The FARC’s First March and the Making of Contemporary Colombia

The opening weeks of 2017 provided dramatic images of what commentators around the world term “the FARC’s final march:” the historic demobilization of Latin America’s oldest insurgent force, which has long been viewed as a Marxist revolutionary group dedicated to the seizure of political power.

This talk explores the origins of those established narratives, in the context of the FARC’s first march in the mid-1960s – how certain ideas about violence came to configure our understanding of recent Colombian history.