The armed conflict in Colombia has its origins back in 1920, in a moment of high repression and inequality to peasants by the elites of the country. Peasants effectively were the slaves of coffee farms that were controlled by rich land owners who took advantage of the mountainous geography of the country where some rural communities were isolated making difficult the influence and the control of the government over them.
By 1930’s when the agricultural market collapsed, peasants started to fight over ownership of coffee lands, leading to massive rural protest which caused the liberals and conservative parties, who were the dominants in Colombian politics, take sides in the conflict, making it worse.
By 1940’s many peasants, mostly Liberals
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As La Violencia wound down, most self-defense and guerrilla units demobilized, but at the same time some former Liberals and active Communist groups continued operating in several rural enclaves.
Pedro Antonio Marin, a peasant farmer who went by the alias Manuel Marulanda, or “Sure Shot,” founded the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1964 after La Violencia, after the offensive that the Colombian Army carried out in against the "Republic of Marquetalia", one of the autonomous communities created by communist armed self-defense groups at the end of the era of La Violencia. The FARC’s stated aim was to seek redistribution of land favoring the poor as well as opposition to the presence of multinational companies.
Under Marulanda’s leadership, the FARC drew recruits mainly from poor, rural, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities and universities, growing to an estimated 20,000 armed fighters by the late