The role of indigenous activists in the creation and development of the communist movement in Colombia since 1930

1 INTRODUCTION

In the more classic or orthodox definition of communism, it is usually suggested that to bring about socialism and communism a given country must first develop a capitalist stage and a proletariat, or waged laborers.¹ In Latin America, and indeed other parts of the “developing” world, the communist movement has modified this formula to accommodate the different economic stages found in their respective countries. As the late Marta Harnecker stated, some Marxist intellectuals and communist activists in Latin America have gone on to develop and adapt the theory to include “new social sectors” that “should also be considered revolutionary subjects.”² While the more classic understanding of the theory continues to be dominant among communists in the region this is often combined with local adaptations both in the scholarship and in the labor and social movements. One of the earliest, and probably the most impactful, of these Latin American communists was José Carlos Mariátegui who played a significant part in the intellectual formation of thinkers and revolutionaries such as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Augusto Sandino, Julio Antonio Mella, and is considered to be one of the precursors of dependency theory.³ Since the 1920s Mariátegui and his followers have spoken of “special conditions” that warrant strategies that are unique to the region, contradicting what was being proposed by the leaders of the Soviet Union and the Comintern who denounced it as “dangerous” and “revisionist.”⁴ Although Mariátegui's theoretical propositions only really became widespread in the Latin American communist movement decades after his death, we do see an evident pattern toward adapting communism to suit the local conditions found in Colombia from the 1930s on.

Much of the existing scholarship, especially in the United States, has tended to focus on communism as an alien ideology that was imposed on Colombia due to Soviet geopolitics.⁵ Furthermore Colombian scholars themselves have sometimes reproduced the idea that communism was a rigid transplantation that can generally be characterized by its ideological orthodoxy, lack of pluralism, and “Bolshevisation.”⁶ Scholar Javier Duque Daza, for example, has argued that from its founding, the Party has been characterized by a “rigid belief system,” extending and opening up their organization to other social sectors with an underlying motive to recruit members and further their own political goals.⁷ Similarly, Daniel Pécaut's seminal work on the period in question, argues that the Colombian Communist Party did not have a capacity for political agency during its initial period due to overbearing Soviet influence.⁸ According to these scholars, this lack of independent or original political thought led them to accept Marxist concepts that did not fit Colombia's political and economic context. While there was an undeniable official ideological orthodoxy that was set along Soviet lines, this article will argue and show evidence for a communist movement that welcomed communities from rural regions in what can be described as a convergence. Specifically, we will observe that indigenous leaders and communities in the Cauca and Tolima departments were accepted into the communist fold on their terms and largely for their own local political motives during the 1930s and parts of the 1940s.

In terms of research methods, this article will make use of primary sources such as articles printed by the Communist Party's newspaper, Tierra, whose volumes have been digitized by Colombia's national library. In particular, the information contained in Tierra can help us analyze the role of indigenous peoples as subjects of communist news as well as reporters themselves. Key historical figures that come up frequently in the literature of this period are indigenous communist leaders José Gonzalo Sánchez and Isauro Yosa, and I have therefore used a diverse collection of biographical notes which up until the present are quite scattered in the broader literature of this topic. Although there is an abundance of secondary literature focusing on the general political, economic, and social conflict in Colombia during the period in question there is an evident lack of focus on the role of indigenous peoples and their role in the creation and development of communist ideas and movements.

This article commences with a brief background exploration of the material conditions that peasants in indigenous majority regions of Colombia faced in the decades preceding the radicalization of their struggle from 1930. Thereafter, we will outline the process that took the peasant struggle in Cauca and Tolima from being influenced by the radical indigenous movement known as the Quintinada to being led by indigenous activists that broke with this movement to join the nascent Communist Party. Our exploration of this history shows that Colombia's communist movement was far from an empty vessel for powerful external forces. Rather, they attracted actors that had been developing as political activists before encountering communist ideas and who saw the new ideas of class struggle as complementary to their long-standing struggles for land and labor justice. Concretely, we will demonstrate that indigenous activists did not abandon their long-standing objectives but instead used the regional and national platform offered by the new Communist Party to further these. What is more, indigenous activists played an important role in the creation and subsequent evolution of the Colombian Communist Party. To give an idea about the extent of this influence we will dedicate a section of this article to an exploration of José Gonzalo Sánchez's life, by far the most influential indigenous communist within the Party and in the two regional departments that this study focuses on. Conclusively, we will show that the political convergence between communists and indigenous peasants eventually inspired the insurgent armed struggle. First as a way for peasants in Cauca and Tolima to defend themselves from the violence meted out by Conservative forces and then later as a struggle to take state power through an armed insurrection. This article will, then, demonstrate that not only did indigenous people play an important role in the birth and growth of communism in the country, they also played a crucial role in the historic break with bipartisan politics and a military war that has lasted into the present.

