Introduction
In August of 2016, I was thumbing through my Facebook feed on my phone when I saw Sergio's post:Footnote 1 ‘See you at the Décima!’
My left thumb braked its upward motion. I clicked the link and craned my neck to read a press release that the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia − Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army, FARC–EP)Footnote 2 had posted on its blog. The Marxist guerrilla group was blowing open its tenth guerrilla conference (henceforth, the Décima) to the media, instructing journalists to apply for accreditation by filling out five columns on an Excel spreadsheet and sending the file to a Gmail address.
I had interviewed Sergio five months earlier in Havana, Cuba. There the FARC and the Colombian government were in the final stretch of negotiating a peace accord. He had been directing the FARC's commission on propaganda. Our conversation focused on transformations in the FARC's media strategy during the four-year negotiating period, 2012–16, as the group experimented with the full functionality of media technologies and platforms it could only use provisionally as a guerrilla army under military and political siege. But that was in Havana. The Décima would take place in the plains of Yarí, deep in its own territory, along the northern edge of Colombia's Amazonian South. Unlike its nine previous conferences, internal conclaves convened in extreme secrecy, the FARC turned the Décima into a media extravaganza.Footnote 3 The conference's formal purpose was to ratify the peace agreement internally with representatives from its many units spread throughout the country, but it also served as a laboratory to test political strategies and discourses on the cusp of a transition to unarmed politics and to celebrate its 50 years of armed resistance to the Colombian state and its allies.
As the FARC embraced the logics and practices of consumer marketing, it moved onto symbolic ground where it faced a sharp disadvantage. Over the first 16 years of the new millennium, the government had honed its media warfare capabilities.Footnote 4 Of the FARC's numerous miscalculations throughout the negotiating period, its rash embrace of spectacle as a locus of political struggle has evaded systemic analysis. What I will argue is that the group's vanguardist structure – in which its two central leadership organs, the Secretariado and Estado Mayor, held a near monopoly on setting the strategic direction of the group – led it on a foolhardy exercise to brand itself as the leader of a counter-hegemonic coalition in the post-accord period. Although the group's high-ranking commanders envisioned the FARC spearheading a broad political mobilisation, the group struggled to maintain internal consensus and retain the allegiance of its former combatants.
Even before the peace accord was signed and approved by the Colombian Congress in November 2016, think-tank analysts and academics warned of an all too predictable remobilisation that would echo the failures of peace agreements and amnesties past.Footnote 5 The pitfalls they foresaw included a lack of gainful opportunities for ex-combatants; thriving illegal economies that provide powerful incentive for former guerrillas to re-arm and for other armed factions to vie for the territory that the FARC–EP had held; a lack of government capacity to implement ambitious reforms in territories where it had a minimal imprint; the ongoing threat of ruthless right-wing groups; and the complex and highly sensitive legal quandaries posed by transitional justice. These are all important parts of the story and factor into my analysis; however, what I want to explore in this article is the often-overlooked element of the FARC's symbolic and discursive strategies throughout the transitional period. Its decision to host the Décima – which included nightly concerts on a stage fit for the Rolling Stones (see Figure 1) – and the event's unfolding at the threshold of its demobilisation illuminate how the group imagined the transitional moment and shed light on its internal divisions, both of which have marked the trajectory of post-accord Colombia.
Figure 1. Esteban, a Young Rapper and Member of the FARC, Performs Onstage with the Bogotá-Based Reggae Band Alerta-Kamarada
Source: Photo by author.
The FARC's emphasis on media spectacle from the late negotiating period to the early implementation period, 2015–18, of which the Décima was paradigmatic, shifted its political struggle onto a lopsided terrain of spectacular competition. Engaging in such culture-industry tactics was at odds with its historical commitment to grassroots organising and its Marxist–Leninist theoretical orientation. The broader rebrand spurred internal division as factions struggled to define the contours of the border between spectacle and politics. Those divisions only grew as the FARC leadership hubristically believed in its ability to effectively wield spectacular power despite a series of disadvantages, not the least of which being a generational cum technological one.
This article combines a written and photographic ethnography of the Décima, theoretical engagement with Guy Debord's concept of ‘integrated spectacle’, and analysis of the still-unfolding post-accord period to highlight and understand how the FARC's symbolic and discursive strategies have contributed to its political faltering during the transitional period. The ethnography was carried out throughout the intensive one-week duration of the conference and consisted of participant observation, interviews and documentary photography (methods that blended, given the journalistic nature of the event). Photography allowed me to process the symbolic dimensions of the conference and explore its admixture of on- and off-stage elements. Interviews, semi-structured and unstructured, as well as less formal conversations with guerrillas at the Décima, at all levels of rank – from the Secretariat to the rank and file – illuminated the FARC's analysis of its then present and future. This mini-ethnography builds upon a decade of qualitative research on the propagandistic dimension of the Colombian armed conflict and a two-year-long ethnography with guerrillas who had deserted (demobilised in the government's parlance) from the FARC–EP in the 2000s and early 2010s, as well as research into the FARC's media practices in Havana, Cuba, throughout the negotiating period. This previous research provided insights into the state of spectacular political contestation and the organisational culture of the FARC in the period just before and during the peace negotiations.
