On Tuesday, September 27 at 2 pm, Dr. Les Field will present: What Was the FARC? The Colombian Guerrilla Dystopia 1948-2016 in conversation with Felix Manuel Burgos, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, NYU as part of the Latin American and Iberian (LAII) Speaker Series.  You can attend the talk in person at the LAII (801 Yale Blvd NE) or via Zoom (register here).

Media and often academic discourse about guerrilla movements in the 20^th and 21^st centuries typically flattens what are substantive differences between extremely diverse armed social movements. That diversity is present not only between the armed movements of Latin American and those of the Middle East, for example and perhaps most obviously, but within Latin America itself post World War II.  US academic perspectives on Latin American guerrilla movements have been and in many ways continue to be shaped by Central American nationalist, anti-imperialist armed organizations such as the FSLN (Nicaragua), the FMLN (El Salvador) and the URNG (Guatemala), or by the leftist nationalist guerrillas of the Southern Cone, such as the Tupamaros (Uruguay) or the Montoneros (Argentina).  Colombia’s FARC, which was founded in 1964 but was impelled by a chain of events that exploded in 1948 stands in substantive and stark contrast to any of these other guerrilla movements.  The history of the FARC which as it had been configured since its founding came to an end in 2016 offers a window into a movement shaped by an oligarchic society, inspired by Stalinist interpretations of Marxism, and marked by a profoundly dystopian trauma at its very start.