Do Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have a multibillion-dollar fortune from kidnapping and drug trafficking stashed in foreign bank accounts?
That question has triggered an explosive debate in Colombia just as it tries to turn the page on the half-century conflict between the government and the Marxist rebel group.
The FARC’s ill-gotten gains have long been a subject of scrutiny, but the issue was blown wide open again when The Economist put a number on the guerrillas’ alleged fortune.
The British weekly reported that the FARC had assets of US$10.5 billion in 2012, citing an unpublished study by government analysts.
The article opened a new rift between the FARC and the government even as negotiators from both sides work to hammer out the final details of a peace accord at long-running talks in Havana.
“What a joke that Economist story. They should check their sources and not believe stories about the insurgency’s imaginary fortune,” the FARC’s chief peace negotiator, Ivan Marquez, wrote on Twitter. “No human being takes up arms against an unjust regime to get rich.”
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos had a very different take.
“I don’t have the slightest doubt... [that the FARC] probably have money somewhere,” Santos said.
At the height of its strength in the 1990s and 2000s, the FARC made huge amounts of cash kidnapping wealthy citizens for ransom, operating illegal mines in territory under its control and running a large chunk of the drugs trade in the world’s largest cocaine-producing nation, but it is hard to pin down exactly how much.
“Estimating the FARC’s resources will always be a matter of speculation,” said Gustavo Duncan, a Colombian academic who researches the guerrillas’ involvement in drug trafficking.
Several experts on the conflict and sources close to the rebels dismissed the estimate published by The Economist as exaggerated, but beyond the matter of the exact amount, “what’s important is the availability of those resources as part of the peace negotiations,” Duncan said.
“That money should serve to pay reparations to victims of the conflict and not to fatten personal fortunes,” he said.
The rebels for their part insist they have no money, a claim political analysts tend to reject.
“It’s important that the FARC declare what they have. Their position is to say they have nothing, that they’re poor, but that’s an exaggeration, because we know they’ve lived off of kidnappings, extortion and drug trafficking,” said Frederic Masse, a specialist in conflicts and peace negotiations at Colombia’s Externado University.
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