The ‘Integrated Spectacle’ in Latin America
June of 1968 saw a burst of protests in South America, from La Paz (Bolivia) to Guayaquil (Ecuador) to Caracas (Venezuela). It is beyond the scope of this article to determine who inspired whom in the global diffusion of uprisings in the spring and summer months of that tumultuous year. I will limit myself to affirming recent scholarship that argues against a unidirectional flow in which protests in Latin America followed the lead of student uprisings in Europe and the United States.Footnote 6 While contemporary Marxist theory and avant-garde antics in Europe did circulate widely on Latin American campuses, student leaders were keenly aware of contextual differences and local determinants. A Uruguayan student, for example, quipped to a journalist from Marcha, ‘The French students were inspired by Che Guevara and I don't know if you are aware that Che was a Latin American.’Footnote 7 Historian Victoria Langland quotes a reflection by Brazilian activist Amir Haddad: ‘Today, twenty years later, we remember ’68 in Brazil and in the world. And naturally we associate the Brazilian agitation with what was going on in Europe at the same time. But in 1968 I only wanted to free myself from that nightmare of a regime that oppressed me and my country.’Footnote 8
Although situationist-inspired graffiti scrawled on the walls of Paris, which played with language as an expression of ideology, did not translate fluidly across the Atlantic, playful bravado reverberated across contexts. As protests of the late 1960s in Latin America morphed into a second wave of insurgency in the early 1970s, which was more urban in orientation than the FARC–EP and its rural predecessors, or of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and their peasant-based movement, the tactics of the new groups became, well, spectacular. The insurgencies of Ação Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Action, ALN) and Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (8 October Revolutionary Movement, MR8) in Brazil, Tupamaros in Uruguay, Montoneros and Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army, ERP) in Argentina, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR) in Chile, and the Movimiento 19 de Abril (19 April Movement, M-19) in Colombia engaged in symbolic banditry, stealing national symbols, dramatically seizing and redistributing the contents of food or milk trucks in working-class neighbourhoods, and perpetrating high-profile kidnappings and ‘trials’.Footnote 9 These groups stretched beyond the doctrine and discipline of local communist parties (often after formal breaks from them) to blend leftist critique with pranksterism and novel communication strategies that allowed them to make inroads with the urban working class and liberal bourgeoisie. The wave came crashing down by the mid-1970s under the weight of state security apparatuses that infiltrated and repressed the movements.Footnote 10 The FARC–EP, by contrast, remained true to its rural origins for decades. Only after the Séptima and the Octava (its seventh and eighth conferences) in 1982 and 1993 did it cautiously begin to shift its attention to urban centres and try to adapt its political style accordingly. The Décima was the group's most dramatic experiment with urban communication strategies and techniques, even as it was situated deep in its rural territory.
Since the 1970s, spectacle has become both a prominent New Left critique and a defining feature of politics from Patagonia to Alaska. The critique literature has expanded exponentially but unevenly across the Americas with Latin American scholarship mostly avoiding it until recent years.Footnote 11 Silvio Waisbord writes that communication studies in Latin America ‘evolved with one ear close to theoretical arguments in Western Europe and the other tuned to historical and contemporary developments in the region’.Footnote 12 The field emerged at the same time as it did in the West, in the 1960s and 1970s, pioneered by figures such as Nestor García Canclini and Jesús Martín-Barbero, who helped to consolidate a research agenda that centred on critiques of capitalism, cultural analysis and nuanced understandings of media imperialism.Footnote 13 It had a uniquely Latin American trajectory but built on a hybrid constellation of referents, which, according to Waisbord, featured ‘John Berger and Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Antonio Gramsci, Raúl Prebisch and Darcy Ribeiro, Herbert Marcuse and Régis Debray, Julia Kristeva and Theodore Adorno, Paulo Freire and José Carlos Mariátegui’. This article begs the contrapositive, what if Guy Debord and his situationist movement had been among the seminal references for the scholarly literature of Latin American communication studies? What new insights might blending this line of critique with historically rooted socio-political analysis in Latin America generate?
My own emphasis is not on spectacle as first articulated by Debord in his now-seminal text The Society of the Spectacle (1967) but rather focuses on its revision, 21 years later, in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988). In his own essay on Comments Giorgio Agamben said, ‘Probably the most disquieting aspect of Debord's books is the fact that history seems to have committed itself to relentlessly confirm their analyses.’Footnote 14 Debord's 1967 text and the Situationists International lent the students of Paris a playful language that they would mobilise in 1968. In 1988, Debord's prescience centred upon a new element of his understanding of spectacle – ‘I only need add a single detail to my earlier formulations’. The ‘single detail’ emerged out of his previous distinction between the ‘concentrated spectacle’ of dictatorial iconography and the ‘diffuse spectacle’ of commodity images.Footnote 15 In his estimation, the two categories, concentrated and diffuse, had fused to become an ‘integrated spectacle’. This melding, he notes, entailed ‘the general victory of the form which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse’.Footnote 16 Debord described the subsumption of the concentrated into the diffuse such that the strength of the integrated spectacle eclipsed the spectacle's previous iterations. ‘When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality.’Footnote 17
The conclusion may be hyperbolic but, given the confluence of technological and ideological developments through the 1970s and 1980s (and since), it also appears prophetic. Although Debord slips into presenting the integrated spectacle as an omnipresent false-consciousness machine (for which he was severely criticised at the time),Footnote 18 the fundamental insight – that the two forms of spectacle had fused – provides a productive prism to refract political phenomena in the early twenty-first century, from Trumpism and the authoritarian celebrity presidency,Footnote 19 to the public−private symbolic system of contemporary China,Footnote 20 to the intensely mediated rise and fall of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).Footnote 21
McKenzie Wark interprets the integrated spectacle by highlighting the influence of the concentrated spectacle as it is absorbed into the integrated, specifically the concentrated's hostility to transparency. The integrated spectacle therefore is a matter of not only mass distraction (diffuse) and dishonesty (both diffuse and concentrated), but also authoritarian secrecy (concentrated). She argues that ‘the integrated spectacle not only extended the spectacle outwards, but also inwards; the falsification of the world had reached by this point even those in charge of it’.Footnote 22 The integrated spectacle's alternative hypervisibility and opacity – even to those who wield it professionally – make it extremely productive as a tactic while vacuous as a strategy. This decline into spectacle for spectacle's sake, the integrated spectacle's capture of ideology, is what I witnessed at the Décima.
