Manuel Marulanda Vélez

The Peasant Formation: What the Schools Did Not Teach

Marulanda never finished primary school — a fact that the Colombian right emphasised repeatedly as evidence of his barbarism and that the Colombian left sometimes presented as evidence of his authenticity, both framings being distortions of a more straightforward reality. He was not educated in the formal sense because the Colombian educational system, in the coffee country of Quindío in the 1930s and 1940s, was not designed to provide sustained education to the children of poor peasant families. The schools that existed were inadequate, the teachers irregular, and the economic pressures on rural families meant that children were expected to contribute to agricultural production rather than to pursue schooling beyond the basics. This was not Marulanda's failure; it was Colombia's.

What he learned instead — from his family, from his community, from the experience of La Violencia, from fifty years in the Colombian mountains — was a different kind of knowledge: the knowledge of terrain, of weather, of the capacities and limitations of the people around him, of the specific ways in which a guerrilla force could sustain itself in difficult conditions against a numerically and technologically superior adversary. He could read a landscape the way a geographer reads a map, understanding its military implications immediately. He understood logistics — the movement of supplies and personnel through difficult terrain — in ways that most formally trained officers do not. He understood the management of human beings under conditions of extreme stress: how to maintain morale, how to resolve conflicts, how to keep an organisation functioning when the conditions of its functioning were consistently adverse. These were not book-learned skills. They were the accumulated product of fifty years of continuous practice.

The Long War: What It Cost Both Sides

The FARC that Marulanda commanded for forty-four years was not a static organisation. It began with fewer than fifty survivors at Marquetalia and grew, through decades of sustained rural organising and military activity, to an organisation of tens of thousands of combatants controlling territory across much of Colombian rural space. Its peak was approximately the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it had sufficient military strength to threaten major Colombian cities and sufficient political organisation in some regions to function as a de facto government. Plan Colombia's military offensive, which began in 2000 with enormous US funding and technical support, reversed the trend: the FARC's territorial control shrank, its urban networks were dismantled, its military capacity was substantially reduced.

The cost of this war — on both sides and on the Colombian civilian population caught between them — was staggering. Estimates of the total death toll from the Colombian conflict across its full duration run to 200,000 to 300,000 people, with the majority of those being civilians rather than combatants. Millions were displaced. Communities were destroyed. The drug revenue that the FARC derived from taxing coca cultivation — and, later, from more direct involvement in the drug trade — produced its own social damage, strengthening the narcotrafficking organisations whose interests intersected with the FARC's in some regions and conflicted with them in others. The Colombia that emerged from the peace process of 2016 was not the Colombia that Marulanda had set out to transform in 1964: it was a country exhausted by war, its structural inequalities largely intact, its rural poor still poor, but at peace — a peace that Marulanda died eight years before seeing, in the mountains where he had spent his entire adult life.

The Empty Chair at Caguán

The image of the empty chair at Caguán on 7 January 1999 — the formal opening of the peace negotiations between the FARC and President Pastrana's government, attended by the President, diplomatic observers, and journalists from around the world, but not by Marulanda himself — encapsulates something essential about both the man and the organisation he led. He had agreed to negotiate. He had agreed to this specific event. And then, at the last moment, he did not come. The security concerns were real: appearing in public, in a fixed location, at a known time, was the kind of vulnerability that fifty years of evading capture had trained him to avoid absolutely. But the security concerns were also the expression of a deeper ambivalence about the peace process — an organisation built for war and functioning well, at that point, militarily, asked to trust that the negotiations were genuine when the history of the Unión Patriótica massacre showed what happened to FARC members who entered the political arena unprotected.

The Caguán process eventually collapsed in February 2002, when Pastrana called off the negotiations following a FARC attack on a civilian aircraft. The war resumed with increased intensity. The peace agreement that eventually ended it — the 2016 accord between the Santos government and the FARC — was negotiated in Havana over four years, without either side appearing in public, without the risks that Marulanda's empty chair at Caguán had dramatised. By then, Marulanda had been dead for eight years. The organisation he left behind completed the negotiation he had been unable to conclude, in conditions — the FARC's military weakening, the political pressure from the Colombian civil society, the changed international environment — that his death had not created but that his absence had not prevented from developing. The peace he could not make in life was made in his absence. Whether he would have endorsed it — the specific terms, the specific political framework, the specific relationship between the FARC's disarmament and the social reforms it received in exchange — cannot be known. He left the mountains only in a box, and the mountains did not give him back.

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