Colombia Peace Deal: Will FARC be on ‘Narcos’ After Escobar, Cali?

FARC made money from the drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and for ‘protection’ in the areas under its influence.

Colombia’s center-right government and the Marxist FARC rebel group signed a peace deal on Monday to end a half-century war that killed a quarter of a million people and once took the Andean country to the brink of collapse. This piece is from The Quint’s archives, originally published on 14 September 2016.

If you’ve been following the hit Netflix series Narcos, you probably already know that FARC is a Colombian communist guerrilla rebel group. You also probably know that it was functional around the time that the notorious drug baron Pablo Escobar was struggling to maintain his drug empire. But here’s a refresher – FARC is still functional and is only now reaching a negotiated truce with the Colombian government.

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers to Seasons 1 and 2 of the Netflix Series Narcos.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC (its Spanish acronym) has been carrying out its armed rebellion in the country for over half a century now. And while Narcos Season 1 focuses on the Palace of Justice Seige undertaken by the M-19 guerrillas hand-in-glove with Escobar, FARC only really finds a mention in Season 2. And even then, it’s a passing comment about how the Castano brothers, who form the death squad Los Pepes to take down Escobar, launch a right-wing extremist organisation in response to the kidnapping and subsequent murder of their father at the hands of FARC.

Well, let’s clear some things up. Narcos, at least up till the second Season, focuses mainly on the Medellin cartel headed by Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria and the Cali cartel. But it wasn’t just these cartels that dealt in cocaine. FARC has been in the narcotics business to fund its guerrilla war for decades. It is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group which claims to represent the poor and wants to establish a far-left government in the country.

The group earned between $200 million and $3.5 billion a year from its cocaine business and as the formal signing of the peace deal between FARC and the President Juan Manuel Santos’ Colombian government draws closer, there is speculation about whose hands the vast fields of cultivated coca plant will fall into. The deal will be signed on 26 September and will be put to a plebiscite vote on 2 October. Negotiations have been ongoing for four years.

The war lasted 52 years, killed around 220,000 people and displaced over five million.

Apart from the drug trade, FARC made money from kidnappings, extortion and for ‘protection’ in the areas under its influence.

Not many Colombians have been left unaffected by the violence that FARC unleashed on the country. Because of this, there is a strong lobby against the peace deal. Led by former President Alvaro Uribe Velez, this lobby believes that the FARC narco-terrorists are getting too sweet a deal and are not being made to pay for the decades of terror they inflicted on the civilians of the nation.

Here’s FARC’s commander Rodrigo Londono, also known as ‘Timochenko’, arriving in La Macarena for the tenth and final National Guerrilla Conference on Tuesday, 13 September.

At the end of the day, though, the success of the peace deal depends on whether FARC holds up its end of the bargain and disarms completely as well as on the government’s ability to follow through with the many promises it has made, especially about providing the group representation in decision-making in the country.

Narcos has been renewed for a Season 3 and 4. After Escobar, the next Season is likely to focus on the Cali cartel. But, perhaps the show will continue to live up to its name and also deal with FARC’s narco operations.

Watch what the Narcos cast thinks about the peace deal. And while we’re on the subject, here’s Pablo Escobar’s son, Sebastian Marroquin’s Facebook post on everything that’s wrong with Narcos Season 2. It’s in Spanish but The Telegraph has a translation.

(Sources: The Washington Post, Slate, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic)