forces.20 I employ the term “cultural logic of networking” as a way to conceive the broad guiding principles, shaped by the logic of informational capitalism, that are internalized by activists and generate concrete networking practices.21 Networking logics specifically entail an embedded and embodied set of social and cultural dispositions that orient actors toward (1) the building of hori­zontal ties and connections among diverse autonomous elements, (2) the free and open circulation of information, (3) collaboration through decentralized coordination and consensus­ based decision making, and (4) self-directed networking. At the same time, networking logics represent an ideal type. As we shall see, they are unevenly distributed in practice and always exist in dy­namic tension with other competing logics, generating a complex “cultural politics of networking” within particular spheres.

In what follows, I argue that anti–corporate globalization movements involve a growing confluence among networks as computer­ supported infrastructure (technology), networks as organizational structure (form), and networks as political model (norm), mediated by concrete activist practice. Computer networks provide the technological infrastructure for the emer­gence of transnational social movements, constituting arenas for the produc­tion and dissemination of activist discourses and practices. These networks are in turn produced and transformed by the discourses and practices circu­lating through them.24 Such communication flows follow distinct trajectories, reproducing existing networks or generating new formations. Contemporary social movement networks are thus “self­-reflexive” (Giddens 1991), constructed through communicative practice and struggle. Beyond social morphology, the network has also become a powerful cultural ideal, particularly among more radical activists, a guiding logic that provides a model of, and model for, emerging forms of directly democratic politics.

contemporary norms and forms are shaped by technological change and, further, how they reflect emerging utopian imaginaries.

Computer-Supported Social Movements

Although the wide­ spread proliferation of individualized, loosely bounded, and fragmentary social networks predates cyberspace, computer­ mediated communication has reinforced such trends, allowing communities to sustain interactions across vast distances. The Internet is also being incorporated into more routine aspects of daily social life as virtual and physical activities are increas­ingly integrated. The Internet thus facilitates global connectedness even as it strengthens local ties.

Build­ing on the pioneering use of digital technologies by the Zapatistas, as well as early free trade campaigns, anti–corporate globalization activists have used computer networks to organize actions and mobilizations, share information and resources, and coordinate campaigns by communicating at a distance.

Computer ­mediated communication is thus most effective when it is moderated, clearly focused, and used together with traditional modes of communication. Accordingly, activists generally use e­mail to stay informed about activities and perform concrete logistical tasks, while complex planning, political discussions, and relationship building occur within physical settings.

Network-Based organizational Forms

Beyond providing a technological medium, the Internet’s reticulate struc­ture reinforces network-­based organizational forms.

Networking logics have given rise to what many activists in Spain and Catalonia refer to as a “new way of doing politics.” By this they mean a mode of organizing involving horizontal coordination among autonomous groups, grassroots participation, consensus decision making, and the free and open exchange of information, although, as we shall see, this ideal is not always conformed to in practice. While the command-oriented logic of traditional parties and unions involves recruiting new members, developing unified strat­egies, pursuing political hegemony, and organizing through representative structures, network politics revolve around the creation of broad umbrella spaces, where diverse collectives, organizations, and networks converge around a few common principles while preserving their autonomy and identity­ based specificity. The objective becomes enhanced “connectivity” and horizon­tal expansion by articulating diverse movements within flexible, decentralized information structures that facilitate transnational coordination and com­munication. Key “activist­ hackers” (Nelson 1999) operate as relayers and exchangers, receiving, interpreting, and routing information to diverse net­ work nodes. Like computer hackers, activist ­hackers combine and recombine cultural codes—in this case political signifiers, sharing information about projects, mobilizations, strategies, and tactics within global communication networks.33

At the same time, discourses of open networking often conceal other forms of exclusion based on unequal access to information or technology. As a grassroots activist from India suggested to me at the 2002 WSF in Porto Alegre, “It’s not enough to talk about networks; we also have to talk about democracy and the distribution of power within them.”

what many observers view as a single, unified anti– corporate globalization movement is actually a congeries of competing yet sometimes overlapping social movement networks that differ according to is­ sue addressed, political subjectivity, ideological framework, political culture, and organizational logic.

Social movements are complex fields shot through with internal differen­tiation (Burdick 1995). Struggles within and among specific movement net­ works shape how they are produced, how they develop, and how they relate to one another within broader movement fields. Cultural struggles involv­ing ideology (anti-globalization versus anticapitalism), strategies (summit hopping versus sustained organizing), tactics (violence versus nonviolence), organizational form (structure versus non-structure), and decision making (consensus versus voting), or what I refer to as the cultural politics of network­ing, are enduring features of anti–corporate globalization landscapes. In the following chapters, I thus emphasize culture, power, and internal conflict.34 As we shall see, discrepant organizational logics often lead to heated struggles within broad “convergence spaces” (Routledge 2003), including the “unitary” campaigns against the World Bank and EU in Barcelona or the World Social Forum process more generally.

Networks as Emerging Ideal

Expanding and diversifying networks is more than a concrete organizational objective; it is also a highly valued political goal. The self­-produced, self-developed, and self­-managed network becomes a widespread cultural ideal, providing not only an effective model of political organizing but also a model for reorganizing society as a whole.

The dominant spirit behind this emerging political praxis can broadly be defined as anarchist, or what ac­tivists in Barcelona refer to as libertarian.35 Classic anarchist principles such as autonomy, self­ management, federation, direct action, and direct democracy are among the most important values for today’s radicals, who increasingly identify as anticapitalist, anti­authoritarian, or left ­libertarian.

 

These emerging political subjectivities are not necessarily identical to anar­chism in the strict ideological sense. Rather, they share specific cultural affini­ties revolving around the values associated with the network as an emerging political and cultural ideal: open access, the free circulation of information, self­-management, and coordination based on diversity and autonomy.

In a similar vein, Arturo Escobar (2004) has drawn on complexity theory to argue that anti–corporate globalization movements are emergent in that “the actions of multiple agents interacting dynamically and following local rules rather than top­ down commands result in visible macro­behavior or structures” (222).36 This is a compelling depiction of how anti–corporate globalization networks operate from a distance, but a slightly different perspective emerges when we engage in activist networking firsthand. Transnational networking requires a great deal of communicative work and struggle. Complexity theory provides a useful metaphor, but given its emphasis on abstract self -organizing systems, it tends to obscure micropolitical practices.

activists increasingly express their emerging utopian imaginaries di­rectly through concrete organizational and technological practice. As Geert Lovink (2002) suggests, “Ideas that matter are hardwired into software and network architectures” (34). This helps to explain why ideological debates are often coded as conflicts over organizational process and form.

Networks are not inherently demo­cratic or egalitarian, and they may be used for divergent ends. The network technologies and forms explored in this book were initially developed as a strategy for enhancing coordination, scale, and efficiency in the context of post-­Fordist capital accumulation. As we are reminded nearly every day, ter­ror and crime outfits increasingly operate through global networks as well.

while networks more generally are not necessarily democratic or egalitarian, their distributed structure does suggest a potential affinity with egalitarian values—including flat hierarchies, horizontal relations, and decen­ tralized coordination—which activists project back onto network technolo­ gies and forms.

What many activists now call “horizontalism” is best understood as a guiding vision, not an empirical depiction

Multiscalar ethnography

I specifically employ two tracking strategies: fol­ lowing activists to mobilizations and gatherings, and monitoring discourses and debates through electronic networks.

During my time in the field, I employed diverse ethnographic methods. First, I conducted participant observation among activists at mass mobili­zations, actions, and gatherings; meetings and organizing sessions; and in­ formal social settings. Second, I made extensive use of the Internet, which allowed me to participate in and follow planning, coordinating, and political discussions within Catalan, Spanish, and English­ language Listservs based in Europe, Latin America, and North America. Third, I conducted seventy qual­ itative interviews with Barcelona ­based activists from diverse backgrounds. Fourth, I collected and examined movement ­related documents produced for education, publicity, and outreach, including flyers, brochures, reports, and posters. Finally, I also collected articles and texts within mainstream and alternative media.

Practicing Militant ethnography

The ethnographic methodology developed here, which I call “militant eth­nography,” is meant to address what Wacquant (1992) calls the “intellectual bias”: how our position as outside observer “entices us to construe the world as a spectacle, as a set of significations to be interpreted rather than as concrete problems to be solved practically” (39). The tendency to position oneself at a distance and treat social life as an object to decode rather than entering the flow and rhythm of ongoing social interaction hinders our ability to understand social practice.45 To grasp the concrete logic generating specific practices, one has to become an active participant. With respect to social movements, this means organizing actions and workshops, facilitating meetings, weighing in during strategic and tactical debates, staking out political positions, and put­ ting one’s body on the line during direct actions. Simply taking on the role of “circumstantial activist” (Marcus 1995) is not sufficient; one has to build long­ term relationships of commitment and trust, become entangled with complex relations of power, and live the emotions associated with direct­action orga­nizing and transnational networking. Militant ethnography thus refers to ethnographic research that is not only politically engaged but also collaborative, thus breaking down the divide between researcher and object.46

Furthermore, militant ethnography also generates embodied and affec­tive understanding. As anyone who has participated in mass direct actions or demonstrations can attest, such events produce powerful emotions, involving alternating sensations of anticipation, tension, anxiety, fear, terror, solidar­ity, celebration, and joy. These affective dynamics are not incidental; they are central to sustained processes of movement building and activist networking. In this sense, I use my body as a research tool, particularly during moments of intense passion and excitement, to generate what Deidre Sklar (1994) calls “kinesthetic empathy.”47

militant ethnography can provide tools for activist (self­) reflection and decision making while remaining pertinent for broader aca­ demic audiences. I thus hope to contribute to strategic debates, but always from the partial and situated position of the militant ethnographer.

Practicing militant ethnography can thus help activists carry out their own ethnographic research.

For Burdick, this involves supporting movements in their efforts to reach out to a wider audience. But it might also mean helping activists analyze di­ verse movement sectors, understand how they operate, and learn how to most effectively work together.

Militant ethnography thus includes three interrelated modes: (1) collective reflection and visioning about movement practices, logics, and emerging cul­tural and political models; (2) collective analysis of broader social processes and power relations that affect strategic and tactical decision making; and (3) collective ethnographic reflection about diverse movement networks, how they interact, and how they might better relate to broader constituencies. Each of these levels involves engaged, practice­ based, and politically committed re­ search carried out in horizontal collaboration with social movements.

those of us within the academy can use writing and publishing as a form of resistance, working within the system to generate alternative politically en­gaged accounts.

The Book ahead

the genealogy of diverse processes that converged there, including grassroots struggles in the Global South, student­based anticorporate activism, campaigns against struc­tural adjustment and free trade, anarchist ­inspired direct action, and global Zapatista solidarity networks. I then go on to trace the growth and expansion of anti–corporate globalization movements after Seattle, before concluding with an analysis of their major defining characteristics.

The conflict between networking and traditional command logics forms part of a broader series of struggles involving competing visions, ideologies, and practices, leading to a complex pattern of shifting alliances driven by networking politics at local, regional, and global scales.

Notes from The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism

The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism

 

by Jon B. Perdue, Stephen Johnson

Jon B. Perdue is the author of The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism, published by Potomac Books in August 2012. Mr. Perdue was also the editor and wrote the foreword to the book Rethinking the Reset Button: Understanding Contemporary Russian Foreign Policy by former Soviet Central Committee member and defector Evgeni Novikov. He also contributed a chapter to the book Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America (Lexington Books, 2014).

Perdue also serves as an instructor and lecturer on peripheral asymmetric warfare, strategic communication and counterterrorism strategy. He is credited with coining the term “preclusionary engagement,” a strategy of counterterrorism that focuses on combined, small-unit operations that can be conducted with a much smaller footprint prior to or in the early stages of conflict against a threatening enemy, in order to preclude the necessity of much larger operations, which are far more difficult in terms of costs and casualties, once the conflict has escalated due to the lack of a forceful resistance.

Mr. Perdue’s articles have been published in the Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a number of newspapers in Latin America. Perdue served as an international election observer in the historic elections in Honduras in 2009 and as an expert witness in a precedent-setting human rights trial in Miami-Dade Circuit Court in 2010. He has served as a security analyst for NTN24, a Latin America-based satellite news channel, and CCTV, a 24-hour English-language news channel based in China.

For most of the past decade Mr. Perdue has served as the Director of Latin America programs for the Fund for American Studies in Washington, DC, and as a Senior Fellow for the Center for a Secure Free Society. He also serves on the boards of the Americas Forum in Washington, DC and the Fundación Democracia y Mercado in Santiago, Chile. He has worked unofficially on three presidential campaigns, contributing foreign policy and counterterrorism policy advice.

Preface

As Edward Gibbon hypothesized despite its greatness and the quantum leap in human achievement and prosperity that it wrought, Rome fell after being pushed – but it requires little force to topple what had already been hollowed from within. Rome fell when Romans lost the desire and the ability to defend it.

The American republic has survived the buffeting winds of war and governmental caprice to stand as the sole remaining superpower. Its principal threat is no longer from rival nation-states but from a multitude of smaller subversions.

As the military strategist Bernard Brodie noted, “good strategy presumes good anthropology and sociology. Some of the greatest military blinders of all time have resulted from juvenile evaluations in this department.

What still challenges the United States today is the pervasive lack of seriousness that prevents those agencies tasked with defending the homeland from being able to even name the enemy that we face. It illustrates a failure of will to claim the legitimacy that we have sacrificed so much to attain and an infections self-consciousness that has no basis in realpolitik.

More than any failed strategy or improper foreign policy, it is this American self-consciousness that is the topsoil for the growth of anti-American terrorism worldwide.

It is foolhardy to allow our enemies to paralyze our will to fight by defining American foreign policy as some new form of imperialism or hegemony. The desire for human freedom, lamentably, is not an expansionist impulse.

Introduction

“The War of All the People” is the doctrine of asymmetrical and political warfare that has been declared against the United States, Western civilization, and most of the generally accepted tenants of modernity. At its helm today are Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran – two self-described “revolutionary” leaders hell-bent on the destruction of capitalism and what they call “U.S. hegemony” throughout the world.

In October 2007 the two announced the creation of a “global progressive front” in the first of a series of joint projects designed to showcase “the ideological kinship of the left and revolutionary Islam.” Ahmadinejad would promote the theme on state visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, highlighting what he called “the divine aspect of revolutionary war”.

Declaring his own war against “imperialism,” Chavez aims to supplant U.S. dominance in the hemisphere with so-called 21st Century Socialism.

(2)

The Castro regime adopted the War of All the People doctrine from Viet Minh general Vo Nguyen Giap, who began publishing the military theories of Ho Chi Ming along with his own (much of it adapted from the theories of Mao Zedong) in the 1960s.

Giap’s most thorough examination of the tenets of a “people’s war” was put forth in his book To Arm the Revolutionary Masses: To Build the People’s Army, published in 1975.

(8)

What makes the current threat different is its stealthy, asymmetrical nature. The doctrine has been adapted to avoid the missteps made during the days of Soviet expansionism and has instead focused on the asymmetrical advantages that unfree states enjoy over free ones. While the United States enjoys a free press, it has no equivalent to the now-globalized state-run propaganda operations that unfree states utilize to attack the legitimacy of free ones.

…oil-rich states like Venezuela and Libya have been able to leverage their petrodollars to buy influence in those organizations and by corrupting weaker states to do their bidding on the world stage. These regimes have also formed new alliances around “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist” ideology in order to coordinate their efforts against the ideals of the West.

(10)

Peripheral warfare conducted by Chavez also includes the use of “ALBA houses,” ostensible medical offices for the poor that serve as recruitment and indoctrination centers for his supporters in neighboring countries… ALBA houses are modeled on Cuba’s Barrio Adentro program, which it has utilized for years to infiltrate spies and agitators into neighboring countries under the guise of doctors, coaches and advisers to help the poor… What is given up by ignoring a tyrant’s provocations is the ability to actively prevent the incremental destruction of democratic institutions that solidify his power.

(16)

There exists a mistakenly view of the interactions between disparate extremist organizations and terrorist groups internationally. This “burqa-bikini paradox” – the premise that culturally or ideologically distinct actors couldn’t possibly be cooperating to any significant degree – has frequently been the default position of journalists, the diplomatic community, and even some in the intelligence community.

Douglas Farah, a former Latin America correspondent for the Washington Post and now a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, challenged this premise at a December 2008 Capitol Hill briefing titled “Venezuela and the threat it Poses to U.S. and Hemispheric Security”:

These lines that we think exist where these groups like Iran – well they’re a theocracy, or Hezbollah, they’re religiously motivated, they won’t deal with anyone else – bullshit! They will deal with whoever they need to deal with at any given time to acquire what they want…. And the idea that someone won’t deal with Hezbollah because they don’t like their theology is essentially horseshit. You can document across numerous times and numerous continents where people of opposing views will do business together regardless of ideology or theology.

(17)

It is no stretch of logic to surmise that terrorist groups are the natural allies of authoritarian regimes. But throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, there was a battle in Washington between those who believed that the Soviet Union was complicit in terrorism and those who maintained that the Soviets eschewed it as a tactic. The official policy of the Soviets during the Cold War was to declare its opposition to terrorism while unofficially supporting and supplying proxy terrorist groups. But in 1970 Moscow had grown bold enough to train terrorists to overthrow the Mexican government and set up a satellite totalitarian state just across the U.S. Border.

(20)

Carlos (the Jackal) “was given a staff of 75 to plot further deaths and provided with guns, explosives and an archive of forged papers” by the East Germans. He was provided with safe houses and East German experts to ensure that his phones were not bugged, and even his cars were repaired by the Stasi.

(21)

The recovery of Stasi files had proven that the extent of Soviet bloc involvement in terrorism was far greater than even the CIA and other security agencies had considered. Throughout the Cold War, much of the conventional media and the foreign policy establishment often dismissed reports that the Soviets were sponsoring international terrorism or that the Marxist terrorists of Europe might be intermingling with Maoists in Latin America.

Some analysts and scholars referred to the writing of Karl Marx and Lenin to shot that the, and hence the Soviets, were ideologically opposed to terrorism… This and other tenants of Marxist-Leninist theory were often used to claim an ideological aversion to Soviet terror sponsorship.

(22)

In 1916 Lenin wrote to Franz Koritschoner, one of the founders of Austria’s Communist Party, telling him that the Bolsheviks “are not at all opposed to political killing… but as revolutionary tactics individual attacks are inexpedient and harmful. Only the mass movement can be considered genuine political struggle. Only in direct immediate connection with the mass movement can and must individual terrorist acts be of value.

(24-25)

Soviet Use of Communist Party Front Groups in the United Nations

The CPSU’s International Department was tasked with controlling the policy of the world communist movement. From 1955 to 1986, Boris Ponomarev was the chief of this department, which became the premier Soviet agency for fomenting and supporting international terrorism.

Under Ponomarev, the CPSU founded the Lenin Institute, which trained communist from Western and Third World countries in psychological warfare and propaganda and in guerilla warfare. Seeing the potential of “liberation movements” and “anti-imperialist” movements as proxy forces against the West, the CPSU also founded in 1960 the Peoples’ Friendship University (renamed Patrice Lumumba University in 1961) to train “freedom fighters” from the Third World who were no Communist Party members.

The International Department was also in charge of setting up front groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that could advocate by proxy for Soviet aims at the United Nations (UN) and other international governments. According to a U.S. House of Representative Subcommittee on Oversight report on February 6, 1980, Soviet subsidies to international front organizations exceeded $63 million in 1979 alone.

The report noted that the KGB and the Central Committee “actively promote” the UN imprimatur of the NGO front groups. The international Department controlled the NGOs and held coordinated meetings twice a year, and an official of the Soviet journal Problems of Peace and Socialism (also known as World Marxist Review) would always attend.

According to the report, Anatoly Mkrtchyan, the Soviet director of the External Relations Division of Public Information, was in charge of the NGO section.

Source: At the U.N., Soviet Fronts Pose as Nongovernmental Organizations Juliana Geran Pilon

https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/report/the-un-soviet-fronts-pose-nongovernmental-organizations

(32)

After Arafat started the First Intifada in 1987, both the Soviet Union and Cuba increased military support to the Palestinians, often portraying U.S. and Israeli actions in the Middle East as hegemonic aggression against unarmed Palestinian victims.

In 1990 Havana sent assistance to Iran following an earthquake, and Iran started buying biotechnology products from Cuba. In the last 1990s Castro made a number of bilateral agreements with Iran, and several high-level delegations from Iran made trips to Cuba.

(33)

In 1962, the CPSU helped to establish the Paris-based Solidarite terrorist support network that was masterminded by Henri Curiel. Curial was an Egyptian communist born to an Italian Jewish family who ran a highly successful clandestine organization providing everything from arms to safe houses to actionable intelligence for terrorist group from Brazil to South Africa.

In 1982 a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate stated that Curiel’s Solidarite “has provided support to a wide variety of Third World leftist revolutionary organizations,” including “false documents, financial aid, and safehaven before and after operations, as well as some illegal training in France in weapons and explosives.”

Besides the direct support and training of terrorists, the Soviets made ample use of front groups that posed as religious organizations, academic institutions, or human rights advocates. A 1980 CIA report titled Soviet Covert Action and Propaganda stated:

At a meeting in February 1979 of World Peace Council (WPC) officials, a resolution was adopted to provide “uninterrupted support for the just struggle of the people of Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, Haiti, Paraguay, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil.” Without resort to classified information, from this one my logically conclude that the named countries are targets for Soviet subversion and national liberation struggles on a continuing basis. One might interpret “uninterrupted support for the just struggle” to mean continuing financial and logistic support to insurrection movements.

(34)

A former senior GRU officer confirmed this when he made the following statement:

…” If I give you millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, or cash, I have a small right to expect you to help me. I won’t tell you where to place the next bomb, but I do expect to have a little influence on your spheres of action. And if someone later arrests an Irishman, he can honestly say that he never trained in the Soviet Union. And he still believes he is fighting for himself.”

(38)

The point that Colby and Sterling were making was that the Soviets supported terrorist groups as proxy forces, specifically to retain the appearance of distance from their activities. The more important point was that international terrorist groups would have been far less prodigious, and far less deadly, without the support that they received from the Soviet Union and its satellite states…. The Soviet aspect could be seen as giving these groups a “do-it-yourself kit for terrorist warfare.”

(41)

According to [Former Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates, “We would learn a decade later that [CIA analysis] had been too cautious. After the communist governments in Eastern Europe collapsed, we found out that the Easter Europeans (especially the East Germans) indeed not only had provided sanctuary for West European ‘nihilist’ terrorists, but had trained, armed and funded many of them.

(49)

She (Leila Khaled) has also been a regularly scheduled speaker at the World Social Forum.

On May 26, 1971, Khaled told the Turkish newspaper Hurryet that:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) sends instructors to Turkey in order to train Turkish youth in urban guerrilla fighting, kidnapping, plan hijackings, and other matters… In view of the fact that it is more difficult than in the past for Turks to go and train in PFLP camps, the PFLP is instructing the Turks in the same way as it trains Ethiopians and revolutionaries from underdeveloped countries. The PFLP has trained most of the detained Turkish underground members.

Within ten years, terrorist attacks in Turkey would be killing an average of nine to ten people per day.

Source: Sterling, Terror Network

(52)

The Baath Party’s founders were educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, where, incidentally, an inordinate number of the world’s former dictators were schooled. Commenting on this phenomenon, Egyptian journalist Issandr Elamsani said that Arab intellectuals still see the world through a 1960s lens: “They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists, who look at everything through a postcolonial prism.”

The Sorbonne in the 1960s was one of the intellectual centers of radial political science. In the tradition of the Jacobins, it offered a pseudo-intellectual foundation for end-justifies-means terrorism, which many of its graduates – among them Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Peruvian terrorist leader Abimeal Guzman, intellectual arbiter of the Iranian revolution Ali Shariati, and Syrian Baathist Michel Aflaq – would use to justify mass murder.

(60-61)

Aleida Guevara, the daughter of Che, made a trip to Lebanon in 2010 to lay a wreath on the tomb of former Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi. At the ceremony, she echoed [Daniel] Ortega’s sentiments, saying, “I think that as long as [the martyr’s] memory remains within us, we will have more strength, and that strength will grow and develop, until we make great achievements and complete our journey to certain victory.”. Guevara later told supporters while visiting Baalbek, “If we do not conduct resistance, we will disappear from the face of the earth.” To make sure that the international press understood the subtext, Hezbollah’s official in the Bekaa Valley said, “We are conducting resistance for the sake of liberty and justice, and to liberate our land and people from Zionist occupation, which receives all the aid it needs from the U.S. administration.

Though Guevara was parroting what has become standard rhetoric among revolutionaries in all parts of the world, her visit had the potential to become controversial. Just three years earlier, in 2007, she and her brother Camilo had visited Tehran for a conference that was intended to emphasize the “common goals” of Marxism and Islamist radicalism.

Titled “Che Like Chamran,” the conference was a memorial to the fortieth anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, which happened to coincide with the twenty0sizzth anniversary of the death of Mostafa Chamran. Chamran, a radical Khomeinist who founded the Amal terrorist group in Lebanon, went to Iran in 1979 to help the mullahs take over and died in 1981 in the Iran-Iraq War (or, according to some, in a car accident.

Speaker Mortaza Firuzabadi, a Khomeinist radical, told the crowd that the mission of both leftist and Islamist revolutionaries was to fight America “everywhere and all of the time,” adding, “Our duty is to the whole of humanity. We seek unity with revolutionary movements everywhere. This is why we have invited the children of Che Guevara.”

…He ended his speech with an entreaty to all anti-American revolutionaries in the world to accept the leadership of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his revolutionary regime.

Qassemi returned once again to the podium at this point. “The Soviet Union is gone,” Qassemi declared. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic Republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality.

Though it has been treated as a rarity by much of the Western media, collaboration between radical groups that might appear to have little in common have included joint operations of far-right, fascist, and neo-Nazi groups with far-left, Marxist and Islamist groups. These collaborations go back well before World War II.

The widespread misconception that a philosophical or religious wall of separation exists between the extremist ideological movements of the world is not only demonstrable false, it is highly detrimental to a proper analysis of the terrorist threat and to the public’s understanding of counterterrorism efforts. This myth has served well the forces of subversion.

The small subset of the population that is drawn to extremist movements is not limited to those who process the same or a similar ideology but instead includes those who tend to seek personal fulfilment from extremism itself. Ideology can be quite malleable when militants see an opportunity to take advantage of the popularity of a more militant group, regardless of any ideological differences between them. In fact, these groups have often found common cause soon after seeing a rival group begin to dominate international headlines.

(64-65)

One of the principal objectives of a terrorist attack that is often overlooked is the expected overreaction of the state in response to the threat.

Feltrinelli’s thesis, like those of many terrorist theorists before and after, was that this would bring “an advanced phase of the struggle” by forcing “an authoritarian turn to the right”.

Feltrinelli is emblematic of the ideologically itinerant radicals who wreaked havoc in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. He was a close friend of Fidel Castro’s, attended the Tricontinental Conference in 1966, and published its official magazine, Tricontinental, in Europe after the event… (he) began wearing a Tupamaros uniform on his return to Italy. There Feltrinelli built his own publishing empire, flying to Moscow to secure the publishing rights to Boris Pasternack’s Dr. Zhivago and publishing Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s bestseller The Leopard, … The profit from these blockbusters allowed him to fill bookstores throughout Italy with radical manifestos and terrorist literature.

On March 15, 1972, the police found Feltrinelli’s body in pieces at the foot of a high-voltage power line pylon. He had been placing explosives on the pylon with a group of fellow terrorists when one of his own explosives detonated accidentally.

(71)

According to the Aryan Nations’ website, the premise that could bridge the ideological gap between these ostensibly disparate worldviews that Muslims are of the same “Aryan” lineage. This view was not hard to concoct. Adolph Hitler’s minister of economics, Hjalmar Schacht, had professed a similar theory which was one promoted by King Darius the Great: the Persian bloodline was of Aryan lineage. This, Schacht argued it made the Persians – and therefor, somehow, all Muslims – the natural allies of Hitler’s vision of a superior Aryan race that should rule the world.

(72-73)

The rise of the Third Reich became a rallying point for many Muslim leaders, who fostered a bit of Muslim mythmaking by claiming that both Hitler and Mussolini were closet Muslims. One rumor had it that Hitler had secretly converted to Islam and that his Muslim name was Hayder, translated as “the Brave One”.” Mussolini, the rumors told, was really an Egyptian Muslim name Musa Nili, which translated into “Moses of the Nile.”

