The Farc: The Longest Insurgency

For starters it is unique in the Western hemisphere. Why? Elementary, dear reader.

It is an armed defence organisation of peasants, by peasants and for peasants.

An urban middle-class leadership gone native after a lick of Lenin, Prestes or Giap is not for them.

And there is one more surprise - one not devoid of historic irony - that Marx would have loved dearly.

Unlike the rest of its Latin American sister parties, the PCC - Parted Communist de Colombia - had no fixation with the urban working class and readily provided, from the 1930s on, political education for these committed and articulate peasant insurgents.

Furthermore, it was prepared to learn from them by inviting Farc leaders Marulanda and Arenas to join the PCC leadership.

A valuable bond was forged with Farc retaining full control over its own operations.

This able adaptation of Marxist principles to a specific reality, aided by the works of regional thinkers of the calibre of Carlos Mariategui, has given Farc an enviable revolutionary credibility among the predominantly native south American peasantry who suffer not only economic exploitation at the hands of the landed oligarchy but also a racially aggravated contempt in the national context.

Farc's provision of all state infrastructures in the 40 per cent of national territory they control has won it plaudits from a wide range of observers.

One controversial aspect is taxation, levied according to income and wealth.

Kidnapping of associates or members of families to extract payments due dealt with the familiar ploy of tax avoidance by oligarchs and drug traffickers who were acquiring vast amounts of land but keeping it idle.

Over the last decade-and-a-half the servile media rebranded Farc as "narco-guerillas" despite an official report by DEA chief of operations Donnie Marshall who stated categorically "to date there is little to indicate the insurgent groups are trafficking in cocaine themselves."

Not that truth would stand in the way of Bill Clinton or indeed many of Farc's middle-class fair-weather friends in Colombia and internationally.

There is no glamour to Farc's nearly a century-old struggle - just the hardest and harshest of endeavours on behalf of the people it is symbiotically part of and together with whom it searches for a better world.

Government after government have rejected its agenda for dialogue - agrarian reform, revision of neoliberal economics and the reform of the state and its repressive apparatuses, the police and the army. Therefore the struggle must and will continue.

Garry Leech, who was held by Farc, writes with a doctoral thesis detachment at times giving in to "imperial speak" as when referring to Farc tactics as "terrorist" or inferring "profiting" from the drug trade. So keep them peeled while leafing this otherwise useful volume.