Colombia: The end for guerrilla warfare?

In Colombia: The end for guerrilla warfare?, the conclusion is:

An era of guerrilla warfare in Latin America is coming to an end. Exactly how the end game will be played out remains to be seen.

The primary reason for the failure of guerrilla warfare in Colombia is that the insurrection is against a domestic government that has maintained the veneer of legitimacy since the national war of liberation.

Instead, the origin of the guerrilla warfare was in the rural defense of the small farmers against the land grab of the large landlords. The decline in the insurregency appears to be the result of the migration of the small farmers to the urban centres.

What began as a civil war between the Liberal and Conservative parties became more and more clearly a war of the large landowners against the small landowners, especially those led by Liberal Party and communist self-defence forces in what came to be called the “independent republic”.

This urbanization led to the radicalisation of the urban poor. However, this radicalisation gave rise to recruits to the insurgency. This surge ran up against the material constraints of arms, food, and safety in the rural hinterland as the depopulation continues. So the insurgency cannot retrest to the countryside to be a Maoist one.

This is further complicated by the cocaine production which fueled both the insurgency and the repression as the land became valuable for production of cocoa leaves. Control of land and refining is valuable enough to kill for.

And the insurgency lost the political battle as:

…the FARC was more politically isolated than it had ever been before, and the ruling class of the country was more united than ever before in its determination to defeat the FARC. The Pastrana government had won the political victory it sought at the beginning of the negotiations.

And the military counter-insurgency succeeded because of technological developments as well as:

The offensive against the FARC also included an international component with three major goals: reducing sympathy for the FARC among the broad left in other countries, eliminating safe havens for FARC operations outside of Colombia and reducing FARC income from cocaine trading.

The end game is seen as:

Although the FARC still leads thousands of armed fighters and has the financial resources to continue fighting, the decimation of its leadership combined with its political isolation has brought it to the point of no return. It may enter into a new peace process with the government of Juan Manuel Santos, although it has little to bargain with. On the other hand, if it does not, the continued offensive against it by the Colombian military could result in its complete disintegration as an organised force.