The FARC’s militaristic blueprint

This article intends to explain the outstanding sequence of success and failure exhibited by the FARC, the main Colombian guerrilla since the 1980s. It claims that such sequence is unintelligible unless the adoption by the FARC of a militaristic organizational blueprint at its 1982 7th Conference is taken into account. By building itself like an army, the FARC could boost its combat capacity, maintain its structural integrity, and develop powerful mechanisms that held the whole structure together. At the same time, the militarization of the FARC also entailed significant risks and costs like political isolation and high personnel turnover. After describing the militaristic blueprint, the article compares the FARC with other irregular forces that operated in the Colombian context – a comparison which is important to understand the specificity of the FARC trajectory, as well as the benefits and costs involved in it. The analysis highlights the critical role of organizational dimensions in the explanation of civil war outcomes, and suggests that at least for some problems organizational dynamics should be observed at a low level of granularity.