Colombia’s Rebels Switch From Cocaine to Cattle

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has seen more lucrative days. The-guerrilla-army-turned-drug-cartel has seen its homelands, its outposts and — most importantly — its cocaine revenue chipped away in recent years by record seizures of the drug and a military campaign backed by billions in American aid. The guerrillas’ solution? Cattle rustling and hustling. Call it narcollaneros, or Colombian cocaine cowboys. The FARC is suffering from a “lack of financing…. due to the blows to their funding sources, especially drug trafficking,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said Monday. “One of the orders was to sell cattle to get more resources.” Precisely how much cattle the FARC wants to offload is not known, but the total number of cows in FARC lassos alone range up to 26,500, according to e-mails discovered on FARC computers following the September 2010 raid that killed second-in-command Mono Jojoy. This is about half of the FARC’s total number of animals, which include horses and various other livestock.



And with livestock comes land — lots of land. The FARC controls an estimated 42,000 hectares of stolen land in just two of Colombia’s southern provinces, and that’s fairly tame compared to some other Colombian militant groups. The worst are the BACRIMs, a Spanish acronym for bandas criminales, or scattered and loosely-connected criminal bands which arose following the demobilization of the FARC’s right-wing rivals: the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). All in all, according to Edward Fox at Latin American security monitor InSight, the various guerrillas, drug-trafficking paramilitaries and bandits control about 7 million hectares of land, or 12.9 percent of the country’s farmland.

The cattle sell-off could be a sign of disorganization in the FARC following the death of leader Alfonso Cano in a November military raid. Cano’s death was the strongest blow yet inflicted on the guerrillas, who had seen numerous high-level commanders killed since a crackdown began under the administration of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. It’s also a reflection of the relative success of the Colombian government and the U.S. in the South American drug war, where the matter is more exerting state authority over territory never really controlled by the government in the first place, unlike Mexico, which has a government in the process of losing territory to new, hyper-violent cartels.
Part of exerting such authority is what the Colombian government calls “land restitution” — clearing agricultural land of rebels and resettling families displaced by drug violence. Under the plan, dubbed the Victims and Land Restitution Law, families displaced from land by drug traffickers and paramilitary groups are to be resettled in areas cleared by the military in partnership with businesses. More than 300 families were reportedly resettled this month in “Las Catas,” an estate in northern Cordoba department once controlled by traffickers affiliated with infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar — also the chief stronghold of the BACRIMs.
“However, it is likely that in these areas [Santos] will face his biggest challenges both politically and logistically, especially in former paramilitary-controlled areas that have large, legitimate business interests,” Fox said. “There — as well as displacing alleged ‘guerrillas’ from their land, securing drug trafficking routes and extorting local industry — the AUC introduced a form of pseudo-legitimacy to the displacement of small land owners by in some cases working in conjunction with these big businesses.”
The government hopes to eventually expand the amount of restituted land to three million hectares over the next four years. But, as Fox points out, there’s no guarantee resettled families won’t face threats and violence from the FARC and the BACRIMs. Likewise, the government will not only encounter “stiff resistance from wealthy private land owners and criminal groups who have been able to expand their holdings through nefarious means, but will also have to battle with corrupt state officials who have a stake in the matter, or what Santos termed the ‘Black Hand.’”
Meanwhile, be cautious about buying FARC cattle. You’ll have to pay a tax to the rebels if you want to keep them.