However, contra Wark, who views this as a universal phenomenon, I approach it as a situated one in which political contestation on the ground of integrated spectacle is inherently uneven. The unevenness has everything to do with the layered history of spectacular politics, the advantage of experience for certain actors, and the disparate resources available for waging spectacular struggle. When power differentials are accounted for, integrated spectacle offers insights into contemporary Latin American politics. As pendular swings between left and right roil the region, the mode of politics remains tethered to spectacular tactics that continually adapt to technological developments.Footnote 23 From this vantage, FARC leaders who are in their 50s and 60s and have spent long stretches of their lives ‘in the mountain’ and on the run are not exceptional, only less seasoned, given their relatively insular experience and ideological biases.Footnote 24
In what follows, I enter into the spectacular world that the FARC created in the Décima and identify two miscalculations the group made in its analysis of ‘the correlation of forces’ (a Gramscian term for a systemic analysis of power adopted by the FARC–EP). First, it overestimated how underdevelopment and inequality might lend it a social and moral advantage while underestimating its political isolation. Second, it failed to anticipate the impact of the drive of family reconnection on its rank and file. The FARC's faulty projections into the post-accord period set the stage for the fragmentation of the group. Post-accord dynamics are too numerous to synthesise here, suffice to note that the fragmentation of the FARC has contributed to the uncertainty that permeates Colombia in the present moment (early 2022). A slow and ineffective implementation of the 2016 accord, the return of a right-wing administration to power in 2018 that has further undermined the implementation of the agreement, a resurgence of reactionary violence, and vibrant illegal economies have all contributed to remobilisation of the FARC's former combatants as dissidents.Footnote 25 Most estimates (and it is important to emphasise that these are only estimates) tally approximately 3,000 armed dissidents, which is roughly a third of the total number of the FARC's armed fighters who demobilised as part of the 2016 accord.Footnote 26 Enzo Nussio and Rafael Camilo Quishpe describe this dynamic of small groups and individuals pulling away from the main FARC group as centrifugal and create a matrix of factors – rival opportunities, local support, and leadership (especially of mid-level commanders) – that accounts for this centrifugal dispersion.Footnote 27 The centrifugal tendency grew in 2019 when high-ranking commanders Iván Márquez, Jesús Santrich, El Paisa and Romaña absconded to an area bordering Venezuela to form their own guerrilla group, ‘Segunda Marquetalia’.Footnote 28 Other prominent leaders, such as Joaquín Gómez, Victoria Sandino and Benkos Biohó, have remained faithful to the peace accord while openly critical of Timoleón Jiménez's leadership of the new political party, which had adopted the acronym FARC but with the name Fuerza Revolucionaria Alternativa del Común (Common Alternative Revolutionary Force). In 2021 the group renamed itself simply ‘Comunes’, a party on the verge of irrelevance if not extinction.
Illegal economies of narco-trafficking and extortion are centrifugal forces in that they undermine the unity of the FARC political party by tempting its members to re-arm, either with dissident factions or other armed groups (including cartels). These active groups capitalise on the structural conditions of poverty and inequality to recruit former combatants and disaffected youth, a key demographic in the ongoing political violence.Footnote 29 In short, the recombinatory war machine of the layered armed conflicts in Colombia flows onward like a raging river that has only been momentarily slowed and moderately diverted by a fallen tree trunk, the historically rooted insurgency of the FARC–EP.
My ethnographic analysis of the Décima is as much about spectacle as it is about the spectacular buckling of a type of peace, which was built out of the hollow beams of marketing. The Colombian government used brand strategies to persuade guerrillas to abandon the armed struggle and inform on their former comrades, then trying to rehabilitate the ex-combatants as consumer citizens and entrepreneurial subjects. In this article we see how guerrillas engage in their own marketing in a bid to undo the story repeated about them as a less-than-human internal enemy and present themselves as a viable political movement. Analysing the way that the last bastion of armed Marxism in the Americas experimented with mass publicity offers an opportunity to hone our theoretical tools for understanding mediated spectacle in post-accord Colombia, a case with implications for Latin American politics more broadly.
Usted Está Aquí / You Are Here
‘You want to solve the country's problems? Demobilise the FARC and sign them up to the Sisben [a Colombian public–private healthcare scheme].’ The driver smirked, trying not to laugh at his own joke. The four of us passengers had met at the baggage carousel of the airport in Florencia, the provincial capital of Caquetá Department. We had all arrived on a plane packed with visitors to the Décima. We – a reporter–photographer duo for the Los Angeles Times, a blogger for the prominent Colombian web portal Las2Orillas, and myself, a media anthropologist – banded together to rent a long-distance taxi. The Colombian blogger and I smiled at the wry insinuation that the privatised health system is deadlier than the military. The punchline eluded the Los Angeles Times journalists, so I played my role as a researcher / cultural translator for my Western counterparts – and I translated the joke. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer riding shotgun did not react, folding open her copy of the New York Times to resume reading.
The next day we travelled onward in a pickup truck that we contracted. Orange-red dust kicked up behind us. Luckily it had not rained and the roads were passable. The driver, a local cattle rancher, transported us for the money but also to satisfy his curiosity. For the last two months he had watched trucks haul: event staging flown in from Medellín, scores of mini-mattresses, more than 100 cattle to be slaughtered and crates upon crates of beer, among other provisions.
When we finally arrived at the FARC camp, we stretched our legs and walked to a wooden structure marked with a sign: ‘Accreditation’. Inside, a reception team smiled, welcomed us and registered our documents. They sat us down on plastic chairs to explain the procedure for soliciting interviews with guerrilla leaders. Leading the media team was Milena, who explained that all interviews must be formally requested, that we could speak to and photograph whoever we wanted, but if we wanted to use a recording device, video or audio, that required filling out a form and the FARC would respond to the request the next day.Footnote 30 The FARC had entered the public-relations logic of controlling the message; they would have no problem with discipline – that they were good at.