As far back as 1933, Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq were supporting Nazism.

Arab support for Hitler was widespread by the time he rose to power. And when the Nazis announced the Nuremburg Laws in 1935 to legalize the confiscation of Jewish property, “telegrams of congratulations were sent to the fuhrer from all over the Arab and Islamic world.”

It was Germany’s war against the British Empire that motivated much of the early support for the Nazi regime. Hitler was, after all, fighting the three shared enemies of Germany and the Arab world at the same time: Zionism, communism, and the British Empire.

After World War II, many German officers and Nazi Party officials were given asylum in the Middle East, mostly in Syria and Egypt, where they were utilized to help set up clandestine services throughout the region – this time in support of many of the anticolonialist forces fighting the British and French.

(74)

Ronald Newton, a Canadian academic who wrote The Nazi Menace in Argentina, 1931-1947… thesis was that the tales of Nazi-fascist settlement in Argentina was the result of British disinformation, designed to thwart postwar market capture of Argentina by the United States. The theory was refuted in 1998 after Argentina president Carlos Menem put together a commission to study the issue.

(85)

The stated aim of right-wing extremist groups had always been to bring down the leftist democratic state model and bring about a national socialist or fascist state. But that ideology began to devolve in the 1980s as neo-Nazi groups started to see the dame and legitimacy that was afforded to left-wing terrorist groups that were committing far more violent acts and seemed to be rewarded proportionately.

Two years after Palestinian terrorists killed eleven Israeli team members at the Munich Olympics in 1972, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat was invited by the United Nations to address its General Assembly, and the PLO was awarded UN observer status shortly after that. Moreover, by the 1980s the PLO had been accorded diplomatic relations with more countries than Israel had.

(91)

In 1969, Qaddafi became the chief financier of terrorism of every stripe throughout the world. And though he became known as the principal donor to worldwide leftist groups, he began his terrorist franchise with those of the extreme right.

(93)

In his book Revolutionary Islam, Carlos tried to join the two strongest currents of revolutionary terror, declaring that “only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States.”

Carlos’s book would be little noticed until Hugo Chavez, speaking to a gathering of worldwide socialist politicians in November 2009, called him an important revolutionary fighter who supported the Palestinian cause. Chavez said during his televised speech that Carlos had been unfairly convicted and added, “They accuse him of being a terrorist, but Carlos really was a revolutionary fighter.”

(97)

“There is a revolution going on in Venezuela, a revolution of an unusual kind – it is a slow-motion revolution.” Thus, declared Richard Gott in an interview with Socialist Worker on February 12, 2005. Gott, a British author and ubiquitous spokesman for all things Chavez and Castro, is not the first to note the nineteenth-century pedigree of Chavez’s 21stCentury Socialism.

The incremental implementation of socialism was the dream of the Fabian Society, a small but highly influential political organization founded in London in 1884… The logo of the Fabian Society, a tortoise, represented the group’s predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism, while its coat of arms, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” represented its preferred methodology for achieving its goal.

(98)

In a 1947 article in Partisan Review, [Arthur] Schlesinger Jr. stated, “there seems to be no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

Gradualism has always been considered “anti-revolutionary” in communist and socialist circles. But pragmatism has taken the place of idealism after the events of 9/11 increased international scrutiny on radical groups, forcing revolutionists like Chavez and Ahmadinejad to use the Fabian strategy as a “soft subversion” tactic with which to undermine their enemies. In the past decade, Chavez and his allies in Lain America have all embraced Ahmadinejad’s regime, and all have developed their strategic relationship based on mutual support for this incremental subversion.

(99-100)

Castro has had a lot of practice in the art of subversion. Within a short time after he came to power in Cuba, he began trying to subvert other governments in Latin America and the Caribbean. On may 10, 1967 Castro sent an invasion force to Machurucuto, Venezuela, to link up with Venezuelan guerillas to try and overthrow the democratic and popular government of President Raul Leoni.

Led by Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, the invasion force was quickly vanished, and the Venezuelan armed forces, with the help of peasant farmers leery of the guerillas, pacified the remaining guerrilla elements before the end of the year. Then the Venezuelan government issues a general amnesty to try and quell any violence from the remaining guerrilla holdouts. But the PRV, Red Flag and the Socialist League continued to operate clandestinely. Douglas Bravo, the Venezuelan terrorist who inspired Carlos the Jackal, remained the intransigent leader of the PRV. One of Bravo’s lieutenants was Adan Chavez, Hugo’s older brother, who would serve as Hugo’s liaison to the radical elements throughout for years to come.

After suffering calamitous defeats at the hand of the Venezuelan armed forces, the PRV decided the best way to continue the revolution would be to infiltrate the “system” and subvert it from within. In 1970, they would first make a move to infiltrate the armed forces. Bravo first contacted Lt. William Izarra in 1920. A year later, Chavez entered military school and started to recruit leftist military members to what became a clandestine fifth-column groups, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movements. The failed 1992 coup that launched Hugo Chavez’s political career would be planned and executed jointly by the MBR, PRV, Socialist League and Red Flag.

After his release in 1994, Chavez spent six months in Colombia receiving guerrilla training, establishing contacts with both the FARC and the ELN of Colombia, and even adopting a nom de Guerra, Comandante Centeno.

Once he was elected president four years later, he would repay the Colombian guerrillas with a $300 million “donation” and thank Castro with a subsidized oil deal.

Though Chavez would denounce Plan Avila often, it would be his own decision to order its activation in 2002 that would provoke his own military to remove him from power.

Chavez seemed to take the near-death experience as a sign from divine providence of his right to rule and began a purge of the military and the government of anyone who might later threaten his power. Chavez then began radicalizing the remainder of the Venezuelan military by replacing its historical training regimen with a doctrine of asymmetric warfare that involved all sectors of society. He would call his new doctrine la guerra de todo el pueblo – “the war of all the people”.

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The Revolutionary Brotherhood Plan

While Chavez calls his hemispheric governing plan “21st Century Socialism,” his critics have given it another name – democradura.

Democradura is a Spanish neologism that has come to define the budding autocracies in Lain America that have incrementally concentrated power in the executive branch under the guise of constitutional reform.

A Socialist think tank in Spain, the CEPTS foundation, part of the Center for Political and Social Studies, was founded in Valencia in 1993 by left-wing academics supporting Spain’s socialist Party as well as the FARC and ELN terrorist groups in Colombia. It put together a team of Marxist constitutional scholars to write the new constitutions of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, turning them into “socialist constitutions” but with variations applicable to each particular country.

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Where Bolivia’s indigenous president Evo Morales used race to marginalize his opposition, Correa used the rhetoric of environmental radicalism to demonize the mining, oil and gas sectors in Ecuador. Anyone who opposed the anthropocentric environmental language in the (new) constitution was called a “lackey” or multinational corporations and oligarchs. This stance also allowed Correa to eventually break the contracts with these companies in order to demand higher government revenues from their operations, which was then used to support government-funded projects in government-friendly provinces.

The process of Marxist constitution making first caught the attention of the revolutionary left during Colombia’s constitutional change in 1991. The Colombian constitution had been in place since 1886, a long time for regional constitutions, and was only able to be changed with some political machination and legal subterfuge.

As M-19 guerrillas began demobilization talks with a weak Colombian government in the late 1980s, the group took advantage of its position to transition from an armed insurgency to a political party. By 1991 M-19 was able to get one of its leaders, Antonio Navarro, included as one of the three copresidents of the constituent assembly that drew up the new constitution.

Navarro was able to negotiate a prohibition against any attempts by the state to organize the population against the armed guerrilla groups. Not only would this provision end up escalating violence in Colombia, but it would inspire other terrorist groups throughout the America to seek both an armed and a “political wing” which would be utilized skillfully to prolong their longevity as insurgents.

After witnessing the ease with which the Colombian constitution was changed, “constitutional subversion” became standard operation procedure for those countries headed by Chavez’s allies.

The former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Kingdom, Jorge Olavarria, assessed the situation with a bit more apprehension and foresight: “The constituent assembly is nothing more than a camouflage to make the world think that the coming dictatorship is the product of a democratic process.

Where most Latin American constitutions contained between 100 and 200 articles, the new Venezuelan constitution had 350, or 98 more than its predecessor. According to Professor Carlos Sabino of Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, the essence of the new constitution was “too many rules, no system to enforce them.” (it) “would consolidate an authoritarian government with a legal disguise, necessary in today’s globalized world where the respect for democratic values is the key to good international relations.

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The Defense of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination Law would prohibit organizations, as well as individuals, that advocate for the political rights of Venezuelans from accepting funds from any foreign entity. It also prohibited them from having any representation from foreigners and even sponsoring or hosting any foreigner who expresses opinions that “offend the institution of the state.” This law was included with the International Cooperation Law, which would force all NGOs to reregister with the government and include a declared action plan on their future activities, along with a list of any financing that they expected to receive.

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gNGOs are Governmental Non-Governmental Orgs. Fake NGO’s operated by the government.

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The Sandinista government in Nicaragua has been even more aggressive against civil society groups, raiding the offices of long-established NGOs and launching what it called Operation No More lies, a crackdown against those that it accuses of money laundering, embezzlement and subversion.

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At the end of March 2011, former president Jimmy Carter made a trip to Cuba to meet with members of the regime. About the time he arrived, Cuban state television aired a series in which it portrayed independent NGOs as subversive organizations that sought to “erode the order of civil society” in Cuba. The report claimed that “via the visits to the country of some of its representatives and behind the backs of Cuban authorities, these NGOs have the mission of carrying out the evaluations of the Cuban political situation and instructing, organizing, and supplying the counter-revolution.” It accused the organizations of hiding “their subversive essence [behind] alleged humanitarian aid.” The series featured Dr. Jose Manuel Collera, who was revealed as “Agent Gerardo,” a Cuban spy who had infiltrated the NGOs in the United States “to monitor their work and representatives.”

Along with thwarting the oversight power of NGOs in Venezuela, Chavez also included a number of “economic” laws designed to put the stamp of legitimacy on his new “communal” economic system that had caused shortages throughout the country… These laws made communes the basis of the Venezuelan economy and established “People’s Power” as the basis of local governance. It is codified as being responsible to the “revolutionary Leadership,” which is Chavez himself. This effectively supplanted the municipalities and regional governments.

(117) 

Managing the Media

Speaking in September 2010 at a Washington event to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors Walter Issacson, warned, “We can’t allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies. There’s that Freedom House report that reveals that today’s autocratic leaders are investing billions of dollars in media resources to influences the Global opinion… You’ve got Russia Today, Iran’s Press TV, Venezuela’s TeleSUR…”

Their techniques are similar: hire young, inexperienced correspondents who will toe the party line as TV reporters, and put strong sympathizers, especially Americans, as hosts of “debate” shows.

Where normal media outlets will film only the speakers at such an event, these state-sponsored media units will often turn the cameras toward the audience in order to capture on film those in the audience who may be government critics. Their purpose for this is twofold – to later screen the video to see who might be attending such a conference and to intimidate exiles from attending such events.

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TeleSUR’s president, Andres Izarra, is a professional journalist who formerly worked for CNN en Espanol. He also serves as Chavez’s minister of communications and information. Izarra said of TeleSUR’s launch: “TeleSUR is an initiative against cultural imperialism. We launch TeleSUR with a clear goal to break this communication regime.”

In a 1954 letter to a comrade, Fidel Castro wrote, “We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital – propaganda is the heart of our struggle.

“We have to win the war inside the United States, said Hector Oqueli, one of the Rebel leaders. And after the Sandinistas first took power in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the late Tomas Borge, who served as the interior minister and head of state security for the Sandinista regime, told Newsweek, “The battle for Nicaragua is not being waged in Nicaragua. It is being fought in the United States.

It had not been difficult for the revolutionary left in Latin America to find willing allies in the United States to help with its propaganda effort. An illustrative example is William Blum, the author of several anti-American books that have called U.S. foreign engagements “holocausts”. Blum has described his life’s mission as “slowing down the American Empire… injuring the Beast.” Blum’s treatment of U.S. involvement in Latin America is noteworthy, because it is emblematic of what often passes as scholarship on the subject and because it gets repeated in many universities where he is often invited to speak to students… In January 2006, Blum’s Rogue State got an endorsement by Osama bin Laden, who recommended the book in an audiotape and agreed with Blum’s idea that the way the United States could prevent terrorist attacks was to “apologize to the victims of American Imperialism.”

Examples of bad scholarship follow…

Blum’s book is typical of a genre that has long eschewed scholarship for sensationalized anti-Americanism. At the summit of the Americas in April 2009, Chavez handed President Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, about which Michael Reid, the Americas editor at The Economist, wrote, [Galeano’s history is that of the propagandist, a potent mix of selective truths, exaggeration and falsehood, caricature and conspiracy. Called the “Idiots Bible” by Latin American scholars, Galeano’s 1971 tome was translated to English by Cedric Belfrage, a British journalist and expatriate to the United States who was also a Communist Party member and an agent for the KGB.

The Artillery of Ideas

Another Chavez propaganda effort designed to reach English-speaking audiences is the state funded newspaper Correo del Orinoco, named for a newspaper started by Simon Bolivar in 1818.

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Un April 2010 Chavez held a celebration on the eight anniversary of the coup that earlier had removed him from office for two days. He named the celebration “Day of the Bolivarian Militias, the Armed People and the April Revolution” and held a swearing in ceremony for 35,000 new members of his civilian militia. As part of the festivities, Chavez also had a swearing in ceremony for a hundred young community media activists, calling them “communicational guerrillas.” This was done, according to Chavez, to raise awareness among young people about the “media lies” and to combat the anti-revolution campaign of the opposition-controlled private media.

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The most notorious propaganda and coverup operation to date has been that of the Puente Llaguno shooting in 2002, in which nineteen people were killed and sixty injured as Chavez’s henchmen were videotaped shooting into a crowd of marchers from a bridge overhead.

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According to Nelson (the author of The Silence and the Scorpion) the reason that Chavez felt the need to go after the Metropolitan Police was because they were the largest group in the country, aside from the army. This, feared Chavez, made them a potential threat for another coup against his regime. After he was briefly ousted from office in 2002, Chavez skillfully utilized the canard that the Metropolitan police had fired the first shots at the Bolivarian Circles as an excuse to take away much of their firepower and equipment, leaving them only with their .38 caliber pistols. And one a Chavez loyalist took over as mayor of Caracas, the Metropolitan Police were completely purged. According to Nelson, loyalty to Chavez’s political party became much more important than expertise or experience on the police force.

In January 2007, the President of TeleSUR, Andres Izarra, revealed the thinking behind Chavez’s campaign against the media: “We have to elaborate a new plan, and the one that we propose is the communication and informational hegemony of the state.”

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A report done for the United Nations by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said that verbal attacks against anyone “who dared to criticize the policies of President Ortega or his government… were systematically and continuously taken up by the official or pro-Government media.” The reports, issued in June 2009, stated:

President Ortega’s government tried to silence dissident voices and criticisms of Government policies through members of the government who verbally assaulted demonstrators and human rights defenders as well as the Citizens Council (Consejos de Poder Ciudadno – CPC) who hampered the NGOs’ activities and physically assaulted defenders. In this context, 2008 saw numerous attacks against human rights defenders and attempts to obstruct their activity…

These Citizens’ Councils were taken directly from the “Revolutionary Brotherhood” plan and are close facsimiles of groups like the Bolivarian Circles in Venezuela. Ortega claimed in July 2007 that “more than 6,000 [CPCs] has been formed,” and “around 500,000 people participated in CPCs.”

(142)

Managing the Military

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: More and more the United Nations seems only to know of violations of human rights in countries where it is still possible to protest such violations… our suspicions are that there could be a design to use the issue of human rights to undermine the legitimacy of precisely those nations which still overserve human rights, imperfect as that observance may be.” (871)

The Department of State Bulletin. (1975). United States: Office of Public Communication, Bureau of Public Affairs.

The southern Connections was a coordinated effort by far-left supporters of the Castro regime and other leftist governments in Latin America to end the Monroe Doctrine or at least to deter Washington’s policy of intervention against communist expansion in the hemisphere.

(144)

EL Salvador’s civil war, from 1979 until 1992, was emblematic of the Cuba-instigated wars in Latin America. It was Fidel Castro who convinced the various left-wing guerilla groups operating in El Salvador consolidate under the banner of the DRU, officially formed in May 1980. The DRU manifesto stated, “There will be only one leadership, only one military plan and only one command, only one political line.” Fidel Castro had facilitated a meeting in Havana in December 1979 that brought these groups together – a feat that has not been repeated since, as the historic tendency of most leftist terrorist groups in the region have been of splintering after fights over egos and ideological differences.

It was a Salvadoran of Palestinian descent, Schafik Handal, who helped found the Communist Party of El Salvador and who would serve as Castro’s partner in the Central American wars of the era.

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Stealth NGOs

One of the most effective asymmetrical tactics has been the use of dummy NGOs as front groups in Latin America. A number of nongovernmental organizations operating in the region that claim to advocate for human rights actually receive funding from radical leftist groups sympathetic to revolutionary movements in the hemisphere. Many of these groups derive much of their legitimacy from unwitting representative of the European Union, the United Nations and even the U.S. Department of State who often designate them as “special rapporteurs” for human rights reporting.

(146)

Both Cristian Fernandez de Kirchner, the current president, and her husband the late President Nestor Kirchner, were far left radicals in the 1960s and 1970s and filled both of their administrations with ex-terrorists and radicals… Many have accused the Kirchner’s and their allies of blatant double standards on human rights issues – especially in the prosecution of former military members who served during Argentina’s Dirty War from 1976 to 1983.

Since 2003, when Nestor Kirchner took office, the successive Kirchner administrations have aggressively prosecuted hundreds of ex-soldiers, many of who served prior to the beginning of the Dirty War. The double standard arises because not one of the ex-terrorists, who started the Dirty War in the first place, has been prosecuted. The Kirchners, along with far-left judicial activists in the region, have relied on a blatantly unjust tenant of “international human rights law” that says crimes against humanity only apply to representatives of the state, a group that includes military and policy but excludes the terrorists who ignited the guerillas wars.

(148)

Since the late 1990s, the NGO practice of dragging the military into court on allegations of human rights violations has destroyed the careers of some of [Colombia’s] finest officers, even though most of these men were found innocent after years of proceedings.”

According to O’Grady, the enabling legislation that makes this judicial warfare possible is what’s been termed the “Leahy Law,” after its sponsor, Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Under this law, American Military aid can be withdrawn if military offenses are brought against them, even when the credibility of the charges is dubious. O’Grady noted, “The NGOs knew that they only had to point fingers to get rid of an effective leader and demoralize the ranks.”

The legislation that became the Leahy Law was first introduced in 1997 in the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, and similar language was inserted into the 2001 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. It has since been used repeatedly against Colombia, which has been a target ever since it became serious about taking on the FARC and took funding from the United States to Implement Plan Colombia, an anti-drug smuggling and counter-insurgency initiative.

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The publicity about Reyes’s death put the spotlight on the situation in Colombia and led researchers to uncover the fact that many of the so-called trade unionists in Colombia were moonlighting as FARC terrorists.

Raul Reyes was the prime example, having begun his career at age sixteen when he joined the Colombian Communist Youth (JUCO), which led him to become a trade unionist at a Nestle plant in his hometown of Caquetá. His position as a Nestle “trade unionist” was a front for his real job, which was influencing, recruiting, and radicalizing fellow workers at a plant for the Colombian Communist Party… Since the beginning of the FARC, and its collaboration and later split with the party, a number of Colombian trade unions have served as way stations for FARC members as they moved from union posts to the ranks of the FARC.

(150)

Uribe was able to turn the tide…. By strategically transitioning from the largely fruitless supply-control methods of Plan Colombia to the population centric counterinsurgency (PC-COIN) methods of Plan Patriota, a later iteration of the original plan that put focus on counterinsurgency.

Where the previous policy had granted a vast demilitarized zone to the FARC in exchange for a proposed peace treaty, Plan Patriota utilized a counter-insurgency strategy that attacked terrorists with physical force. But more importantly, it attached their legitimacy by placing security personnel in remote areas where there had been no state presence before. What this accomplished, more successfully than any of the Colombian military’s previous operational tactics, was to change the populations’ perception of the forty-year insurgency. What had been seen as a conflict between rival political parties was now looked upon as the battle of a legitimate, elected government against illegitimate narco-terrorists.

Revolutionizing the Military

In 2001 the Venezuelan daily Tal Cual published a leaked document from the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DIM) which spelled out a plan to politicize the military. According to the document top military officers were to be divided into “revolutionists” who supported Chavez, “institutionalists” who were considered to be neutral, and “dissidents” who were opposed to the regime. It also advocated for catequesis (Spanish for catechism) to proselytize these officers to accept Chavez’s socialist governing program.

(152-153)

During the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Andropov “had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts” It is said that Andropov was “haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple” and was thereafter “obsessed with the need to stamp out ‘ideological sabotage’ where it reared its head within the Soviet bloc.” This obsession made the Soviets much more eager to send in troops whenever other communist regimes were in jeopardy.

…both Castro and Chavez, would develop a Hungarian complex as well, leading to a clampdown on ‘ideological sabotage’ within their respective countries. In 1988 Castro stated, when speaking of the Sandinistas’ use of civilian militias to defend their revolution in Nicaragua, that both Cuba and Nicaragua needed a “committed… people’s armed defense that is sufficient in size, training and readiness, “adding that Salvador Allende hadn’t had a big enough force to prevent the coup that drove him from power in Chile in 1973. It was a rare moment of candor, as the militia is usually touted as the last bastion against a U.S. invasion. But in reality, it is a tool designed to accomplish the prime objective of an aspiring autocrat – to ensure the longevity of the regime. Max Manwaring, writing on Chavez’s use of these civilian militias, stated:

All these institutions are outside the traditional control of the regular armed forced, and each organization is responsible directly to the leader (President Chavez). This institutional separation is intended to ensure the no military or paramilitary organization can control another, but the centralization of these institutions guarantees the leader absolute control of security and social harmony in Venezuela.

Perpetuating the Regime

Started as a jobless protest in 1996, the piquiteros have transformed into what are, according to The Economist, “government rent-a-mobs” consisting of “unemployed protestors receiving state welfare payments.” The piquiteros were co-opted by Nestor Kirchner’s government, through some have splintered since his wife succeeded him.

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In February 2011 the gravity of the effort to militarize Morales’s civilian supporters became far clearer. According to ABC, a Paraguayan daily, Iran was providing the financing for the militia training facility. Called the Military Academy of ALBA, it is located in Warnes, thirty miles north of Santa Cruz. ABC reported that the facility would train both military personnel and civilian militia members from all of the ALBA countries.

(156)

Shortly after Castro’s guerrillas took power in Havana, Cuban embassies in Latin America became recruitment centers and incubators for radical groups and terrorist subversives throughout the hemisphere. Organizing subversive student movements became a priority for Cuban “diplomats,” and the autonomy of the campuses provided easy access and impunity.

A comparison of the student vote to that of the general population at the time provides an illustration of the radicalization of the student body. During the 1960s in Venezuela, students at the Central University typically voted 50 to 60 percent for candidates from the Communist Party of Venezuela and the radical Castroite MIR, while these candidates never broke 10 percent among the general population.

A Venezuela MIR guerrilla noted that their near total domination of the liceos (secondary schools) and the universities led them wrongly to believe that this level of acceptance could be extrapolated to the general population. But in reality, noted the guerrilla, “there was absolutely no mass solidarity with the idea of insurrection.” One MIR cofounder, Domingo Alberto Rangel, noted after renouncing the group’s support for terrorism that “the Left enjoys support among students, but it is unknown among working-class youth, or the youth of the barrios.”

In Colombia, the Industrial University of Santander in Bucaramanga was a haven for that country’s ELN terrorists. In 1965 in Peru, the ELN based itself in the San Cristobal of Huamange National University in Ayacucho, and at the National University in Lima a number of leftist political parties set up operations for MIR terrorists.

Just over twenty years later, after Shining Path and Tupac Amaru terrorists had gained control over a majority of the rural area of Peru and had begun to threaten the capital, the (first) government of President Alan Garcia reluctantly decided to raid the University of San Marcos, the National University of Engineering, and a teacher’s college – three schools that had long been known as terrorist havens.

This kind of autonomy without accountability is a policy that invited terrorist infiltration among impressionable young people.

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Like guerrilla groups in many countries in Latin America, Mexico’s also have a cadre of supporters in NGOs who purport to be human rights advocates. After the bombing of the FARC camp in Ecuador, instead of denouncing the FARC for hosting Mexican students in a war zone, one Mexican human rights NGO called the operation an “unjustified massacre” and announced that it was planning to sue the Colombian government.

(161)

According to The Miami Herald, [Tareck] El Aissami was born in Venezuela to Syrian parents, and his father, Carlos, was the president of the Venezuelan branch of the Baath Party and was an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein. El Aissamni’s uncle, Shibili el-Aissami, whose whereabouts are unknown, was a top-ranking Baath Party official in Iraq.

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The extent of Cuban subversion was investigated and reported to Congress as early as 1963, when the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report detailing the activities of Cuban operatives in the hemisphere. The report concluded: “A war of liberation” or ‘popular uprising’ is really hidden aggression: subversion… the design of Communist expansion finds in subversion the least costly way of acquiring peoples and territories without exaggerated risk.” The report elaborated on the goal of Cuban subversion:

Its aim is to replace the political, economic, and social order existing in a country by a new order, which presupposes the complete physical and moral control of the people… That control is achieved by progressively gaining possession of bodies and minds, using appropriate techniques of subversion that combine psychological, political, social, and economic actions, and even military operations, if this is necessary.

(166)

It was reported by a defector that all Sandinista military plans were sent first to Havana to be vetted by Raul Castro and a Soviet handler before any action was taken against the contras.

A State Department background paper also reported that besides the influx of thousands of Cuban “advisers,” nearly all of the members of the new state police organization, the General Directorate of Sandinista State Security, were trained by the Cubans.

Alfonso Robelo, one of the original members of Nicaragua’s five-man junta, told reporters, “this is something that you have to understand, Nicaragua is an occupied country. We have 8,000 Cubans plus several thousand East Bloc people, East Germans, PLO, Bulgarians, Libyans, North Koreans, etc. The national decisions, the crucial ones, are not in the hands of the Nicaraguans, but in the hands of the Cubans… And, really, in the end, it is not the Cubans, but the Soviets.”

While many foreign policy experts and officials in the Carter administration scoffed at the idea of either Soviet of Cuban steering of the Sandinistas, numerous defectors later confirmed it. Victor Tirado, one of the original Sandinistas, wrote in 1991 that “we allowed ourselves to be guided by the ideas of the Cubans and the Soviets.” Alvaro Baldizon, a chief investigator of the Sandinista Ministry of the Interior, said after defecting, “The ones who give the orders are the Cubans…. Every program, every operation is always under the supervision of Cuban advisors.”

Since the Barrio Adentro program began in Venezuela in October 2000, the number of Cubans in the country has grown to somewhere between forty thousand and sixty-five thousand, depending on the source.

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One of the programs instituted by the Cubans that has driven out many of the professional officers is a new system that allows sergeants to be promoted to the rank of colonel simply by what they call “technical merit” – which most officers define as a high level of fealty to the Chavez political program.

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Prior to the 2006 presidential election in Peru, Hugo Chavez set his sights on the country to try to bring it into the ALBA orbit. Besides sending letters of invitation to mayors near the border areas of his allies, Chavez underwrote a number of ALBA houses in rural areas of Peru. The Peruvian government became concerned enough about the ALBA houses that a congressional committee investigated them and issues a report in March 2009 recommending they be shut down. The committee report concluded that Chavez was trying to influence Peruvian politics via the ALBA houses, which had been established without any government-to-government agreement.

A June 2009 incident in the Amazon city of Badua ended the détente. The incident, called the Baguazo, ended in a bloodbath when members and supporters of a radicalized “indigenous rights” group slit the throats of police officers who had been sent to end the group’s roadblock that had closed the city’s only highway for over a month. Leaders of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest were revealed to have ties to Chavez and Morales and had previously traveled to Caracas to participate in a meeting of radical indigenous groups.

(171 – 172)

Like Soviet communism, Chavez’s 21st Century Socialism can only survive by spreading and enveloping its neighbors, lest too much of a distinction be shown in economic outcomes by its nonsocialist neighbors.

