For decades, politicians and journalists framed Colombia’s civil war (1964–2016) as a narcotics problem, collapsing its political and social dynamics into the claim that the FARC was nothing more than a drug cartel – a narco-terrorist organisation masquerading as a political movement. This ‘War on Drugs’ narrative served as the major pretext for extensive U.S. intervention from the late 1990s onwards, under which Colombia became one of the largest recipients of U.S. military assistance globally.
Drawing on my recent article, War of Movement, published in the Review of International Studies, I explain why this framing fundamentally misunderstands how and why the conflict escalated.
The article rejects the idea that Colombia’s war can be understood as an ‘internal conflict’ – the dominant category in security, conflict and peace studies. Instead, it reinterprets the escalation as fundamentally internationalised, shaped by the uneven and combined dynamics of global capitalism and Colombia’s violent process of neoliberal reintegration during the 1990s. This reframing shifts the focus away from the dubious moral tale that the FARC ‘degenerated’ into a drug cartel toward the deeper political-economic dynamics shaping the conflict.
The war’s rapid escalation during the 1990s was driven by an elite-engineered project of passive revolutionary restructuring that destroyed rural livelihoods, fractured state authority, and transformed Colombia’s countryside into a battlefield of global capitalism. It was only under these changing political-economic conditions that it became strategically viable for the FARC to transition to a war of movement, posing an existential threat to the state by 1998.
Responding to the pressures and opportunities generated by the accelerating transnationalisation of production since the 1970s, Colombian political elites – most clearly under the Liberal government of César Gaviria (1990–1994) – embarked on a project of state restructuring in the early 1990s. This project followed the logic of a passive revolution, combining limited reforms to incorporate subalterns with the restoration of capitalist development through economic opening and deeper integration into transnational cycles of accumulation. Celebrated as a ‘modernisation’ initiative by political elites, the project was in fact aimed at realigning Colombia’s form of state with the evolving dynamics of global capitalism.
While the passive revolution sought to restore dominant class authority under changing international political-economic conditions, it reshaped the terrain of conflict in ways that ultimately exacerbated tensions. Economic opening fundamentally restructured Colombia’s development model, making campesino populations increasingly vulnerable to foreign competition. As basic protections and subsidies were dismantled, subaltern communities faced ruinous market pressures, driving dispossession, poverty, and displacement. This amounted to an unofficial declaration of war on campesinos as a class, intensified by an empowered narco-bourgeoisie that exploited deregulation to launder capital through a violent ‘counter-reform’ process of land dispossession.
Faced with the destructive effects of economic opening and agrarian counter-reform, campesinos turned in much greater numbers to producing coca, a cash crop that proved far more sustainable than traditional sources such as coffee, potatoes, maize, and plantain. Neither ‘greed’ nor ‘grievance’ drove this shift; it was a class-based strategy of survival and resistance.
Campesinos adapted to the changing structural conditions through their own agency, forming a powerful trajectory of grassroots mobilisation throughout the 1990s. New struggles and communities were formed on the rural fringes, as deteriorating conditions in the cities encouraged unemployed and informal workers to join the ranks of the cocaleros in the countryside.
The ‘War on Drugs’ – most visibly through aerial coca fumigation – reinforced the structural violence of neoliberal reconfiguration. Fumigation targeted not only coca but water supplies, soils, and subsistence crops more broadly, effectively functioning as a form of chemical warfare against rural communities. Together, these dynamics reshaped social class identities and encouraged many campesinos to identify more strongly with the FARC’s rebellion.
The FARC interpreted this conjuncture through a Marxist lens, understanding the campesino turn to coca as a symptom of a broader crisis of global capitalism rooted in extreme land inequality and class exploitation. Rather than criminalising coca, it treated the drug trade like any other capitalist sector, subjecting it to taxation and regulation. In doing so, the FARC secured not only increasing revenue to fund its political-military project, but also a growing social base among campesinos subjected to structural and direct violence.
Yet the FARC’s rapid expansion during the 1990s cannot be explained by income generation and growing campesino support alone. Neoliberal restructuring also had wider repercussions. Within the passive revolutionary project itself, tensions emerged between dominant class fractions, deepening the spreading crisis of authority. While some aligned with a modernising, globally oriented technocratic elite committed to liberal-democratic institutions and integration into the U.S.-led world order, others – particularly landed sectors – were deeply entangled with illicit economies and increasingly alarmed by the guerrillas’ advance. The neoliberal project thus failed to stabilise rule or secure legitimacy even within the dominant power bloc. This internal fracturing of the state project encouraged sections of the ruling class to rely more heavily on coercion, reflected in the expanding support across political and civil society for paramilitary terror.
It was within this shifting conjuncture that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a war of movement becomes decisive in explaining the FARC’s advance. Gramsci understood a war of movement as a direct confrontation for state power, made possible by a crisis of authority in which the state increasingly governs through coercion rather than hegemony. He distinguished this from a war of position, a longer-term struggle to build counter-hegemony across political and civil society, centred more on consent than force.
As legitimacy collapsed and the state fractured, new strategic opportunities opened for the FARC. Acting within these conditions, the organisation moved to the strategic offensive, prioritising mass recruitment, territorial expansion, and increasingly conventional military operations against the Colombian state, opening up corridors to take Bogotá.
The war’s escalation was therefore not the result of ‘cartelisation’ – a depoliticising fiction that strips the conflict of its international political-economic foundations and shields the dominant classes from responsibility. The war intensified through an elite-engineered passive revolutionary project that laid waste to subaltern communities, fractured the social order, and triggered a crisis of authority across the integral state, making the FARC’s rapid expansion strategically possible. Placed in its international political-economic context, the war exposes what official narratives have obscured: political violence was not a deviation from capitalist modernisation, but a constitutive outcome of a passive revolutionary project through which capitalist modernisation was produced.
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