Alfonso, a tall guerrilla who had his hair tucked beneath a bandana, led us into the guerrilla encampment across the road to allocate our very own guerrilla living quarters. Makeshift huts built from cut branches and rolls of black plastic or olive-green nylon drawn taught with rope lined the path. Each hut provided shelter to individual guerrilla fighters or guerrilla couples, and often carried its own personal touch, such as a heart-shaped window in a wall (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. The Side Window of a Guerrilla's Living Quarters
Source: Photo by author.
When it came time to show me to my quarters, Alfonso guided me over a small footbridge and inside a hut, then pointed to my bed. On top of my mattress lay a sheet, a mosquito net and a thin blanket, all in unopened packaging. I pulled out the blanket, pausing to inspect its patterning. Winnie-the-Pooh! Though such Disney detritus can be found throughout the Colombian countryside – including FARC territoriesFootnote 31 – and its placement in my bunk or cambuche was entirely coincidental, the honey-licking bear's cameo in the middle of the Décima resonated with my own interest in the FARC's efforts to project a gentler, more humane image of itself throughout the negotiating period.
My neighbour (see Figure 3) came over to welcome me. ‘If you need anything, let me know’, he said. I thanked him and then decided to take a self-guided tour of the camp. Not only were journalists living side by side with the rebels, but they would bath side by side as well. I walked down to the river where two journalists were documenting a group of rebels washing themselves and their clothes (see Figure 4). With varying levels of discretion, the unlikely neighbours would size up each other's bodies in the river, a scene that became decreasingly awkward with each day that passed.
Figure 3. My Neighbour Reads and Listens to the Radio outside of His Hut
Source: Photo by author.
Figure 4. Photographer Álvaro Cardona Documents FARC Guerrillas Bathing in the River
Source: Photo by author.
Although familiarity with the other grew gradually, the artificiality of the conceit of inviting large numbers of journalists to cohabitate with the guerrillas meant that the camera and notepad-wielding visitors hoping for an authentic experience would remain frustrated. Their coping strategy, by and large, was to cast for their guerrilla and tell the story of the FARC's transition through that character. Writing in the Colombian blog La Silla Vacía, Catalina Lobo-Guerrero recalls how one of her colleagues complained that ‘mine is talking with another journalist’ and keenly observed that ‘it's as if he was being unfaithful’.Footnote 32 Journalists had to not only find their insurgent, but also coax candid personal stories out from behind a wall of guerrilla talking points. During the week I spent in the FARC's camp in the plains of Yarí, I came to realise the scale of the experiential marketing operation that the group had engineered and appreciate the complexity of this public-relations extravaganza crossed with eco-conflict tourism.Footnote 33 (Some demobilised guerrillas have since tried to capitalise on such eco-political tourism, guiding tours through their former territory.)
After surveying the guerrilla encampment upon my arrival, I walked the half-mile up the road to the conference grounds where the guerrillas had erected a series of wooden buildings and white tents. The FARC had restricted access to the buildings where it caucused and its leaders lodged, but journalists could wander anywhere else. The sprawling grounds included a canteen for the troops equipped with a billiards table, television, bar and ice-cream corner; the guerrillas’ health post, a small house serving as an infirmary and dental service; a giant press tent separated into one area where press conferences were held at 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily and another where the swarm of journalists could craft and file their reports (see Figure 5); and a massive state-of-the-art stage built on an expansive field. It took some orientation to learn the lie of the land. The guerrillas figured that visitors might be overwhelmed and designed a bilingual site map of what it called ‘New Colombia Theme Park’ (see Figure 6). They displayed the map in different parts of the premises, each with the appropriate ‘You Are Here’ stamp.
Figure 5. Journalists Work in the Press Tent
Source: Photo by author.
Figure 6. New Colombia Theme Park, Site Map
Source: Photo by author.
The first time I stumbled upon this map, I stood before it to take it in. ‘Usted Está Aquí / You Are Here’. But where is here? What does it mean for the FARC to have conceived of this site as New Colombia Theme Park? The New Colombia part is not coincidental: the group had named its news-production company New Colombia News and had been betting its political regeneration – going back to 1993 – on the generic idea of building a different Colombia, covering its socialist ideology beneath the less-controversial bid for change in the abstract. But what to make of the idea of a theme park? It evoked ‘Farclandia’, a term the Colombian military used to deride the decision of President Pastrana (1998–2002) to withdraw the Colombian military from four municipalities as a precondition for negotiating with the FARC. Back then, cocaine served as currency and journalists flocked to drink whisky and take photographs of the last of a type: the Latin American jungle revolutionary. A similar logic of salvage journalism returned in the Décima, as did many of the same journalists who had covered the Caguán negotiations. But now, in the Décima, the echoes between Farclandia and Disneylandia became more explicit: a theme park, a destination, an experience – an adventure!Footnote 34
Halfway through the Décima, FARC leaders began to wear white tee-shirts with the conference's aquamarine logo, a profile drawing of a triumvirate of the FARC–EP's historic guerrilla commanders. The three faces on the logo were of Manuel Marulanda, the group's co-founder and patriarch; Jacobo Arenas, its historic ideologue; and Alfonso Cano, the commander who had authorised the diplomatic contacts that would lead to the negotiations ending in the 2016 accord − who the military killed before news of the then-incipient negotiations became public in 2011.