In a July 2008 hearing of the Western Hemispheric Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dr. Norman Bailey, a former official of the National Security Council whose specialty was monitoring terrorism by tracking finances, testified that Chavez had spent “$33 billion on regional influence.” Bailey further stated that corruption in the Chavez regime was “nothing less than monumental, with literally billions of dollars having been stolen by government officials and their allies in the private sector over the past nine years.” Bailey also testified that a Chavez government official had his bank accounts closed by HSBC Bank in London, which had deposits of $1.5 billion.”

A large portion of the income derived from both the narco-trafficking and money laundering is funneled to Venezuelan entities and officials and “is facilitated by the Venezuelan financial system, including both public and private institutions.”

* Bailey testimony before the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee

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A Wikileaks cable released in December 2010 revealed that Ortega had been given “suitcases full of cash” in Caracas. “We have firsthand reports that GON [Government of Venezuela] officials receive suitcases full of cash from Venezuelan officials during official trips to Caracas,” a 2008 diplomatic cable written by Ambassador Paul Trivelli stated. The embassy cables also said that Ortega was believed to have used drug money to underwrite a massive election fraud.

The accusations of suitcases of Venezuelan money going to Nicaragua match very closely with an August 2007 case in which a Venezuelan American businessman, Antonini Wilson, was cause at the Ezeiza Airport just outside Buenos Aires with a suitcase packed with $800,000 in cash. According to U.S. prosecutors who ended up in charge of the case, the money was intended for Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who was campaigning for (and eventually won) the presidency of Argentina… when Wilson flew home to Key Biscayne immediately after he incident, he reported it to the FBI, fearing (rightly) being set up as the “fall guy,” according to his court testimony. Wilson agreed to wear a wire during his subsequent meetings with Venezuelan officials and to record his phone calls. Three of the officials involved were indicted in the United States and pleaded guilty. Another fled and is still at large.

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Nicaraguan defectors had long reported the drug-trafficking habits of the Sandinista government. Antonio Farach, a defector who had worked as a Sandinista minister in Nicaragua’s embassies in Honduras and Venezuela, told U.S. officials in 1983 that Humberto Ortega, brother of the president and then Nicaragua’s minister of defense, was “directly involved” in drug trafficking.

Farach repeated an oft-reported rationale used by Marxists who moonlight in the drug trade as a sideline to revolution. He states that Sandinista officials believed their trafficking in drugs was a “political weapon” that would help to destroy “the youth of our enemies.” According to Farach, the Sandinistas declared, “We want to provided food to our people with the suffering and death of the youth of the United States.”

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As of 2008, nineteen of the forty-three groups that are officially designated “foreign terrorist organizations” were all linked to the international drug trade, and as much as 60 percent of all terrorist organizations were believed to be linked to the drug trade.

From fiscal years 1999 through March 2010, 329 Iranian nationals have been caught by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In March 2005 FBI director Robert Mueller testified before the House Appropriations Committee that “there are individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connection who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic.

In 2010 the Department of Homeland Security had thousands of what are called “OTMs” – Other Than Mexicans – incarcerated for illegally crossing the southern border. The OTMs consisted of individuals from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere.

(199)

Hugo Chavez’s placement of individuals with known ties to terrorist groups in charge of his immigration and identification bureau have long been documented.

(204)

Influenced by Chavez and radical leftist groups in the region, Lopez Obrador staged a populist sit-in in the central square of Mexico City for nearly two months, claiming to be the “legitimate president”.

Rep Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) told several Mexican legislators at the time that he had received intelligence reports that Chavez had been funding AMLO’s Party of the Democratic Revolution. Had Lopez Obrador won, the nefarious influences of Chavez and Ahmadinejad would have moved to America’s doorstep, and the nexus of drug trafficking and terrorism that were already on the border would be an order of magnitude greater.

(207)

In September 2011, El Universal reported that a Spanish court had prosecuted five members of Askapena, the international wing of ETA. Court documents showed that Askapena had been instructed to set up an international relations network by organizing seminar and creating “solidarity committees” in Europe and North and South America.

(208)

The New York Times reported on January 28, 1996 that during the last two months that the Sandinistas were in power, they had granted Nicaraguan citizenship and documentation to over nine hundred foreigners, including terrorists from ETA and Italy’s Red Brigades, three dozen Arabs and Iranians from Islamic terrorist groups, and terrorists from “virtually every guerrilla organization in Lain America”.

(209)

As far back as May 2008, Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor and foreign policy writer for the Washington Post, wrote that Chavez belonged on the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terror.

His reported actions are, first of all, a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, passed in September 2001, which prohibits all states from providing financing or havens to terrorist organizations. More directly, the Colombian evidence would be more than enough to justify a State Department decision to cite Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. Once cited, Venezuela would be subject to a number of automatic sanctions, some of which would complicate its continuing export of oil to the United States…

(221)

It is this irrational reluctance to properly describe the threat we face from declared enemies that validates those enemies contrived grievances. Almost inversely proportional to our increased prowess in kinetic warfare, we have continually ceded the ideological war that has become the only battlefield on which our enemies are able to make an impact. As Max Manwaring and others have stated, today’s battles are fights for legitimacy. To allow political correctness or misplaced deference to alter the terminology of war is to cede our most valuable territory. To our enemies, deference equals weakness, not civil accommodation.

Another tenet shared by political Islam in the Middle East and 21st Century Socialism in Latin America is that its adherents have declared war not only on the United States and the West in general but on capitalism and free societies as well. TO most of us in the West, this is equivalent to declaring war on gravity, as free exchange and free enterprise are the bases of life and the engines of progress throughout the world.

We enjoy the advantage that our enemies are not only fighting against us but are also fighting against the trajectory of human progress. Our duty is to decide whether we are going to continue to accommodate their superstitions or whether we will confront them before further carnage provides them with false validation.

 

Notes from CastroChavism: Organized Crime in the Americas

CastroChavism: Organized Crime in the Americas by José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, Bolivia’s former Minister of Defense and the author of XXI Century Dictatorship in Bolivia.

(16)

[Venezuela and Bolivia] are dictatorships that reach[ed] power through elections and through successive coups that liquate democracy.

(17)

The two Americas make up an axis of confrontation in which perpetual and arbitrary control of power, on the one handed, branded dictatorship with ideology as a pretext; versus democracy, with respect for human rights, alternation in power, accountability and free elections, declaratively protected by the inter-American system, enshrined – among others – in the inter-American democratic charter.

From 1959 to 1999, the Cuban dictatorship is “Castroism.” From 1999 onwards it is “Castrochavismo,” led by Hugo Chavez until his death.

(18-19)

It began as progressive leftist populism, and was successively called ALBA Movement (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America); the Bolivarian Movement; and after a few years Socialism of the 21st Century.

Castro receives a new source of financing for his conspiratorial and criminal actions with Chavez’s surrender not only of Venezuela’s money and oil but, as we have learned today, of the entire country. This allowed the dictator to reactivate genuine Castroism under the mantle of the Bolivarian Movement, or ALBA, and disguise it as democracy. With Venezuela’s money he started conspiracies, which led to the fall and overthrow of democratic leaders. The first one occurs in Argentina, with the fall of President De La Rua. The second happens in Ecuador and it is Jamil Mahuad who pays the proce. The Third one is the overthrow of President Gonzalo Sanches de Lozada in Bolivia. The fourth is in Ecuador, with the fall of President Lucio Gutierrez. They also overthrew the OAS Secretary General, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, who had just been elected. A false case of corruption was planted in Costa Rica, where Rodriguez ends up being illegally detained, making room for Insulsa to arrive.

The nascent CastroChavista organization expands with Lula da Silva taking power in Brazil with the Workers Party, whose government he used to strengthen the extraordinary flow of economic resources with transnational corruption .A sample of such crimes include the infamous case of “Lava Jato – Odebrecht”

The destruction of democracy becomes noticeable in the exiles, who had been purely Cuban and are now regional – waves of Venezuelans Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians, Argentines, and Central Americans.

(21)

An electoral dictatorship is a political regime that by force or violence concentrates all power in a person or in a group or organization that repressed human rights and fundamental freedoms and uses illegitimate elections, neither free no fair, with fraud and corruption, to perpetuate itself indefinitely in power.”

(23)

Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua… are criminal entities that must be separated from politics and must be treated as transnational organized crime from within the framework of the Palermo Convention and other norms, without the immunities or privileges inherent to the heads of State or government.

(24)

Castrochavista dictatorships are in crisis, but are not defeated. They are called out as regimes that violate human rights, that have no rule of law, where there is no division or independence of public powers, and that are narco States and creators of poverty. To remain in power, they apply the uniform strategy of “resisting at all costs, destabilizing democracies, politicizing their situation and negotiating.”

The first element of this strategy, of “retention of all power at all costs,” can be seen in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba – where they imprison and torture political prisoners. The President of the Human Rights assembly in Bolivia has just reported that there are 131 deaths without investigation from killings that the government has committed, and there are more than 100 political prisoners.

(25)

The second element of their strategy is to “destabilize democracies,” for which they conspire against those who accuse them and against the governments that defend democracy. The destabilization range from false news and character assassination of leaders whom they designate as right wing, to criminal acts of terrorism, kidnappings and narco guerrillas.

The third element of their strategy is to “politicize their situation and their criminal acts.” When the dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua improperly imprison a citizen, when they torture them, when they evn kill them – they call it defense of the revolution.

These four dictatorships are narco states and, to justify themselves, they argue that “drug trafficking is an instrument of struggle for the liberation of the peoples”

Evo Morales in 2016 at the United Nations said that “the fight against drug trafficking is an instrument of imperialism to oppress the peoples”.

Jesus Santrich fled from Colombia to Venezuela, proclaiming that he had been persecuted by the right. The bosses of the ELN narco-guerrillas of Colombia are under protection in Cuba.

The third element of Castrochavismo, which consists in politicizing their crimes, serves to ensure that when they kill any person they say that they are defending the revolution. When they torture they say they defend the popular process of liberation of peoples and so on.

The fourth element of Castrochavista strategy is to “negotiate”. They negotiate in order to gain time, demoralize the adversary, collect bills from their allies or extort money from third states to gain their support or at least neutralize them.

From these four elements, they survive.

(27)

Political events are based on respect for the “rule of law,” which is simply that “no one is above the law,” on the temporality of public service, on accountability and public responsibility, where you can take on an adversary. But organized crime has no adversaries, it has enemies and the difference between an adversary and an enemy is that the former is defeated or convinced, whereas the latter is eliminated, and this explains the number of crimes that Castrochavismo commits in the Americas.

(30)

The peoples of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are fighting against the dictatorships that oppress them, but it is not a local or national oppressor, they take on a transnational enemy, united by the objective of retaining power indefiniately as the best mechanism for impunity.

Castrochavismo as a transnational organized crime structure is a very powerful usurper with a lot of money, a lot of criminal armed forces, control of many media and many mercenaries of various specialties at its service, which has put the peoples they oppress in a true and extreme “defenseless condition.”

As long as there are dictatorships there will be no peace or security in the Americas.

(33)

It is vital to differentiate and separate that which is “politics” meaning an activity of public service, from that which is “organized crime” and “delinquency.” Politics with its ideologies, pragmatisms, imperfections, errors, crises, even tainted by corruption is one thing, but another very different things is politics and power under the control of associated criminals who turn their politics into their main instrument for the commission of crimes, the setting up of criminal organizations, the seizure and indefinite control of power with criminal objectives and for the sake of their own impunity.

Politics is legal, meaning that it is conducted in pheres considered to be “just, allowed, according to justice and reason” because it is of order and public service….

(35)

Castro, Maduro, Ortega and Morales are not politicians, they are not corrupted government – they are organized delinquency that holds political power and plans to indefinitely keep holding it. They can no longer keep being treated as politicians, and least of all as State Dignitaries.

(42)

CastroChavist is the label for Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez’s undertaking that, using the subversive capabilities of the Cuban dictatorial regime and Venezuelan oil, has resurrected – commencing in 1999, the expansion of Castroist, antidemocratic communism with a heavy antiimperialist discourse.

(46-47)

What is happening in Venezuela today is the result of almost two decades of progressive and sustained abuses to freedom and democracy, violation of human rights, persecutions, electoral fraud, corruption, violation of the sovereignty of the country, theft of government and private resources, killing of the freedom of the press, elimination of the rule of law, disappearance of the separation and independence of the branches of government, control of the opposition, imprisonment and forced exile of political opponents, narcotics trafficking and all that may be necessary to make Venezuela a Castroist-model dictatorial “narco-state with a humanitarian crisis.”

The international democratic community has understood that for the sake of their own interests and security, it must preclude Venezuela from turning into the second consolidated dictatorship of the Americas, and prevent the dictatorships of Bolivia and Nicaragua from following that path. Liberating Venezuela is a strategic necessity.

(49)

In Bolivia, the top and perpetual leader of the coca leaf harvesters, Evo Morales, is the head of the Purinational State of Bolivia wherein “by decree of law” he has increated the lawful cultivation of coca by 83% from 12,000 hectares to 22,000 hectares and has increased the cultivation of unlawful coca from the existing 3,000 hectares in 2003 – the year they toppled President Sanchez de Lozada – to the current 50,000 hectares.

Evo Morales’ drug czar Colonel Rene Sanabria was arrested by the DEA for cocaine trafficking and has been sentenced by US judges to 15 years in jail.

(55)

In democracy, corruption is not the rule but the flaw, it is the violation of normalcy, “the misuse of government power to get illegitimate advantages, generally in a secret or private way”, it is “the consistent practice of utilizing the functions and means of the government for the benefit – whether this benefit be financial or otherwise – of those who are involved with it.” In a democracy, there are investigations, prosecution, and punishment with accountability, there is separation and independence of the branches of government, the Rule of Law exists, and there is freedom of the press. On the other hand, however, in dictatorships, corruption is the means, the cause, and the end objective of getting to, and indefinitely remaining in power.

(61)

The Venezuelan dictatorship is the Gordian knot the keeps the Venezuelan people from recovering their freedom and democracy, one that at the same time sustains dictatorships in the America, specifically in Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua as a system of Transnational Organized Crime – they are a real danger not only for this region, but the whole world.

(62)

The hub of narcotics trafficking that Venezuela has been turned into, with the Colombian FARC’s cocaine and with Evo Morales’ coca growers’ unions from Bolivia, has penetrated the entire region and impacts the whole world with serious consequences in security and the wellbeing of people.

(65)

A well-orchastrated international system of public relations, lobbyists who work for the Cuba-Venezuela-Bolivia-Nicaragua group, the subjecting of PetroCaribe countries with bribes of Venezuelan oil, it’s penetration into international organizations, its control over the national news media and its creation and influence over international media, its collusion with important magnates and businessmen, and its repetitive anti-U.S. discourse along with its opening to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, have all been factors – that have allowed the existence of the Ortega’s Crime Dictatorship in Nicaragua.

(67)

Cuba with the Castro’s, Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro, Bolivia with Evo Morales, Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador with Rafael Correa, replaced freedom of the press with a system of control of the information with prior censorship, self-censorship, financial and judicial repression. They appropriated themselves – through transfers under duress, seizures, intervention, and violence – of private news media in order to place them at their service, they have supported and created state media, founded and funded regional media, they manage the official propaganda as a mechanism for extorsion, they use taxes as a means of pressure and retribution, they extort companies regarding the assignment of propaganda, they start and sustain “assassination of reputation” campaigns against journalists and owners of news media.

(74)

Crimes committed by the 21st Century Socialist Regimes range from persecution with the aim of physical torture and killing, judicial trials with false accusations heard by “despicable judges”, the application of the regime’s pseudo-laws violating human rights or of “despicable laws”, restricting freedom of speech or freedom to work, to be employed, or discharge a profession, assassinating the individuals reputation to convert the wrongly accused as an undesirable, subjecting the person into a condition of being defenseless, depriving him/her of a job and much more.

(75)

…they’ve replaced politics with criminal practices in order to totally and indefinitely control political power.

Extortion is a key feature of the Castrochavista methods that is further proof of the Transnational Organized Crime nature of these dictatorships.

Extortion is “the pressure exerted on someone – through threats – to compel them to act in a certain way and obtain a monetary or other type of benefit.” The legal definition of extortion includes “the intimidation or serious threat that restricts a person to do, tolerate the doing or not doing of something for the purpose of deriving a benefit or undue advantage for one’s self or someone else.”

The Castrochavista constitutions have established “the law’s retroactivity” and have suppressed or limited parliamentary immunities in order to keep extorting members of the opposition.

Judges, prosecutors and even attorneys are extorted. Several cases corroborate this, cases, such as Venezuela’s Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni’s jailing, violations, and tortures; the fired prosecutors and judges who were afterwards prosecuted in the case of Magistrate Gualberto Cusi in Bolivia, as well as the jailing of defense attorneys; the persecution and exile of Magistrates from Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal “ the legitimate one in exile,” or that of Attorney General Ortega, the assassination of Prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Kirchner’s Argentina, and dozens more.

The imprisonment, torture, humiliations, assassinations, and exile started as extrortions and are dictatorial warning operations in order to ensure the submission of the system it manipulates “setting precedents” of its decision to use extortion to obtain benefits for the dictator and his Organized Crime group who is called government. Benefits range from financial gain, cover up, and impunity, to the indefinite tenure in government.

(78)

Cornered by crises, the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, have gone into an attack more and the meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum in Havana was the scenario to launch their new phase of destabilization.

Dictatorships attack with forced migration, the generation of internal violence, and destabilization.

(79)

All of the region’s democratic countries are under the pressure of forced migration caused by Venezuela’s dictatorship that has converted on of its shameful problems into a problem for the whole region. Democracies must now deal with problems in: their security, unemployment, provision of health care, their handling of massive numbers of people in transit, identification issues, budgets, and human rights, all because the Castrochavista criminal regime of Nicolas Maduro has transformed its crimes and its effects into a political weapon. Very similar to the so-called “Mariel’s exodus” promoted by Dictator Fidel Castro against the United States, but many folds greater and for an indefinite period.

(81)

The Sao Paulo Forum is 1990 was the dictatorial reaction to the crash of Soviet Communism and was gathered, for the first time, with the objective of addressing the international scenario following the fall of the Berlin Wall and to confront the “neo-liberal” policies. It is the tool with which the Castroist dictatorship formulated the “multiplication of the confrontation axis” strategy, going beyond class struggles to the fight against any elements that may be useful to destabilize democratic governments.

The 21st Century in the Americas is the history of the Castro-Chavista buildup…

The worn-out cliché of “liberation of the peoples” as an “anti-imperialist” argument and slogan for massive demonstrations, has remained to become “the people’s oppression” that is corroborated by the quantity of massacres, assassinations, torture, political prisoners, exiles, and the daily life the people must endure.

(83)

It has become necessary for Americas’ leaders and politicians to clearly differentiate themselves from the criminals who hold power in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Not doing so implies the assumed risk of being accomplices and concealers.

(89)

The price for Pablo Iglesias and PODEMOS backing to the investiture of the PSOE would be the sustainment of the dictatorships for which Iglesias works and their funding, are now amply evident in Spain’s new foreign policy aiming to sustain the CastroChavista dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

(92)

Is the use of force the only options for the dictatorships to leave?

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are under regimes that after applying all possible simulations and misrepresentations in order to be a revolution, a democracy, populist, leftist, and socialist governments but are nothing by Organized Crime’s organizations that hold power by force.

Alleging self-determination of the nation state while oppressing the citizens and violating their human rights is but another flaw of the CastroChavista dictatorships.

(95)

The parameters to qualify a regime as a dictatorship, an Organized Crime dictatorship, and a criminal government, are set out but existing universal and regional standards, such as: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of Bogota, the Convenant of San Jose, the European Union Treaty, the Palermo Conventions, the Interamerican Democratic Charter, and many more.

(102)

The dictatorial nature of a regime is proven by its violation of all essential components of democracy through the supplanting of the democratic order, manipulation of constituent referendums, consults and elections, down to the imposition of a fraudulent legal framework, a “legal” scheme, that nowadays is the legal system in existence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Correa’s Ecuador.

(105)

Why Abstention?

To run as a candidate in a dictatorship is to dress up a tyrant as a democrat.

(106)

For elections to be free and fair, there must be “conditions of democracy” in existence, this is the minimum presence of the essential components of democracy that will enable all citizens to be wither voters or be elected, will guarantee an equity of options to the candidates, transparency in the process, impartiality in the electoral authorities, offer guarantees of resources with impartial judges, with freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and guarantees against electoral fraud, timeliness and more.

(109)

In 1961, Cuba’s dictatorship birthed; Nicaragua’s National Liberation Army (ELN) afterwards converted into the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), then later converted into the 13th of November Revolutionary Movement (MR13N), and the Revolutionary Armed Forced (FAR) in Guatemala. In 1962, it birthed Venezuela’s National Liberation Armed Forces (FALN), the Colombian Self-Defense Forces turned into the Southern Block Forces afterwards turned into the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC). In Peru, it birthed the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR), in Bolivia the National Liberation Army (ELN), in Uruguay the Tupamaros, as an urban guerrilla, in Argentina the Montoneros, and in the 70’s the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), in Brazil the Revolutionary Movement 8 (MR*), and many more. The Castroist movement did no spare any country from staining it with the blood of guerrillas.

(120)

The OAS has two charters; the Charter of Bogota which birthed the organization and the Interamerican Democratic Charter, with which democracy was institutionalized.

Article 1 of the IDC mandates that “America’s people haec the right to democracy and their government has the obligation to promote and defend it.”

(123)

The Palermo Convention for Human Trafficking should be applied to the Cuban physicians.

(134)

What dictator Nicolas Maduro and his regime insist in presenting as “elections” is a chain of serious crimes to misrepresent the popular sovereignty, sustain the narco-state, and guarantee himself impunity. The “organized crime group” that hold power has committed, and is willing to commit, whatever crime may be necessary to continue receiving the criminal benefits that have taken Venezuela to the current state of its ongoing crisis.

(188)

Fear is an essential component of dictatorships, this is why they kill the “Rule of Law” and supplant it with the “Rule of the State” with despicable laws to enable them to persecute, imprison, dishonor and wrest the property of, citizens.

The foreign enemy is useful in order to blame the United States for all disastrous results from the organized crime that holds political power, such as what the Castros’ have done for so many years and now Maduro, Morales, and their thugs do.

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia claim the “right” conspires, pays politicians, and wants them toppled, attributing to themselves the position of being “leftist”, socialist, and communist when in reality they are criminal “fascists” whose sole ideology and objective is the total and indefinite control of power along with their illicit enrichment.

(193)

Odebrecht is one of the Brazilian companies implicated in the Forum of Sao Paulo’s criminal network implemented by Lula de Silva with the dictators Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez with the payments of millions of dollars in bribes.

(202)

Hugo Chavez allied himself with Fidel Castro in 1999 when Cuba agonized during it’s “special period” as a parasite state that, since the breakdown of the Soveit Union, did not have a way to survive. With Venezuela’s oil, Chavez salvaged the only dictatorship there was at that time in the Americas and kick started the recreation of Castroist expansionism under the labels of the Bolivarian Movement, ALBA, and 21st Century Socialism and that is today known as “CastroChavismo”.

 

 

 

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Now available on Amazon.

The leaders of United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro, and their partners in the Cuban Communist Party, the FARC-EP, the ELN and the Sao Paulo Forum have a geopolitical vision for a multi-polar New World Order. This vision is one that transforms all of the current governments and constitutional traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean, by hook and by crook, into Castroist-type Authoritarian dictatorships to be united into a single governing body. Those that struggle to make this Pan-Latin American League of Nations come into being call themselves Bolivarians.

The following selection of translations illustrates how these Communist Parties and transnational criminal networks sought to make this happen though the subversion of politics, democratic norms and institutions in the United States of America via the promotion of illegal immigration, informational warfare, and ideologically-driven economic conflict.

Notes from: Transnational Networks of Insurgency and Crime: Explaining the Spread of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Beyond National Borders

 

 

 

 

 

Transnational Networks of Insurgency and Crime: Explaining the Spread of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia beyond National Borders is the PhD thesis of Oscar Palma.

From what I can tell work, written during his association with the London School of Economics, is the basis for his recent book – Commercial Insurgencies in the Networked Era : The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

It was a fascinating read. While my highlights from it are below, since you can freely download the whole work from the first link I’d recommend doing that if the topics interest you.

Notes

The rise of cyberspace as a theatre of social interaction and political debate, especially social networks as forums of coordinated action, is allowing insurgencies to act as dispersed horizontal entities with interconnected individuals, groups and cells placed in different countries and regions. They are challenging traditional hierarchical notions of organization. More than following Leninist/Castroist paradigms, as witnessed during the Cold War, they are arranged as networked actors.

the concept of complex insurgencies introduced by John Mackinlay describes agents that do not follow traditional hierarchical models of organization

it uses its description of insurgency processes to analyse FARC’s activities and structures, and to formulate possible new routes for the organization.

it is difficult to explain any war as purely national phenomena, and transnational networks have fueled conflict for decades, both in terms of the provision of materiel and the spread of ideas and discourses.

from an International Relations perspective, it contributes to the incorporation of Complexity to the discipline.

the approach requires observing the insurgency not as a single organization but as a system composed by individuals with diverse interests who perform different tasks. This requires observations in the lowest levels of analysis making it impossible to observe several case studies

it will be demonstrated that by 2010 networks and structures beyond borders constructed through the exploitation of environmental elements constituted a base for the insurgency to survive. This was the case even when the organization did not constitute a transnational insurgency per se, remaining only as a national insurgency with transnational operational networks.

According to the classification made by George and Bennett (2005), it is an Atheoretical/configurative idiographic case study providing descriptions that might be used in subsequent studies for theory building, but not configuring a theory by itself.

if FARC, as a commercial insurgency, is understood as one type of a hybrid entity, results can be compared with those of other type of organizations categorized as hybrid entities in order to raise more general conclusions. In other words, although the thesis is mainly interested in FARC, its conceptual developments and the elements of analysis introduced are instruments for the study of other cases, in the hope of raising wider generalizations.

 

it is possible to observe how I have managed to dodge a possible bias since the perspective from which I explain FARC actually opposes dominant narratives which are common through official circles.

observes organizations as composed by interacting individuals (nodes), emphasising their interrelatedness with the environment of operations.

Ideas of topology, network characteristics and failure are useful to think about the insurgency’s structural properties and processes.

develops the concept of commercial insurgencies with a particular proposition of its characteristics, structure and the interaction with its environment. The idea of the triadic character of commercial insurgencies is introduced along with the description of those dynamics through which the region contributes to its survival and re-emergence.

 

Insurgent and counterinsurgent are always in a kind of dialogue with actions, reactions and adaptations. They are mutually re-defining its practices.

FARC is a national insurgency with transnational operative functional networks which altogether constitute a base for the insurgency to survive. It uses elements introduced in the first and second chapters for such analysis, and it explores a networked-complex model of insurgencies to formulate a possible future scenario.

 

The emergence of complexity theory has opened the door to new visions in the explanation of physical, natural and social realities, exploring the interconnected character of agents and their construction of systems, the multidimensional nature of issues, the relevance of linkages among the smallest units, and the symbiotic relations between systems and their environments. In other words, this framework provides the ideal instruments to understand the characteristics of the type of insurgencies explored in this dissertation through FARC as a case study.

 

This linear paradigm emerged from the ideas of philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes

This claim is based on two assumptions: that the chain of causes and consequences is discoverable in every circumstance, and that the universe is deterministic in its nature. The perspective implies an understanding of natural and human realities as systems where processes with specific inputs produce proportional and measurable outputs.

 

In synthesis, the linear paradigm can be explained through four basic principles:

Order: Given causes lead into known effects any moment and in any place.

Reductionism: The system can be understood through the sum of its parts.

Predictability: When behaviour of the system is defined the future course of events can be predicted.

Determinism: Processes flow along orderly and predictable paths with clear beginnings and rational ends

The Complexity paradigm

Further intellectual enquiry into other areas raised doubts about the capacity of the linear paradigm to explain all universal phenomena. Complexity appeared to reject the mechanistic view of society and the universe as predictable, ordered and determined.

Complexity deals with the nature of emergence, innovation, learning and adaptation.

Complexity then believes societies cannot be understood as predictable and ordered systems. Instead it proposes that social, political and economic processes are unpredictable, non-deterministic, and irreducible. It focuses on how interactions between individuals (the parts) generate changes in society itself (the system). The essence, the form, the character and the direction of the latter depends exclusively on how individuals interact in the lowest level; on their conditions, the information they transmit, and the actions they engage in according to specific circumstances in a given moment.

non-linearityappears as one of complexity’s main characteristics.