2 THE INTRODUCTION OF COMMUNISM IN CAUCA AND TOLIMA

The land system and labor relations that existed in Colombia's countryside in the 1930s had its origins in the mid-1800s when the country's rural production was first integrated into the global economy. In the 80 years leading up to 1930, there were substantial changes in terms of land configuration in the countryside with thousands upon thousands of hectares passing from public to private property. Colombia's export economy began to take shape and consolidate itself from the 1850s reaching the peak of its expansion during the 1920s. From the latter part of the 19th century, the national government became increasingly interested in modernizing the rural land system to meet the demands of the world market, which the country was now dependent on for its economic growth. From the 1870s there was a rollout of legislative reforms that were meant to motivate landowners to “found productive enterprises in frontier regions” as well as to “protect peasant settlers… and to encourage others to follow their lead in populating frontier zones.”⁹

The government's effort to expand capitalist production, through opening up public lands for cultivation, attracted poor peasants and wealthy rural families; the latter now given the green light to expand onto public lands almost unlimitedly as long as these were made productive.¹⁰

We observe, then, that while it was in the state's interest to expand the productivity of the countryside to spaces that were uncultivated, a minority of wealthier and more powerful families were the real beneficiaries of the reforms. Simultaneously, latifundios, huge privately owned farms that were remnants of the colonial period were opposed to and had the power to fight these reforms as they would give poor peasants the opportunity to escape labor bondage.¹¹ The severe conditions that peasants faced with the growth of the agricultural export industry during the 1920s forced many of them to accept relatively better paid jobs in the cities as these expanded with the rise of the economy. Interestingly, the exposure that peasants had to political organizations and labor unions in the cities during this period would later help to inspire some of them on their return to the countryside. The failure of the government's agrarian reform program together with the global financial crisis that seriously affected Colombia's all-important agricultural export industry in 1928 gave way to massive protests and the creation of hundreds of organized labor organizations in the countryside.¹²

Unlike other parts of the country where the collective and organized struggle for land really only began in earnest toward the end of the 1920s, Cauca had been the site of the Quintinada, an indigenous peasant movement led by the Páe indigenous leader Manuel Quintín Lame since 1910.¹³ The Quintinada made political and legal demands for the right of land ownership and use, often threatening, and sometimes actually using, violent force. It so happened that at the same time that the indigenous peasants in the Cauca region were feeling the repercussions of the economic crisis Quintín Lame began an extensive political tour of the country leaving the areas under his influence open for new political leaders and actors from within and without the local communities. Indeed, the dire economic and political circumstances that peasants in the Cauca faced during this period were apt for a radical transformation of political ideas, loyalties, and mobilizations.¹⁴

The budding Colombian Communist Party saw an opportunity for expansion of its membership and political activity among disgruntled peasant communities. Areas with large indigenous populations proved to be receptive to some of their core messages but especially that of redistribution of land. The close relationship formed between communists and indigenous communities in certain regions of the Cauca and Tolima departments had their roots in the Quintinada movement. It was this movement, from which important indigenous leaders of the Communist Party would later come, that first attracted the attention of left-wing teachers, lawyers, political activists in nearby cities and the early socialist movement in the country more generally. In the 1920s, Manuel Quintín Lame and his organization became important allies to the national labor movement and the Revolutionary Socialist Party in particular. The Party, not yet concretely communist because of a divergence of views that were held within it, saw indigenous struggles as akin to their own and even created a permanent project and campaign for them, though this convergence only lasted a few years.¹⁵