The iconography smacked of the three heads of Marxism, with the stacked profiles of Marx, Engels and Lenin used by the Soviet Union, and later updated to include the jawline of Stalin. Such imagery, in Debordian terms, exemplifies the concentrated spectacle of bureaucratic, totalitarian systems. The FARC–EP had always aspired to state socialism of a Soviet variety (one FARC leader I spoke with defended Stalin's legacy).Footnote 35 To Colombian publics outside of the FARC's small counter-public, the logo celebrating guerrilla leadership would appear as a three-headed monster; and to those publics on the far-right, a monster to be slain or otherwise disappeared. Such predictable politics and their imagery, honed and repeated over decades, took on a new texture as the logo was applied to tee-shirts, tote bags, baseball caps, CDs, pens, ponchos, calendars, bandanas and mugs (see Figure 7). Such merchandising gestured toward the brand-based politics of contemporary capitalism and its ‘diffuse spectacle’ of commodity abundance, even as the content was decidedly ‘concentrated’ – a quintessential instantiation of Debord's integrated spectacle, in which the diffuse incorporates the concentrated.Footnote 36
Figure 7. A Selection of Merchandise the FARC Distributed at the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
I will return to an analysis of the logo and merchandise at the end of this article. What is important to note at this point is that, internally, not everyone in the FARC was on the same page about this rebranding project. As the prospect of legal politics approached, the FARC's vanguardist structure, so pithily expressed in the iconography of the Décima, would face challenges at different levels of the organisation.
Projecting Brand FARC
As a Marxist–Leninist organisation, the FARC–EP has always been unabashedly vanguardist, its leaders debating and determining the organisation's plans and policies. It became clear during the Décima that the FARC was plotting a post-accord mobilisation that would rely on its party structure, clandestine networks and a co-mobilisation with marginalised sectors. On each front it was making preparations. I learned from one commander that the group was selectively opening its door to those who had defected in the last decade. It had begun looking to broaden its political work with peasant, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian social movements in the regions where they had operated, pre-emptively trying to smooth over contentious histories. But exactly how this broader mobilisation might work after commanders lost their ability to coerce subordinates and strong-arm and bribe civil society was an open question.
An increasingly arduous confrontation with a much larger and better-equipped adversary had left the FARC's rank and file fatigued. The conflict also frayed relations with civil-society groups that had been thrust between armed groups. In FARC-influenced territories civil society had mixed reactions, anticipating the insurgency's demobilisation so it could extend its own agency, while also fearing for the uncertain future that would come after the FARC turned in its weapons.Footnote 37 At the heart of the FARC's political plans and public projections were calculations regarding popular discontent about underdevelopment and inequality, as well as its own standing in left-oriented civil society.
Federico Montes is one of the group's most articulate ideologues and the political leader of Caquetá Department. I asked him why the group had engineered a media event of such magnitude.
FM: By having an event of these proportions we are showing people what the true intentions and motivations of the FARC are, our real character, our real political disposition. I don't interpret this event as something sumptuous but rather as another effort to connect with the people. It's a moment when the guerrillas are also rediscovering the world. You would only see a stage like this during Patriot Plan [a military offensive] when [the government] made those shows as part of campaigns against the FARC. They organised concerts all over Colombia as part of an apology for their war against the people.
AF: You are picking up the same tools.
FM: Of course, it's like in the war. The adversary creates a 120 mortar, we also create a 120 mortar […] It's about the correlation of forces, trying to achieve a balance.
AF: But the [government's] media campaigns have borne fruit.
FM: Yes, fruit based on lies, lies that will fall on account of their own weight. When you build a successful campaign based on the truth, we believe it'll last longer.
Montes made a distinction between their media strategy and their adversaries’, saying:
They [presumably the government and its corporate allies] make a whole campaign to create a need. We are not going to have to create a need through the media; we only have to reflect what already exists in objective reality. That's not difficult in a country like Colombia with such high levels of inequality.
Montes is correct to identify spectacle as a site of struggle, but the nuances of that struggle evade him. His faith in the ability to align spectacle and reality is logical but illusory.Footnote 38 For Montes and other FARC leaders operating in the mimetic logic of guerrilla warfare, producing such an elaborate show was the beginning of not only neutralising hegemonic spectacles put on by the government but also setting their own frame with a message that is more closely aligned with social conditions. What they failed to realise is that spectacle had already been bending reality and it would take work and resources far beyond their means to unbend it. Montes and his colleagues did not appreciate the cumulative effect of seven decades of Cold War propaganda centred on a discourse of an internal enemy and the intensifying spectacularisation of Colombian society.
The FARC not only lagged far behind in this mode of politics, but it also had to contend with a fundamental ideological shift since its last major experiment with electoral politics after the Uribe Accords of 1984. Colombia's neoliberal turn in the early 1990s began to produce its cultural corollary by the turn of the millennium in the form of a spate of telenovelas and films that lionised aspirational narratives of individual enrichment that often glorified violence, a precursor to the current rush of narco-novelas. By the time the FARC had made its experimental turn toward brand politics, the entwinement of neoliberalism and spectacle had already transformed Colombian society. My own read is that tactics began to take the place of strategy for the FARC, and the group's faith in ‘the combination of all of the forms of struggle’, a catch-all justification for using any method at its disposal, led it to believe that it could appropriate twenty-first-century political marketing without realising that twenty-first-century marketing had already been honing its own better-funded and more all-encompassing version of ‘combining all of the forms of struggle’.Footnote 39 One of the things that this meant for the FARC was that its prior experience launching a legal political party in the mid-1980s, the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP), was inoperable.Footnote 40
This is not to say that the unsustainable ballooning of inequality did not offer an opportunity to exploit a political opening; it is just that the FARC's leadership was not in the best position to do it. Hubris steeped in decades of a hierarchical structure, in which decisions could not be effectively challenged from below without fear of retribution, led its leaders to wrongly presume that it would lead a leftist coalition. What becomes apparent through the ethnographic analysis is that the FARC miscalculated its ability to capitalise on the discontents of inequality and underdevelopment in part because it was yet to emerge from its ideological bubble (which security measures for self-preservation helped to reinforce), and in part because it misunderstood how the intensification of spectacle in the digital age has increasingly permeated the beginning of the twenty-first century.Footnote 41
Bubbling beneath Brand FARC
On day four of the Décima, while I was observing the FARC's media team interact with the press, Marta Ruiz arrived. She is one of Colombia's premier journalists, respected for her even-handed coverage, and has gone on to become one of the 11 members of the Truth Commission set up by the peace accord. The FARC had invited her as one of its 40 VIPs. As she registered, Iván Ali, a politically gifted regional commander from the Eastern Bloc who was working with the media team, said, ‘Marta, tell me, what's tomorrow's headline?’ ‘The FARC's brand is finished’, Ruiz responded. Ali, who normally listened quietly and exchanged friendly banter with the visitors, sizing up their ideological tendencies, could not suppress his own objection. ‘Why does it have to end if we will be doing politics, building our movement?’ he said sharply. Ruiz acknowledged his point and did not press the matter.
