A Note on Colombian Rhetoric

Colombian political phrasing has always reflected the world sociopolitical climate, especially when it comes to challengers to the state’s monopoly on the use of force. During the Cold War, the FARC were “communists,” which was technically accurate. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia were the militant wing of the Colombian Communist Party and were funded, trained and supplied by the Soviet Union.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Cold War drew to a close and the Hemisphere’s attention turned to the meteoric rise of the cocaine trade and the equally astronomical escalation of drug violence. No longer “communists” in political discourse—though still a communist organization—the FARC were labeled “narcos” or drug traffickers. This, too, was an accurate label, since, as Soviet funding dried up, the communist guerrillas secured arms and income through alliances with the ultra-capitalist druglords.
Finally, in the last years of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, the FARC became “terrorists.” Getting into the appropriateness of that particular term is a political and semantic quagmire; one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. If defined as “criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act,” (as defined by UN Security Council Resolution 1566) however, there’s a grain of truth to it.
The question in political discourse isn’t the accuracy of the term, but its use in stripping away identity and painting “the Bad Guys” as a faceless, monolithic, puppy-kicking horde of That Which We Most Despise. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, a college professor who was outspokenly critical was a communist. These days, Uribe calls them the “intellectual bloc” of the FARC—which is constantly labeled as a terrorist group.
All of the names that the FARC and others have been called—communists, narcos, terrorists—are true or have an aspect of truth to them, but the choice of words has always been tailored to what the international community (read: the United States) wants to hear. Staging a raid into another country to kill communists in 2008 makes one sound like a crackpot, and bombing drug dealers seems like a military solution to a law-enforcement problem. Killing terrorists, however, is just peachy by current international standards and expectations.