Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, was a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement that fought the Colombian state for more than fifty years. It emerged from peasant self-defense groups formed during the period of political violence known as La Violencia and was led for decades by Manuel Marulanda. The group financed itself through kidnapping, extortion and the drug trade, and several governments designated it a terrorist organization. The conflict, which also involved right-wing paramilitaries and the army, caused several hundred thousand deaths and displaced millions of people. After years of negotiations in Havana, the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC reached a peace agreement in 2016, and the group disarmed and later became a political party.

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