For the media, the story of the conference was that of the FARC's last dance. For the FARC, the conference represented a celebration of its resistance and an opportunity to perform its transformation into a political movement. I interviewed Ali two days before his exchange with Ruiz (see Figure 8). He reflected on the question being debated by the guerrilla delegates at the Décima (i.e. what the FARC should call its political party):
Personally, I think we shouldn't give up on the name FARC. Why? Because that is what we've defended and fought for. FARC is more than a name. FARC is sacrifice. FARC is resistance. FARC is dreams. If you renounce that, you renounce who you are, part of yourself, part of the Colombian people. FARC isn't finished. The people are with us. It's true that they have made us into Satan, the devil. But, man, look, when you're small they tell you the devil is evil. Then you get to Barranquilla Carnival [and someone says] ‘there's the devil’, and everyone goes running. We are going to see if the people come running to see who the devil they call FARC is.
Figure 8. Iván Ali during an Interview at the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
People did come running in the 1980s when the FARC–EP launched the UP, curious and interested in what legal guerrilla politics looked like. Assassins hired by shadowy right-wing forces, however, popped the bubble of political effervescence by targeting the UP's leaders and cadres. So much had changed since the 1980s. The FARC's involvement in drug trafficking brought the group much-needed financing but cost it even more valuable legitimacy – a discursive weakness relentlessly exploited by its enemies. The paramilitary and military offensives of the 1990s and 2000s led the group to seek fickler recruits. Military pressure also thrust communities that had historically benefited from the FARC's ability to carry out state functions – such as mediating disputes and sponsoring development works – into the cross hairs of competing armed groups. Those communities then often turned on the guerrillas for attracting problems. Even at the carefully staged Décima conference, signs abounded that Ali's assertion ‘the people are with us’ was overstated.
The crisis spawned by the FARC's vanguardism is perhaps best viewed through the lens of internal command and control as the transition to civilian life approached. At times, the degree of allegiance the group would command from its own troops after the accord was not clear. My first indication that the FARC's pivot to culture-industry-like politics was tinged with an admixture of naivete and bravado came during the first night of the conference. I stopped by the guerrillas’ canteen and spotted Sergio, who had written the Facebook post from which I had learned that the FARC was treating the Décima as a media event. He wore olive military pants tucked into black boots and a green bandana around his neck. After he finished posing for photographs (see Figure 9), he greeted me warmly.
Figure 9. Sergio Poses for Photographs in the Guerrillas’ Canteen at the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
After a bit of small talk while sipping Poker beers, he asked, ‘Are you going to the concert?’ ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Vamos!’ he said, as he slapped me on the shoulder. We walked behind the wooden bathroom stalls and onto a giant field. The concert staging glowed in the distance, colourful lighting beaming diagonally onto the stage. Music made further conversation impossible.
After the concert ended, I found myself milling around with Sergio in the pit area. A woman approached him to ask if he knew about her son's whereabouts. He dismissed her, suggesting that perhaps he was last seen in the FARC's 1st Front, the only front at the time openly in defiance of the peace accord. The implication being that her son was not under the FARC's control (and may still be in danger) and therefore the group was not responsible for his wellbeing. Certainly not the answer that she came looking for. She was not the only family member who had taken loans from neighbours to travel to the Décima in the hope of finding a loved one. The magnetic drive of familial reconnection pulsed along the edges of the conference and has proven to be a weak link in the guerrillas’ post-accord plans, which depended on a united cadre of party members who could then mobilise other sectors.
One evening in the middle of the conference, Aries Vigoth, a regional star of folkloric music from the eastern plains (see Figure 10), read notes that audience members passed him from below the stage. Most of these were song requests and dedications. One of the notes, however, read: ‘Carrillo, from the Yarí Front, your family hasn't seen you for 20 years and it needs you urgently. If you are here, please come toward the stage and let yourself be seen. Your family is here, waiting, hoping to see you.’ The crowd let out a collective gasp.
Figure 10. Aries Vigoth, a Musician of Traditional Music from the Eastern Plains, Performs at the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
After a moment of silent staring toward the stage, applause erupted and journalists swarmed the young man as he embraced his mother. Among the journalists in attendance, rumours circulated that a reporter from Caracol, a leading TV network and part of an economic group controlled by the powerful Santo Domingo family, had engineered the dramatic moment.Footnote 42 The spectacle had spun out of the FARC's control.
FARC leadership was not blind to the threat of its former fighters abandoning the movement after the peace accord. When I spoke with Boris, the group's lead videographer and a key member of its Havana-based news team, and Tanja, the FARC's Dutch foreign-fighter-celeb (see Figure 11), they were focused on the economic re-integration on the horizon. ‘We have to offer them something. If they want to leave, that's fine, but it shouldn't be because we didn't have anything to offer’, Tanja said. ‘Something that works in the long term, that's worthwhile. That's what we're betting on […] Money, work, that's what we need to provide for the guerrilla once he leaves’, Boris said. They articulated positions both for and against keeping the name FARC as the acronym for the political party the group would become.
Figure 11. Boris and Tanja, Two Key Figures in the FARC's Western Bloc and Media Team, Caucus between Interviews
Source: Photo by author.
