ABSTRACT
The profile of Betancur was taken from Semana magazine. Betancur himself refused to be interviewed and hasn’t been interviewed for years. The estimates of the number of guerrillas came from interviews with political scientists such as Alejandro Reyes Posada and Alfredo Rangel, who also serves as an adviser to the Colombian Defense Department. The accounts of Rojas Pinilla’s repression came from Guzman et al. La Violencia en Colombia, estudio de un proceso social, Bushnell’s The Making of Modern Colombia, and Serpa Erazo’s Rojas Pinilla: Una historia del siglo XX. All the accounts of Betancur’s management of the peace process were from interviews with participants in the process: John Agudelo Ríos, the government’s chief representative, and delegates such as Alberto Rojas Puyo and Juan Sebastián Betancur, a representative of the business sector. Fallout because of Communist Party support for the Liberal Party hierarchy can be found in Sánchez’s article in Memoria de un país en guerra. Concerning Communist Party support of the FARC, several ex-party and ex-FARC explained to me the means by which the party aided the rebels. Several others explained the hierarchy of the Communist Party and how people like Rojas Puyo were shut out from the debates on strategy. Rojas Puyo described for me the trek through Sumapaz to guerrilla headquarters. FARC specialists and members of the “movement,” the rebels’ name for themselves, explained to me the significance of being an “intellectual half-timer.”
