The Liberal and the Conservative parties agreed to alternate in the exercise of government power by presenting a joint National Front candidate to each election and restricting the participation of other political movements.

[81][82] According to social anthropologist María Clemencia Ramírez, the relationship between the guerrillas and the marches was ambivalent: FARC-EP promoted the 1996 protests as part of their participatory democracy policies yet also exercised authoritarianism, which led to tensions and negotiations with peasant leaders, but the cocalero movement brought proposals on behalf of the coca growers and defended its own interests.

[81] French sociologist Alain Labrousse, who has conducted extensive research on the illicit narcotics industry in Latin America and Central Asia, has noted similarities in the reliance on the drug trade by both the FARC-EP and the Taliban.

A 48-hour respite that had been previously agreed to with the rebel group was not respected as the government argued that it had already been granted during an earlier crisis in January, when most of the more prominent FARC-EP commanders had apparently left the demilitarised zone.

For most of the period between 2002 and 2005, the FARC-EP was in a strategic withdrawal due to the increasing military and police actions of new president Álvaro Uribe, which led to the capture or desertion of many fighters and medium-level commanders.

[citation needed] They requested security guarantees both for the displacement of their negotiators and that of the guerrillas that would be freed, which were stated to number as many as 500 or more, and ask the Catholic Church to coordinate the participation of the United Nations and other countries in the process.

[115] On 31 January 2008, the FARC–EP announced that they would release civilian hostages Luis Eladio Perez Bonilla, Gloria Polanco, and Orlando Beltran Cuellar to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez as a humanitarian gesture.

The rescued included Íngrid Betancourt (former presidential candidate), U.S. military contractors Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes, and Keith Stansell, as well as eleven Colombian police officers and soldiers.

[153] On 1 February 2009, the FARC–EP proceeded with the release of the four security force members, Juan Fernando Galicio Uribe, José Walter Lozano Guarnizo, Alexis Torres Zapata and William Giovanni Domínguez Castro.

[161] According to a December report by the Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris NGO, 473 FARC-EP guerrillas and 357 members of the Colombian security forces died in combat between January and September 2010.

Researcher Claudia López considered that the Colombian government is winning the strategic and aerial side of the war but not the infantry front, where both the FARC-EP and ELN continue to maintain an offensive capacity.

President Juan Manuel Santos stated that the FARC commander was killed in an operation that began in the early hours of 21 September in the department of Meta, 200 miles (320 km) south of the capital Bogotá.

The NGO has stated that while most of these incidents remain defensive in nature and were not like the large offensives from years past, FARC actions grew since 2005, and the rebel group was carrying out intense operations against small and medium-sized Colombian military units in vulnerable areas.

He has also been decisive in combatting the New Illegal Armed Groups that emerged as a result of the paramilitary process, especially in fighting threats and violence against human rights defenders and social leaders.

The details of this partnership, however, were far from clear; Washington Office on Latin America's Adam Isacson explains that two issues central to peace accords with ELN—resource policy and kidnapping—are currently off the table in the talks in Havana with FARC, and the addition of these topics may complicate and slow down an already sluggish process.

[217][218] On 28 June 2015, humanitarian and spiritual leader Ravi Shankar, on a three-day-visit to Cuba, had several rounds of discussions with FARC members in an exercise of confidence-building in the peace process, which had many hurdles from the past three years.

[233] The Special Jurisdiction of Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP) would be the transitional justice component of the Comprehensive System, complying with Colombia's duty to investigate, clarify, prosecute and punish serious human rights violations and grave breaches of international humanitarian law which occurred during the armed conflict.

[234] At the end of a six-day visit to Colombia, on 9 October 2017 the UN Assistant Secretary-General for human rights Andrew Gilmour issued statement welcoming progress in the demobilization and disarmament of the FARC.

[243] FARC received most of its funding—which was estimated to average some US$300 million per year—from taxation of the illegal drug trade and other activities, ransom kidnappings, bank robberies, and extortion of large landholders, multinational corporations, and agribusiness.

Instead, it maintained a system of taxation on the production that took place in the territories that they controlled, in exchange for protecting the growers and establishing law and order in these regions by implementing its own rules and regulations.

[272] According to Amnesty International, the number of kidnappings decreased in the last years of the conflict, but the human rights organization estimated that FARC and ELN guerrillas continued to be behind hundreds of cases until their disarming.

[277] The government's revised figures were considered "absurdly low" by Fundación País Libre, which has argued that its own archives suggest an estimated 1,617 people taken hostage between 2000 and 2008 remain in the hands of their captors, including hundreds seized by FARC.

[286] In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced that the FARC-EP had abducted and executed civilians accused of supporting paramilitary groups in the demilitarized zone and elsewhere, without providing any legal defense mechanisms to the suspects and generally refusing to give any information to relatives of the victims.

[287] According to HRW, those extrajudicial executions would qualify as forced disappearances if they had been carried out by agents of the government or on its behalf, but nevertheless remained "blatant violations of the FARC-EP's obligations under international humanitarian law and in particular key provisions of article 4 of Protocol II, which protects against violence to the life, physical, and mental well-being of persons, torture, and ill-treatment".

The CRIC also indicated that neither the Colombian government nor the mediators and armed groups involved consulted with the indigenous people and their authorities about the hostage release, raising concerns about the application of national and international law guaranteeing their autonomy, self-determination and self-government.

[citation needed] FARC was organized hierarchically into military units as follows:[313][314] The FARC–EP secretariat was led by Alfonso Cano and six others after the death of Manuel Marulanda (Pedro Antonio Marín), also known as "Tirofijo", or Sureshot, in 2008.

[323] Within remote locations under FARC control and where the national government is generally absent, the group can function as a revolutionary vanguard and institutes its de facto rule of law by carrying out activities that aim to combat corruption and reduce small-scale crime.

In the populated urban areas where the Colombian state has maintained a solid historical presence, some FARC sympathies may have existed in the poorest neighborhoods and among certain progressive sectors of the middle class, but most city inhabitants tended to view the guerrillas as one of Colombia's main problems.

[323] By the end of 2010, FARC-EP influence was significantly reduced in the regions where it had only carried out a recent military-focused expansion during the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to the failure to establish close social ties with local populations.

Similar military setbacks and retreats occurred even within its traditional strongholds, forcing the FARC to move towards the most remote areas, but there the guerrillas did appear to maintain popular support among the peasants that had developed organic links to the insurgency.