It is not surprising that FARC leaders were still toying with their post-accord identity and messaging. So much was new. The Décima marked the end of the negotiating period, which served as a time to experiment with and adapt to twenty-first-century media politics. With more than 15 members at its height, the FARC's commission of communication and propaganda was the largest of its commissions in Cuba. Within it, debates raged about their New Colombia News YouTube channel, such as how much to mimic the style of corporate news broadcasts in Colombia versus how much to adapt Telesur’s model of television journalism, or to what degree they should forge a more grassroots aesthetic.Footnote 43 FARC cadres were still adapting to online platforms, hardware and software. Before the accord, Boris used quotable phrases such as ‘We will put down our rifles and pick up cameras’, which he said to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to describe their post-accord plans. At the Décima, guerrillas toted brand-new Canon SLR digital cameras and carried state-of-the-art MacBook Pro laptops more visibly than their rifles. I watched sympathisers who had completed master's degrees in media and communication programmes in other Latin American countries train young guerrillas on how to frame a tripod-based video shot and how to take and then repost screenshots to the web. The FARC had just begun to spread such training to youths throughout its fronts. Even journalists who frequented FARC camps found themselves describing the features of their equipment and demonstrating how to use it. The FARC set out to give itself a crash course on the diffuse spectacle, recruiting help where it could.
For all its efforts to make up for lost time and opportunities, the FARC's public-relations offensive was an uphill battle. The firm that it contracted to supply an internet connection to the conference only managed to provide an intermittent signal to a ten-metre radius from one antenna (see Figure 12). The late Santrich, the member of the FARC–EP's secretariat most consistently committed to the group's media and cultural production, acknowledged in our interview that they were up against a ‘voracious monster’ in transnational media corporations. In outlining a strategy for a counter-hegemonic media project, he said: ‘Now that we're legal we'll have to multiply communities’ participation in the communication decisions that we take. Before we couldn't because we were in the mountain or some secret area. Today whichever media we use, whether it is traditional radio and television or the new technologies online, we need to involve the community, initiatives of the working class [sectores populares].’
Figure 12. People Queue to Connect Their Phones to an Unstable Wi-Fi Signal. The Vendor, Conexión Amazon, Struggled to Provide Internet Coverage at the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
What I would emphasise in that quote is ‘we take’. What became clear throughout the conference was that the FARC envisioned itself leading a working-class coalition and a dispersed array of critical media projects. But rather than partnering with community-based media and alternative media, which were well represented at the Décima, the FARC sought to bring them under its wing.
The graphic instantiation of this vanguardism was on display throughout the conference, but especially in the final two days as the FARC propagated its new, professionally crafted, modern set of logos (see Figures 13–15). Those icons of guerrilla leaders (quintessential concentrated spectacle) increasingly saturated the grounds, appearing on banners, screens and the merchandise bursting out of black plastic bags in the main tents. The medium of concert-style merchandise (quintessential diffuse spectacle) gave currency to the joking monikers journalists gave the Décima, such as ‘FARC in the Park’, a riff on Bogotá's yearly Rock in the Park blowout, or ‘FARC Woodstock’. The FARC was performing a modern public-relations potlach in the key of the integrated spectacle without being fully aware of its nuances and inherent contradictions.
Figure 13. A FARC Delegate Hands Out Décima Tee-Shirts to Members of the Alternative Press
Source: Photo by author.
Figure 14. A Journalist Interviews a FARC Delegate
Source: Photo by author.
Figure 15. Juana, One of the Leaders of the FARC's Media Team, Presenting the Next Act in front of One of the FARC's New Logos Unveiled at the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
As the conference approached its conclusion, FARC fighters and citizens from the surrounding region wore the white tee-shirt that the FARC was distributing, the one with the aquamarine logo of its three historic leaders: Marulanda, Arenas and Cano. It became impossible to tell who was a member of the FARC and who was just attending the show (see Figure 16). The guerrilla tactic of blending into the civilian population was being remediated but this time not to hide a guerrilla affiliation but to multiply the appearance of one. It was not clear to what extent people were ‘putting on the jersey’, in the sense of the colloquial expression that connotes commitment to a cause or team, or simply putting on the shirt to participate in the event. The objective of branding the guerrilla group, conference and soon-to-be political party, however, was unmistakable.Footnote 44
Figure 16. Revellers Dance at the Last Night of the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
The formal raison d’être of the Décima was to allow representatives from all the FARC's fronts to debate and ultimately accept or reject the peace accord. The rank and file falling in line was a fait accompli.Footnote 45 The political party to be branded FARC soon after (Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común) would inherit the vanguardist model of the guerrilla insurgency of the same acronym. Whereas the exigencies of war could justify the leadership's secrecy in determining military and political strategies and tactics, the transition to peace entailed increasingly open debate within the FARC and among affine groups on the left. Matters of message and communication style were the first points of friction. Predictably the emphasis on branding, not only what to call the new political party but how to use limited and increasingly well-monitored resources, would prove divisive. The deliberations at the Décima about the name of the political party were just the beginning of an increasingly boisterous internal debate.Footnote 46 While the leadership envisioned leading a counter-hegemonic coalition to power, it was not clear that they could count on the loyalty of their own combatants who might no longer be in the thrall of the FARC–EP's origin story and mythology (in so far as guerrilla indoctrination successfully achieved and maintained such a thrall). Combatants on the verge of demobilising at the Décima were already increasingly surrounded by counter-messaging (see Figures 17 and 18).Footnote 47
Figure 17. FARC Members at the Décima Watch a National Newscast about the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
Figure 18. A FARC Member Reads about the Dissident Faction of the 1st Front at the Décima
Source: Photo by author.
