At a Glance
La Violencia and the Communist Self-Defence Communities
To understand what Arenas brought to the founding of the FARC, it is necessary to understand the specific organisational tradition from which the movement emerged — the Communist Party's self-defence communities of La Violencia. La Violencia was not a class war in the straightforward sense: it was a sectarian conflict between Liberals and Conservatives whose violence reached the rural poor primarily as organised massacre, displacement, and the destruction of communities affiliated with the losing side in a given region's political balance. The Communist Party's response — organising peasant communities to defend themselves, building the political and military structures that could protect communities from partisan violence — was not ideologically driven in the first instance but practically driven by the immediate need to protect people who were being killed.
What Arenas understood, and articulated in the political documents he produced from the early 1960s onward, was that this specific organisational tradition — the armed self-defence community, combining political organisation with the capacity for military self-protection — was not merely a response to La Violencia but a model for a more sustained form of revolutionary politics. The peasant self-defence community was simultaneously a political organisation and a military formation, embedded in a specific territory, connected to the people who lived there, and capable of both articulating their demands and defending their rights. This was different from both the classic Leninist vanguard party and the foco guerrilla theory: it was a form of political-military organisation rooted in specific communities rather than imported from the outside. The FARC that emerged from Marquetalia carried this tradition forward and built it into the most durable guerrilla organisation in Latin American history.
The Marquetalia Document: A Founding Charter
The Marquetalia Document — issued in the weeks after the army's assault on the self-defence community and the survivors' escape — is one of the foundational texts of the Colombian revolutionary left, and its political analysis bears the marks of Arenas's intellectual formation. It opens with an account of the assault and its context: the government's long campaign to characterise the self-defence communities as a threat to national security, the successive military operations that had been building pressure on the region, and the final assault that had been intended to destroy the organised peasant community. It then draws the political conclusion: that the Colombian state's use of military force against a community that had done nothing more than organise to defend itself demonstrated that no form of peaceful, legal peasant organisation would be tolerated by a state committed to protecting the land tenure arrangements that kept the rural poor in poverty.
The document's conclusion — that armed self-defence was the only available response to a state that would use military force to prevent any other form of organised resistance — was not presented as a choice but as a necessity imposed by the state's behaviour. This framing was both politically astute and intellectually honest: the FARC was claiming, accurately, that the Colombian army had shot first and that its own armed organisation was a response to that violence rather than its initiator. The claim was contested by the Colombian government and by those who pointed to the communist political organisation that had preceded the assault and that the government was responding to. But the factual sequence — the state's decision to use military force against an armed peasant community, the community's decision to fight back rather than surrender — was not invented, and the political analysis that Arenas built on it was not simply a rationalisation.
Ideology as Organisational Infrastructure
The FARC's unusual durability — its survival for more than fifty years, through conditions that destroyed most of the other Latin American guerrilla organisations of its generation — is partly explicable by factors of geography (the Colombian jungle provided protection that most other guerrilla theatres did not), economics (the drug trade that the FARC eventually taxed provided financial resources unavailable to most guerrilla organisations), and military tradition (Marulanda's tactical effectiveness and the organisational culture he built). But it is also partly explicable by Arenas's ideological contribution: the construction of a political programme and an internal political culture that gave the FARC's members a framework for understanding what they were doing and why, that connected the immediate military activities to a broader vision of Colombian social transformation.
The importance of this contribution becomes clearer when compared to the organisations that lacked it. The M-19 — Jaime Bateman Cayón's urban guerrilla movement — was operationally brilliant and politically relatively thin: its actions were spectacular but its programme was less developed, and when it decided to demobilise and enter politics it did so without the political infrastructure that a stronger ideological tradition would have produced. The FARC, by contrast, had spent its entire existence building the political structures — the internal education programmes, the community organisation, the political programme — that Arenas had insisted were as important as the military capacity. The result was an organisation that could survive in the jungle for decades because its members had a sufficiently developed political identity to sustain their commitment through conditions that would have dissolved a less ideologically coherent organisation.
The Unión Patriótica and the Price of Peace Attempts
The most consequential political initiative of the FARC's history during Arenas's lifetime was the La Uribe agreements of 1984 — a ceasefire negotiated with the Betancur government that included the creation of the Unión Patriótica, a legal political party through which the FARC and the broader Colombian left would participate in electoral politics. The UP won significant electoral support in the 1986 elections, electing mayors, city councillors, and congressmen in regions where the FARC had built its base. The response of the Colombian right, the military, and the narcotrafficking organisations that had their own interests in preventing a left-wing electoral threat was systematic assassination: over the following decade, more than three thousand UP members were killed, including two presidential candidates, eight congressmen, and hundreds of local officials and activists.
The UP massacre — as it has come to be known — was one of the most comprehensive political liquidations in Latin American history, and it had a decisive effect on the FARC's willingness to pursue peace agreements. Arenas had been one of the architects of the La Uribe process and one of the people most invested in the possibility that the FARC could transition from armed struggle to legal politics. The systematic killing of everyone who tried to make that transition — in conditions where the state was either complicit or unable to protect those involved — was a demonstration that the political space for that transition did not exist. The FARC hardened its positions in response, and the peace process that had briefly seemed possible in the mid-1980s collapsed. Arenas died in 1990 without seeing any resolution, having lived through the failure of the most serious attempt at a settlement that his lifetime produced.
The Intellectual in the Jungle
There is something worth pausing on in the fact that Arenas — an intellectual of genuine formation, someone who had read seriously in Marxist political theory and Colombian history, someone capable of producing political documents of real analytical quality — spent the last twenty-six years of his life in the Colombian jungle, never returning to a city, never accepting any of the safe exits that various Colombian governments and international mediators might have offered. The jungle was not a comfortable or intellectually stimulating environment: it was humid, dangerous, physically demanding, and cut off from the libraries, the conversations, and the wider world that intellectual work normally requires.
What the jungle provided was the specificity of political commitment — the proof, by presence, that the analysis he had articulated in the Marquetalia Document and in the FARC's programme was not a theoretical exercise but a lived choice. An intellectual who theorises revolution from a comfortable position is always vulnerable to the charge that the theory is a substitute for commitment rather than its expression. Arenas eliminated that vulnerability by the simple act of staying: staying in the jungle through the 1960s, through the 1970s, through the 1980s, until his heart gave out in August 1990 and he died in the field where he had always been. The organisation he left behind was, twenty-six years later, larger and more powerful than anything that existed at Marquetalia, and the peace agreement of 2016 that finally ended the conflict was negotiated in the shadow of everything that he and Marulanda had built and refused to surrender.