Colombian conflict: A Visual History

The Colombian conflict began in 1964 when the army attacked the communist peasant enclave of Marquetalia and its survivors founded the FARC; the ELN and other guerrillas followed. Fuelled from the 1980s by cocaine money, the war drew in right-wing paramilitaries (AUC) allied with landowners and parts of the army, and drug cartels; kidnapping, massacres, 'false positive' killings and displacement made it Latin America's longest war. US-backed Plan Colombia (2000) and Uribe's offensives weakened the FARC, whose leaders were killed by air strikes; the AUC demobilised in 2006. The FARC signed a peace agreement in 2016 and disarmed, but dissident factions, the ELN and the Clan del Golfo continue to fight over coca and gold, and 'total peace' talks under Petro have stalled.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Colombian conflict. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Deaths and victims 1985-2018 (Truth Commission)

Timeline of the Colombian conflict

1. 1964
   Marquetalia; FARC and ELN founded
2. 1985
   M-19 seizes the Palace of Justice; Patriotic Union killings begin
3. 1993
   Escobar killed
4. 1997
   AUC formed
5. 2000
   Plan Colombia
6. 2002
   Uribe elected; El Caguan talks end
7. 2006
   AUC demobilises
8. 2016
   FARC peace agreement
9. 2022
   Petro's 'total peace'

From La Violencia to the guerrillas

The bipartisan violence of 1948-1958 left armed communist peasant self-defence zones; the army's 1964 assault on Marquetalia turned Manuel Marulanda's peasants into the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The Cuban-inspired ELN (1964), Maoist EPL and urban M-19 followed. The guerrillas stayed small until the 1980s, when they taxed coca and kidnapped for ransom; the FARC's political wing, the Patriotic Union, was exterminated by paramilitaries and drug lords, with some 3,000 killed.

Cartels, paramilitaries and Plan Colombia

Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel waged war on the state until his death in 1993; landowners' self-defence groups grew into the AUC under Carlos Castano, massacring suspected guerrilla sympathisers (Mapiripan, El Salado) with army complicity. The FARC reached 20,000 fighters and won battles in the late 1990s; Pastrana's peace zone at El Caguan (1998-2002) failed. Plan Colombia's 10 billion dollars in US aid built up the military and aerial fumigation; Uribe (2002-2010) hit the FARC hard, killing Raul Reyes in Ecuador and Mono Jojoy, and rescuing Ingrid Betancourt, while soldiers murdered some 6,400 civilians as 'false positive' guerrilla kills.

Peace and its limits

Santos opened talks in Havana in 2012; the FARC signed a final agreement in November 2016 (after voters narrowly rejected the first version), 13,000 fighters demobilised and a transitional justice court and rural reform were promised. Implementation lagged; over 400 ex-combatants and hundreds of social leaders have been killed; dissidents under Ivan Mordisco and the Segunda Marquetalia, the ELN and the Clan del Golfo fought over the vacuum. President Petro's 'total peace' talks with the ELN and others since 2022 have made little progress, and coca cultivation is at record levels.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• United States (1776 to present)
• Spanish Empire (1492 to 1976)
• Dutch Empire (1602 to 1975)

Wars of the same era and region

• La Violencia (1948 to 1958)
• Thousand Days' War (1899 to 1902)
• Colombian War of Independence (1810 to 1825)
• Cold War (1947 to 1991)
• Mexican drug war (2006 to present)
• Guatemalan Civil War (1960 to 1996)

8 surprising things about the Colombian conflict

1. The Colombian conflict is the longest-running armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere.
2. Colombia has more internally displaced people than any country except Syria, over 8 million.
3. The FARC's founder Manuel Marulanda, 'Tirofijo' (Sureshot), fought for 44 years and died of a heart attack in 2008.
4. Ingrid Betancourt, a presidential candidate, was held by the FARC for six years and freed in a fake-humanitarian-mission rescue in 2008.
5. The Patriotic Union's destruction, some 3,000 members killed, was recognised as political genocide by a Colombian court.
6. The 2016 peace referendum was lost 50.2 to 49.8; a revised deal passed through Congress instead.
7. Juan Manuel Santos won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize days after the referendum defeat.
8. The 'false positives' scandal saw soldiers kill civilians and dress them as guerrillas to inflate body counts for bonuses.

Sources

• Colombian conflict Wikipedia
• Colombia: The guerrilla movements and the peace process Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Colombia profile – Timeline BBC News
• Comision de la Verdad, Hay futuro si hay verdad (2022) Comision de la Verdad

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