The FARC are turning to the use of urban militias as a new strategy in the guerrilla groups’s 47-year old armed fight against the Colombian state, armed forces commander Admiral Edgar Cely said Monday.
“The new strategy of the FARC is the militias,” Cely said in an interview with newspaper El Tiempo.
“That’s where the popular and the Bolivarian militia, the PCC, the Bolivarian Movement for a New Colombia, the Bolivarian Youths. These are the invisible enemies that are harming our youth, that have their eyes on the high schools and universities,” the armed forces commander said.
The FARC and the smaller ELN, as well as neo-paramilitary groups are known to be actively recruiting students in the country’s public universities where security forces have less access because of laws that protects universities from military involvement to guarantee academic freedom.