The political and economic demands that indigenous peasants, and peasants in general, in the Cauca department were making in the early 1930s was centered on access to and ownership of land and communism provided a theoretical framework that could be adopted and adapted. Among the other demands that were being made by indigenous people during this period were the abolition of free labor, access to individual loans, the creation of an education ministry to represent indigenous people in government, educational, and cultural centers in the reserves, the right to profit from mines in their territories, for reserve leaders to be considered governors, an indigenous section of the Confederation of Workers, and freedom for what they considered political prisoners.¹⁶ The above demands made by indigenous people in this period demonstrate both their own political initiatives and those from outside their communities. That some indigenous communities and activists in the region saw class struggle as indistinguishable from their struggle should not come as a surprise as older forms of oppression that could be linked to the colonial era are viewed as continuing in the form of capitalist expansion into their territories. That is, to some communities capitalist growth and historical racist practices are interconnected. With this in mind, we must view the communist ideas that came from the cities to the countryside via migrants or cadres not as novel revelations from a superior political force, but as a corroboration of what many of these communities already understood.¹⁷

The initial and most significant joining of forces between indigenous and communist activists in the rural areas was the creation of the Ligas Campesinas, or peasant leagues. The first evidence of an indigenous peasant league with a communist stance is the Liga Campesina de Jambaló in eastern Cauca founded in 1934. It was from this particular organization that various other indigenous organizations with a communist leaning sprang out throughout the 1930s, most notably the Federación Regional Indígena y Campesina del Oriente del Cauca in 1937 and the Federación Departamental Campesina e Indígena del Cauca in 1946. However, even before these were founded we know that communists and indigenous communities were already working together organizing protests and political mobilizations.¹⁸ It has been recorded that as early as November 7, 1931, in Jambaló, the local population, made up mainly of Nasa and Misak ethnic groups, gathered in the town square to celebrate the Soviet Revolution. The local landowners and authorities saw this gathering as a threat and used heavy-hand tactics to disperse the crowds that had gathered, killing one and injuring several others. Four years later on June 30, 1935, the same community were once again the victims of a police attack that left eight indigenous activists dead this time for organizing a festival to raise funds for the Communist Party newspaper. Despite the violence unleashed by landowners and local authorities, their continued persistence demonstrates there was deep-rooted loyalty to the communist movement. A report presented at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1935 informed that indigenous support for the Colombian Communist Party could count with “more than 25 cells and in the Cauca department alone there exists 17 cells with a total of 150 members.”.¹⁹ The Tierradentro indigenous reserve of the Paez ethnic group located in central Cauca, home of Quintín Lame until his migration to Tolima in the early 1930s, became a stronghold of communist activity. Like in Jambaló, the Communist Party helped to create a peasant league in the reserve which assisted the local population in fighting against “sharecropping and hacendado abuses” as well as helping them in their struggle to end “forced labor levies for public works… and the dissolution of resguardos (reserves)”. Communist presence in the Tierradentro reserve is linked to the fact that the indigenous activist, José Gonzalo Sánchez, once a Quintín Lame follower and collaborator, joined the communists, helped found the Party, and served as an important Central Committee member until his assasination.²⁰

The growth of Colombia's national economy in the early 20th century was linked to the exportation of agricultural produce with coffee leading the charge. It is no coincidence that the regions where this important crop dominated were also the main stage for the radical peasant movements of the late 1920s. The Andean department of Tolima, which neighbors Cauca on its western border, was one of the regions that became the site for radical campesino movements fighting for land justice and against labor violations. In particular, some indigenous reserves and towns in Tolima became strongholds of communist activism from the early 1930s eventually culminating in more organized activism from 1937 when the first peasant leagues were founded. Like its neighboring department, Tolima also has a history of land and labor oppression of indigenous communities and this, alongside the expansion of the national export industry, intensified existing conflicts. The indigenous reserve of Chaparral, in southern Tolima, for example, was one of the places where historical struggles for land and newer struggles against coffee haciendas came together to form a strong movement of indigenous communists and that would later become the epicenter of the armed guerrilla movement.

