Colombia – Promises & Bullets

Colombia is a country, like many in Latin America, plagued with the myriad tyrannical manifestations of poker-faced, sneaky backroom political debauchery. Latin America has long been a playground for the affluent and influential to spin their most extreme politically-propelled propagandist compositions. Politicians have, for as long as I can remember, nestled themselves comfortably amongst the twisted and tangled climate of corruption and shady backhanded business deals involving pompous multinational corporations, shattered indigenous communities and a deeply scarred natural landscape. Latin America, like many continents living in the murky shadow of severe inequality, restrictive freedoms, subjugation of political expression and a constant slurry of vacuous socio-political reform, are a people driven by the turbulence of emotion that comes with the prospect of escapism. It is against this background that this film is presented and it is the FARC that the film’s director, Monica Marin, strives to document.

The film charts the history of the FARC guerrilla movement, taking in the history of its confrontation with the Colombian government and their alluded collaborators in the guise of the paramilitary forces. As Monica pointed out in a Q&A session after the film, the information stream emerging from many of Colombia’s most prominent media sources is highly polluted, clouded by the swift and incisive denunciation of FARC operations by the Colombian government. As President Uribe ardently indicates during the film, “The FARC are here to create a rupture in Colombia. We need to stand up and work collectively to bring unemployment and prosperity to the people of this country.” His words do little to dispel the myth that Government officials are sweetly innocent to the nefarious nature of drug trafficking and the illegitimate seizure of the coveted land of the peoples. Through documenting the opinions and perceptions of those involved either with more liberalist political movements, as well as FARC members themselves, one is instinctively left with a feeling that the film is, at heart, a pro-FARC document, or at least, sympathetic to its goals and ideals. Interviews with various “experts” on the region are littered with the phraseology and rationales that place FARC as a foremost political movement, casting it in the category of a faction that has recognised violence as its only voice, driven to the lamentable, but unavoidable practice of kidnappings and extortion. There is a sense in which the film portrays the FARC as having undergone a kind of forced militarization, a collective group that has had to forfeit the possibility of conciliatory resolution in favour of a democracy spoken in the language of spilt blood and seemingly endless conflict. It is here that Colombia’s story becomes closely analogous to the circumstances surrounding Israel and Palestine. As a viewer, the overarching feeling is one of hopelessness, the despairing resignation of seeing a country ruptured by mobilised groups who see only the “eye for an eye”, for whom potency is expressed through the barrel of a gun.

The history of Colombia mapped out in the film, as a nation whose political and economic trajectory is being jerked in different directions, provides a real sense of the shared culpability amongst all those who have chosen to take up arms. The downtrodden, candid lament of the poor indigenous farmer serves as a reminder that those eking out a bare existence are the piece’s true victims. The creation of a credible framework within which dialogue and co-operation can be sustained is now the truly ultimate objective, where social justice can begin to re-emerge as a feasible notion. Sadly however, like many of its South American counterparts, Colombia continues to heave under the onerous strain of civil friction.