Colombia’s largest guerrilla group FARC is close to bankruptcy, the country’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, reportedly said.
According to the president, the FARC “have suffered a drop in income to finance their violence and business and had to resort to other forms of crime to seek different types of income,” Caracol Radio reported Tuesday.
Santos said there is information the FARC’s highest command ordered its fronts to seek the resources necessary to ensure their continuity.
“The orders of the FARC commanders, of the bosses, to the different fronts is almost like ‘save yourself if you can’, almost like ‘just see how you can get your own resources’,” the president was quoted by Caracol’s website.
Santos warned that some fronts increasingly will turn to extortion to finance their operations.
The FARC — founded by Marxist peasants in 1964 — has used extortion as a source of income for decades and turned to drug trafficking in the 1980s. According to the Colombian government, the guerrillas are also said to be increasingly involved in illegal mining to finance their war against the state.