The decades leading up to communist influence in Chaparral was marked by the indigenous resistance movement of the Quintinada that helped to politicize the local population. The leader Quintin Lame and his young mentee José Gonzalo Sánchez petitioned the government in the 1920s so that Chaparral would be recognized as an official indigenous reserve as this would help in terms of institutional recognition and funding. A few miles away they had already established their own indigenous governed town of San Jose de Indias. Although Chaparral was officially recognized, thanks to their petitions the local landowners and coffee haciendas continued their activities within the reserve limits with the support of the local authorities.²¹ Lame and his Quintinada were forced out of the area in 1931 following a massacre of 17 of their followers and the destruction of the town they had established. Lame himself was subsequently imprisoned and accused of inciting the violence, which led to the massacre, and although he did return to the area after he was released from prison his influence had declined giving way to the communist movement led by his former collaborator Sánchez. When the latter returned to Colombia in 1936 after 3 years of training in the Soviet Union he went straight to work with other peasant leaders, helping to found the peasant leagues of Irco and Limón, the Sindicato de Agricultores de Chaparral, and the Liga de la Comunidad Indígena Yaguará in 1937. The ease with which the communists founded or took over (some had passed to their control from Liberal hands) peasant leagues can be understood when the material and labor conditions that existed in the region for decades are taken into account. To give just one example, historian Eduardo Pizarro recounts that at around the time that the leagues were being organized the big coffee producers in the region had been defrauding their employees through the use of unreliable weights, which underrepresented what they had produced. Because of this widely used practice there had been ongoing peasant strikes across the region but particularly in and around indigenous towns and lands, leading, furthermore, to the “clandestine cultivation of coffee plants in the higher sections of the latifundios.”²²

One of the indigenous communists who became a prominent leader in the region in the mid to late 1930s was Isauro Yosa, although his contributions to the movement have only been studied limitedly. We can more or less build a picture of Yosa and his life's work through piecing together scattered information in a handful of historical studies and articles. Yosa was born in the indigenous majority town of Natagaima, Tolima, in 1910 and relocated to Chaparral at the age of 20 years in 1930 where he found salaried work in a coffee hacienda. Like others working in coffee production during this period, he became involved in “the fight for better pay and just weighting of the coffee” that was being waged. He first joined UNIR, the more radical breakaway of the Liberal Party led by Jorgé Eliecer Gaítan, eventually joining the Communist Party when the former was dissolved in 1935. Yosa became the leader of the Liga Campesina de Irco y El Limón from 1937, most likely working closely with Sánchez, and was eventually able to apply political pressure on the government who handed land titles to 1,500 indigenous peasants in Chaparral reserve thanks to his efforts. Concretely, Yosa fought for the rights of peasants in the hacienda known as La Providencia, “one of the biggest in the south of Tolima,” where the workers were “beaten, received inadequate meals, slept in cramped sheds, and received misery wages.” A strike organized by Yosa on La Providencia in the late 1930s was successful in achieving its demands and news of it spread like wildfire across the region and even into other departments. Subsequently, Yosa was elected councilor of Chaparral between 1942 and 1948, proof of the support he and other communists had in the area.²³

The victories won by indigenous campesinos over Tolima's landlords and haciendas, however, brought with it a wave of violence known as the “revenge of the landlords” not seen anywhere else in the country, pushing communist leaders like Yosa and others to form armed groups known as autodefensas and, subsequently, to form mobile guerrilla groups. Seeing that he would not be permitted to lead the struggles of his communities peacefully, Yosa and hundreds of his followers joined a liberal guerrilla encampment on the El Davis hacienda in Chaparral in 1950. Although liberal and communist forces, respectively, known as limpios and comunes, had an initial agreement to fight together against the violence meted out by Conservative landlords and their police, known as chulavitas, this coalition did not last long and by 1952 the communists led by Yosa had taken over El Davis forcing the liberal guerrillas to settle elsewhere. A young campesino, known as Pedro Antonio Marín, who had been part of the liberal guerrilla forces, was mentored by Yosa who convinced him to join the communist guerrilla and the Communist Party. Marín would later be known by his nom de guerre, Manuel Marulanda, becoming the cofounder and leader of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC, together with Yosa and other indigenous guerrilla leaders like Jacobo Prías Alape and Ciro Trujillo Castaño.²⁴

