Word: colombia
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Leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) since it was formed in 1964, Pedro Antonio Marin was known to his comrades-in-arms by his nom de guerre, Manuel Marulanda--or by the nickname Tirofijo, "Sureshot," which he earned for his marksmanship. The son of a peasant farmer, and a rebel fighter since his teens, Marulanda lived much of his life in Colombia's mountains and jungles. There, despite having only a sixth-grade education, he directed FARC's antigovernment operations, kidnapping and, later, drug trafficking. He was believed...
This was hardly the finale that Marulanda envisioned after so many years of armed struggle. He was still in his teens, the son of a poor farming family in Colombia's northwestern Antioquia province, when he went into the mountains in 1948 as a Liberal partisan fighting against Conservative paramilitary gangs. This was the start of Colombia's decades-long fratricidal slaughter, la violencia. When it ended in the early 1960s, revolutionaries like Marulanda found the new Liberal-Conservative establishment as corrupt and oppressive as the old guard; and so he founded the FARC in 1964. That sparked a bloody...
...among even Colombians who once saw the group as a corrective to their country's admittedly epic inequalities. The U.S. and later the European Union designated the FARC as a terrorist organization. When the U.S. finally came to Bogota's aid in 2000 with the multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia, a counter-insurgency mission disguised as a drug-interdiction project, Colombia's once laughable military began knocking the FARC to the mat. As a result, conservative President Alvaro Uribe is enjoying approval ratings as high as the Colombian sierras...
Aside from being a ferocious fighter, Marulanda also loved to dance and reportedly sired several children around the country. Like Colonel Aureliano Buendia (who himself sired 17 sons by 17 different women) in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombia's Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marulanda was a legendary rebel warrior. And like the fictional Buendia, Marulanda died of natural causes in old age as an enigma. In Garcia Marquez's classic, a character wonders if the colonel "had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought," but rather...
...most likely answer in Marulanda's case, as it was for so many Latin American guerrilla leaders, is that he was driven by both impulses. Despite the cynical thuggery his rebel army has become known for in its twilight, Marulanda's original struggle was heartfelt: Colombia was and remains one of the most socially unequal countries on a continent whose inequalities are still among the world's worst. Whether he fought for idealism or pride, the injustices he and all the other Che Guevaras targeted in the 20th century still have to be tackled before Latin America can enter...