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Civil War in Colombia
Civil war has gnawed at Colombia for six decades. In 1948, the assassination of the head of the Colombian Liberal Party set off a decade of low-level armed conflict against the Colombian Conservative Party; a treaty between the two parties in 1957 ended la Violencia, but not before it had claimed over 200,000 lives. This, in turn, led to a string of other conflicts.
Since then, Colombia has never been entirely free of civil war. In 1964, emboldened by Castro’s success in Cuba, the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia began a struggle for control of the country, and has continued ever since. Several government parties have come and gone since then-some every bit as bad as the guerillas they fought-and rebel groups have splintered, changed identities, and recombined. The names have changed, but the game is the same: men in the jungle want to kill the government, and government troops hunts the men in the jungle.
Meanwhile, the drug cartels have been a not-quite-neutral third party; FARC is largely funded by the drug trade, but the cartels do not wish to allow the revolutionaries to gain control of the cocaine distribution lines, and have no apparent interest in seeing a real victory for either side; after all, without the ongoing civil war, the Colombian government could pay more attention to the drug trade. Likewise, both the official government and the rebels occasionally kidnap and ransom drug traffickers, and the cartels occasionally carry out terror strikes to curb the growth of the FARC’s narcotics assets, or punish the government for extraditing captured criminals to the United States.
The result is a three-way war, always bubbling just beneath the surface, ready to break through at any moment. Civilians keep their heads down and hope the civil war doesn’t wander into their neighborhoods.
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