I feel for anyone who lives in South America. The demands for and interest in communism are always simmering below the surface. No matter how often it is beaten back, no matter how often it fails economically, like a zombie it always seems to arise again with terror, death, and ruin for its target country.

” Sure enough, when I just looked it up, FARC became established as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party in 1964.”

Communism: why we can’t have nice things.

And it was only a few years ago that the jailed American woman who belongs to Shining Path was a feature in the US media. Poor murdering snowflake “still being held in jail by the (evil) Peruvians” or some such rot. She played stupid games, won the stupid prize. Che is still dead, BTW.

They may be quieted, but they are not forgotten; many memories are still raw. I imagine many in Columbia hold similar memories. Forgiveness is a difficult human trait.

While on the topic, we don’t read much about the IRA nowadays, but as of a few years ago there were still no trash bins in Paddington Station.

That’s why you have not heard of them Having spent time in Colombia, the vote did not surprise me .

One aspect of this latest twist in the Colombian civil war that has interested me is how it is now being reported in the NYT and its ilk that there are in fact millions of people in Colombia who hate FARC. Why do they hate them? Because they know FARC as the people who murdered them, robbed them, kidnapped their children for ransom or to serve as child soldiers and who drove them into exile.

The interesting thing (to me anyway) is how little of this we had heard about over the fifty years it was going on. Atrocities and massacres commited by the Colombia military and paramiltary gangs allied with it were regularly reported. The crimes of FARC and ELN? Somehow those just did not seem to be news that was fit to print.