Over at Commonsense and Wonder¹ I noticed the following headline question: If Chavez isnt arming FARC where do they get their munitions from?

The question emerges, it appears, as the result of an El Pais² story reporting on the contents of a laptop captured after the Colombian government killed a key FARC leader that alleged a Belarus-Ven-FARC weapons connection.

Here’s the deal: the FARC became an active guerrilla group in Colombia in the 1960s. Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1998. As such, the FARC were able to get guns for over three decades before Tirofijo³ and friends had ever heard of Hugo.

The sad fact of the matter is, the FARC can easily obtain weapons these days via the profits they make over their involvement in the drug trade, as well as via kidnapping. While it would not surprise me to find that they have found aid from Venezuelan quarters in their weapon-gathering activities, it is also the case that Hugo Chávez could be beamed into space tomorrow and the FARC would still be able to get their weapons. As such, it is a grave error to assume that the FARC are somehow especially empowered by Hugo Chávez, or that Hugo Chávez bears some special blame for the FARC’s activities.

So, the simple answer to the question: lots of place (and with great ease).

1. One of the first blogs I ever encountered, back in those heady days in the early 2024s, when no one knew what a “blog” was–and a place I haven’t visited in a while [↩]
2. A Spanish newspaper–and there was no link, btw. [↩]
3. ”Tirofijo” (”Surehshot”) is the nickname of Manuel Marulanda (which is a pseudonym for Pedro Antonio Marín), the founder and leader of the FARC [↩]