Outcomes are not determined by a single but by multiple causes according to the changes they generate through the system. This is known as ‘multiple causation’ (Byrne, 1998).

According to this explanation, systemic processes depend on the interactions of its units, that is, the system displays bottom-up dynamics instead of top-down coordination. This condition is known as emergence.

systems produce feedback that alters their internal dynamics according to its relation with the environment. Such feedback is classified as ‘negative’ when it is absorbed by the system, generating reactions for it to adapt and to return to its initial state. By contrast, positive feedback comes as information that is not internalized by the system but amplified by it, leading into systemic instability. The generation of new characteristics are ‘emergent phenomena’.

This is closely related to the principle of self-organization. “Self-organization refers to the process by which the autonomous interaction of individual entities results in the bottom-up emergence of complex systems. In the absence of centralized authority, the spontaneous appearance of patterned order results from the interaction of the parts of the system as they react to the flow of resources through the system.”

This means that units in the lower level will not act according to commands given by a centralized authority but following their own initiative. In that sense, the system will become organized according to unit interactions instead of depending on a determined process or a single source of power who directs it.

By logic, in this type of systems small changes in the initial conditions of its elements do not necessarily produce proportional variations throughout the system. Instead, a small change could generate bigger systemic transformations, but major changes in units may not end generating any variations at all. This is technically known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions: “the outcome of the generation of the explanatory variables is sensitive to very small differences in the initial conditions under which the analysis has begun.”

The property of adaptation, together with relations between the system and the environment, has opened the door to the study of a type of system that has been named Complex Adaptive System (CAS). These systems, according to Jon Norber and Graeme Cumming (2008), are made up of interacting components whose interrelations may be complex (non-linear) and display the capacity to learn, generating reactive or proactive adaptive behaviour. They display adaptation, a capacity of the system to change in response to prevailing conditions by means of self-organization, learning and reasoning.

Complex adaptive systems can be characterised as follows:

†“They have active internal elements that furnish sufficient local variety to enable the system to survive as it adapts to unforeseen circumstances.

†The systems elements are lightly but not sparsely connected.

†The elements interact locally according to simple rules to provide the energy needed 
to maintain stable global patterns, as opposed to rigid order or chaos.

†Variations in prevailing conditions result in many minor changes and a few large mutations, but it is not possible to predict the outcome in advance.”

these systems are basically characterised by a “huge amount of interacting particles that, together with energy intake from the environment, produce an overall pattern called ‘emergent properties’.

 

Walter Buckley (1998) proposed that complexity is an ideal theoretical framework for sociological studies given its vision of a system as sensitive to both its environment and its internal dynamics, where even slight stimuli may trigger large reactions.

Sociology, in his view, must be interested in a system described as “a complex of element components directly or indirectly related in a network of interrelationships of various kinds such that it constitutes a dynamic whole with emergent properties.”

“networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture.” (Castells, 1996)

Hyperconnectivitycreates the opportunity for criminals to increase their cooperation, their ties; their possibility to diversify their operations and their geographical scope; to reach new markets and hide their assets; to ease the difficulties and reduce the costs of their actions, to find escape valves when persecuted by a particular state.

the flexibility of the network allows it to shift its organizational structure, moving supply bases, altering transportation routes, and finding new places of residence for their bosses. Escaping police control through networking and globalization allows organized crime to keep its grip on national bases.

It is expressed, as it will be analysed through the dissertation, in the differentiated exploitation of particular elements such as sympathy from individuals, support from particular governments, alliances with armed organizations, connections with political and social movements, the exploitation of spaces with no strong institutional dominion of particular states, and the creation of conditions to place secretive nodes in other societies.

Christopher Coker (2012) summarizes this idea when he argues that “every era fights war differently, in every age war has its own distinctive characteristics.”

Our states and societies are changing from nationally-based to market-based. Power is increasingly determined by the flow of capitals with low barriers and through borderless spaces. Advances in finances and telecommunications create a disparity between the rapid movement of international capital and the territorially bounded actions of the nation-state. These market societies have their own way of fighting through varied sources of interconnection. However, it hasn’t been the state who has adapted more effectively to this reality; terrorist organizations have managed to adapt to network structures better.

 

The increase of all sorts of communication channels at societal levels including mobile technologies, online forums, blogs, online social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and twitter, coupled with the increasing ease to travel and the global reach of powerful news stations, have in the practice created physical and virtual borderless spaces of social interaction.

the concept of network-centric warfare could be understood in a very wide sense as a form of war that brings together different units or agents which act in an interconnected manner towards the same objective

The information age, this era of hyperconnectivity in which communication technologies allow societies to be more interconnected and to learn and act in respect of events occurring all around the globe, has motivated the growth of networked political and social movements, including insurgencies, which are not strictly restrained to the territories of particular states. Rather, they are fed by the realities of different societies with shared political values and objectives.

netwar,which they define as:

“an emergent mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonist use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age. These protagonists are likely to consist of dispersed organizations, small groups and individuals who communicate, coordinate and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, often without a precise central command. Thus, netwar differs from modes of conflict and crime in which the protagonists prefer to develop formal stand-alone, hierarchical organizations, doctrines and strategies as in past efforts, for example, to build centralized movements along Leninist lines.” (Arquila & Ronfeldt, 2001, p.6)

In other words, far from the traditional hierarchical and centralized model of military structure, non-state actors (terrorists, insurgents and criminals) are increasingly becoming organized as a loose set of interconnected organizations, groups, cells and individuals which pursue the same end and coordinate their activities through a wide range of channels offered by modern communication technologies. If the model is taken to the extreme it would be possible to observe, for example, that an insurgency might not even be composed by a single organization but by a group of agents, both legal and in the margins of the law, which are bounded by the same visions, political principles, philosophical background or interests.

If the model is taken to the extreme it would be possible to observe, for example, that an insurgency might not even be composed by a single organization but by a group of agents, both legal and in the margins of the law, which are bounded by the same visions, political principles, philosophical background or interests. This explains the possibility of interoperability without centralized command and control.

“systems [that] are composed by many independent parts which are arranged in a non-linear fashion, making centralized control no longer desirable.”11 Metz (2000) describes it as “a web of strategic partnerships, and strategic flexibility based on project teams or group works rather than hierarchies or bureaucracies.”(p.viii). Bruce Berkowitz (2003) refers to it, in similar terms, as the fighting network, with the following characteristics:

–  A structure developed around a series of interconnected autonomous cells of varied sizes.

–  Each cell is armed with potential weapons that count on a high level of lethality.

–  The cells are linked together by a network of communications, logistics, command and control. (p.16-17)

An interesting feature of the definition of netwar is that the authors describe it as a form of both conflict and crime. This means that the concept, in scope, is applicable to agents who pursue social/political ends or economic self-interests.

Using modern technologies as well as physical spaces and traditional communication channels, agents become organized, make decisions and act in order to achieve their objectives, spread their ideas, and incorporate more actors in the campaign. Their acts might be violent or might be purely political. As a matter of fact the authors described two types of netwar: civil-society activism and violent terrorism or insurgency.

Insurgencies in the information era find elements through the environment that make them increasingly transnational. Communication channels and technologies have the possibility to spread their messages globally, creating a capacity to reach a borderless global community which might act for or against its claims in very diverse ways.

 

insurgencies, and particularly commercial insurgencies, (the system) exploit elements within their regions and the international system (the environment) to place nodes of their military, political and criminal networks beyond the borders of a single state. This ultimately creates the possibility for the insurgency to survive if the state offensive is intense. Survival will always open the door to the possibility for the insurgency to return when conditions are appropriate.

Several of these elements have been gathered by John Mackinlay in a concept that, together with the idea of netwar, becomes useful to understand insurgencies in the information era and in the context of hyperconnectivity. This former British Army Officer and war scholar at Kings College London defines complex insurgencies as:

“A campaign by globally dispersed activists and insurgents who seek to confront the culture and political ideals of a nation or group of nations that are seen to challenge their interests and way of life”(Mackinlay, 2006, p.vii).

 

this description also implies a blurring between the system and its environment. Since dispersed activists and insurgents are part of the campaign, they might act in diverse forms and in different scenarios, making it difficult to recognize who is and who isn’t a member of the insurgency. This boundary will be constantly changing and evolving as individuals, groups or organizations join or leave the campaign. Since events and ideas exist in a borderless global society, those individuals are not necessarily placed in a single territory; they might be, as the definition states, ‘globally dispersed’.

 

the disappearance of the concept of military front. He argues that “everything and everyone is becoming part of the battle as insurgencies become blended with their societies, as they successfully embed within civilian communities, or even more, when the entire society becomes a potential insurgency.”

 

Robert Bunker and Matt Bergett (2005) describe networks on the offensive as free floating cells and nodes linked via information channels, forming a web-like pattern. They benefit from ease of connectivity, allowing them to be established and terminated as required with little or no effort.

 

On the defensive, well-constructed networks tend to be redundant and diverse given the relative ease to replace their nodes, making them robust and resilient to adversity. They are difficult to crack and defeat as a whole. They may be able to defy counter-leadership targeting since the elimination of specific nodes does not immediately lead into the collapse of the network. Attackers may be able to find and confront portions of the network, but the possibility of other nodes to survive provides the opportunity for the organization’s structure to heal and reconstitute

 

Anonymous, although having a core composed by its creators and most important nodes, works more as an idea, a brand or an umbrella, than as an organization. Several hacktivists which find the idea attractive could decide to act by themselves. In that sense leadership is symbolical more than operational: if the main nodes are disabled (captured), the idea and the brand of Anonymous remains, inviting other hackers, cells or groups to continue acting in the same direction.

In similar terms to Anonymous, Al Qaeda could also be understood as a brand more than as an organization; as a dispersed group of activists, insurgents, cells and organizations which decide to act in their name and in the name of Al Qaeda through different territories. Such agents have mastered the use of communication technologies as channels of coordination, indoctrination, recruitment, and networking for the purpose of attack. Online forums, blogs, websites, mobile phone chats, e-mails, online social networks, cafes, libraries and mosques have been of common use. Militants have perfectly blended with their environments.

The insurgency nurtures itself from ideas, claims and grievances than are not only deeply rooted within societies where they operate, but that have been exacerbated by the discourse to the point where it has become a system by itself without depending on its leaders. As such, leaders turn out to be more motivational symbols than organizational administrators and commanders. I

In many cases, violent actions are not the only form of support for the organization. ‘Political’ actions in the order of spreading the discourses and reaching wider audiences might also constitute group support.

The virtual dimension of war is thus vital. The war of ideas is as important as the war of force. It is the existence of a common set of ideas and a spreading discourse which allows individuals to be identified with the groups; which gives cohesion to the network as a whole. Symbols, figures, concepts and brands are very relevant to this end. Without a common understanding of the problem, of the legitimate means to achieve the objective, and perception of the enemy, the network is in risk of falling apart. The centrality of ideas and the spread of information are typical symptoms of the information age.

The Study of Social Networks

Through complexity, a particular understanding of networks has been disseminated. The definition of a network proposed by Pierre Musso offers an insight into this change: “an unstable structure of connections composed of interacting elements, whose variability follows certain functional rules”

This means that networks, instead of being stable and static structures are the result of continuous internal readjustments given the interactions among its elements and with the environment.

complexity is evident because there are no formalized procedures for a node to resolve conflicts arising from interaction; no single actor with formal authority to impose its will on other participants. There are no command and control structures making the forms of the network dependant on a continuous inter-definition of their participants.

He believes that social networks today should be understood as an enduring form of social organization, composed of asymmetrical, interacting elements held together by a shared set of values, standards, or functional rules. They are coordinated through an on-going negotiation in which elements re-define not only the network’s identity but also their positions within it; and this process of self-definition creates a permanent condition of flexibility. The transformations of the networks are not entirely random deriving into total chaos; they follow the network’s own internal logic according to its identity or its functional rules.

Randomness means irregularity: nodes in a network will have a different amount of connections. Very few elements will have either an extremely high or low amount of linkages, while most of the nodes will demonstrate an average number of them. In statistical terms this is known as the Poisson distribution

nodes could follow a power law distribution, in which very few nodes have an excessive amount of linkages, while others display fewer connections.

Since the power law distribution abandons the idea of a characteristic node and a peak of average of connections, the idea of ‘scale’ is discarded. This type of network then became known as a scale-free network.

 

an archetypical netwar actor would consist of a dispersed set of interconnected nodes, where the nodes can be individuals, groups or formal or informal organizations.

 

A node in a network could itself be a hierarchy. More than being structured as a single type of network, they are combinations of all of these forms. A typical case would be an all channel network as the core of the structure connecting starsand chains whose nodes are to conduct tactical operations. This is very important for the analysis of FARC. As it will be demonstrated, whereas military structures remain as hierarchies, criminal and political structures appear to be arranged more as networks, confirming this idea of combination.

the strength of a network is guaranteed by the high amount of connections among its elements. Interconnectivity leads into robustness. Following Barabasi, if a particular node fails, it is very likely that a specific fragment of the network will be isolated, but the network itself can be maintained. Removing only a few nodes will not have a significant impact on the integrity of the network.

Generalized node failures can break the network into a set of non-communicated fragments, but if this happens as part of a random attack, it is statistically more likely that the nodes destroyed or removed will be smaller since they are more abundant. But destroying hubs may pose a serious challenge.

 

defined two network properties: connection, which explains who the nodes are and how they are connected (structure); and contagion, the flows which run through the network, the information that is passed from node to node through all the existing linkages (function).

Failure cannot only emerge from the structure, as it was proved by Barabasi, but from the diffusion of information in the form of a cascading event, or through a domino effect, from node to node.

hyperconnected. Following their ideas, a superior level of connectivity has motivated a radical evolution of social networks in four ways: enormity, an increase in the scale of networks and the amount of people who might be reached; communality, broadening the scale in which we can share information and contribute to collective efforts; specificity, an increase in the particularity of the ties that are formed (interest groups); and virtuality, the ability to assume virtual identities

Insurgencies are, by definition, organizations which pursue particular political goals. But the opportunity found in the maximization of profits in a globalized economy may divert organizations from their original route and into the road of criminality.

insurgencies can become hybrids of criminality and political insurrection, making it difficult to recognize if the rebels are still following an original political cause or if such a purpose is only a facade to the real objective of profit.

Nodes and structures in other territories provide the opportunity for the insurgency to survive and to re-emerge as it will be explained ahead.

Insurgency is warfare; it is a form of achieving a political end through the force of arms. It is different to conventional warfare in that it is not waged by regular state military forces which follow determined standardized norms and procedures, but by groups of civilians, communities, and nations which take up arms against the established ruler. They fight for a cause they see as legitimate: a change in the nature of the political system, the creation of a new state, the separation of a portion of the territory, or the independence from a dominating power.

Walter Laqueur, a historian at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Chicago and Georgetown, listed three elements to characterise this type of tactics: the exploitation of the environment in order to wear the enemy down; more than fighting it frontally, fighting it for a long period in order to wear it down instead of defeating it directly; and conducting actions through a sequence of attacks and retreats, using basic instruments instead of advanced technologies (Navias & Moreman, 1994). This tactics are known as guerrilla tactics.

 

the origin of insurgencies can be found in the national insurrections that flourished against established states only after a condition of regularity was achieved in terms of international law and politics, with the emergence of the state and European Public Law in the early modern era. (Schmitt, 2006) “The Ius Public Europaeum not only encompassed law, but the norms, philosophical texts, and power constellations that governed war and relations between states.”

insurgency as “a struggle between a non-ruling group and the ruling authorities in which the former consciously employs political resources (organizational skills, propaganda, and/or demonstrations) and instruments of violence to establish legitimacy for some aspect of the political system it considers illegitimate. Legitimacy and illegitimacy refer to whether or not existing aspects of politics are considered moral or immoral (or, to simplify, right or wrong) by the population or selected elements therein.”

The psychological dimension of war, then, becomes as important as the physical act of combat, and the reason why insurgencies are protracted, lasting not only years but maybe even decades.

In conceptual terms, insurgency (or politically motivated violence) and criminality can be clearly differentiated.

partisan warfare is rooted in the sphere of politics. It is his intense political commitment which sets the partisan apart from other combatants. It is politics which distinguishes him from the common thief and criminals whose motives are personal enrichment. The pirate is possessed of what jurisprudence knows as animal furandi (felonious intent). The partisan, by contrast, fights on a political front and it is precisely the political character of his actions that throws into stark relief the original sense of the word we apply to comprehend him” (Coker, 2008, p.46)

But whereas in conceptual terms the difference might be clear, in practice the dimensions tend to merge when specific cases are observed: “In theory, the distinction is crystal clear: to be classified as warfare, violence must be motivated by politics, not profit, as is the case with criminal behaviour. In practice, though, the political and the criminal tend to merge” (Gray, 2007, p.250) Criminal entities sometimes display political interests, for example, when they provide goods and services to a host community either because there are shared feelings of appreciation or as a means to make its job easier. Similarly, criminals might seek to control local political institutions in order to carry on with their activities more easily. As such, they could become a sort of parallel state performing political and social functions in a particular location. On the other hand criminals might challenge certain state acts, as the enactment of extradition laws, and might act to achieve their reversal.

Politically-guided organizations may also become permeated by criminal interests. Non-state organizations need to fund themselves in order to operate. Given their illegal nature, they are more likely to find funds in illicit economic activities. This fact creates the possibility of insurgents, or groups within the insurgency, to become more motivated by profit than by politics.

An economic circle emerges in which local populations find a source of income through commodities that are used by the armed organization to fund their war: “conflicts can create war economies, often in regions controlled by rebels or warlords and linked to international trading networks; members of armed gangs can benefit from looting; and regimes can use violence to deflect opposition, reward supporters or maintain their access to resources.”

 

more than understanding political or economic motivations for war separately, a political economy perspective linking agendas and explaining the interdependence of economic and political variables is more appropriate.

“Conceptualizing explanations of armed conflict in terms of greed and grievance has imposed an unnecessary limiting dichotomy on what is, in reality, a highly diverse, complex set of incentive and opportunity structures that vary across time and location.”

These authors proposed an examination of combatants’ behaviours without understanding rebel organizations as unitary groups. This is precisely the approach in this dissertation since FARC will not be explored as a monolithic entity but as a set of nodes (individuals) with different interests, objectives and functions.

 

narcotics and diamonds have a stronger influence on the duration of conflict than oil, gas, timber or minerals. Narcotics, particularly, tend to favour non-state actors disproportionately because of its illegality, allowing them to strengthen their operational capabilities and even to increase their legitimacy with communities connected to the business. Narco-trafficking is in fact the largest source of profit for both criminal groups and terrorism, accounting for 2% of the global economy according to the International Monetary Fund, and 7% of international trade following United Nations statistics

 

 

anda Felbab-Brown, a researcher at Brookings Institution, demonstrated that legitimacy is not only constructed from an ideological affinity between agents. In the case of narcotics, in those areas where the organization is the de facto authority and coca is grown, the insurgency provides the security and stability necessary for inhabitants to have an income. As such, it is the insurgent organization which actually provides some sense of organization, protection, authority and stability in locations where war economies develop. This circumstance guarantees freedom of action, popular support and legitimacy to the organization…the organization turns into a sort of parallel state becoming a political agent, transforming a criminally-based enterprise into a political phenomenon.

Terrorism and organized crime cannot be analysed separately in the contemporary international context, since evidence “suggests that they may be deeply intertwined in ways that go well beyond tactical alliances of convenience.” (Lal, 2005, p.293)

Given the continued need of these organizations to engage in activities that are not natural to their original purpose, they might build an alliance with an organization that would provide such services in order for the organization to focus on their key activities; a sort of outsourcing. Examples include FARC and Mexican Cartels, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Afghan Mafia, and Al Qaeda and Bosnian Criminals.

A subsequent stage referred to as ‘symbiosis’ implies a stronger interdependence between both organizations given their impossibility to conduct their operations without its ally.

A further stage in the interaction model speaks about the creation of a hybrid organization. This type of entity was also introduced by Williams (2008). In this case political motivations and criminal interests, and the execution of criminal and terrorist activities, have merged in a single organization, without the possibility to define it entirely in political or criminal terms. As examples of this type of entities Williams (2008) points towards FARC in Colombia

Shelley and Makarenko describe another element of this interaction that is relevant for the case of FARC. Shelley linked lawless physical spaces without the authority of state institutions to the processes of convergence between terror and crime. It is argued that “areas with little government control, weak enforcement, or opened borders” foster the collaboration between criminal and terrorist entities, making their activities easier

Makarenko introduced a similar idea through her concept of the black hole, which she described as a space where weak or failed states foster a convergence between transnational organized crime and terrorism; a sort of safe haven for convergent groups.

The concept of commercial insurgencies

Metz argued that although the United States lost strategic interest in insurgencies, the Post-Cold War era was about to observe the growth of evolved forms of insurgency. Among them he described ‘commercial insurgencies’ “driven less by the desire of justice than wealth” (Metz, 1993). In his words:

“Commercial insurgency will be a form of what is becoming known as “grey area phenomena”–powerful criminal organizations with a political veneer and the ability to threaten national security rather than just law and order. In fact, many commercial insurgencies may see an alliance of those for whom political objectives are preeminent and the criminal dimension simply a necessary evil, and those for whom the accumulation of wealth through crime is the primary objective and politics simply a rhetorical veneer to garner some support that they might not otherwise gain. It is this political component that distinguishes commercial insurgents from traditional organized crime. Most often, though, commercial insurgencies probably will not attempt to rule the state but will seek instead a compliant regime that allows them to pursue criminal activity unimpeded.” (Metz, 1995, p.31-37)

In this type of insurgencies, by similarity to Williams’s conception of hybrid organization, it would be impossible to determine if the commercial interest constitutes the purpose of the organization, or if the political motivation is still driving combatants’ desires.

Although the concept has been used as a base for empirical analysis through several cases, there haven’t been deeper developments on how a commercial insurgency is structured, how it operates, and especially how it interacts with its environment (the region). The present dissertation, then, takes forward this concept through the case of FARC to explain how this organization can be characterised, and how it exploits several elements of the environment which allow the spread of its structures and networks beyond borders. This vision challenges the idea of the state as the counterinsurgent given its impossibility to act in the territories where it is not sovereign.

 

If understood as a criminal entity, political elements are downplayed, and if pictured purely as an insurgency, profits are reduced as a problem of means and not as a motivation. The approach also allows constructing a vision of the organization not as a monolithic entity that can be understood through simplifying adjectives (narco-terrorist, criminal) but, as it was suggested by Ballentine and Sherman, as a system composed by different interacting individuals or sectors with diversified interests that range between the social and political to the selfish and criminal.

There is no scientific and analytical rigour in placing “a disparate group (of actors) with widely divergent motives and types of relationships with drugs” as part of the same category (Wardlaw, 1988, p.5).

The triadic character of commercial insurgencies

How then to think about such entities? Evidently a simplistic and generalizing view is insufficient to fully understand commercial insurgencies.

systems are composed by a series of units whose conditions at the lowest level determine the system as a whole. As such, and following the logic in Metz’s definition, it is necessary to ‘open the box’ and dig deeper within the insurgency to explore motivations and functions of individuals, groups, sectors or levels, instead of understanding them through the same lens. It is necessary to propose a comprehensive understanding of how these actors operate in the context of hyperconnectivity

Several factors ranging from prestige and unemployment to coercion explain such decision. But within the insurgency several processes are in place to create organizational cohesion, including political indoctrination. Through time, combatant’s motivation to remain in war could change. Some might continue to be interested only as means of income (criminal motivations) while others might be convinced by the political objective (political motivation).

In theory, the nature of an insurgency is political by definition. This means that all individuals, commanders and combatants are motivated by the achievement of a social/political goal. But this does not mean that everyone will be a combatant. As several classic theorists of insurgency such as Mao Tse Tung or Vo Nguyen Giap, have suggested, insurgencies develop political structures which remain independent to those units waging war, for they will spread the discourse to build popular support and to participate through political spaces.

In other words, all combatants -those who wage war- have a political motivation and are thus part of the political dimension in motivational terms, but in terms of functionality they only constitute the ‘military’ dimension since they do not develop specific political tasks. By contrast, those individuals that are only dedicated to the organization’s political tasks (i.e. members of the political party) can only be part of the political dimension both in motivational and functional terms.

Those who perform tasks related to the criminal activity are part of the criminal dimension in functional terms. For example, in the case of narcotics, the criminal dimension expresses interests in profiting from drug-dealing (motivational) and the performance of tasks related to the production and trade of drugs (functional).

It is then here proposed that this type of organization displays a triadic character composed of military, political and criminal dimensions, for which particular functional structures are developed, composed by individuals who conduct activities and tasks according to the nature of each of them. Such structures are not mutually exclusive; that is, the organization will not necessarily establish separate units (fronts, columns, companies, cells, blocs, platoons) for each of the dimensions. There is an overlapping; individuals can be part of several dimensions simultaneously.

 

functional structures extend beyond state borders, exploiting elements in its environment, and challenging the capacity of the state to respond to the threat.

The military dimension, as it can be observed, exists only in functional terms. Militants must have a motivation that can be classified either as political or criminal, but a military motivation by itself does not have a proper logic. There is no fighting for the sake of fighting. Combatants are not waging war because they want to wage war; they are fighting for a purpose.

A describes an individual who is politically motivated and develops political tasks without engaging in combat. For example, those militants of political parties or movements of the insurgency, without including urban militias. It is difficult to trace a defined border between this area and the rest of society.

–  B refers to those individuals who are politically motivated and participate in armed actions, whether in rural spaces as traditional frontline combatants or in urban areas as militias. In classic theory this is the bulk of the insurgency, and it corresponds to those within the military dimension in figure 2.2.

–  C describes those individuals who are motivated by the proceeds of criminal activities, and perform tasks related to them, but do not engage in combat. From a strict point of view they might be seen as associates of the organization, but they could be actual insurgency members specifically destined to such tasks. As with the political dimensions, it might also be difficult to trace a dividing line between society and this area.

–  D refers to insurgents motivated by criminal wealth and performing specific tasks related to criminal activities, but participating in combat.

–  E describes the point where all the dimensions come together. Combatants in this area are both politically and criminally motivated, and are understood to engage in political, criminal and political activities. It is possible to think about commanders as part of this category. But this space should not be thought as exclusive of commanders, we could probably find mid-ranking combatants also performing varied functions in all dimensions. As it was argued by William Reno, “economic benefit is not the motivation of all individuals in every internal war. Combatants might pursue diverse objectives simultaneously.” (Pizarro, 2004, p.16)

–  F describes an odd condition. Individuals who are criminally motivated but for some reason end up performing only political functions. They shouldn’t be a general case within the organization but under strict conditions of command, it could be a possibility. For example, an individual who is part of the organizations because he is interested in wealth, but his commander has placed him in a position where he must indoctrinate communities or coordinate cells of the clandestine political party. Point G would explain a similar condition but adding the role of combat.

–  H refers to the same situation in opposite terms. Individuals who are politically motivated but end up performing tasks related only to the criminal activity. I adds its participation in warfare.

 

But these dimensions are not static. As complexity explains, nodes can change and evolve over time, their motivations and the tasks they perform may vary. Nodes can ‘jump’ from dimension to dimension, expressing their interdependence. This has a relevant implication in terms of re-emergence, as it will be detailed ahead, since stimuli from the environment may trigger changes in nodes allowing them to engage with other dimensions. This ‘leap’ can be produced through a series of processes:

–  Node politicization: In motivational terms this means convincing those who pursue a criminal objective to follow the political struggle (indoctrination). In functional terms it means the beginning of the conduction of political activities and tasks.

–  Node militarization: It consists in transforming nodes that were developing exclusively political or criminal tasks into active combatants. This can be achieved through military training and the preparation of a reserve force with appropriate capabilities.

–  Node criminalization: In motivational terms, this implies a loss of interest regarding the original political reason to fight. A lack of motivation produced by low perspectives on winning the war or the appearance of a stronger interest in profits. In functional terms, this implies that militants will begin to develop tasks related to the organization’s criminal activities.

Now, in theory, several organizations might find its military and political dimensions significantly overlapping, even in functional terms. That is, every member of the insurgency is both a political actor performing political tasks and a participant in military actions. Such might be the case not of classic Marxist or Maoist insurgencies, but of a decentralized, networked and loose structure of individuals, very much as described in the last chapter: Individuals who decide to act by themselves without receiving a formal order, who look for support in cells or groups, or come together with others to form their own.