3 JOSÉ GONZALO SÁNCHEZ AND HIS ROLE IN THE COMMUNIST PARTY

The information that exists on José Gonzalo Sánchez, as in the case of Yosa, is at present mainly limited to snippets found in the literature that focuses on the more general history of peasant activism. Although there are gaps about his life and life's work that could be completed to help us understand the convergence of indigenous and communist activism, what does exist can give us a preliminary idea. Sánchez was born in the rural, and mainly indigenous populated, town of Totoró located in eastern Cauca in 1900. In a brief study of his life by Colombian historian, Mauricio Archila Neira, it is stated that Sánchez joined Manuel Quintín Lame and his indigenous movement between the ages of 14–16 years old becoming a central figure up until their falling out in the late 1920s due to ideological and organizational differences. When Lame was imprisoned by the government for subversion between 1917 and 1921 the young Sánchez honed his skills as an activist organizer taking over the leadership of the indigenous movement in Cauca and the neighboring departments under the banner of the Quintinada.²⁵ In 1924, with Lame out of prison and with the help of another young indigenous leader, Eutiquio Timoté, Sánchez cofounded the Supreme Indian Council giving the movement increasing authority among indigenous communities in the region. The authority of the Council allowed them to found “a town named San Jose de Indias and set about reconstituting the indigenous reserves of Natagaima, Velú, Yaguara and Coyaima.” All of these indigenous reserves eventually became strongholds of the Communist Party, a testament to the influence that Sánchez had in the region.²⁶

The radical and revolutionary activities of the Quintinada caught the attention of local powerful landowners as well as state authorities who harassed them, put them in prison, and went as far as shaving their hair which to indigenous leaders like Sánchez represented the revivification of indigenous power and autonomy. There are several petitions and grievances made by Sánchez to the government which can be found in the national archives in Bogota corroborating the persecution that the Quintinada faced during the 1920s as well as for the massacres and assaults committed against the indigenous communist activists later in the 1930s. In one such petition, Sánchez asks for armed security to protect Quintín Lame, who was to go on a tour of indigenous reserves in the department of Huila, weary of possible attacks and persecution from local authorities against their planned events.²⁷ It is evident that Lame's socialist and labor movement allies, with whom he came to have close relations from the early 1920s, had a profound ideological impression on Sánchez. Furthermore, as Yesenia Pumarada Cruz states, indigenous activists were drawn to socialism during this period as they saw it as a necessary alliance to defeat their powerful local enemies who had already begun to kill some of their fellow activists and leaders.²⁸ It is not clear when Sánchez started personal relations with the socialists but he appears among the list of founding members of the Communist Party in Bogota on July 17, 1930, traveled to the Soviet Union for 3 years in 1933 for political training and was a Central Committee member until his assassination in 1949. During the first meeting of the Communist Party, Sánchez makes a definitive decision to part with his mentor and fellow indigenous leader stating that Lame “has nothing to do with us, we are not going towards a bourgeois revolution, but our own revolution, in the name of the real indigenous people. Lame is duping poor indigenous people with promises that are never kept. He is collaborating with the government.”²⁹

Some scholars, such as James David Henderson, have suggested that Sánchez and others became leaders without a following because of indigenous communities being unwilling to join the communists, yet there is an abundance of evidence that contradicts this view.³⁰

Jambaló and Tierradentro are two reserves where the Communist Party had support which was in no small part a consequence of the alliance they had with indigenous leaders who had joined them after leaving the Quintinada. According to historian Luz Angela Nuñez Espinel, a rally that resulted in the massacre of 18 indigenous people in Coyaima, southern Tolima on May 1, 1931, was made up of Sánchez's followers who had gathered to celebrate International Workers' Day. Furthermore, the extent of the support for Sánchez among indigenous and campesino communities can be gauged by the fact that he was elected government representative for the town of Silvia, Cauca, in 1936, the first of several local government roles he was elected for.³¹ A couple of years later in 1938 Sánchez attended the Third National Workers' Congress held in the city of Cali acting as the representative of indigenous communities in the Cauca and Tolima departments. At the Congress, the indigenous leader presented a 14 point document titled Plataforma de lucha en pro de las masas indígenas de Colombia where he details the most pressing concerns of the communities he was representing.³²

