Talk:Jacobo Arenas
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[edit] Article definitely needs cleaning up
It talks about so many things that "Jacobo Arenas" himself is apparently only incidental to the article's current content. Juancarlos2004 19:17, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
- Yes, we have articles on the FARC and the war for this stuff; the level of content not directly related to Arenas is excessive. Everyking 06:59, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Jacobo Arenas the ideological leader of FARC
On May 27, 1964, the force changed its name to the FARC and survived despite repeated early reversals. It operated mostly in remote corners of the nation.
Marulanda soon allied himself with Jacobo Arenas, a communist ideological leader who became Marulanda's second in command. Arenas supplied Marulanda with much of his political schooling, though Marulanda was best known as a military leader rather than a political theorist. In the years that followed, Marulanda demonstrated skills in hit-and-run guerrilla warfare while building close ties to other peasant leaders.
Over the years, training and organizing in obscurity, the FARC took root as a peasant movement. By 1984, Marulanda and Jacobo Arenas had built the FARC into a belligerent force of 27 battalions, a rebel army of national dimensions. At that time, he considered a negotiated peace with President Belisario Betancur in exchange for the government's commitment to address social ills. But the cease-fire collapsed when the Colombian army launched a surprise attack on the FARC's public headquarters in Casa Verde. As the violent struggle progressed, Marulanda's humility allowed the FARC to develop a strong grassroots structure from which emerged a new generation of leaders. Marulanda evolved more into a presence behind the scenes of the increasingly powerful FARC, still influential but less dominating.
In 1992, to speed FARC's demise, President Cesar Gaviria offered amnesty to all rebels as well as the right to participate in the constitutional assembly. Marulanda, however, countered with demands for broad social, political and economic reforms. Given the FARC’s international isolation, Gaviria chose to take the offensive, striking powerful military blows against the FARC. But the aggressive maneuver backfired, leaving the FARC less willing to negotiate and prolonging the civil war.
Jacobo Arenas and the Manuel Marulanda Velez are the mind and the heart of the long run Communist revolutionary struggle in Colombia. Jacobo Arenas the FARC’s ideological adviser and second-in-command who was unfortunately died of natural causes a decade ago was a major blow to the FARC. Some say the cause of death was a cancer; others believe diabetes or an ulcer.
After the Cold War ended, Colombian authorities and U.S. intelligence expected that the FARC gradually would disintegrate. For poor Colombians, drug trafficking seemed is a far more promising route to social mobility than armed revolution. There seemed to be following Marulanda through endless years of struggle in the mountains and jungles.
[edit] Images
I don't think that it's helpful to have images of a cuban mural, Macchu Pichu, and Nixon in China in an article about a founding member of the FARC. --Descendall 22:00, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