Which are the tasks that define the dimensions in functional terms? In the military dimension, the tasks resemble those of a proper military institution: recruiting and finding the adequate personnel for each of the tactical demands; developing training routines to guarantee success in operations and, if necessary, the required specialization; executing operations, either offensive or defensive according to the dynamics of conflict; building logistical chains to keep the organization running (e.g. food, weaponry and clothing); securing communication channels to allow the necessary coordination among its command and control structures; establishing routines and practices of internal control and discipline to keep internal cohesion with adequate punishment procedures when necessary; obtaining intelligence information; and organizing urban militias for the conduction of operations, intelligence and logistical support in the cities.

 

 

 

The activities related to the political dimension of an insurgency may be derived from the creation of a political party or movement as the cornerstone of its participation at the national and local levels. In the case of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist insurgencies during the Cold War, communist parties became the political wing of armed rebellions. But according to the political and strategic contexts, the case for a political body acting at the national level might not always be the ideal mechanism. Political structures might be developed in a clandestine manner, and the tasks performed informally within specific local contexts.

In general terms, such tasks are related to spreading the discourse, ideals, philosophy and arguments of the insurgency in search of the sympathy of individuals for their active or passive support. These include popular assemblies, smaller local meetings, indoctrination of specific individuals, dissemination of ideas by word of mouth, and the spread of propaganda through methods such as pamphlets or radio stations. Today, these tasks extend to the cyberspace and include online social networks. If the organization has somehow become the local authority in particular areas, either directly or through third parties, their acts of government are also duties of political nature.

The environment of operations

As complexity explains, systems are part of the environment and they constantly interact with it. Insurgency adapts to the circumstances it imposes, while elements of the environment might change as a result of the acts of insurgents.

it is difficult to make a difference between members of the insurgency and supporting elements in Latin America. Members of the FARC-created Movimiento Continental Bolivariano, a Latin American movement bringing together Bolivarian and Communist parties, groups and individuals, could well be considered active part of the insurgency.

the environment is constituted as a grand continuum connecting the local, national, regional and global theatres of operations where the insurgency finds elements that allow for its nodes to be embedded through different social and geographical spaces. It is through these elements or variables that the interaction between the system and the environment is possible; through these variables the insurgency is able to embed nodes in geographical and social spaces beyond borders. They include:

–  Sympathy of non-organized individuals (individuals not formally enrolled in any organization)

–  Connections with political and social movements

–  Alliances with armed actors

–  Support from national governments

–  Exploitation of empty spaces

–  Accommodation of secretive nodes

 

these elements are exploited by the insurgency to expand, to place nodes of all its dimensions through different social and geographical spaces.

Support from national government in the primary environment lacks sense since insurgencies by definition exist as opposed to the government. On the local level it could be understood as support from the local authority. But this is usually a result of the process of insurgency growth. As the movement grows and individuals, organizations and political figures are incorporated into the effort, local power is achieved to be administered directly or through third parties.

when support spreads considerably to incorporate an increased amount of individuals, support is likely to be channelled through different instruments, such as a social movement, or it can be understood as part of the progressive territorial expansion of the insurgency itself. As such, this support can be understood not through this particular variable but, for example, through social movements.

Empty spaces are here understood as those areas or zones of the territory of any country where there is virtually no authority or presence of the security forces, allowing its relative occupation by the insurgency.

It is possible to observe three different scenarios of insurgency involvement in regional/global processes.

Transnational networks of a national insurgency

Insurgency as part of a regional revolution

Transnational insurgency

In the first case, the organization counts with militants in several countries but they exist in function of an internal conflict. Even when certain operative functions extend beyond borders, the objective is still revolution in a particular state.

 

In the second situation, the insurgency is part of a wider regional or even global uprising in which several actors, movements, organizations and rebel groups pursue the same objective.

 

There is no single theatre of operations since they extend through regions.

 

In the third case, the insurgency constitutes a regional revolutionary army by itself. There are connections and alliances with other actors but they are either local, operating in national scenarios, or constitute different regional actors pursuing a particular regional agenda.

this understanding of insurgencies challenges the traditional model of competition between a national insurgency and a single counterinsurgent state. The survival of militants beyond borders creates the possibility for the insurgency to re-emerge in case of being reduced to a point of near destruction in the primary theatre.

 

An insurgency that is part of a regional revolution will find elements of support within the secondary environment more easily than a national insurgency.

 

Although the primary environment is vital to understand the configuration of the structures of the three dimensions, this dissertation prioritizes events in the secondary environment for survival and re-emergence.

survival might be expressed by scattered and diffused nodes, without any major organizational logic, and without the possibility to interact and to coordinate actions. But they might continue performing their functions in different scenarios, through other organizations or in smaller groups. As explained through network theory, structures can survive unless 5 to 15% of hubs are disabled simultaneously.

There are specific environmental (regional) processes that contribute not only to the embedment and survival of insurgency nodes beyond borders, but to the re-emergence of the organization via the possibility of nodes to re-engage with other dimensions. These processes are the preservation of the ideology and the discourse, and the mobility of elements of the criminal economy. They guarantee node redundancy, and the flexibility, adaptability, and resilience of the networks.

The globalization, or regionalization, of particular ideologies, doctrines and discourses that speak about societies in certain political/geographical contexts, contribute to the embeddedness of operatives beyond borders and provides instruments for nodes to re- engage with the political dimension. Trans-nationality generates local expressions of support channelled or materialized through specific political parties, social groups or other armed organizations. Examples are Political Islam or Islamism in the case of Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations, and Bolivarianism-Communism throughout the Andes and South America.19

 

Node politicization: remnants of the insurgency may become criminals in the strict sense of the concept. However, through the preservation of the ideology and discourse through the region, and probably through contacts with other regional actors, they might be pushed back into fighting for a political cause (indoctrination).

Node militarization: when there is an offensive against an insurgency, evidently the military dimensions is severely hit. Remaining nodes may either become tempted to turn entirely into criminals, or to escape to cities and towns to proselytise without actually waging war. The militarization of nodes means the return of such nodes into combat.

Node criminalization: If military and political nodes continue to exist beyond borders, but eradication policies in Colombia became successful in eliminating war economies, the existence of spaces for cultivation, production and traffic in other areas of the region will invite not only those remaining nodes to engage on activities related to drug production and trafficking, but also new nodes to participate.

given the right environmental conditions, the insurgency may be reconstituted from nodes dedicated to any of the dimensions.

 

The traditional model of insurgency, socially and geographically marginalized rural guerrillas dressed in combat fatigues progressively conquering human and territorial spaces, such as Castro’s Cuban Revolution, is declining in favour of interconnected horizontal and decentralized structures, as Arquila and Ronfeldt have explained. As worldwide political events during 2010-2011 demonstrate, there is considerable power on social mobilizations and popular movements, for which online social networks have become highly instrumental. The youth, the students, marginalized social sectors, the unemployed, and political activists are an ideal niche for insurgency growth.

variables the insurgency is able to embed nodes in geographical and social spaces beyond borders. They include:

–  Sympathy of non-organized individuals (individuals not formally enrolled in any organization)

–  Connections with political and social movements

–  Alliances with armed actors

–  Support from national governments

–  Exploitation of empty spaces

 

Chapter 3. The evolution of counterinsurgency warfare

The emergence of Maoism

Mao Tse Tung proposed a model for a conservative and parochial vast rural population, and a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society (Beckett, 2001). He developed a theory for a small weaker actor to override a more powerful enemy by the means of will, time, space and propaganda, in the absence of initial fire power capacity.

 

From local support of specific communities the insurgency will grow to become a mass movement challenging established powers. His theory of insurgency is generally known as Popular Protracted Warfare.

 

In a first stage known as strategic defensive the insurgency is still a small armed force which attacks and makes a gradual retreat before a strong retaliation of the enemy’s army. Insurgents do not recur to positional warfare; the objective is survival through time.

 

In a second stage known as stalemate, guerrilla tactics of quick strike and retreat are the mode of military operations. The sense of futility among army troops and its home front continues to grow while its morale decreases. The war reaches a state of equilibrium with insurgents controlling little land but maintaining positions of tactical initiative.

 

The third stage, known as strategic offensive begins when these regular armies grow in size, and positional warfare dominates the mode of conflict.

 

Maoism became the main paradigm of insurgency warfare throughout the developing world, and COIN would evolve to respond to such paradigm.

 

In Malaya, Harold Briggs, a British Officer with experience on the Burma revolts during the Second World War, was appointed as director of operations. He formulated a plan, known as the ‘Briggs Plan’, which aimed at protecting and isolating the populace from insurgents, while identifying the Malayan Communist Party’s (MCP) political body, not the fighters in the jungles, as the priority in confrontation.

An organizational structure was created with the Federal War Council on the national level, and district and village level committees. These collegiate bodies constituted assemblies where diverse institutions came together to discuss insurgency matters and to make decisions on the appropriate actions to be taken. Not only security institutions such as the Army and the Police were included, also civil agencies, and representatives of ethnic communities.

a‘comprehensive approach’to counterinsurgency: the idea that the responsibility to fight an insurgency is not exclusive of security institutions, but of a wider range of state and even societal organizations; and that actions must be conducted in issues beyond security. These principles would later constitute a central tenet of modern COIN, as it has been experienced not only in Colombia but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These cases have demonstrated that addressing the grievances of the communities that fuel the insurgency’s motivations or discourse is not necessarily a sign of state weakness, as extremist in national contexts may tend to describe it, but actually a vital part of an effective counterinsurgency strategy.

As summarised by Ian Beckett, the experience against Maoists demonstrated the importance of six factors:

  1. Political action designed to prevent insurgents from gaining popular support should have priority over pure military action.
  2. Civil-military cooperation is necessary.
  3. Intelligence should be coordinated
  4. Insurgents must be separated from the populations through winning their hearts and minds
  5. Pacification should be supported with the appropriate use of military force
  6. Lasting political reform should be implemented to prevent the recurrence ofinsurgency

 

Theorisation of counterinsurgency during the Maoist era

counterinsurgency must follow several principles:

– The objective of the struggle is political and not military. Since insurgency was finally understood as a political construction, military means are insufficient to confront the rebels. Given the precedence of the organization’s political objectives and

structures, the response must be understood as political and not only as military.

  • –  COIN is not only a responsibility of the military forces. As a consequence of the last point, the campaign against insurgents is a matter of all state institutions and not only of the security and defence sector. The leadership must be civilian/political, and

the military command must be subordinated to it.

  • –  There must be a plan of action. State policy should guide the conduct of the

campaign, including of course the role of the military and other security institutions, but also the participation of other organizations and sectors. This implies the existence of a degree of coordination between interacting agencies under a single direction and command.

  • –  Government’s actions must comply with the law: the heart of the campaign, as it has been argued, is winning the support of the population and achieving its rejection of the insurgent movement. As such, legitimacy expresses the centre of gravity. The government cannot recur to excesses or actions beyond the law which could be used by the insurgent to present it as an illegitimate actor. Its conducts must follow all norms and rules, guaranteeing the integrity, security and rights of the population.

The five principles announced by Robert Thomson, several of which were just discussed, summarize the essence of counterinsurgency thought from the perspective of the classic authors:

    1. “The government must have a clear political aim
    2. The government must function within the law
    3. The government must have an overall plan
    4. The government must give priority to defeating the political subversion, not the guerrillas.
    5. In the guerrilla phase of an insurgency it must secure its base first”

Convincing the population of why the state is a better option, or persuading insurgents to demobilize, becomes more important than killing rebels in mass.

For such a purpose the government must respect the feelings and aspirations of the nation, provide a firm and fair government, build up public confidence, and establish a campaign of civic action and propaganda to counter the discourse and propositions of the insurgency.

Counterinsurgency failure during the Cold War

As stated before, it is highly relevant for civilians and military to adapt to the efforts required by COIN campaigning; the lack of adaptation is likely to lead into failure.

actions by other US Agencies such as the US Information Agency, the CIA, and USAID were conducted independently without any coordination.

whereas the theorisation of COIN gained momentum during the Cold War, military cultures impeded its proper application in the field. The United States who was traditionally sceptical to such type of warfare, decided to act in Vietnam through conventional instruments. As a consequence, mistakes allowed for the growth of the insurgency and the spread of hatred towards the counterinsurgent.

Hearts and Minds and the Comprehensive Approach.

Human Terrain System (HTS) are composed of individuals with social science and operational backgrounds that are deployed with tactical and operational military units to assist in bringing knowledge about the local population into a coherent analytic framework and build relationships with the local power-brokers in order to provide advice and opportunities to Commanders and staffs in the field.

On the other hand, the ‘build’ component of the clear-hold-build approach makes this practice very similar to nation-building. Once the insurgency has been expelled and the presence of security institutions have been guaranteed, the campaign turns into development. Building capabilities for communities to achieve social and economic sustainability within the law, and building the permanent presence of all state institutions is the objective.

This is a step beyond civic action campaigns aimed at winning hearts and minds. Whereas medical, educational or other types of civic campaigns might be temporary, providing some benefits for the population in a specific moment, the aim of local development is sustainability through time, reducing dependence on particular state actions and empowering local communities. This is why this type of COIN approach can also be referred to as develop-centred counterinsurgency. It is this particular component of current COIN theorization that makes to the elimination of criminal war economies part of an overall strategy to defeat insurgents. As it will be seen in the case of Colombia, this approach was valuable for the fight against FARC during the administration of Alvaro Uribe.

Counterinsurgency beyond the state: looking to the future

History demonstrates that the practice of counterinsurgency has been almost defined in state-centric parameters. Insurgents have traditionally challenged the government, the regimes and institutional structures of particular states.

the state-centric paradigm in terms of insurgency is crumbling. Globalization and the spread of communication technologies have created opportunities for insurgencies to extend beyond the boundaries of a single state, as it was described in the last chapter.

 

Chapter 4. The configuration of FARC as a commercial insurgency and the evolution of state responses

In the beginning, FARC’s capacity to challenge the state militarily was marginal, and its political dimension was expressed through the motivations of its members. Rebels fought because of real concerns of the peasant communities, especially regarding land possession and income distribution. As they evolved into a guerrilla movement, they created clusters of support in specific regions taking advantage of the sympathy demonstrated by local peasants.

The lack of development in marginal areas of the country, the inexistence of state institutions, and the peasant colonization of areas motivated by the coca boom created a perfect combination for the growth of a commercial insurgency.

At first COIN strategy lacked any doctrinal and systematic order. The state basically reacted with all available means and with excessive force not only against insurgents but also against the communities which hosted them. A tactic of depopulation was implemented in areas of strong insurgency presence: Settlers were expelled, houses were burnt down and the areas were bombarded (Pardo, 2004). In many occasions, anti-guerrilla units fought dressed as civilians or pretending to be guerrilla members.

Following global tendencies, as explained by the classic COIN authors, during the 1960’s information gained a central position in COIN. Intelligence and psychological operations were becoming as relevant as military actions. Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966-1970) created a national intelligence and regional intelligence boards to coordinate actions at the national and local levels.

From self-defence to guerrilla resistance

During the early 1960’s, communists organized enclaves of peasant colonization with support of the PCC, after spreading their influence through the population with civic-military actions and propaganda (Matta, 1999). These were agrarian zones which rejected national authority and opted for a socialist order, with their own organizational and self-defence institutions. These zones were known as republicas independientes (See Map 2).

 

In Marquetalia, Tirofijoorganized its guerrilla group with strong support from the families in the region (Rizo, 2002). He launched an ‘agrarian guerrilla programme’ demanding the redistribution of lands allowing peasants to own properties. Guerrillas ceased to exist as self- defence movements to become groups of armed resistance. Through the 1960’s a different type of insurgency had flourished. It was not based on partisan identities as it was the case during the 1950’s but motivated by the ideals of social vindication, subversion against injustice, class struggle, and anti-imperialism

By 1965, 48 men had reconvened in Southern Tolima to celebrate the First Guerrilla Conference, a collegiate meeting in which FARC is officially founded, although it was initially named ‘Southern Block’. Basic plans of political, military, organizational, and propaganda actions were sketched, mainly with the objective of guaranteeing survival of the group. Since then, the ideals and discourse have followed an orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine

The emergence of a commercial insurgency

It was in the Seventh Conference in  that FARC adopted a comprehensive strategy as a base to become a powerful commercial insurgency during the 80s and 90s. The organization is projected as a broader popular-based insurgency, promoting ideals such as mass struggle, open democracy with opposition, and popular participation in state decisions. Thus its new name FARC-EP (Ejercito del Pueblo or People’s Army) (Pizarro, 2004). The objective was to constitute a proper conventional-like revolutionary army with popular support.

A Strategic Plan was sketched during this conference to be further elaborated during the next 17 months. It was later approved by the Plenum of the Central General Staff (the second hierarchical assembly of the organization). It was a flexible eight year plan for taking power: if insurrection was not successful in the first eight-year cycle, strategic withdrawal would be followed by a second attempt. It blended a Maoist three step approach with the Vietnamese concept of Dau tranh (political warfare among enemy forces, enemy society and a group’s own civilian support base (The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011). The plan required advancing towards major cities to isolate them. The most important was Bogota, the capital, for which the Eastern Bloc was strengthened, deploying troops through the Eastern mountain chain in order to surround it.

A plan of expansion was also established. It consisted in increasing recruitment and to ‘unfold’ existing fronts in order to create new ones, covering every single province. For this purpose FARC implemented systematic plans for recruitment, indoctrination and training of operatives; the indoctrination and control of civilian population; and the use of propaganda

Urban units would radicalize urban population intending to aggravate the contradictions of a capitalist society, and would gather intelligence and resources (The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011). After the adaptations, FARC managed to advance from guerrilla warfare to the conduction of semi-conventional attacks.

But more interestingly, through the Seventh conference, the criminal dimension of FARC finally emerged, joining the political and military dimensions to complete the tripartite character of the commercial insurgency. The organization formalized its participation in the drug business with the establishment of a tax known as gramaje. It was initially a percentage of 10 to 15% from the quantity of the drug produced

by 1978 FARC opposed the Medellin Cartel and forbade peasants to cultivate coca. But such position eroded its support among peasants, given their increase dependence on coca leaf, so two years later cultivation was authorized only if they also cropped licit products. The tax was agreed in negotiations with the drug barons, and it generated a peaceful coexistence between the insurgency and the cartels, especially in the South.

The tax became ideal for FARC’s growth and expansion plans, and indeed provided the necessary resources for its strongest period during the 80s and 90s. The expansion derived from the Strategic Plan was only possible given such resources. The insurgency’s participation in the drug business became evident with the discovery of production complexes such as Tranquilandia in the jungles of the province of Caquetá, where the bulk of Medellin Cartel’s drugs were produced with protection from the insurgency. The joint operation which destroyed the camp in 1984 accounted for 16 labs, 7 airstrips, 7 airplanes and 7000 tanks with chemicals (Lizarazo, 2008, p.50).

From 1996 to 1998 they had gained total control of the local drug trade in Putumayo and Caquetá. They eliminated local drug dealers and introduced fixed prices for the coca paste. They forced farmers to sell only to the local Front of the organization, and began to store and trade large amounts of cocaine with envoys of multiple new micro-cartels (International Crisis Group, 2005). This is how interests in profiting from drug-dealing permeated the organization to create a commercial insurgency. Whereas some individuals continued to be motivated by the political goals of the organization, others became more interested in their own profits. Some could actually display both types of motivations simultaneously

The fight against narcotics and the insurgency had been understood as separate efforts. There was never a comprehensive strategy to eliminate insurgencies, disrupt criminal economies, and generate new sustainable legal economies with presence of state institutions. Programmes were not articulated with social, economic and political processes of the national level, being mere isolated and unsustainable efforts to eradicate coca leaf cultivation.

Years later, Carlos Lleras (1966-1970) implemented the Plan Andes incorporating university and school students as soldiers in groups with lawyers, doctors, dentists, engineers, vets, sociologists and economist to spread education in the regions, in a figure that resembled human terrain teams. 1000 soldiers and 328 professionals were incorporated in 10 Brigades for this purpose. Each soldier needed to teach 25 individuals (Torres del Rio, 2000, p.180). The plan was part of a military strategy to isolate insurgent groups, destroy the irreducible groups, and engage on consolidation operations.

Negotiations as a strategic base for growth

The period of rapid growth of the insurgency was possible not only because of the increase of its revenues via drug-dealing, but because of their strategic use of the spaces conceded by governments in times of negotiation. Such spaces have been useful to break the offensive of the Military Forces, to rest and re-group, to gain territorial control, to increase their political profile, and to reach international audiences.

Peace was seen by FARC as another strategic instrument for its objectives; an opportunity to grow and to gain political recognition at the national and international levels. Peace itself never seemed to be an ultimate objective, only an instrument for the real strategic objective of winning the war. “In short, despite their public discourse of reformist peacemaking, FARC leaders would remain uncompromisingly maximalist, stating that a truce ‘is a form of war and not a form of peace’”

With a stronger force, FARC proceeded with its strategic plan, occupying the Eastern mountain chain surrounding Bogota. Control wasn’t only expressed in terms of military presence, but also municipal control, the expulsion of state forces, the assassination of social leaders or opposing figures, and the dominion over public budgets (Pizarro, 2004). Overall, insurgencies grew 414% from 1981 to 1988

theTeofilo Forero counted on more combatants that any of the fronts in the South and with 250 of the most specialized combatants in irregular warfare, explosives, rural and urban intelligence. They were trained in the zona de distension (to be explained ahead), and sometimes even outside Colombia, by foreign experts, including members of the IRA and ETA

FARC emerged from support of the Communist Party, so the guerrillas were understood as its military wing (dimension). FARC depended on the doctrinal orientations of the PCC, while it determined their priorities of action according to the political context. In fact, as it was recognized by the Secretary of the Party, all militants of FARC were considered members of the PCC (Pizarro, 2011). The presence of Jacobo Arenas, a Party intellectual, as a leader of the insurgency evidenced the linkage.

At the Eight Guerrilla Conference in 1993, they opted for the creation of a clandestine political party, the Partido Colombiano Comunista Clandestino (PC3), to avoid the elimination of its members. The Party became a relevant structure for networked individuals to promote FARC’s political platform.

Both the PC3 and the Movimiento Bolivariano were political structures under command of the National Secretariat, a move that analysts have qualified as the organization’s abandonment of politics, or the subjugation of politics to the military.29Guerrilla leaders became both the military and the political commanders of the organization, and as such, they became part of both dimensions. As explained by Eduardo Pizarro, “FARC, after its break-up with the PCC and the creation of the MB, do not divide the political direction from the military direction, they are integrated in a single team: the National Secretariat”

In operational terms, FARC recurred to large columns in order to engage military units which had spread out, thinking they were facing small groups (Ospina, 2006). It would make about twenty simultaneous attacks, eroding the ability of the military to discern the dimension of each of them, and in the end only one would have the battalion-strength that ultimately overwhelmed the camp.30 It was a people’s war technique observed in Vietnam and El Salvador. This became known by FARC as the ‘new form of operations’ which included stages of siege, hit, occupy and retreat.

As former Minister of Defence, Rafael Pardo, explained “the combination produced by resources from coca crops, the training and the close relation with tens of thousands of coca cultivators, gave a territorial, financial, military and social base to this insurgency, which took its political capability to a level never witnessed before.” (Pardo, 2004, p.540) This is a clear expression of the triadic character of FARC, and an example of how the dimensions coexist to make the organization stronger.

Julio Cesar Turbay (1978-1982) enacted the Security Statute, which conceded wider powers to the military to investigate and judge civilians, and more autonomy for the Forces to operate. It was designed to confront insurgencies but also to control popular sectors of society and trade unions. This obeyed to the widening of the conception of enmity into that of an ‘undefined and non- localized’ enemy, meaning that not only fighters in mountains and jungles were to be considered as such, but also civilians in cities or in certain social or political organizations (Torres del Rio, 2000). In other words the counterinsurgent included a wide number of elements of the environment, not necessarily members of the insurgency, as part of the political or the military dimensions, which needed to be fought accordingly.

A total of 82000 individuals were arrested (Galindo, 1999, p.170-171). Abuses committed by the military without any rejection from the administration generated a sense of illegitimacy (Torres del Rio, 2000). The Statute was thus widely rejected because of its violations of Human Rights, and especially because of the control and judgement of civilians by the Military. As a result, Turbay revoked the Statute not only because of its criticisms but because results of its application were not positive

Pastrana’s approach consisted more on negotiations than confrontation. He granted an area in South-eastern Colombia, roughly the size of Switzerland, without military or state control for the insurgency to convene in safe conditions. The area became known as the zona de distension. (See map 4) The idea was strongly opposed by certain political figures and sectors. The Military supported establishing a zone for negotiations, but rejected the removal of all military and police forces in the area.

Negotiations, once again, failed. No ceasefire was contemplated during the process so terrorist attacks, kidnapping, and cocaine production were constant. Furthermore, FARC practically transformed the zona de distencion into a sort of parallel state: They enacted decrees imposing taxation, served as judicial authority for disputes between civilians, and built roads and airstrips for cocaine trade. In fact, coca cultivation areas increased

They changed military operations: “instead of running around chasing guerrillas, [the Army] and [the Military Forces] got inside FARC’s strategic decision-making loop.”31 They realized FARC had two centres of gravity, its finances and its units; the latter since they did not count with a mass base of support.

After the operation in Mitu, and from 1999 to 2001, a series of operations would prove that the Military Forces were gaining the advantage while FARC was losing its initiative. General Ospina has explained such a dynamic with a graph that became known as the ‘Ospina Curve’, in which he observed the number of casualties of the military forces through time to determine how strong FARC’s operations where (See figure 4.1). It is evident that from 1999 the insurgency’s capacity decreased progressively.

Democratic Security Policy and widening COIN

As it was argued before, Alvaro Uribe added a very valuable element to the fight against the insurgency: an understanding that such a fight is not an exclusive responsibility of the Military but of all state institutions, and that strong political authority was necessary to conduct a real comprehensive strategy to defeat the insurgency. The strategy was based on a very basic principle: that authority and state institutions should extend to all of the Colombian territory. It became known as the ‘Democratic Security Policy’ (DSP).

The DSP intended to eliminate the insurgency from all of territory by fighting it in their strongest areas, extending the coverage of the National Police to every municipality, destroying illicit war economies, building state institutions, and guaranteeing processes of sustainable development for the population in remote areas. In COIN terms, it meant the application of a clear-hold-build model in which Military Forces would act to clear areas of insurgents, and many other institutions would contribute with the second and third stages. The Policy set five objectives:

  1. 1-  Consolidate state control of the territory
  2. 2-  Protect the population
  3. 3-  Eliminate illicit drug trafficking
  4. 4-  Build and maintain a credible deterring capability
  5. 5-  Efficient and clear accountability

With a clear comprehensive strategy, political will, sources, and knowledgeable commanders, the state was ready to severely damage FARC.

The Department of Special Joint Operations (JOEC) was created as an instrument to share information between Military Forces, Police and DAS, specifically on high value targets: the members of FARC’s Secretariat. Each of the targets was assigned to one of the institutions which would gather all the intelligence provided. The JOEC did not produce intelligence; it worked as a coordination centre to process intelligence provided by the Forces, and to count on the logistical, human and technical resources necessary to act against such targets in due moment. On the other hand, former guerrilla members who demobilized and decided to cooperate with the government to obtain benefits provided specific detailed information about their units and commanders, generating valuable intelligence for the planning and execution of key operations.

Changes in the intelligence structure along with increased operational capabilities guaranteed military success against the insurgents. According to Santos, it was “the perfect union of joint intelligence, capacity of immediate action and political decision.”

From 2002 to 2009 there were 12,294 demobilizations of which 1128 were middle rank commanders with over 10 years of experience; an increase from 1 in 27 in 2002, to 1 in 3 in 2008.

The demoralization of FARC’s combatants became evident through the testimonies of those who defected. It was shocking for guerrilla fighters to see the abysmal differences between commanders, who live in relative luxury, and common troopers whose living conditions were appalling, opposing the ideals of a Marxist organization. Demotivation was also created by the inexistence of a viable project guiding the insurgency, by a sense of nostalgia for family and friends, and by the impossibility of having a family while enrolled.