Among the demands included in the document are the:

“creation of new reserves on lands labelled as unused occupied by indigenous families with buildings, rooms, livestock, etc.,... the abolition of all free labour by indigenous people that is not in their own or their organisations' benefit… the right for indigenous councils or individuals to take out loans from the Caja de Credito Agrario Industrial y Minero for the improvements that we want to make, without jeopardising the reserves or their parcels of land… the government of the indigenous communities, that are in some parts of the country (Tolima, etc.) named administrator of the governor should be required, from now on, to be called Governor and that with all of its members be called Indigenous Councils as it is stated in Law 89 of 1890.”³³

As we can observe the demands that were made are void of the obvious jargon associated with communism and Marxism even though they were presented to a Workers' congress organized by the socialist and communist movement. Indeed, some of these, such as the struggle for land ownership, did overlap with the demands being made by the Communist Party at the time, yet these were the same historic demands that the indigenous movement had been fighting for from even before there was a convergence between the two movements. As a consequence of Sánchez's presentation on the indigenous problem, the second point on the general resolution of the Congress was “against the dispossessions of indigenous people and peasants. Against feudal obligations. For the democratisation of the agrarian credit, giving preference to the cooperatives of small producers. For the perfection of Land law, until it is made into the statute of rural workers, eliminating all of the feudal remainders. For the integration of the indigenous reserves.”³⁴ Despite the important national platform that was given to the indigenous movement of Cauca and Tolima by the Communist Party, Sánchez was not uncritical of the party and their “olvido a los indígenas” as we can observe in a note he wrote for the Party's newspaper: “the reality is that not enough is being done for them. The vast and complicated indigenous problem is touched on and discussed very superficially at preparations for the Party's Central Committee plenaries or for a national conference of the Party, or for a labour union's congress. There, some measures are taken to do some work and nothing else is done. In fact, those measures are left archived.”³⁵

The documents that were presented at and that resulted from the Congress are very much a continuation of the struggles that indigenous and campesino communities had fought for decades prior to the coalition with communists, showing that Sánchez and his followers were not being coopted but, in fact, were using their national platforms to further their own political and economic objectives. Furthermore, even though the note written by Sánchez and published by the Party's newspaper is evidence of the Party's neglect of said issues, it is also evidence that indigenous activists were not simply being assimilated to the Party's class-based objectives. The demands for indigenous and peasant communities were continually and incessantly made by Sánchez throughout the 1940s in his capacity as councilor, member of the Communist Party's Central Committee, as well as other leadership positions he held up until his death. According to some scholars, Sánchez was killed by Conservative party militants in 1952. However, a database of victims of state killings records him as being murdered 3 years earlier in 1949 in his hometown of Totoró after drinking a coffee that had been poisoned by the town's wealthy landowners.³⁶

4 THE ROLE OF INDIGENOUS LEADERS IN COLOMBIA'S ARMED PEASANT STRUGGLE

A few years after Sánchez's assassination the Communist Party began a “Leninist reconstruction of the party” in which an alliance with the Liberals against the Conservatives broke down and both parties were once again viewed as enemies and lackeys of the imperialist United States government. This period saw the Party leadership, which had focused on gaining support in the cities, turn their attention to strengthening the already existing communist forces in the countryside. Specifically, they began to organize armed groups of campesinos who sought to defend themselves from Conservative, Liberal and landowner violence. The rural municipality that would serve as the base of operations for this armed peasant movement was none other than Chaparral, Tolima, the same indigenous town where the communists had established a presence since the early 1930s and where they had formed important cadres. Prior to his death, José Gonzalo Sánchez had been recognized and elected as leader in the municipality as it was here that he had worked with Lame in the 1920s to halt the breaking up of reserves and where he helped to organize various rural leagues including El Sindicato de Agricultores de Chaparral in 1937.³⁷

