A Visit to FARC's Jungle Lair
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
I would have thought the FARC would have historically held onto Russian / Chinese AK platforms due to their reliability in Jungle environments.
Unless they source most of their weapons from cartels?
> He is very eager to have a Kalashnikov like Lorena's, a comrade having told him that there's no better rifle for the jungle. Unfortunately, those rifles are currently hard to find, so Carlos has to make do with an American M16.
US is very happy to sell arms left and right, so its either through cartels or just good old arms dealers.
New Chinese and Russian AKs are currently hard to find in the U.S. due to sanctions. China’s Norinco was sanctioned for trying to sell AKs (and heavy weapons) directly to L.A. street gangs. Russian state-owned arms manufacturers were sanctioned due to Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine. You can find new AKs for sale in the U.S., but they’re from a limited number of manufacturers and more expensive than the equivalent AR-style rifles.
In contrast, AR-style rifles are massively oversupplied right now, in the wake of both the Obama presidency and Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. Manufacturers built up large inventories in expectation of “panic buying” after Hillary’s election. When that didn’t happen and sales didn’t pick up accordingly, prices fell. In fact, Colt recently stopped making AR-15s for consumers, saying “The fact of the matter is that over the last few years, the market for modern sporting rifles has experienced significant excess manufacturing capacity.”
Jungle ops always intrigues me. So do insurgencies. But a jungle insurgency ...? I mean, good luck countering that if you're averse to burning down the entire forest. It takes some fanatically dedicated fighters to put up with that kind of life and still maintain even a rudimentary level of combat effectiveness.
At least 10 head commanders of FARC were killed through out the years, when the Colombian Military found their location and bombed their camps deep in the jungle.
The Colombian Military is probably the best military when it comes to fighting in this terrain.
Kind of a sad story if you ask me, seems like Colombians don't learn from their own mistakes even though the FARC have been operating on the same premise for more than 2 decades.... their Government doesn't take care of their own people and it's not hard for plenty of farmers to see.
Don't you know that computer science is the only degree program to make you an expert in math, physics, history, economics, and politics?
Like Álvaro Uribe. Good first mandate. Second mandate: it was all about making his sons richer, he stopped caring about the country. And now he only cares about staying out of jail.
... and so we should have a marxist-leninist class revolution to install a dictatorship of the proletariat, by armed insurgency if necessary, and if so, funded by drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping.
^ it helps if you at least attempt to describe things fully.
and yes, I realize the contras don't have clean hands either and are guilty of many of the same things.