To what extent, if any, could an aquamarine logo shore up internal and external allegiances? The group's concentrated spectacle was transforming into an integrated one in which the logic of diffusion began to spread, from the increased presence of corporate media to the looming family unifications. One harbinger of such diffusion at the Décima was the lists of names the media team kept of family members who had come searching for a relative in the guerrillas. The subject came out repeatedly in journalists’ interviews with guerrillas. After the talking points about the ongoing struggle dulled, most conversations with individual rebels about post-accord plans veered toward family, with many guerrillas showing more enthusiasm for seeing their parents, sisters and brothers than for promoting the political movement. Many had already downloaded images of their family from social networks and onto their phones with every megabyte of bandwidth they could muster.
Possibilities after Tragic Realism
In the final press conference, the FARC leadership announced the Décima's foregone conclusion: the delegates had unanimously approved the peace accord. Márquez, the FARC's principal negotiator and second in command, added a poetic flourish to the announcement: ‘Tell Mauricio Babilonia that they can now release the yellow butterflies.’ In invoking yellow butterflies, Márquez sought to depict the then-imminent signing of the peace accord as one filled with beautiful possibilities, romanticism in a Colombian key.
The reference to a paradigmatic scene of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gabriel García Márquez's signature style, magic realism, however, is a curious one. In García Márquez's masterpiece, Babilonia, whose presence is announced with a swarm of yellow butterflies, is ultimately paralysed by a bullet on account of confusion emerging from a prohibited love affair. Babilonia dies a lonely invalid, banished from Macondo. Following literary theorist Jeffrey Browitt's explication of the term, I would argue that Babilonia's yellow butterflies exemplify the ‘tragic realism’ of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in which a community is enchanted by nationalist modernisation but condemned to an amnesia that precludes it from navigating its torments and ultimately ends in tragedy of biblical proportions.Footnote 48 Perhaps this was not the best reference for a moment that hoped to challenge the cyclical history of amnesty/peace accord followed by rancorous accusations of betrayal followed by rearmament/remobilisation.Footnote 49 Within one year of Márquez's wistful evocation of García Márquez's fiction, the demobilisation/remobilisation cycle would be churning once more.
The details will be familiar to Colombianists, but they are worth noting here. Three days after the Décima concluded, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC leader Jiménez signed the agreement with a pen made from a bullet casing in an event featuring 15 heads of state and the UN Secretary General, all dressed in white. The prematurity of the pomp was jarring. One week later, with the ink barely dry, the Colombian people narrowly rejected the accord in a plebiscite.Footnote 50 Government and FARC negotiating teams tweaked the accord and passed it through the Colombian Congress, lending it a weak stamp of popular approval. The results from the plebiscite left the peace accord hobbled, an effect redoubled by the re-election of the Far Right to the presidency in 2018, a national election in which the FARC political party received a paltry 84,000 votes. According to a 2019 report by the UN's Verification Mission to Colombia, economic integration of former guerrillas has been lacking, with only about 30 per cent of the accredited ex-combatants receiving the seed money for either individual or collective re-integration projects.Footnote 51 The FARC's political party in early 2021 was down to below 1,500 members, from over 13,000 at its founding in 2017. Violence fuelled by illegal economies continues to engulf the regions, including the systematic assassination of social leaders and more-than-occasional murders of demobilised combatants.
Another blow to the pact came when the government brought drug-trafficking charges and extradition proceedings against Santrich, its lead propagandist cited earlier. The charges were ultimately dropped amid an intrigue-filled prosecutorial effort, but the distrust sown by the affair helped drive a wedge through the FARC leadership, sending Márquez, Santrich and other military and political commanders to return to clandestine guerrilla life. When the re-armed commanders appeared in a YouTube video, they were decked out in military fatigues and toting heavy weaponry. The iconography was familiar. Portraits of Marulanda, Simon Bolívar and fallen rebel leaders hung in a non-descript camp in a forest. This was a return to the FARC–EP's well-worn style of spectacle – concentrated and spectral. Concentrated for its one-party iconography, spectral because it derives its force not from omnipresence but from the fact that it could emerge out of the shadows, anywhere.
Ironically, the dissipation of the FARC as a unified group may be what makes way for the type of coalition politics necessary for systematic change in Colombia.Footnote 52 In late 2019–early 2020 and then again in the spring–summer of 2021, a general strike that did not rely on visible leadership mobilised across sectors. The strike, an expression of social desperation, signalled prospects of mass social awakening and also a renewed guerrilla conflict as it was violently suppressed (or some combination thereof). At such a crossroads, it is worth pausing to think about what spectacular or anti-spectacular politics might help peasant, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian students and labour movements co-mobilise. This is a subject for a new generation of scholars and Left organisers in Colombia and across the region who might benefit from (re-)reading Debord from a Latin American perspective and engaging in a sustained inquiry into integrated spectacle and how it might be productively disintegrated. For the lesson of the Décima is that integrated spectacle (a counter-revolutionary concept) is antithetical to a politics of coalition, which is so urgently lacking across Colombia's left−centre divide and grates against the Far Left's disposition toward vanguardism. Understanding integrated spectacle in its situated manifestation is a first step toward crafting a counter-hegemonic media/organising strategy that can help facilitate and steward a movement of movements.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Anthony Olorunnisola at Penn State for his flexibility, which allowed me to carry out this research. I am grateful to colleagues in the Anthropology Department at the University of Connecticut for their feedback as well as three anonymous reviewers who helped to strengthen the manuscript substantially. Thanks are due to everyone who sat for a formal interview or took time at the Décima to speak with me and share their story. For their camaraderie, friendship and keen insights into the surreal experience in the plains of Yarí, I want to acknowledge many of the journalists who attended the Décima. Back in Bogotá, long discussions with Darío Villamizar about the urban wave of guerrilla insurgency in Latin America have informed this article. Finally, a note of appreciation for my colleagues and students in the Communication Department at the University of California, San Diego, who have welcomed me into their vibrant and supportive intellectual community.
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