Before the formation of the communist guerrilla groups that radiated out of Chaparral there was an already existing armed campesino movement known as autodefensas that were organized self-defense groups, a response to the attacks that were unleashed by the Conservative government on campesinos in 1946. The autodefensas were not a partisan group and both the Liberals and communists influenced their formation and development, something of a joint enterprise. This armed movement was not motivated to counter the Conservative forces for political reasons but, rather, in order to defend the gains that had been made in terms of land struggle since the early 1930s. It was common, even when official Communist and Liberal alliances had raptured, for communist leaders to join forces with peasant families and groups that were either loyal to the Liberal Party or not affiliated to any particular political group. For example, it is recorded that in the early 1950s Isauro Yosa organized a battalion that was “reinforced by Liberal families and harassed peasants” to fight back against the region's police and the national army who had been persecuting them since the 1930s. These joint campaigns among peasants from differing political affiliations in Cauca and Tolima did not last long, however, as it became Liberal policy to not only distance themselves but to actively eliminate communists. The autodefensa groups that formed in the Chaparral area were led by indigenous communist activists including Marco Aurelio Restrepo, Pedro Pablo Rumique, and Jorge Hernández Barrios, among others. Although it is difficult to establish a direct link between these communists and Sánchez in the existing literature and available records, he would likely have played an important role in their political development, as he was the veteran communist with the most authority in the area.³⁸

Barrios, an indigenous communist from Chaparral, whose nom de guerre was Comandante Olimpo, is recognized as the first communist guerrilla commander since he was the first to lead the columnas de marcha, the mobile armed groups that evolved from the stationary autodefensas. He later used the pseudonym Eutiquio Leal, in honor of the indigenous communist leader Eutiquio Timoté, in a successful literary career, and is said to have been the first communist to command both Manuel Marulanda and Jacobo Arenas, cofounders and leaders of the FARC in the 1960s. These columnas de marcha commanded by Olimpo and other indigenous leaders are said to have been an initiative of the Communist Party who saw it as a solution to the increasing encirclement of settled communities by state authorities and their allies. It has also been suggested that in certain areas it was the Communist Party that was the mastermind behind the peasant armed groups from the autodefensas to the columnas de marcha and, finally, to the highly organized guerrilla groups that went on to seek state power through attacks against the country's military and police authorities. Be that as it may, it is not a coincidence that these armed groups were possible because of the historical role played by indigenous leaders in those regions.³⁹

In late 1949 and early 1950 the communist armed groups of Tolima, led by Isauro Yosa, marched to the El Davis hacienda, located near Chaparral, as they had accepted the invitation of an influential Liberal family to join forces against the violent aggression of the region's Conservative elites. In an investigation into the formation of the guerrilla groups of this region Daniel Torres Oviedo states that there were marked differences between the Liberal guerrilla forces of the Loaiza family and those of the communists of Chaparral. According to Oviedo, while the former was made up of local mestizo (mixed-race) peasants led by influential local leaders with extensive families and land, the latter were formed of a variety of families of mestizo and indigenous descent with little or no land titles and were led by agricultural leaders who were predominantly indigenous. Apart from their loyalties to separate parties, the main contradiction between the two groups and what helped cause the fracture was a radically different view on private and communal property. The Loaiza family and their forces were effectively fighting against Conservative violence with the hope that the Liberal Party would achieve power once more so that they could go and resettle their traditional lands.⁴⁰ The leaders of the communist forces, on the other hand, such as Isauro Yosa, Ciro Trujillo and Jacobo Prías Àlape, were descendants of indigenous families that had been fighting against the conditions in the region's large estates as well as the breakup of the indigenous reserves. As Oviedo succinctly puts it, the enemy of the communists were not the Conservatives per se but the system that existed regardless of the political colors of those who were in power. With no end in sight to the violence and chaos in Colombia's countryside, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla took power in a coup against the Conservative government of Laureano Gomez.⁴¹ Motivated by an amnesty offered by the Rojas Pinilla government, and in conjunction with local military forces that sought the elimination of the communist guerrilla, the Loaiza family and their followers began to attack the communists at El Davis causing their definitive separation. The break with the Liberal guerrilla in El Davis and the subsequent military attacks against their forces caused the communists to once again organize themselves into columnas de marcha and from the mid-1950s they began to march and temporarily settle isolated areas in the departments of Cauca, Tolima, Cundinamarca and Meta. Forced to disperse across these regions, the communist guerrillas began to attract and recruit peasants from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds that transformed the constitution of the organization to one that was much more varied and representative of the country as a whole. Despite this, their notable indigenous composition remained an important feature in both the command and general body of the organization. In the mid-1960s when the communist guerrilla finally organized itself into the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) most of the leadership could trace their roots to indigenous communities, these included Isauro Yosa known as “Mayor Lister,” Jacobo Prías Álape known as “Charro Negro,” Ciro Trujillo Castaño, Jaime Tarsicio Guaraca, Raul Valbuena, among others.⁴²