Applying development-centred COIN

the Presidency created the Centro de Coordinación de Acción Integral (CCAI) to coordinate more than 20 governmental entities involved. Before the CCAI, state entities acted by themselves, with no coordination or without following any strategic central guidelines. But with the agency, once an area was stabilized and ready for consolidation, a task force with of institutions coordinated by CCAI would evaluate regional needs to design an inter-institutional plan for its development.

FARC’s conditions by the end of the Uribe era

FARC’s response to the strongest offensive in history, in military terms, consisted on a strategic withdrawal and re-concentration in areas of the South, more specifically in the provinces of Putumayo, Caquetá, South of Tolima, North of Cauca and Huila, and taking over the control of specific corridors.

Main activities were displaced to border regions, especially with Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, to provinces such as Arauca, Norte de Santander and Chocó.

Vertical coordination between the Secretariat and the fronts, and horizontal between similar units (inter-blocs or inter-fronts) was significantly eroded given the interception of communication systems and the obstruction of strategic corridors. (Fundación de Ideas para la Paz, 2009). In Maoist terms, FARC was forced to return to the strategic defensive stage when it had almost advanced towards strategic stalemate, at least in several regions.

In 2008, Alfonso Cano, a former student of Anthropology at the National University in Bogota, launched a strategy known as the Plan Renacer Revolucionario de las Masas in order to adapt to the context imposed by the counterinsurgent. The new commander had always emphasised Gramscian ideas about conceding maximum importance to the political elements of the struggle, the work through masses, urban action and the international front (Mendoza, 2008, October 30). More than remaining as an isolated war-prone army-like guerrilla located in marginalized areas of the country, he believed the insurgency should be an expression emerging from communities and even from society as a whole, fighting for the grievances of specific social sectors. Correctly interpreting social realities such as the increasing urbanization and the construction of new spaces of political action, he intended to build a more politically-focused insurgency, diffused among Colombians and blending with society, in order to conquer new social and political spaces of participation.

It was evident that the conquest of political and social power could not be achieved in rural areas anymore, and it couldn’t be done exclusively through military means. Political and social action became necessary in order to build support of the masses and of specific social sectors; FARC needed to have individuals (nodes) in the cities, spreading its discourse, and acting in their favour. It became necessary to work through all types of social organizations, political movements, NGO’s, and local communal boards.

As it will be explained in the next chapter, several of FARC’s adaptations under Cano can be better explained through the paradigm of networked insurgency than from the traditional model of insurgency: flexibilization and urbanization of military structures, engaging on swarming more than in frontal combat; increasing the invisibility of forces; and strengthening political networks, especially in major cities.

In military terms, FARC was recurring to guerrilla tactics, harassing Police or Military units in isolated regions. It prioritized the use of landmines as a defensive tenet and as a mechanism to guarantee territorial control. Mined camps of hundreds of squared meters had appeared in the South, East and Southwest, more specifically in Meta, Cauca and the lower valley of the Cauca River in Antioquia (Avila, 2009, p.26). In the offensive, the insurgency decided to avoid frontal confrontations and resort to the use of snipers. Sniper attacks nearly doubled from 87 in 2007 to 177 in 2009

At the zona de despeje Cano launched an ambitious political project, a movement known as Movimiento Bolivariano por una Nueva Colombia (MB), which was to become a political platform for the expansion of Bolivarianism as a popular movement of mass support. Since the foundation of this organization, political networks became increasingly relevant for FARC as it will be detailed in the next chapter

FARC was also recurring to the ‘invisibility of its forces’. It opted for blending more strongly with civilian communities by having its combatants wearing civilian clothes and living in towns and municipalities. It was also transforming its strategic rear-guard from jungle areas to social spaces.

The level of support at the national level was practically non-existent. The organization was perceived as lacking direction and a political motivation, being moved only for economic benefits. Its discourse was observed as incoherent with its actions. While proselytising about being warriors fighting for people’s needs, they turned against the people, attacking civilians and communities.37 Indiscriminate violence, kidnapping, assaulting municipalities, and using landmines were common actions of which most victims are civilians. It had practically lost its international support, while its lack of legitimacy was considerable even among students, unions and NGO’s (Baron, 2006).

Chapter 5. Networks and structures through the primary environment

The objective of this chapter is to explain FARC’s political, military and criminal structures in what has been denominated the ‘primary environment’ (Colombian nation and territory), observing the relation of the system with its environment through several variables: exploitation of empty spaces, connections with social and political organizations, sympathy from of non-organized individuals, and the accommodation of secretive non-public nodes.

One of FARC’s features has been its historical observance of Marxist-Leninist principles of organization, command and control. The processes and flows of orders and information have followed strict hierarchical patterns. In other words, FARC had functioned as a traditional guerrilla, with its combatants wearing uniforms, organized as platoons and battalions in jungles, mountains or zones where state presence had been weak. This has been clear for the military dimension, but when structures of the political or criminal order are observed, networks more than hierarchies seem to explain their form and logic more appropriately. As it was explained in the first chapter, structures and networks are not static through time, they are evolving and nodes are in constant change. The offensive of the Uribe administration pushed rebels into a series of adaptations that could be explained from a networked model of insurgency.

Such adaptations include the flexibilization and decentralization of military structures, recurring to smaller, more flexible and mobile groups, applying ‘swarming’ tactics instead of concentrating big masses to fight ‘conventionally’; the increased diffusion of nodes through Colombian societies in order to conquer political and social spaces, mainly expressed through the urbanization and the invisibility of its forces; and the strengthening of political networks through interconnected nodes acting both openly and covertly in specific social and professional spaces in order to create favourable environments for the insurgency.

For these explanations, the present chapter addresses first the transformations of military structures, followed by the analysis of political networks including the Partido Comunista Colombiano Clandestino and the Movimiento Bolivariano.

In similar terms, they have occupied specific geo-strategic areas of great value, in many occasions related to drug traffic routes, such as the Perija region in the Northeast, not only relevant in terms of coca leaf plantations but also neighbouring Venezuela. With the strong offensive of the Uribe period, communications between members of the Secretariat, but especially between FARC Commanders and Blocs and Fronts, were disrupted. The possibility to move freely through the territory was truncated, generating a command and control crisis within the organization.

Commander Alfonso Cano implemented new measures following the principles announced in 2008 under his Plan Renacer. The Plan comprising 14 points proposes dispositions on operations, politics, and its international strategy. Those regarding operational adaptations include:

  • –  Using guerrilla warfare as a response to the Democratic Security Policy
  • –  Increasing mined camps as a means to stop the advance of the Military Forces
  • –  The use of snipers with high precision rifles type VD or Dragunov
  • –  The obligation of new insurgents to carry on terrorist attacks in urban and rural areas.

 

From these ideas, three specific military strategies were developed:

  1. Increasing the process of organizational decentralization, with the creation of new sub-structures, the creation of new commands and new operational forms.
  2. Prioritizing mobile guerrilla warfare instead of massive operations.
  3. Differentiation and specialization of military units either in combat or for supplies.

This included the professionalization of insurgents.

This is how structures such as Unidades Tacticas de Combate (Tactical Combat Units -UTC) and Comandos Conjuntos de Area (Area Joint Commands-CCA) also known as interfrentes orminibloques,were implemented (Pizarro, 2011). CCAs are smaller that blocs but bigger than fronts, and thus more efficient in tactical withdrawal to maintain communications and preserve the line of command with fronts

The implementation of the Plan changed the strategic scenario for FARC, its operations in smaller, more flexible, capable and professional units led to positive results. Their objective of conducting surprise attacks against stationed units or small military and police patrols had caused an increased number of deaths since 2008.

this transformation allowed the insurgency to overcome communication problems between bloc commanders, and to absorb the impact of the elimination of FARC’s leaders. Command, control and communications worked in these circumstances because instead of having closed and continued procedures, which are typical of military organizations, they were flexible, and discontinued, giving relative operational autonomy to units.

In a personal interview with the Deputy Minister of Defence for the Uribe government, Sergio Jaramillo, he noted that by 2010 the risk of FARC’s atomization was considerable. The lack of internal cohesion would push the organization into a process of node criminalization in which smaller autonomous groups would focus mainly on profiting from the drug trade. Several fronts would disappear, others would merge and those strongly focused on drug trafficking would survive purely as drug cartels.

according to reports by the Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, FARC has implemented a strategy to prevent atomization. In essence, it consists on having its structures specialized so that they generate relations of co-dependency. For example, the Compañia Movil Alfredo Gonzalez in Tolima specializes in explosives and landmines. This unit, composed by about 50 insurgents, gets its food from the 21st Front and its weapons from the 50thFront. The 16thFront in Vichada patrols and protects coca plantations, while the 39th Front goes to combat and the 1stFront makes the contacts for weapons smuggling

Military structures: urbanization and militia networks

FARC had seen the urbanization of war as a strategic goal for several decades. The insurgency would see social spaces as a new kind of strategic rear-guard; as a space to be conquered. For this purpose FARC counted on two instruments of particular importance, urban militias, which are set at the crossroads of the military and political dimensions, and political structures which obviously express the political dimension. Under this logic, FARC needed to exploit two particular variables to embed nodes through the primary environment: connections with social and political organizations and raising its acceptance by non- organized individuals and communities in the cities.

 

Although FARC had been a rural-based organization since its inception, it was in the cities where social and economic structural contradictions would become evident. It was logical then for the insurgency to exploit marginalized sectors to mobilize them in their favour and against the capitalist society. This is a clear reference to the need to gain the support from individuals and communities from specific social sectors, and to incorporate social and political organizations in their struggle (NGO’s, unions, student organizations, communal boards, etc.) As it was clearly stated after a plenary meeting of the High Command in 1989:

“That’s why our strategy has to go in the correct direction, where the contradictions of society are being noted. And these contradictions are not given in the same way or with the same intensity everywhere, but in the big cities and urban centres with the highest population density. (…) There the contradictions are not only given in terms of work-capital but at the same time, all contradictions, and if this is so FARC has to give a fight in the area of stronger social- political conflict”

Militias are defined as a “mechanism of political and military work; they have their own structure and are directed by the Central High Command and the High Commands of the fronts and blocs. They are armed by FARC but constituted by civilians. [Militia members] have a political and a partisan life, they live from their jobs, in their houses and with their families, and they are not committed to remain in the organization as FARC members do.” (Ferro & Uribe, 2002, p.55) They have also been defined as an “armed body with civilian camouflage, who are ruled by the same guerrilla statutes, and as such, every militia member is a potential guerrilla member”44FARC officially defines them as “a military organization that welcomes all persons whose physical integrity and interests are threatened by the reactionary repression, the dirty war and its disastrous consequences.”

It must be understood that the structure, although similar to a proper military organization, does not imply operations through a conventional distribution of forces in the field. The levels of command and flow of information may be consistent with a typical military structure, but in tactical terms, they resemble more a set of interconnected nodes approaching targets in different manners. In that sense, swarming explains their tactical behaviour better than conventional operations through battalions and squadrons. Urban militia networks are usually developed in marginalized areas of the cities, and once they gain control, they impose order engaging in murder, extortion and terrorism.

The dual military/political character of the militias can be demonstrated through their types of meetings: one to study, discuss, and agree on activities and tasks related to the political, economic, cultural and social situation of their area; and another for proper military purposes

The importance of militias and urban networks became so evident that Admiral Cely placed them at the heart of FARC’s strategic action: “FARC’s new strategy is based on its militias, and there we find the popular and Bolivarian militias, the PC3, the MB, the Juventudes Bolivarianas, which is that invisible enemy that hurts the youth, and that is looking at schools and universities.”

Political networks

A more urban and networked model of insurgency would be insufficient if only militias were to conquer the cities. Military structures may perform relevant functions, but in order to gather support of the population much more was necessary. As it was said, FARC needed to increase its sympathy through communities and individuals, and to establish connections with existing social and political organizations in order to become a real mass movement according to its objectives; this, especially, taking into account specific social sectors observed as its potential base for growth… But not all political structures were determined to serve as the instrument to build a mass social movement of support for the insurgency. One of the organizations, the Movimiento Bolivariano por la Nueva Colombia (MB) was in charge of this mission, thus exploiting the variables that have been mentioned. But the Partido Comunista Colombiano Clandestino (PC3) was a clandestine closed organization of infiltrated nodes, spreading across the primary environment not through the support from other actors, but by accommodating secretive nodes in specific scenarios.

Files found on Raul Reyes’s computer demonstrate that the MB and the PC3 were not the only institutions through which FARC was trying to build support from the masses to become a nation-wide political movement. Particularly, with students, FARC organized the Federacion de Estudiantes Universitarios FEU, an association of university students, and Federacion de Estudiantes Secundarios FES, for school students.51 But the former two were the widest and the most relevant.

The Partido Comunista Colombiano Clandestino (PC3)

There is a significant difference between the PC3 and the MB. Whereas the former is a clandestine organization of networked individuals who infiltrate diverse institutions, the latter is a semi-clandestine wide mass movement that incorporates diverse sorts of individuals, groups, and organizations. For that reason they display a different form of organization and command procedures, and they exploit different elements in the primary environment. Their implementation was ratified in the Plenary of the Central High Command in 1997

Three principles –secrecy, compartmentality and verticality– rule PC3 networks. Secrecy guarantees the existence of its members, giving them “protection towards the outside, making its location unknown to the enemy, but allowing their ideas and claims to be known” (FARC-EP, n.d.d, p.18). Compartmentality is an internal measure that contributes to the secrecy of the organization. “It is the fractioned truth, known to individuals only according to their participation in the conduction of their tasks.” (FARC-EP, n.d.d, p.18) Verticality explains the direction of the organization, its hierarchy. Processes follow a top-down logic, not a bottom-up initiative. “Different organisms are directed from the top to the bottom. They work separately from others, and only those responsible establish contacts with staff under their command and with their superiors.” (FARC-EP, n.d.d., p.19) In that sense PC3 networks are directed and do not follow an emergence logic that is typical of complexity.

The PC3 is defined by the insurgents as the “most elevated expression of ideological, political and organizational unity of the working class and of all Colombian workers. It is the superior form of organization and its part of the vanguard of the revolutionary and insurrectional struggle for political power and the construction of socialism. (…) It is inspired by the revolutionary thought of El Libertador Simon Bolivar, [and his principles of] anti-imperialism, Latin American unity and people’s welfare.” (FARC-EP, n.d.e) It has also been defined as an “orthodox communist party, of clandestine and compartmented character. It is a pillar for FARC’s strategic plan and the urbanization of conflict.”52

The purpose of its members is to infiltrate diverse organizations in government, security institutions, private companies, media, universities, NGO’s, international organizations, unions, social organizations, and to comply with specific requirements in order to contribute with FARC’s objectives. They carry on with their normal lives, in their offices and their homes, without other individuals, not even their closest family members, noticing they role. This is why, by contrast to militias, members of the PC3 are “mostly professionals or qualified political leaders.”

The member of the PC3 who was interviewed explained that there are three Party types or branches in order to reach the intended audiences. These are the Agricultural PC3, which spreads through the countryside penetrating peasant organizations and unions to direct them in favour of FARC’s causes; the Industrial PC3, determined to ‘capture’ the labour unions in companies, corporations and enterprises in order to have them acting in favour of the organization; and the University PC3 to recruit students, promote FARC’s ideas through younger generations, create cells and penetrate student groups.

The structure of the organization allows for the principles of secrecy, compartmentality and verticality to be strictly followed. Members ignore who other nodes beyond their cells are, even if they are placed in the same organization. They might actually know each other and constantly interact among themselves without knowing they are part of the same clandestine organization. They ignore what other cells are doing.

Cells follow a General Plan for action in order to infiltrate different institutions according to the profiles and contexts of its members. Ideal targets of infiltration are state security institutions, the Military Forces, National Police and intelligence agencies; communication media; international cooperation NGO’s; and financial institutions. Ideal scenarios of political intervention are schools, universities, labour unions, social organizations and local communal boards.

Orders and directions from FARC commanders will flow down to the cells through the organisms, while proposals and concerns from the militants will flow up to commanders. Through the structure it is possible to coordinate the execution and assessment of plans and tasks

Explaining how the militias and the PC3 interact in their own spaces, the PC3 member compared the militias as being the Police, controlling spaces and providing security, and the PC3 being the social-political power, controlling the Communal Boards of Action, and its Committees for Education, Health, Public Works, Sports, and most importantly the Conciliation Committee, which deals with the resolution of conflicts and conciliations between members of the community. He admits sometimes there are tensions between the militia and PC3 members, especially with the Bolivarian Militias given its political character, but given its nature it is always the PC3 who has precedence.

If network theory is brought into analysis, it is possible to argue that this is a directed network given the flow of information (commands) from the top to the bottom of the chain, and the centralized control by the High Commands. Evidently nodes in the lowest level are not acting freely with other nodes, except for the members of their own cells. In that sense, it relatively follows the logic of Christakis and Fowler’s telephone tree model but without the tree spreading arithmetically by two nodes from every node. Rather the spread is limited according to the structural parameters which have been described. Command procedures explain the flow of information through the structure in the form of the tre

Although not very flexible, given the difficulty to join the network and the lack of linkages at the lowest levels, the network is very resilient in the sense that random attacks will not destroy the network itself, both because of its structure and the principle of compartmentality.

Movimiento Bolivariano por la Nueva Colombia (MB)

As already explained, by contrast to the PC3, the MB was created as a wide movement, opened to all individuals and groups of diverse tendencies and beliefs, which share the ideals of FARC. It is though as a movement for the masses to create viable political spaces. The idea of this type of movement is not new, and it can be traced back to the Seventh Guerrilla Conference in 1982:

“We will begin the construction of the BOLIVARIAN GATHERING OF THE PEOPLE, (caps in original text) a wide organization, without statutes or regulations, opened to the participation of those patriots who want to fight for a new Colombia, and in Bolivarian countries, those who share the objectives of liberty for which Bolivar fought.”

In the Zona de Despeje in San Vicente del Caguan, in April 29, 2000, it was officially launched. It is described as a “wide movement without statutes, regulations or discriminations, with the exception of the declared enemies of the people. It does not have offices and its headquarters are in any place of Colombia where the unsatisfied live”

Determining the structure of the MB is not as easy as with the PC3 given its character as an opened movement. According to FARC’s documents, the base of the MB should be constituted by “millions of Colombians members of clandestine groups, of multiple and varied forms such as circles, boards, workshops, malokas, families, unions, combos, brotherhoods, lanzas, groups, clubs, associations, councils, galladas, parches, barras, working groups, mingas, guilds, committees, and all the forms that their members want to adopt in order to guarantee their secrecy and compartmentality.”60 This groups, formally referred to as nucleos bolivarianos are the equivalent to the PC3’s cells, the basic structure of operation in the lowest levels.

These cells are supposed to spread through the nation, but especially through the social sectors listed above in the declaration. These sectors constitute the potential space for MB network growth. These individuals, members of diverse organizations and part of specific social sectors, are potential nodes of the organization. This is how the variables of sympathy from non-organized individuals and connections with social and political organizations can be observed as a mechanism for the placement of nodes of the insurgency through Colombian societies, or for the growth of insurgency itself. Through these mechanisms the border between the insurgency and the primary environment becomes blurry.

Each nucleus selects ten candidates and those with the highest results are asked if they want to assume their position (FARC-EP, n.d.g.).

In that sense the network, following Arquila and Ronfeldt’s idea, might look as a combination of different types of networks. A general structure could look as a power-law or scale-free network with hubs displaying a higher amount of connections and random linkages among its nodes. Nodes can be individuals, but also, groups, cells, and small organizations. Clusters might be formed around dense organizations and given the secrecy of particular groups or cells, cliques are likely to be common through the network.

The emerging bottom-up logic contrasts the directed flows of the PC3 networks. There is, of course, leadership, but the type of leadership is different.

Alfonso Cano used to send opened messages in the form of videos through opened channels such as YouTube or Google videos, and posting them in the Movement’s websites.61 However, the organization is not entirely ‘command-free’ and there seemed to be some planning and coordination. According to official documents “the MB is being constructed under the direct orientation of each Front in coordination with the Command through the planning and assessments of working plans with each of the clandestine structures”.

As explained by MB militant ‘Julian Rincon’ from the Nucleo Francisco Miranda “we made ourselves known through culture, art, academia, labour unions, gangs, parches, groups; in infinity of expressions aimed at the development of an objective, and that is the unity of popular sectors to fight for the points of our platform.”

As it can be evidenced from the videos uploaded to their websites, the militants of nucleos bolivarianos are always active and present in events of student mobilizations; they repetitively appear in public universities through the country, and they make special activities to commemorate special dates, such as the anniversaries of the foundation of the MB.

According to this data, and if calculations made in the regions of the Omega Force are extended to the country as a whole, then 8000 to 10,000 active combatants being 30% of the organization would speak about 26,666 to 33.333 members of the organization including Bolivarian and popular militias, members of the PC3 and the MB.

Criminal Networks

In the case of FARC’s criminal dimension, its nodes have a wide participation in the lower levels of the cocaine production-trade chain, and this is possible given the development of a war economy in particular marginalized regions of Colombia.

There are several types of nodes through the chain according to their functions, explaining the process itself and the participation of FARC in the business:

  • Coca growers and collectors. They include raspachines (scratchers) which are generally poor individuals from other regions that move to producing areas in search of some economic stability and who scratch the coca leaf in order to process it.
  • Extraction of crude coca paste from the coca leaf, performed by peasants with very basic instruments in makeshift laboratories, usually known as ‘paste laboratories.’
  • Purification of coca paste to coca base in a different type of laboratory, still very basic in technical terms, referred to as ‘base laboratories ́ or ‘kitchens’. It has been learned, however, that in certain cases the ‘paste’ and ‘base’ stages are done in leaf- to-base laboratories (Casale, 1993). FARC taxes peasants that produce coca base.
  • During the first years of FARC’s participation in the business, coca base was sold to intermediaries (commission agents) in the regions where the base was produced. FARC also taxed commission agents.
  • Such intermediaries sold the coca base to agents who would travel to remote areas to take it to ‘crystal’ laboratories owned by drug-dealers. However, by the end of the 1990s, FARC had eliminated intermediaries assuming sales themselves.
  • Coca base is transformed into cocaine hydrochloride, in a technically sophisticated laboratory that requires a certain level of chemical expertise and materials. Usually owned by drug-dealers, laboratories are usually known as cristalizaderosor ‘crystal’ laboratories.
  • Once the process is done, cocaine is taken via air, land or river, to consumption centres, where micro-traffic begins or to shipment points for its exportation.68 FARC taxes not only the coca base producers and agents, but also the traffickers which used land strips in their areas of control. When towns and small municipalities developed around the cocaine economy, FARC also used to tax companies of the services sector (Vargas, 2005).
  • Exporters send products to international transhipment points in Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean and West Africa, from Colombia or Venezuela. There, they are distributed to grand consumer markets.
  • Distribution groups or cells in overseas markets receive shipments and distribute the product to wholesalers.
  •  Wholesalers distribute to retailers
  • Brokers provide critical linkages between the nodes by introducing participants from different groups (Kenney, 2007).
  • Money launderers receive illicit proceeds from wholesale or retail transactions and clear them through the system (Kenney, 2007).

As it can be seen, FARC’s involvement had always been restricted to the lowest stages of the chain, but its level of participation differs from region to region

It has been argued that they operate as an armed monopoly imposing the price of coca base on peasants and growers; controlling routes of precursors, coca, cocaine, guns and ammo; and exchanging drugs for weapons.

 

“Narcs, terrorists and counterterrorists form distinctive social systems characterized by complexity, adaptability and hostility. Trafficking and terrorist systems are complex because they contain large numbers of actors who interact with each other (…) the Colombian trafficking system contains hundreds of smuggling enterprises and law enforcement agencies in the US, Colombia and other countries.” (Kenney, 2007, p.15)

There are several advantages that drug dealers find in this type of structures. Their workers are segmented, meaning that they don’t have to learn about the entire operations system but only about their specific tasks. If several of them are eliminated, then it is possible to recover the lost segments easily.

A very important feature is the decentralization of decision-making, providing a degree of resiliency from targeted attacks. If a particular head of an organization is captured or killed, activities will continue since there will be more heads who will be in capability of making decisions

FARC as a networked insurgency

It is not appropriate to argue that FARC constituted a networked or complex insurgency in a strict sense by the end of the Uribe administration. Evidence is not sufficient to support such a claim; by 2010 the organization was still marginal within Colombian society, and its hierarchical character still determined patterns of organization. However, under Cano, FARC did incorporate several elements more typical of a proper networked-complex insurgency than of a traditional rural isolated guerrilla, further exploiting connections with political and social organizations and elevating the sympathy towards the insurgency by communities and individuals, especially through specific social vulnerable or marginalized sectors as described in the MB’s manifest.

Through evidence collected it is not possible to confirm that Cano intended to turn the organization into a more decentralized and loose organization. But he evidently understood the importance of conquering spaces of social and political participation, exploiting all sorts of instruments to build mass support, in order for FARC to become a real popular movement. In that sense, although the organization is not a networked insurgency in strict terms, several of its components can be explained under such a model.

Militias and political structures were intended to clearly blend with society, making the borders between the system and its primary environment blurry. They allowed the embedment of FARC’s nodes through communities, in several cases without individuals noticing their affiliation. From within, they could spread FARC’s ideas and recruit more militants to be added to the networks. In the end, insurgents had the appearance of normal civilians, but acting against the state and in favour of the insurgency.

Peña described this evolution as “the creation of a new type of combatant, a civilian combatant with sufficient training and cohesion to develop military operations and to return to its daily activities, making recognition by the Military Forces much more complex.”(Peña, 2011, p.229) This description is very close to the idea of a combatant in a networked or complex insurgency, as it was explained in the first chapter.

This organization, given its wide, opened and inclusive character, gives the insurgency all the potential to become an interconnected insurgency, or at least to increase the number of FARC’s interconnected members and supporters –nodes–. Their members can be anywhere, in many organizations, in marginalized communities or they can be part of specific social sectors as described in FARC ́s open invitation to join its movement.

The Military Forces began facing a significant challenge because of their impossibility to make an objective difference between combatants and non-combatants. When they patrol a town or municipality, and they were attacked from civilian’s houses, they could not respond with fire without breaking principles of international humanitarian law and without being widely criticized.

in practical terms, it is difficult to define to which dimension nodes belong to. It was earlier explained that although Bolivarian Militias belong to both dimensions, PC3 and MB nodes are part of the political dimension. But through time, they may end up involved in military tasks, proving the interdependence between the dimensions. Since members of the MB also go through military training, it is possible to think about them as a sort of military reserve, which could become active according to the decline of regular combatants.

If we put together the military training received by members of the MB, their possibility to join war, and the wide and opened character of the organization, then we have to at least consider the possibility, or the potential, of individuals from marginalized social sectors to become combatants. In such case, an image of interconnected nodes acting in their spaces, in their cities, through small groups, resembles the model of complex or networked insurgency.

Marginal entities might still represent a considerable threat, generating instability, putting people and assets at risk, and causing real havoc in the countries where they operate. Given the right conditions and depending on their actions, they might even grow to incorporate more elements in its environment. It must not be forgotten that, in theory, insurgencies begin as marginal entities and they gain support and legitimacy through the process.

Chapter 6. Node embeddedness and structures through the secondary environment.

Nodes placed beyond Colombian borders become central to the analysis in the interest of determining to what extent they could offer the opportunity for FARC to survive or to re- emerge when national counterinsurgency operations are offering positive results.

Government support, although very favourable for node placement, is not a necessary variable, and through alliances with armed actors, connections with social and political organizations, exploitation of ‘empty spaces’, and the accommodation of secretive nodes, insurgents can be safely embedded. On the other hand, it explains that the combination of all the variables, especially through the exploitation of empty spaces, create the right conditions for the placement of hubs and clusters.

The International Commission and a first configuration of networks

Initial entry to a foreign country was explained through the accommodation of secretive nodes in specific social spaces. But as they began to act politically, interactions with other actors increased. Their permanence in those countries, then, began to be explained through other variables such as their connections with social and political organizations.

In this construction three variables interact: An individual, or several individuals, are embedded as secretive nodes in other societies. In their host country, they identify a number of individuals which display sympathy for the insurgency. Together they create a group, cell, or organization, probably affiliated to others with similar ideological views. They will promote FARC’s ideals and struggle to incorporate more militants to their organization.

