Independent Republics (Colombia)

Independent Republics (Colombia), the regions of Sumapaz, Marquetalia, Río Chiquito, El Pato, Guayabero, and Viotá in central Colombia, which were "independent" of state control during the Violencia of the 1950s. These mountainous frontier zones were the sites of widespread land conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, intensive mobilization efforts by Gaitán Liberals and Communists in the 1930s and 1940s, and brutal Conservative repression in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After the Rojas Pinilla amnesty of 1953, men such as Juan Cruz Varela, Fermín Charry Rincón ("Charro Negro"), and Manuel Maralunda Vélez ("Tirofijo") helped organize peasant organizations to defend their agricultural and political autonomy. Although Cruz Varela entered the political mainstream in the 1960s, winning election to the House of Representatives, others faced military repression. Under the Plan Lazo, formulated with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Colombian military brutally subdued the regions in the mid-1960s, prompting Tirofijo and others to form the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in April 1966. During the 1970s the group maintained a low profile, but by the 1980s, the FARC had become heavily involved with the illegal drug trade. After repeated bombings and other attacks, including a large-scale attack on a military base in Guaiviare in 1996, in which at least 130 people were killed, the Colombian president, Andrés Pastrana Arango, tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a peace settlement. Under President Alvaro Uribe, in 2004 and 2005 attacks abated, but on June 28, 2007, the group kidnapped and murdered at least eleven provincial deputies from the Valle de Cauca department in the western mid-coastal region of the country.

See alsoColombia, Revolutionary Movements: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo; Varela, Juan Cruz; Violencia, La.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Germán Guzmán Campos, La violencia en Colombia: Parte descriptiva (1962).

Richard Gott, Rural Guerrillas in Latin America, rev. ed. (1973).

Additional Bibliography

Appelbaum, Nancy P. Muddied Waters: Race, Religion, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Hylton, Forrest. Evil Hour in Colombia. London: Verso, 2006.

Palacios, Marco. Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Safford, Frank, and Marco Palacios. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

                                         David Sowell