5 CONCLUSION

The material conditions that existed in Colombia's countryside in the first decades of the 20th century were severe enough for a political void to appear to compete with the traditional bipartisan loyalties that had dominated since independence. The failure of the government to materialize the promised land-reform, largely due to the power of the traditional landowner elites, encouraged the development and adaptation of new political ideas and loyalties. The peasant leagues that appeared thereafter were the cradle for these and communists were in the frontline creating these leagues, infiltrating them, or taking them over from the Liberals who were losing support. This, however, should not be seen as foreign or external activists taking advantage of the situation as it was indigenous activists themselves who, after helping to found the Communist Party, brought communist ideas and forms of organization to their communities.

There is currently no evidence to argue that the political ideas of indigenous activists from Cuaca and Tolima were transformed all that much when joining the communist movement from their time in the Quintinada. In fact, we have observed that there was a continuation of past political agendas and this steered the Party's politics to include the indigenous problem as central to the fight against capitalism, bearing a resemblance to the propositions of José Carlos Maríategui in neighboring Peru only a few years earlier. Although this topic has only been studied limitedly, there is enough evidence to argue that indigenous communist leaders had a significant share of followers and competed with Quintin Lame and his Quintinada, the better known indigenous movement of this period. Furthermore, there is evidence of politically motivated massacres against indigenous communities with links to the Communist Party in both Cauca and Tolima which further gives an indication of the support that communists, especially indigenous communist leaders, had among them. What all of this suggests is that not only did the Colombian Communist Party in general enjoy at least some level of autonomy from the dictates of the Comintern, rebuking some of the scholarship on the subject, but also that sections or groups within the Communist Party were utilizing their platform to advance their specific goals while also accepting the main tenets, namely that of class struggle, of the ideology. We have seen that in some cases indigenous communists influenced and recruited nonindigenous campesinos that were historically loyal to the Liberal Party, yet their role in the rapture the country's bipartisan political monopoly has yet to be properly acknowledged.

From this perspective, one could argue that the indigenous activists that were members of the Communist Party or that had a relationship with them, assimilated communist ideas into their own political discourse and used a communist platform when it was available, yet never lost their own fundamental ideals or, crucially, their ethnic and racial identities. The Federación Regional Indígena y Campesina del Oriente del Cauca, for instance, was created in 1937 at the very moment that the Party was re-channeling its energies away from rural struggles, an organization that would serve as the foundation of several future offshoots of militant organizations. There is broad agreement among scholars in the relevant literature that suggests that it was the Communist Party as an external force that organized the communities in Chaparral into armed groups that developed into subsequent mobile guerrilla units.⁴³ Future investigations, however, could bring to the fore the leading roles of indigenous leaders like Isauro Yosa and Comandante Olimpo in the initial formation and organization of these groups, and not just relegated to mere subordinates following the instructions of the Party. In any case, the strong indigenous composition of the communist guerrillas and their important roles in the leadership of the FARC guerrilla suggests that indigenous people of Cauca, Tolima, and other parts of the country, played a significant role in the direction and policies of this revolutionary movement from the late 1940s and throughout the 1960s.