It was only with the Eight Guerrilla Conference in 1993 that the idea of an International Commission took form as a “linkage between FARC and leftist political parties, social organizations, labour unions, human rights organizations and non-profit foundations”, mainly in South America and Europe

The International Commission (COMINTER) was an idea of Raul Reyes. Together with Rodrigo Granda and Liliana Lopez Palacio (alias Olga Lucia Marin), who joined Reyes at the top level

of the Command structure, he defined the mission and objectives of these networks:

  • Contacting government officials, parliamentarians and NGO leaders, to obtain their support and to achieve recognition by relevant political sectors.
  • Interacting, in FARC’s name, with national governments such as Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
  • Participating in conferences, forums, gatherings, meetings, political, social and student workshops, on hemispheric and global levels.
  • Establishing support groups in each of the countries where FARC is present according to the political context and the assigned tasks.
  • Creating and managing instruments for the diffusion of information in other countries such as websites, magazines and radio stations.
  • Establishing contacts with leftist movements, radical anarchist parties, insurgent groups, and networks of weapons trade.
  • Administration of FARC’s goods in other countries.
  • Contacting associations of political refugees and solidarity groups.
  • Engaging in university studies and postgraduate degrees in universities in Europe and the United States in order to achieve their infiltration.
  • Designing ideological campaigns of recruitment and disinformation about the Colombian conflict and the illegality of Colombian institutions

Reyes set as essential objectives to reach “the European Parliament, the US Congress, the Latin-American Parliament, the Central American Parliament, the Amazonian Parliament, the UN, the Sao Paulo Forum, the Bolivarian People’s Congress, the Bolivarian Continental Coordinator Committee, the World Social Forum, Universities, Churches, media, journalists, workers associations, agrarian and popular movements, cooperatives, Indians, black communities, women’s and youth organizations, and to participate directly and indirectly in gatherings, seminars, meetings and all type of activity where they could promote their project.”

It could initially be thought that given the description of Comintern’s role, the networks were developed in function of the political dimension. But that is not the only case. Insurgents were not only conducting political tasks, in practice they also performed military and even criminal duties. They wouldn’t participate directly in violent actions, but in general sense they “established contacts with weapons and explosives traffickers and forged links for narcotics trade, infiltrated social organizations or universities to gather support, through NGO’s they created linkages for intelligence cooperation, and in the end, they spread insurgency propaganda.”

This structure of ‘embassies’ was supported by a network of media and communications linkages which included online agencies to spread FARC’s news and communiqués. Examples are Anncol, the most important source of propaganda, based in Sweden; Kaosenlared; farc-ep.org; resistencia.org; the Bolivarian Press Agency; and even a radio station, Cafe stereo, also based in Sweden.

even without government approval of an office, FARC’s militants in Costa Rica where able to develop different types of contacts, making this country one of the first hubs for international action.

They managed to reach labour unions and human rights and student organizations such as CODEHUR, FEUCR, FEUNA, ANEP and CUT (Rojas, 2008). According to Berrocal, there were two key groups of FARC’s nodes, the Asociacion Centro de Integracion Cultural Colombia- Costa Rica, established in 1997, and the GAIF established between 1994 and 1998

it has also been argued that Costa Rica served as a space where Colombian, Mexican and Dominican mafias met, proving that the networks are also relevant for the criminal dimension

A second and more important theatre for international action was developed in Mexico. An office was created with government’s authorisation and it was led by Olga Lucia Marin and Marco Calarca. They established linkages with organizations such as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the Mexican Communist Party, the Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR), and several media companies. This country became a new hub for FARC’s international action. According to research conducted by Jorge Fernandez, the office was not only useful for political purposes, but also to forge ties with drug cartels. He explains that since 1997 there was communication with the Tijuana Cartel, with which a weapons- drugs exchange agreement was reached

Raul Reyes and other five guerrilla leaders had the opportunity to visit several countries in Europe for 33 days in 2000, including Spain, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and the Vatican. They were able to establish contacts with leftist leaders and to gain sympathy from different political and social sectors through the continent (Perez, 2008).

After this period, FARC’s networks extended to Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Canada, France, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Portugal (Perez, 2008). Its operatives were actively establishing contacts with radical and leftist movements, political parties, and human rights organizations. They were participating in academic spaces, and in general terms they were promoting FARC’s vision of the Colombian conflict, gaining support through different social sectors. Media and communication channels became highly instrumental, with the special role of FARC’s journal, Resistencia, created in 1999, which included articles of leftist Latin American thinkers

Appendix 4 describes FARC networks developed by the Comintern, but it must be clear that representing it as a static structure might not be rigorous, since they had been in constant evolution through time. Nodes change from place to place, they disappear, they are replaced, and new ones are added to the structure. Delegates are changed from country to country depending on the political conditions, and in other cases they are captured and replaced by others.

The rigid hierarchical structure tightly controlled by Reyes, however, gave way to a more loose set interconnected cells and NGO’s spread through diverse countries and mainly composed by Europeans. They were more effective than Colombian expatriates given their knowledge of the environment (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011). Although Colombians continued establishing contacts for military and criminal purposes, NGO’s became the front for political actions. Through those NGO’s it was possible to reach several social and political spaces and to spread FARC’s views more easily. But this structural arrangement does not necessarily mean that the command was unaware of cells’ actions. When Reyes moved to the Colombian-Ecuadorian border, he was able to establish direct links with most of these supporters

In Spain, Leyla Yolima (alias Manuela) was in charge of the creation of a support group and the recruitment of young activists

nodes in each of the countries would develop specific tasks. In Spain, it was through Remedios Garcia Olmert (alias Irene) that cells become functional. She was relevant for logistics, obtaining visas for guerrilla members, moving funds, but also for political duties as establishing contacts and the diffusion of journal articles (Arrazola, 2008). She had a direct communication with Raul Reyes and other members of the Comintern such as Gualdron, Orlando Higuita (alias Orlando), Ovidio Salinas (alias Juan Antonio) and Rodrigo Granda (Arrazola, 2008).

Several arrest warrants have been issued for European citizens because of their connections with FARC: four Spaniards, two Italians, one Dane, and one Australian (Europa Press, 2008, August 3). It is believed that between 2000 and 2008, the Spaniards acted as coordinators for the Comintern in the Iberian Peninsula and Central Europe, and participated in events in Germany, Switzerland and Spain. The Dane citizen was identified as ‘Carlos Mono’ who was arguably one of the most effective agents of FARC’s networks in Europe, moving around Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm. Information indicates he established contacts with at least 10 labour unions in Denmark and others in the United Kingdom.

According to Europol, Colombian expats would be in charge of information, training and the creation of clandestine cells to trade weapons and drugs more easily. The Organization believed FARC could have been planning the creation of a delegation office in Brussels, Amsterdam or Paris.

Although most of the linkages for criminal and military purposes were established by Comintern delegates or Colombian expats, Europeans organized in cells, NGO’s, or organizations, contributed with the political activities. In the end, the pattern through which three variables allow for the construction of these networks becomes evident: members of the Comintern who were secretly placed in each of the countries identify individuals who are able to contribute in the host country, and through the creation of support groups and NGO’s political action is maximized.

Through the creation of the Movimiento Continental Bolivariano, the insurgency’s networks beyond borders were reinforced, especially, but not uniquely in terms of the political dimension.

Strengthening networks: the Movimiento Continental Bolivariano

From 2003 FARC’s transnational networks grew, not necessarily extending through more countries but increasing the number of nodes and connections in the Americas and Europe. It is clear that networks developed by Comintern delegates, and their support groups, were political, military, and even criminal in their functions. But the multiplication of connections experienced since 2003 would be mainly, but not uniquely, political.

It was through the emergence of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela in 1999, and the subsequent rise of other leftist governments, that FARC found a favourable environment for a regional projection. The creation of an international organization, the Movimiento Continental Bolivariano (MCB) became a platform to spread its discourse, gather support, and strengthen links with different types of actors through Latin America.

The dynamics created by MCB networks ratify the idea previously introduced: governments might play a key role in the placement of nodes within their territories but they are not vital. Other variables, which were listed before, can actually contribute more to the placement and preservation of nodes beyond borders.

The MCB emerged initially as a mechanism to coordinate efforts between Bolivarian and communist organizations, known as the Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana CCB. The advantage of this construction was that ‘Bolivarianism’ as such is not a carefully defined doctrine but a series of basic principles related to South American political reality, so wide that they can be observed by movements or organizations with diverse philosophical backgrounds. Bolivarianism had married Marxism-Leninism, creating a tent for leftist organizations and movements to meet in a similar, yet not identical, doctrinal ground.

In a personal interview with Commander Wilmer Castro Soteldo, Governor of the State of Portuguesa in Venezuela and one of the leaders of the 1992 military coup with Hugo Chavez, he defined Bolivarianism as a broad set of ideas extracted from the discourses and works of Simon Bolivar, from which particular principles can be deduced. These include:

  • Anti-imperialism, directed against Spain during Bolivar’s campaigns, but applied now to Western world powers and their capitalist system which exploit the Latin American nations and its resources.
  • Latin American Union, as it was Bolivar’s great dream to constitute a single nation out of all of the provinces that were liberated from the Spanish empire, and today even as counterweight to the United States.
  • Equality and welfare, which is interpreted as the justification of socialist ideas.74

Rather than being an objective and strictly defined political doctrine, Bolivarianism is more a common background for political action of diverse agents. Hence its famous motto ‘in Bolivar we all meet’. This explains why movements, organizations and individuals from varied doctrinal backgrounds on the Left of the political spectrum find a powerful symbol in Bolivar’s image.

“The CCB is work of FARC and the Movimiento Bolivariano, Bloques Jose Maria Cordova and Caribe. Comrade Alfonso, as head of the movement, has been informed of these steps, as had been the Secretariat. As I informed in a past email, the first plenary of the executive committee was made in one of our camps, which defined specific tasks that are being developed today. Among other tasks we have the creation of the Movimiento Bolivariano, organization of the CCB, in each country. This organization has already led protests in Ecuador and Panama.”

By December 2009 the CCB had evolved into the MCB, becoming a transnational Latin American political movement which brought together several organizations and individuals from the hemisphere which agreed with the ideals and propositions of Bolivarianism. With its headquarters in Caracas it already included “1200 delegates, counting with the representation of 30 countries and a diversity of political, social and cultural organizations.” (Agencia Bolivariana de Prensa, 2010)

It had a clear structure: The Executive Committee, later renamed General Secretariat, composed by fifteen Honorary Presidents listed in figure 6.2 who became notable speakers in favour of the insurgency through the hemisphere, most especially Narciso Isa Conde and Carlos Casanueva. A foreign legion named officially the ‘International Region’ in which individuals from the Basque Country, France, Spain, United States and Canada participated. A Continental Regional Direction composed by five members of the Regional Directions:

  • –  Brazil
  • –  Great Colombia: Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia
  • –  Caribbean: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti
  • –  Mexico: Twenty social and political organizations and two FARC support cells.
  • –  South: Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.

According to the MCB’s website, each of these countries is a national chapter by itself.

In principle, the idea of NBAFs was to reach social and political movements to have them working in favour of FARC’s objectives; almost like a job of infiltration and manipulation. Member organizations of the MCB are not in principle FARC’s allies working in the insurgency’s favour. They might have joined the Movement in order to pursue their own particular interests. As such, the insurgency needs to have them acting according to their plans.

In order to articulate FARC cells in different countries with the MCB, Raul Reyes set a common model of organization in 2007 for all groups. It included specific defined positions for individuals to be in charge of specific areas:

  1. Political Secretary
  2. Education, Security and Documentation Centre
  3. Finances
  4. Organization and Bolivarian Press Agency
  5. Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana (Perez, 2009)

Marquez was involved on MCB’s activities since the beginning, given his permanent location in Venezuela. So after Reyes’s death, it could be said that he became the head of FARC’s international actions.

It is now necessary to turn into the analysis of the elements that have allowed for the establishment of nodes beyond borders. These variables are government support or permissiveness, linkages with social and political organizations, connections or alliances with armed actors and the exploitation of empty spaces. As it has already been analysed the accommodation of secretive nodes was relevant in an initial stage for the construction of support groups in each of the countries.

Government support or permissiveness

Government support is not only the first variable that comes into mind when we think about foreign elements that contribute to the safe placement of insurgents beyond borders. It is also the most valuable source in order for militants to be protected in the medium or long term. In the case of FARC, this was evident in Mexico. Through their public office they were able to establish contacts and spread their discourse more easily.

But this was obviously not the only government FARC intended to contact. Antecedents were positive with Nicaraguan President, Ariel Ortega, after he visited Manuel Marulanda at the Zona de Despeje to decorate him in name of the Sandinista party.

In an email signed by Granda, Bermudez and Rojas, they explained that the Cuban Ambassador believed “[President] Daniel Ortega is in full disposition to help [the insurgency] with whatever possible” (El Tiempo, 2008, August 27). Ortega was even considered as an intermediate with the Libyan government for the purchase of weapons (El Tiempo, 2008, August 27).

Nicaragua became one of the main spaces for the preservation of nodes. Even when it is not possible to empirically demonstrate FARC and the Sandinistas are allies, it is impossible to deny that this type of actions contributes to the flexibility of its networks.

 

But the most significant cases of government support, or permissiveness, by 2010, were Venezuela and Ecuador, with Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa. Their relations became evident when files of the computers of Raul Reyes, which were retrieved in the attack to his campsite, were made public. In the case of Chavez, contacts began in 1992 and increased after he was released from prison in 1994, time when he received 100 million Colombian pesos (US$ 150,000) from the insurgents (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011, p.47). By 1996, contacts were revived, and by 1998 Chavez reportedly participated in several meetings of FARC’s 10thFront, while several of his aides met with Marco Calarca in Caracas (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011).

Chavez appointed a high official, Ramon Rodriguez Cachin, later to be Minister of Interior and Justice, to be his personal representative to FARC, dealing personally, directly and in secret with the insurgents in all matters. In August 1999, Chacin negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the insurgents, approved by Chavez, which went beyond a clause of non-aggression. It appeared to give FARC and advisory role within the Venezuelan administration; it facilitated the security and development of Venezuelan Border regions; and it opened communication channels between the Secretariat and Venezuela’s government and Armed Forces (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011). FARC agreed to

“provide intelligence on other criminal groups, violently oppose this groups in Colombia, abstain from violent operations in Venezuela, seek authorisation for training of any armed groups. In return, the Venezuelan government would provide help with health care, safety for operatives on Venezuela soil, unspecified ‘special support’, and various arrangements to trade energy resources with FARC and to launder money through investments in agriculture, housing and finance.“ (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011, p.60).

 

But from 2002 to 2004, there was a period of tensions with Chavez given their ideological differences and marked by the lack of progress in their relations. Secretariat member Mono Jojoy called Chavez “a deceitful and divisive president who lacked the resolve to organize himself politically and militarily, he scorned the corruption of Chavez’s political associates and dismissed [Chacin] as the worst kind of bandit” (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011, p.83). During this period FARC was even attacked by the Venezuelan Military forces (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011, p.89). In 2004 FARC made two mistakes which cause a more permanent rupture: On one hand, an attack in the State of Apure killing five Venezuelan soldiers; on the other, when Colombian operatives abducted Rodrigo Granda in Caracas, FARC reacted badly arguing that elements of the government had contributed.

 

From 2006, however, relations seemed to have improved given Chavez insistence on the reconstitution of the historical linkages and the appointment of a new envoy, Julio Chirino. Comprehensive agreements seemed to have been reached with Generals Cliver Alcala and Hugo Carvajal, and although during that year Chavez was still ambivalent towards FARC (camps were still being attacked) by 2007 the relationship had been restored. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), it was during this period that Chavez began to perceive the insurgency as a strategic ally in his geopolitical agenda, conceding immense territorial benefits, and agreeing to provide the insurgency with US $300millon (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011).

Meetings with Comintern members, including Marquez and Granda, began to happen in Caracas. A stronger commitment from Venezuela was demonstrated by several initiatives: Chavez’s attempt to reconcile FARC and the ELN, full support for FARC’s quest on the status of belligerence, and the creation of special rest areas in the border. All of these were supposed to be given in return for the training of Venezuelan Military Forces in asymmetric warfare, which became the paradigm of Venezuelan security doctrine (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011). By the time of the attack of Reyes’s camp in Ecuador, relations between the insurgency and Chavez seemed to be booming, but there is no information of the relation between both actors after the attack.

In the case of Ecuador, evidence demonstrates that officials from Correa’s government established contacts with insurgents. During Correa’s political campaign, FARC established communications with one of his aides, Jorge Brito, to whom they provided US$ 100,000. In return, Brito offered “and ideologically appealing programme of government, high level diplomatic relations, ‘means of reciprocal assistance’, Ecuadorian neutrality in the Colombian conflict, and a reduced armed-forces presence on the border” (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011, p.29). According to James Lockhard-Smith, a researcher at the IISS, Correa received the funds and most likely knew about their precedence. He cites a demobilized guerrilla member who was in Ecuador and held conversations with Correa who was apparently aware of negotiations (El Tiempo, September 21, 2011).

Although there were genuine signs of permissiveness towards FARC, which allowed the insurgency to place nodes in its country, “the relationship between FARC and Correa had not been consolidated and indeed could be seen as embryonic. Each party sought to manipulate the behaviour of the other to its own advantage, but without displaying the commitment or compromise typical of a real strategic alliance.”

The closure of the Mexico office in 2002, fifteen years after its creation, was a setback for their international strategy, but also a condition for the demonstration of how resilient, flexible and adaptable the networks were. Reyes ordered Comintern operative Marco Calarca to create two support groups in the region of Mexico City, in order to maintain their relations with parties, organizations, universities and movements. As a consequence, the Ricardo Florez Magon andLucio Cabañas cells were created, continuing the tasks of the Comintern

openly, they operated through student groups at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) where there were at least 30 cells, mainly from the Simon Bolivar Lecture at the Department of Philosophy and Literature, one of which was led by Lucia Morett, a survivor of the attack on Raul Reyes’s camp (El Pais, 2008, May 10). These groups are said to be close to the Movimiento Francisco Villa linked to the Partido de la Revolucion Democratica (PRD).

Connections with Social and Political Organizations

As opposed to linkages with governments, which may vary according to the political context, more permanent relations were established with social and political movements. FARC had made contact with about 400 organizations, including NGO’s, revolutionary leftist movements and legally established political parties (Martinez, 2011). Comintern operatives began setting contacts, but through the MCB interactions increased considerably.

Organizations which nurtured the existence of militants in other countries were existing ones, but also those constructed by loose individuals who came together in order to work in favour of FARC’s agenda. In that sense it is possible to observe how sympathy from non- organized individuals is in fact useful to embed nodes beyond borders. As it has been explained, there are individuals in several social contexts which, for some reason, agree with FARC’s agenda. If they want to take action they can either join an existing organization or create a cell affiliated to the movement. That’s how their contribution is more solidly expressed.

In Chile, Manuel Olate (alias Roque), a former member of the Frente Politico Manuel Rodriguez FPMR and coordinator of the MCB in Chile, visited Raul Reyes at his camp in Ecuador several times. According to intelligence information, in July 2004 Reyes demanded from ‘Roque’ the creation of “two clandestine cells to allow the administration of resources for FARC’s activities.”(Infobae, 2011, March 17). He was captured by Chilean authorities and was requested by Colombian justice in extradition.

According to emails, the insurgency even trained several PCV operatives during 2006 and 2007 (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011). But these were not the only organizations which established links with the insurgency. There was also communication with Patria Para Todos, Movimiento Quinta Republica and the Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo(International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011).

The favourable atmosphere created by Chavez and other political organizations was enough for FARC to set the MBC’s headquarters in Caracas. After Mexico and Costa Rica, Venezuela became the new hub for FARC clusters to develop. The office in Caracas was coordinated by Ivan Marquez, Rodrigo Granda and his daughter Monica, as members of the Cominter. But these were not the only elements that favoured the embeddedness of FARC nodes in this country as it will be explained ahead.

In a similar case, FARC nurtured strong connections with the Ejercito del Pueblo Paraguayo EPP for over a decade (El Tiempo, 2010, April 27). After an investigation by Paraguayan officials it was evident that FARC had trained EPP units and supported the organization in the kidnapping and assassination of Cecilia Cubas, daughter of former President Raul Cubas. One of her assassins, Osmar Martinez confessed to have links to Bolivarian organizations through the Congreso Bolivariano de los Pueblos. According to Villamarin, FARCs support also led into the creation of mobile guerrilla units in the municipality of Juan Caballero and mobile militias in the outskirts of the capital, Asuncion. He describes the organization of networks in the location of La Marquetalia, district named after the municipality were Tirofijo created his first communist enclave, and where Police is said to have no access. He describes 16 bases, each of which is led by a political and a security leader.

Empty Spaces

Empty spaces allow for the expansion of the networks of the three dimensions, political, military and criminal. Embedding political nodes is of course important for the insurgency, but the possibility to place combating military nodes in spaces where they are safe, is almost priceless. Empty spaces also have the potential to serve as the theatre for connections and alliances with other agents, governments, social and political organizations and armed actors on the long term, because given the lack of strong presence of state’s institutions, the insurgency engages in processes which gradually and increasingly make it an authority in the area. This attracts the attention of other agents or individuals in the region that will feel attracted to the insurgency (sympathy), legitimizing its actions. In these spaces they create the conditions for hubs to be embedded and to build insurgency clusters. B

More than being a safe haven, Venezuela had become FARCs new hub and a territory for the development of insurgent clusters. According to the information provided by the Government with full evidence, there were 1500 insurgents organized in 28 camps

Luis Fernando Hoyos, former Colombian Ambassador to the Organization of American States, stated that “Venezuela had become a place for the meetings of international criminals, from where they plan attacks, trade with drugs and weapons, and perform kidnappings.”(El Tiempo, 2010, July 22). The empty space was favourable for FARC to interact with armed groups, to provide training to the FBL and to strengthen links with organizations like ETA.

It was learned that FARC met members of ETA at Ivan Marquez’s camp in 2003. They taught Colombian insurgents on the use of explosives in return for training on combat techniques and shooting.

A Colombian intelligence report also indicates that Grannobles, Marquez and Timochenko had direct linkages with several individuals in powerful positions, businessmen and social and education organizations (El Espectador, 2010, July 15). The mayor of the Municipality of Libertador, one of the districts of Caracas, Freddy Bernal, was very close to FARC, and was even appointed by Chavez to serve as his representative

The Brazilian government recognized in 2003 that there were three FARC camps in the states of Parana, Matto Grosso do Sul and Boavista. (Villamarin, 2007) They served the purposes of training, trafficking and even projecting force through the Amazon (Villamarin, 2007). A report from Correio Braziliense points at the existence of a second level commander in Brazil identified by Colombian counterintelligence as Ocyuber Sanchez (alias Hugo Mal Ojo), with the mission of acquiring weapons, uniforms, and supplies. He was in contact with Brazilian drug dealer Fernandinho Beira Mar (Sequeira, July 25, 2006).

As it can be seen from the examples, empty spaces might happen because of the unwillingness of a state to fight armed actors in the region, or because of its incapacity to build a stronger institutional presence. It might be difficult to evaluate which is more significant for every case, but the consequences are clear. The insurgency finds opportunities for its military, political and criminal nodes to create connections with different sorts of agents. Given the relative lack of opposition, the scenario is ideal for the configuration of new insurgency clusters, and the embedment of hubs (insurgents with a higher amount of connections). The important question, once again, is what does this mean in terms of insurgency survival or reconfiguration?

Node embeddedness and network characteristics

The alleged support from Chavez to FARC is not the only reason why this country had become, by 2010, the main territory for the development of guerrilla clusters. It is the combination of all the variables, government approval or support, connections with political and social organizations, linkages with armed groups and the existence of empty spaces, which allow for the insurgency’s political, military and criminal nodes to be embedded in their territories on the long term, with a relative level of security.

Governments constitute the ultimate source of support for insurgencies. It is with their acknowledgment, channelled as protection, material support or lack of confrontation, that insurgents find it easier to survive. However, this support is not a necessary condition, and even when governments oppose guerrilla presence in its territory, networks can be developed. Now, when this is the case, when the central government is not an ally, political networks, more than military, are likely to be developed, through contacts with particular social and political organizations. This can be evidenced through actions of all MCB chapters in different countries, which speak favourably about FARC.

But networks are also flexible and adaptable in the sense that militants can move from place to place without altering their flows, especially in the case of hubs (senior members of the Comintern which have the higher amount of connections).

Flexibility can also be observed from the mobility of hub scenarios, from Costa Rica to Mexico and later to Venezuela. The internal flexibility that nodes enjoy in each of their countries can be exemplified with the re-accommodation of Mexico’s nodes after the closure of FARC’s office.

Chapter 7. FARC as a regional actor and the survival of its structures.

Conditions in the environment contributed not only to the preservation of such nodes, but to give the networks a degree of flexibility, resilience, redundancy and adaptability. These conditions include the preservation of the ideology and political discourse, and the mobility of elements of the criminal economy.

These processes create the possibility for militants to engage with any of the dimensions, through node politicisation, criminalization and militarization as defined in the second chapter. As such, in order to avoid the survival and re-emergence of the organization, the counterinsurgent needs to develop a strategy to address elements of the three dimensions simultaneously, while acting in regards to elements placed beyond borders.

Complexity tells us that systems are opened; that the system (the insurgency) is in constant interaction with its environment (Latin America), in a process of co-evolution: the insurgency is changed by the environment, while the former contributes to variations in the latter. In that sense, the extent to which environmental conditions allow the survival of the insurgency depend on how deeply intertwined the system and its environment are, and how blurry the boundary between the primary and secondary environments is.

There are three scenarios:

  • Transnational networks of a national insurgency
  • Insurgency as part of a regional revolution
  • Transnational insurgency

In the first case, FARC would count with militants in several countries but they would exist in function of the Colombian internal conflict. Even when certain operative functions extend to other countries, the objective would still be action in Colombia. There would be no regional common agenda, and alliances with other organizations would express solidarity but not a shared objective.

In the second situation, FARC would be part of a wider continental uprising in which several actors, movements, organizations and rebel groups pursue the same objective. FARC would not be alone in its struggle neither would Colombia be the only theatre of confrontation. Bolivarian governments, extremist parties, movements, and armed rebels would come together in a single borderless effort to implement political systems according to their ideals. This hypothesis has been considered within official and academic circles. It is popular through the Latin American right, and it was common in Colombia during the Uribe administration. The Sao Paulo Forum is seen as the space where such efforts are coordinated

In the third case, FARC would constitute a transnational or regional revolutionary army by itself. There would be connections and alliances with other actors but they would be either local agents, operating in a national scenario, or actors pursuing a different regional agenda. In a similar way to the second scenario, the objective of the organization would not be explained exclusively through the logic of the Colombian conflict, but through wider dynamics in the region. This means that FARC would also target other governments opposed to its revolutionary cause.

It is here demonstrated that by the end of the Uribe administration, FARC remained as a national insurgency with transnational structures. Although its objectives remained purely national in terms of fighting the Colombian state and not others in the region, their operations have expanded according to the spread of its military, criminal and political networks. This expansion has given FARC the opportunity to survive and re-emerge, even when its objectives remain primarily national.

the paths for survival and re-emergence of the insurgency would be evident since the environment would provide all of the necessary elements for this to happen. FARC would be waging the same war with other regional actors; and Colombia, the main US ally in the region, would be the common enemy and the strongest obstacle for the FSP regional agenda. The relation between the system (FARC) and its environment (the region) would be stronger, meaning that as an opened system the line that separates them would be very diffuse. Given the strong interaction and cooperation with all sorts of regional actors, it would be difficult to determine which elements actually belong to the insurgency.

If counterinsurgency operations in Colombia destroyed FARC, or reduced it to its minimum expression, it would be coherent to believe that such actors would provide all possible support for militants in their countries to re-engage with the struggle against the Colombian state.

 

The real scenario: node preservation

Evidence demonstrates that the ‘regional revolution’ scenario was not real, and in that sense the preservation of nodes depended on each of the variables introduced in the last chapter, for each of the types of nodes (political, military or criminal).

Secretive nodes, given their obvious lack of open interaction with the environment would be unaffected by the type of scenario. They would continue performing their functions, mainly criminal and logistical, in each of the countries where they were embedded. Finally, as it has already been stated, sympathy from individuals was an insufficient variable for the insurgency to place operatives through the secondary environment. As such, it was only valuable when it was expressed through other variables like the existence of empty spaces or the formation of social or political organizations.

Government support

Observing all leftist Latin American governments through the FSP lens is inaccurate. There are notorious differences, interest and priorities among them. To make just a basic distinction, which is not sufficient to explore differences in depth, there were at least two main tendencies: centre-left or social democracies and radicals and Bolivarianists.

