BOGOTA.- “The Jaime Martínez Front awaits you, young man.” Some boots, a canteen, a plate of rice and the promise of a better life accompany the text. With messages like this, the largest dissident group in the FARC recruit via TikTok in Colombia.
The front operates in the department of Cauca (southwest) and responds to the Central General Staff (EMC), the largest faction of dissidents who rejected the 2016 peace agreement between the extinct guerrilla of the FARC and the Colombian government. Since the end of 2023, they have been holding talks with leftist president Gustavo Petro.
But in parallel they maintain a propaganda campaign on social networks, with uniformed influencers surrounded by drug crops and promises of wealth set to Mexican corridos.
Messages that resonate in a country plagued by more than half a century of armed conflict and where poverty affects 46% of the rural population, according to the most recent balance sheet from the statistical authority (2022).
“I want to join”
The AFP found on TikTok, and to a lesser extent on Facebook, dozens of accounts, hundreds of publications and several propaganda communities of this armed group. Some 3,500 combatants make up the EMC, they impose a regime of terror in the countryside and finance themselves mainly from drug trafficking, according to military intelligence.
“I want to join,” comments a young woman in a video set to music with a Mexican corrido. “Privately,” responds the TikTok user identified as “.revolucionario_.”
The same profile has had more than a dozen similar interactions. “I served in the military (…) and now I would like to pick up a rifle again,” comments a man in a publication where uniformed men are seen training in a foggy forest.
Guerrillas and drug traffickers in the country recruited 110 minors in 2023 and this year there are already 23, according to the Ombudsman’s Office.
For rural youth with few opportunities, dissidence means a certain financial stability, but many also “end up stuck there escaping domestic violence” or other armed groups, Alejandro Jaramillo, a researcher at New York University, tells AFP.
“The narrative has always been that the guerrilla is going to become your family,” he adds.
Ninjas and coke
There is a network of profiles associated with the EMC in Cauca that follow each other and, sometimes, replicate videos created by sister accounts.
With thousands of followers, they use images of uniformed men on horses or crossing rivers in boats, accompanied by motivational and revolutionary texts.
The use of emojis reveals a common language. The illustration of a green leaf refers to drug crops, according to experts, in the country that produces the most cocaine in the world. They include videos and photos of large expanses of coca bushes.
Also the emojis of Colombian flags, colored hearts and the covered face of a ninja, a “symbol of the underground” according to Jaramillo, are repeated in the publications of the rebel accounts.
New and old FARC
Unlike traditional FARC propaganda, the EMC’s TikTok videos have “a much more refined aesthetic proposal” and are focused on a young audience, says Clément Roux, researcher at the Center for Media Analysis (CARISM) at Paris University. -Pantheon-Assas.
For the analyst, the EMC narrative has “ruptures and continuities” with the old “Farian culture.”
The use of the classic FARC-EP logo, references to historical commanders such as Manuel Marulanda and “a glorification of the guerrilla way of life” are some of the similarities.
But other publications reveal a “much less vertical” language than the “hierarchical” one of the former guerrillas that laid down their arms.
Today “every combatant has a cell phone” with which they can produce content, adds Roux.
“Influencers” and cohesion
For researcher Juana Cabezas, from Indepaz, dissidents “seduce” young people with a “material discourse of jewelry, money, women, cars,” backed by the coca economy that “guarantees a fixed income.”
Thus, the narco aesthetic that Pablo Escobar and his associates imposed four decades ago merges with some rebellious messages, alluding to a singular mode of rise and social revenge, in one of the most unequal countries in Latin America.
The contents present “a way of life where money, drinks and women are trophies” and, at the same time, “it is combined in a very curious way with the entire Farian imaginary of the class struggle,” says Roux.
Propaganda on social networks serves as a “recruitment tool,” but also fosters “internal cohesion” of the guerrilla, says the expert. He makes people deployed on “geographically separated fronts feel part of a larger organization.”
Some profiles preserve the institutional appearance of the FARC-EP, but more and more accounts of uniformed and armed influencers are emerging, full of selfies.
Source: With information from AFP
