Another profoundly interesting aspect of the book is the way in which it forcibly rejects the widespread notion that the FARC is involved in and profits from the drugs trade. This, according to Brittain, is not the case. He argues that the FARC reject the coca industry because this industry replicates capitalist relations of production, and because its cultivation corrupts the alternative social order that the guerrillas seek to defend. In fact, the FARC and the narco-traffickers are enemies precisely because the huge profits that the narco-traffickers make from cocaine are recycled into land acquisitions which replicate and deepen land concentration at the expense of the FARC’s peasant social constituency. The opposition of the FARC to the narco-traffickers then led these to establish alliances with the armed forces and large landowners in order for them to expand territory used for coca cultivation.
Brittain describes how the FARC have been forced to accept some cultivation of the coca crop in areas under their control because they “must support the class that produces it”. Rather than profit from the drugs trade the FARC has decided, in cooperation with the peasants, to establish fair market relations governing the production of what is in effect Colombia’s main export crop. The FARC ensures fair prices for small-time producers, protects the peasants from paramilitaries and the armed forces, and, through taxation of the production and movement of coca, provides funding and resources for self-managed social services for the rural population. Thus, the FARC’s relationship with the coca trade is similar to its relationship to the economy and Colombian society as a whole. The FARC doesn’t profit from coca because it isn’t interested in money, it is interested in the creation of a revolutionary social order that will replace the Colombian state.
The author then uses this to explain the state’s relationship to narco-traffickers and the paramilitaries. The FARC is a threat to the Colombian state because it successfully establishes a fully functioning and legitimate alternative social organisation that fully compensates for the absence of the Colombian state, and is moreover, more democ