 

Incompatibility between them was so evident that it was necessary for more radical governments to recur to smaller and more ideologically-sound coordination spaces. This is how the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Americas-ALBA emerged. It brought together the governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua. In similar terms, it could also be argued that FARC’s creation of the MCB served as an alternative to a very wide and inclusive FSP. Furthermore, spaces such as the South American Union of Nations (UNASUR) which emerged as an idea of leftist governments, proved to be more effective in advancing regional agendas than the FSP itself.

Radical governments, as it was observed in the last chapter, were more instrumental for the placement of militants. Other leaders as Lula, Bachelet or Vasquez lacked an authentic ideological connection with FARC.

As Commander Castro Soteldo explained “we all have different interpretations of what Bolivarianism is. We have different interpretations of Bolivar, different visions, and different ways to drive our struggle. Not everyone wages war.”86 This is evident from the ambivalence that both Chavez and Correa demonstrated in its relation with FARC. During some periods they seemed to be more collaborative with the insurgency, while in others they were more confrontational, depending on what they were gaining from the relation. In the end, personal interests more than a common political or ideological vision of the region defined their relations:

“Chavez’s commitment to FARC has proved fragile for two reasons. Firstly, despite the overall strategic convergence, there is no firm ideological bond between FARC and Chavez, whose idosincratic and pragmatic approach to political problems has been perceived as incoherent and even alien to FARC. Secondly, the balance of power between Chavez and FARC has always been markedly unequal, with Chavez the stronger party. As a result, the president has not hesitated over the years to go back on promises made to the group, to distance himself from it, or even to harm its interests in Venezuela in pursuit of economic or political expediency.” (International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011, p.56).

There are situations in which an alliance with FARC could be seen as counterproductive to Venezuela’s interests.

What becomes relevant for the present analysis is that under Chavez’s government the insurgency found the appropriate conditions for the expansion of its networks, transforming Venezuela into a space for the development of insurgency clusters and for the protection of hubs.

Two security analysts interviewed in Caracas were very clear in their coinciding opinion: ‘Venezuela had become FARC’s country’.

Political and Social Movements

Connections with political and social movements also demonstrate how the idea of a regional revolution scenario is unreal, but also how they are more meaningful for the preservation of FARC’s operatives. Field research conducted in Chile and Peru demonstrates that such connections do not constitute general strategic alliances on the long term given the disparity in their objectives. However, this does not imply that they do not contribute to the preservation of nodes in their countries.

In a personal interview with Manuel Castillo, Secretary of the Partido Comunista Peruano, he explained that the struggle of Communists and Bolivarians in Latin America was more a series of unbound national or local struggles with coincidences through the nations, than a single fight through the entire continent. In his words, “it is not a process where we are constantly agreeing on our actions; it obeys to each of our realities (…) the vision of Socialism is not necessarily common.”92

They were focused on the next elections and on political negotiations to retain local and national-level seats. Objectives beyond this panorama, he believed, are simply too idealistic.

Dialogues could have been produced in several countries, in order to listen to insurgency representatives. But this does not imply the establishment of long-term alliances or even processes of cooperation between agents. On the other hand, sectors or individuals within the organization, as opposed to the organization as a whole, could actually feel a stronger sympathy for the insurgents and they could have engaged on a more permanent interaction.

In sum, FARC’s political nodes were present, active and performing their tasks through connections with specific members of diverse political and social movements, and through the MCB. Although mainstream communist parties were affiliated to this Movement, smaller and more radical social and political groups were more likely to be closer to FARC’s operatives. They provided spaces such as academic forums, public conferences, political meetings, or street demonstrations, where FARC’s discourse could be spread in order to gather support and increase its legitimacy. Through these actions FARC could have won the sympathy of other individuals who would, in return, join the MCB or organize more support groups.

Alliances with Armed Actors

The idea of a unified South American grand people’s army, a ‘Bolivarian Liberation Front’, is also remote. Tirofijo set as an objective of the international campaign to “create a grand revolutionary army in the Americas with mass support to overthrow the capitalist system and implement socialism.”106 But by the end of 2010 this objective was farfetched. Although there were connections with several rebel groups through the continent, such as the EPP in Paraguay, MRTA and SL in Peru, FBL in Venezuela or Mapuche groups in Chile, the idea of a single transnational insurgent movement was still unthinkable. Most of the connections are explained more as operational alliances for the transfer of know-how than as a symbiosis of objectives and aims.

Most importantly, such alliances did not imply a long term placement of FARC’s combatants in other territories, since schemes of cooperation consisted on the temporary location of either the other group’s insurgents in Colombia, or FARC rebels in their territories.

In general terms, Chilean actors know that recurring to violence is not a positive strategy. As explained by Ivan Witker, for sociological and cultural reasons, rejection of the use of force in Chile is very high, and actors who recur to it are deemed to find more opposition than support.112 In that sense, political and social organizations would find connections to radical groups, such as FARC, more counterproductive than useful. If there were connections between members of the CAM and FARC, they were temporary and with the specific purpose of training.

Communists themselves believe that “Sendero is not a revolutionary group. If they had a programme, it was abandoned few months afterwards (…) it was dismembered into several groups which appeared to represent Sendero but were more the armed branches of drug dealers.”114Business alliances of mutual benefit between FARC and Sendero could help both groups if there are sufficient sources for the parties to make a profit, otherwise competition more than cooperation, could be the rule, as it happens in the West of Venezuela.

In general terms, then, marginality expresses the condition of FARC’s nodes both in other societies and through the region. Communists and other radical movements are not precisely the most popular tendencies in each of the countries (except for Venezuela). But insurgency nodes exist in conditions of even more marginality since their supporters are members or sectors within these parties, and at best, smaller and more marginal social organizations. In that sense, the emergence of a mass movement through the Americas was farfetched. But marginality, as it has been said, is not equivalent to non-existence, and threats to security could come from a marginal organization. Insurgencies, by definition, begin as a marginal phenomenon. FARC within Colombia is a fringe organization in terms of national popular support, and yet it was the most pressing issue in the national security agenda.

Empty Spaces

What we observe in an empty space is a process of co-evolution between the system and its environment.

She explained how units of the Venezuelan Military Forces “used its entire operative arsenal, including the suspension of border operations, to help FARC avoid Army action through a command chain that went all the way up to Miraflores.”

It is important to note that FARC’s presence and actions in Venezuela were extending further beyond the border with Colombia to inner states like Barinas, Guanare and Carabobo, and even to main cities where they built political networks and engaged in businesses.123 “There were cells in Barquisimeto, the Centre-West, and Barinas”124. The Venezuelan journalist who was interviewed mentioned the case of a shelter of FARC in the mountains of Yaracui, in Central-North Venezuela. She mentioned the training of militias, mainly for extortion and kidnapping, in an area extending from Carabobo to Central Venezuela.

The militias were yet another actor through which FARC could extend its influence in the country. In the opinion of Indira de Peña, militias are the “people in arms”. She calculates about 80,000 to 120,000 militia members who would supposedly be under FARC command in the event of an attack.126 It was learned that a high military commander ordered a governor of the state of Amazonas to organize a group of peasants and militants to be trained by the Army, FARC and the ELN.

As described by Roberto Giusti, “many NGO’s, cooperative social organizations, and criminal structures, emerged associated to FARC.”

Strong connections with political parties, businessman, social organizations and political figures is why, it has been argued, that even in the absence of a single regional revolution, the Venezuelan space had become not only the most important element for the clustering of combatants beyond borders, but the base for the reconstitution of insurgency networks. As Indira de Peña explains, “If FARC needs to be re-organized here they can find all they need.”

The re-emergence of a commercial insurgency

As it was demonstrated, by the end of 2010 FARC continued to be a national insurgency in terms of its position within the region. It was still fighting against the Colombian state and not to implement a revolutionary system through South America. However, in terms of its operations (military, political and criminal), it was becoming more transnational. The expansion of its networks created a window of opportunity for the insurgency to survive creating a serious challenge to the Colombian counterinsurgent.

Network theory, introduced in the first chapter, explains that networks do not collapse when a considerable number of nodes are disabled, or even when several of its hubs are destroyed. It was mathematically proven that about 5% to 15% of its hubs would have to be de-activated simultaneously for its destruction, but this is precisely what protection of nodes and hubs beyond borders prevents.

re-emergence occurs when dispersed nodes come together with some sort of organizational logic to re-engage with the three dimensions and to return to the primary theatre of operations.

As network theory suggests, networks are not static structures but evolving entities in constant change according to the conditions of its nodes and the influx of elements from the environment. Complexity tells us that systems are in a co-evolution process with the environment, meaning that the latter creates conditions that affect the system, stimulating change. In the case of FARC, the environment does not only create opportunities for the organization to place insurgents in other countries, it also allows a series of conditions that permit the flexibility, redundancy and adaptability of its networks.

Whereas Colombia was the base for aerial transportation of cocaine for decades, Venezuela became the new space from where almost all cocaine was flown into other destinations. The air traces presented in Appendix 8 describe the evolution of trafficking routes. The state of Apure in Venezuela, more than any location in Colombia, became the point of origin for almost all air traffic.

 

In specific terms of re-emergence, there are many possible paths depending on how the organization is being attack in Colombia, and on which elements manage to survive. It would depend on economic, political, social and strategic circumstances in the country. It can occur in one single moment, or it may happen gradually by dimensions. As in complexity, the direction of the system is undetermined and unpredictable, and presents no single path for the re-appearance of the insurgency in Colombia.

But the possibilities of re-emergence are also related to the processes of node militarization, politicization and criminalization, explained in the second chapter, through which all the dimensions of the commercial insurgency can be reconstructed. Militants focused on political activities in Colombia and other countries could suddenly become combatants. As it was observed in the fifth chapter, members of the PC3 and the MB were receiving military training, and according to an interview with a member of the PC3, they were ready to take up arms if the conditions justified it. On the other hand, a number of foreigners within the ranks demonstrate the will of non-nationals to join the organization.

Pressure was also pushing combatants towards the borders and especially to Venezuela. So the counterinsurgent did not only face the challenge of addressing the three dimensions altogether, but to confront the nodes of the three dimensions beyond Colombian borders. The state could potentially reduce FARC to the point of near-destruction within its borders, but to guarantee that the insurgency will not re-emerge it needs to implement control measures to mitigate the effects of those elements remaining in other spaces.

A potential future

It is important to consider a potential transnational scenario based on changes motivated by the implementation of Cano’s model.

It was explained in the fifth chapter that this model intended to turn the insurgency into a more urban political organization, more connected with the communities, and embedded within its society, exploiting the real grievances of marginalized or specific social sectors. International networks could become the extension of this model through other societies, allowing the organization to become a more transnational networked-complex insurgency with legitimacy and support within specific social and political sectors through the region. Such sectors would include marginalized communities, students, peasants, indigenous peoples, labour unions, political radicals, progressive organizations, communists, Marxists and extremists, possibly unified under the umbrella of Bolivarianism.

From this perspective there would be a connection between the internal and external dimensions. The line that divides internal and external institutions would become blurred; external cells and networks would be understood as extensions of national ones. The insurgency would be a grand single movement with the same kind of cells in Colombia and beyond borders; a massive set of interconnected groups performing similar functions through different social and geographical spaces. Political internal structures, the PC3 and the MB, would be articulated with support groups created by the Comintern and NBAF’s within the MCB. Furthermore, they could be understood as a single institution but with different labels. They would all be embedded through the region exploiting elements that have been discussed, in the hope of building a real mass movement.

A graphic vision of this model would be, very much as in the case of Al Qaeda, an interconnected group of individuals in a specific country motivated by the ideals of Bolivarianism and sympathetic towards FARC. They would engage in all sorts of activities in favour of the insurgency: blogging; spreading the discourse; recruiting more militants; organizing demonstrations; and using virtual spaces, such as the internet and social networks. Once again, Cano’s model is closer to the idea of a netwar, in which the political and military dimensions would overlap significantly, as combatants would be members of cells embedded within the population instead of isolated guerrillas in the jungle.

 

f commanders would observe and understand the current global social and political contexts, they would appreciate the potential that an insurgency could find in this type of models as a source of power.

 

The rise of the internet, the interest in social networks, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of student protests, and in general terms, the emergence of a wide global people’s movement with local expressions, constitute an enormous opportunity for the insurgency to become a mass political movement.Cano seemed to have recognized such importance:

“[We need to talk] to Senator Piedad [Córdoba] about the need to create a Party of the people and to look for its alliance with the Movimiento Bolivariano”

ARC is not the same now as it was before.”132 It exploits communication technologies and social networks. Its discourse spreads through different websites; political structures like the MCB and the MB are active in Facebook and YouTube; and FARC and commanders such as Hermes have twitter accounts.

Conclusion

To appropriately understand commercial insurgencies this dissertation introduced a particular narrative explaining the organization not as a monolithic entity with a single body, direction and aim, but as a system composed by individuals (nodes, in terms of network theory), which display differentiated interests and functions according to three dimensions of the organization: political, military and criminal. For this reason it was argued that commercial insurgencies display a triadic character of complementing dimensions. It is necessary to go beyond simplistic and reductionist perspectives to ‘open the box’ and discover competing and contrasting interests and functions of groups or individuals within the organization. An understanding of these entities through simplifying concepts such as ‘narcoterrorism’, terrorism, or criminality is insufficient to include all the elements at play in this type of situations.

Complexity teaches us that the system (the insurgency) and the environment are in constant interaction.

For analytical purposes the environment was studied through a categorization in which a ‘primary environment’ included the local and national levels, whereas a ‘secondary environment’ expressed the regional and global levels.

It was explained that through these elements combatants or militants who perform political, military or criminal tasks, can be embedded in the environment, through societies and territories beyond the borders of a single state. Their embedment in other social and geographical spaces depends on the type of functions they perform. In other words, not all variables are equally useful for the conduction of the three types of tasks. Some of them allow militants who perform political duties to act, but are not useful for the development of military or criminal activities. By contrast, other elements allow insurgents to conduct political, military and/or criminal duties.

Doctrines like Bolivarianism and Communism served more as a platform for the formulation of common principles for action within each state, than as the ideology of a single movement with a transnational agenda and coordinated agents throughout the region.

Traditional observations of FARC’s international dimension either underestimated the role of external elements, in the belief that they were irrelevant for the future of the organization, or overestimated them on the understanding that every agent in the Left of the Latin American political spectrum was part of a conspiracy to undermine the Colombian government.

It is interesting to observe, by contrast, that FARC had developed a political organization with secretive militants through the primary environment. The PC3, more than being an opened organization, is a political party composed of individuals performing clandestine activities where they operate. The MB is a semi-clandestine organization, so although its activities are public the identity of most of its militants is unknown. This is one of the differences between the primary and secondary environments.

whereas political organizations in host countries do not necessarily contribute directly to the embeddedness of militants who perform criminal or military tasks, their constant support and direct participation with FARC in political events, contributes to the stability of the cell. Individuals in the cell could well be establishing contacts for drug-dealing and weapons acquisition, without the knowledge or approval of members of other organizations

in terms of structure FARC was not necessarily a network, but it increasingly incorporated networked elements. As explained by netwar theorists, insurgencies are likely to be composed of a combination of hierarchies and networks; with different types of networks coexisting within the same organization. A hierarchy is strictly preserved through its military structure with centralized command and control. But increased flexibility was evident as conventional-like structures gave way to smaller, more mobile and adaptable formations. Swarming, more than frontal confrontation became a routine.

the evolution of counterinsurgency theory introduced in the third chapter explains the emphasis that should be placed on state actions. It is clear that military action alone is not effective itself. A focus on the population, more than on the destruction of the rebels, is more successful.

In the end, the solution is to build state institutions in those areas where their historical absence has allowed a parallel authority to appear.

Political networks had been the most difficult to confront. Their actions fluctuated between the liberty of expressing ideas in free-speech democratic societies, and the illegality of cooperating with violent armed agents. In judicial terms it will always be difficult to prosecute individuals based on their political beliefs or their association with a political organization, if there is no proven connection with an armed actor.

As counterinsurgency history demonstrates, repression of political thoughts is not only inconsistent with the principles of a democratic state; it has also been counterproductive, generally providing more justifications for the insurgency. Intelligence, more than force, becomes strategic when it comes to discovering and dismantling clandestine networks. Infiltration, penetration, and information operations are more valuable in this sense.

Targeting the general population through psychological operations aimed to delegitimize the insurgency is practically unnecessary. The lack of support of FARC at the national level makes it difficult to believe that Colombians are willing to join the insurgency en masse. But on the local level, and through marginalized social sectors which the insurgency is expected to exploit, information operations could be used in order to avoid an increase in recruiting for the insurgent’s political networks. This should not be done through indoctrination, but by raising awareness about the risks of becoming part of organizations associated with the insurgency, and the importance of acting through institutions which act fully within the law.

But political structures have a particular value. In democracies, insurgencies are illegal because they recur to violence, not because they display certain type of ideals or pursue particular political goals. The counterinsurgent could then stimulate process to strengthen the insurgency’s political dimension if that derives into the weakening of its military dimension. In other words, it could motivate insurgents to leave their weapons and to conduct their struggle through political parties. Counterinsurgency, once again, is not necessarily about physically destroying the enemy, but about finding a balance between different sorts of measures that will produce the end of violence.

The idea that ‘it takes a network to defeat a network’ could be understood as the need to include a wider range of actors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest – Occupy Wall Street Actors

I haven’t yet read The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protests but did want to share the name of the Occupy Wall Street interviewees listed in the back in case I wasn’t the only one researcher them.

Name City Profession
Malav Kanuga
New York
Researcher
Linnea New York Student
Caiti New York Student
Mark New York Travel writer
Noah San Diego Student
Richard New York Community organizer
Elizabeth New York Teacher
Thanu New York Student
Julian New York Teacher
David New York IT designer
James New York Unemployed
Andrew New York Event organizer
Shawn Carrié New York Unemployed
Laura New York Student
Emily Kokernak New York Fundraiser
Patrick Gill New York Unemployed
Stephanie Jane New York Filmaker
Kalle Lasn Vancouver Adbusters main editor
Cari Iceland  Activist
Michael Premo New York Community organiser
Tim Fitzgerald New York  IT developer
Micah White New York Journalist/activist
Joan Donovan Los Angeles Researcher
Isham Christie New York Union Organizer

Data from Black Flags and Social Movements: A Sociological Analysis of Movement Anarchism

Black Flags and Social Movements: A Sociological Analysis of Movement Anarchism by Dana M. Williams covers transnational Anarchist organizations.

A little less empirical than I was hoping, the book still does provide some worthy information.

ABBREVIATIONS

AFA Anti-Fascist Action
AFO anarchistic franchise organization
ALF Animal Liberation Front
APOC Anarchist People of Color
ARA Anti-Racist Action
ASN Anarchist Studies Network
ATTAC Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne
AYP Anarchist Yellow Pages
BAS “Big Anarchist Survey”
BBB Biotic Baking Brigade
CIRCA Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army
CM critical mass
CNT Confederación Nacional del Trabajo
CW Catholic Worker
DIY do it yourself
EF! Earth First!
ELF Earth Liberation Front
FAI Federación Anarquista Ibérica
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FNB Food Not Bombs
G8 Group of 8
HDI Human Development Index
HNJ Homes Not Jails
IBL International Blacklist
IMC Independent Media Center
IMF International Monetary Fund
IWA International Workers’ Association
IWPA International Working People’s Association
IWW Industrial Workers of the World
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NAASN North American Anarchist Studies Network
NEFAC Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists NGO non-governmental organization
NSM new social movement
NYT New York Times
PO political opportunity
POUM Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista
RABL Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League
RMT resource mobilization theory
SM social movement
SMO social movement organization
WOMBLES White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian EffectiveStruggles
WS world-system
WUNC worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment WVS World Values Survey

 

 

Review of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America

According to the book blurb “Occupying Wall Street draws on extensive interviews with those who took part in the action to bring an authentic, inside-the-square history to life. In these pages you will discover in rich detail how the protest was devised and planned, how its daily needs were met, and how it won overwhelming support across the nation.” – which I think is funny as OWS certainly did not win overwhelming support across the nation. Did it eventually attract media interest after a number of events designed to get attention – like the fake news about Radiohead performing? Yes certainly, but there was never any great support for a new revolutionary lead by communists, anarcho-crust-punks, disaffected professors who felt the world ought to listen to their unique contributions to understanding the world and narcissistic artists and poets.

The book isn’t terribly written, though the Biblical saying here about the need to remove the beam in one’s eye before casting out the splinter in one’s brother is appropriate.

The absurdity of the premise – a call for a leaderless politics of revolution without demands, which is an open invitation for subverstion – is never questioned in opposition to simply becoming more active in the existent political project. That was my response when I was first approached by a New School student several months before the Occupation of Zuccotti Park.  I’m pretty sure my response was, “If I wanted to go camping, it’d be in the woods and if I wanted to change politics, I’d get involved in elections and policy-making.”

There are multiple admissions that the anti-capitalist seed society that the occupation camps was meant to be were riddled with problems such as theft, assault, inability to organize hygene and food and the organization being completely dependent on donations and grants to function as no one there was employed in any sort of productive activity. The encampment attracted people with mental disorders that non-professional volunteers tried to assist, but couldn’t, etc..

I’ll not keep heaping contempt on these people so deserving of it but instead share the names I’ve been collecting from OWS literature to determine if they were involved with the World Social Forum or it’s offshoots.

Occupiers 

Amy Roberts
Marina Sitrin – Professor at City University of New York
Matt Presto
Justin Wedes
Brennan Cavanaugh
Mandy
Imani J Brown – Open Society Foundation
Christy Thorton – NYU graduate student
Anthony Whitehurst – Med Mob
Charlie Gonzalez – Consciousness Group
Michael Rodriguez
Brendan Butler
Fateh Singh
Lisa Montanarelli
Adreanna Limbach
John Paul Learn
Rebeka Beiber
Pauly Kostora
Breanna Lembitz
Ed Mortimer
Frank White
Lily Johnson
Miriam Rocek
Jesse Jackson
Maria Fehling
Mesiah Bruciaga-Hameed
Betsy Fagin
Maida Rosenstein
Benjamin Shepard
Amina Malika
Kat Mahaney
Alex Gomez-del-Moral
Daniel Levine
William Scott – Professor of English at the University of Pittsburg
Jason Ide
Ilektra Mandragou
Rivka Little
Jez
Reg Flowers – theatre artist
Imani
Boris Nemch
Alessandra De Meo
Nani Mathews
Leo Goldberg
Kara Segal
Dan La Botz
Tara Hart
Jesse LaGreca
Natasha Lennard
Caitlin Curran
Kirby Desmarais
Hermes – from Mobile, Alabama
Bill Scott
Josh Frens-String – NYU Historian
Julian Tysh
Betsy Fagin
Mandy Henk
Zachary Loeb
Daniel Levine
Heather Squire
Emily Curtis-Murphy
Erin Littlestar
Many Henk – from Greencastle, Indiana
William Scott
Angela Davis
Janos Marton
Mark Bray
Jason Ahmadi
DiceyTroop – from Foxboro, Massachusetts

Foreigners
Senia Barragan – Colombian
Patricia – A Chilean woman
Alexandre de Carbalho – A Brazilian from Rio de Janiero
Jaco – from Toronto

Groups
National Lawyers Guild
Occupy the Hood
Occupy 477
Movement for Justice in El Barrio
Audre Lorde Project
Poetry Guild

181st St Community Garden
beautificationproject.blogspot.com
212-543-9017
880 West 181st Street, #4B
New York, NY 10033

Ali Forney Center
www.aliforneycenter.org
212-222-3427
224 W. 35th St. Suite 1102
New York, NY 10001

ALIGN – the Alliance for a Greater New York
alignny.org
contact@alignny.org
212-631-0886
50 Broadway, 29th Floor, New York, NY 10004

ANSWER Coalition
answercoalition.org
nyc@internationalanswer.org
212-694-8720
2295 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd., New York, NY 10030

Asian American Arts Centre
http://www.artspiral.org/

CAAAV
caav.org

Campaign to End the Death Penalty
www.nodeathpenalty.org

Campaign to End the New Jim Crow
endnewjimcrow.com

Center for Immigrant Families
212-531-3011
20 W 104th St
New York, NY 10025

Coalition for the Homeless
coalitionforthehomeless.org
info@cfthomeless.org
212-776-2000
129 Fulton Street, New York, NY 10038

Code Pink
codepinkalert.org
info@codepinkalert.org
310-827-4320

Community Voices Heard
cvhaction.org

Families for Freedom
familiesforfreedom.org
info@familiesforfreedom.org
3 West 29th St, #1030, New York, NY 10001
646 290 5551

FIERCE
www.fiercenyc.org
147 West 24th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10011
646-336-6789

Fort Greene SNAP
fortgreenesnap.org

FUREE
furee.org
718-852-2960
81 Willoughby Street, 701, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Green Chimneys
www.greenchimneys.org
718-732-1501
79 Alexander Ave – 42A, Bronx, NY 10454

GOLES
info@goles.org
169 Avenue B, New York, NY 10009
212-358-1231”

Guide to New York City Women’s and Social Justice Organizations
bcrw.barnard.edu/guide

Immigrant Movement International
immigrant-movement.us
united@immigrant-movement.us
108-59 Roosevelt Avenue, Queens, NY 11368 USA

Industrial Workers of the World
iww.org/en
wobblycity.wordpress.com

International Socialist Organization
internationalsocialist.org
contact@internationalsocialist.org
773-583-5069
ISO National Office P.O. Box 16085 Chicago, IL 60616

Iraq Veterans Against the War
www.ivaw.org/new-york-city
646-723-0989
P.O. Box 3565 New York, NY 10008-3565

La Union
la-union.org
Labor community forum
laborcommunityforum@gmail.com

Make the Road
maketheroadny.org
Bushwick, Brooklyn: 301 Grove Street Brooklyn, New York 11237
718-418-7690
Jackson Heights, Queens: 92-10 Roosevelt Avenue,
Jackson Heights, New York 11372
718-565-8500
Port Richmond, Staten Island:479 Port Richmond Avenue,
Staten Island, New York 10302
718-727-1222

Malcom X Grassroots Movement
mxgm.org
718-254-8800
PO BOX 471711 Brooklyn, NY 11247”

Marriage Equality NY (MENY)
www.meny.us

Mirabal Sisters Community and Cultural Center
Mirabalcenter.org
info@mirabalcenter.org
212-234-3002

National Lawyers Guild
www.nlg.org
nlgnyc.org
212-679-5100
132 Nassau Street, Rm. 922, New York, NY 10038

New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE)
nycore.org

New York Students Rising
nystudentsrising.org

NMASS
nmass.org
nmass@nmass.org

No Gas Pipeline
nogaspipeline.org
nogaspipeline@gmail.com
235 3rd Street, Jersey City, NJ 07302

Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition
northwestbronx.org
718-584-0515
103 East 196th Street Bronx, NY 10468

NYU4OWS
nyu4ows.tumblr.com

Occupy the DOE
nycore.org/occupy-the-doe/

Occupy Equality NY
www.facebook.com/groups/OccupyEqualityNY/

Occupy Wall Street
www.occupywallst.org/
General Inquiries: general@occupywallst.org
+1 (516) 708-4777

Organizing for Occupation
www.o4onyc.org

Parent Occupy Wall St
parents@everythingindependent.com

Parents for Occupy Wall Street
parentsforoccupywallst.com

Picture the Homeless
picturethehomeless.org
info@picturethehomeless.org

Queer Rising
QueerRising.org
queerrising@gmail.com
917-520-8554

Queerocracy
www.queerocracy.org
contact@queerocracy.org

Shut Down Indian Point Now
shutdownindianpointnow.org

Speak Up HP
speakuphp.org
info@speakuphp.org

Strong Economy for All Coalition
strongforall.org/coalition

Students United for a Free CUNY
studentsunitedforafreecuny.wordpress.com

 

I haven’t yet started cross-referencing all of the people listed above, but as  Imani J. Brown has a uniqiue name I looked her up. There I found that she is not just an Occupier, but also a Open Society Foundations fellow and that the Arts Incubator called Antenna that she is the Director of – which looks super cool and has some interesting community events – also works with other Open Society Fellows, like Dread Scott. Below is a clip from his community-engaged performance art project titled Slave Rebellion Reenactment, reinterpreting Louisiana’s German Coast Uprising of 1811—the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history.