Scion of Colombia's Upper Class Returns as a Captured Rebel Leader
Banker-Turned-Guerrilla Personifies Bygone Era of Insurgency

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page A12

VALLEDUPAR, Colombia -- Ricardo Palmera is the son of a prominent country lawyer and attended the finest private schools, doing graduate work at Harvard University before becoming the manager of an important bank here in northeastern Colombia. Then, one day in 1987, for reasons unfathomable even to the wife and two sons he left behind, the onetime provincial dandy disappeared into the Sierra Nevada to begin life as a soldier in a Marxist guerrilla army.

He adopted a new name, Simon Trinidad, and turned against his former bourgeois friends with such calculated cruelty that his motivations have baffled this wealthy cattle-ranching region ever since. By the time he was arrested Jan. 2 in Quito, Ecuador, the most politically influential guerrilla ever to be caught, Palmera had become a puzzling symbol of the sacrifice and savagery of Colombia's long civil war.

"This has been the mystery for everyone in Cesar province," said Hernan Araujo, a prominent cattle rancher who once socialized with Palmera. "A son of the rich, a daddy's boy, and suddenly he's gone. We ask ourselves again and again: When did Ricardo change?"

Palmera represents a bygone era for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the roughly 18,000-member Marxist insurgency known as the FARC, and his capture has sharpened the focus on the military, demographic and diplomatic challenges threatening the guerrillas four decades after they emerged to challenge the state.

While President Alvaro Uribe and his U.S.-backed military campaign rack up successes, the FARC's older political leadership is losing ground to a younger generation of less doctrinaire commanders who favor harsh military tactics over political organization to achieve the group's goals, according to Western diplomats, analysts and former FARC members.

At 53, Palmera is identified with that older political wing, now engaged in a leadership struggle with the ascendant military faction that controls much of the FARC's weapons traffic, money and lucrative drug-producing regions. The outcome could determine who succeeds the group's septuagenarian peasant leader, Manuel Marulanda. Palmera's absence will likely strengthen the military wing's influence and silence calls inside the organization to pursue peace talks, analysts and others familiar with the group said.

The FARC is no longer drawing from the pool of sympathetic intellectuals like Palmera, according to Western diplomats and former guerrillas, largely because the group has failed to adjust its early strategy that focused on peasant organizing for land reform to attract Colombia's increasingly urban population.

"They have isolated themselves politically, and to regain space that they have lost because of political failures they have turned solely to military action," said William Alfonso Forero, a former mid-level FARC commander and one of nearly 1,500 guerrillas the government says deserted last year.

Forero, 31, was recruited a decade ago as a politically active student at the National University in Bogota, Colombia's capital, 400 miles southwest of here. When he joined, Forero said, each commander was required to explain in writing how a planned military operation would help achieve the FARC's political goals. By the time he left, Forero said, the rule had been dropped even for major operations.

"They have abandoned the political formation of recruits, abandoned education, and the kids joining now are being enlisted directly on behalf of the military process," Forero, who used the nom de guerre "Plotter," said in an interview last year. "I joined the guerrillas because of my love of man. And I left because of my love of man."

It is unclear what official position Palmera held in the FARC hierarchy at the time of his capture, although he is certainly the first household-name guerrilla leader to be apprehended. FARC leaders have disputed government claims that he held a seat on any of the group's governing councils, but Palmera is being charged with a number of crimes as if he had. He has remained silent during pretrial depositions, maintaining he would answer only to the charge of rebellion.

The 45 charges filed against him form a catalogue of the FARC's bewildering violence in recent years, which has cost the group support from the Latin American and European left because its tactics have appeared unrelated to the group's declared political objectives. Such acts included the September 2001 murder of Consuelo Araujo, the matriarch of Cesar province's most important family and a popular former culture minister. Palmera was the nominal head of the Caribbean Bloc, which carried out her kidnapping and execution. In the small world of Colombia's war, Palmera's sister is married to Araujo's brother.

"At the moment, the FARC is incredibly isolated and couldn't have a worse reputation," said a Western diplomat familiar with the organization. "They face an evolutionary challenge, and I have real doubts they can change. If they can't, they will lose their niche."

A desert breeze brushes over Cesar's scrub-covered plains, which rise steeply to the Sierra Nevada where Palmera first took up arms. Cattle outnumber the province's 1 million inhabitants by three to one, and prime ranchland is concentrated in the hands of several large families, which make up what a member of one of them characterized as a "modest oligarchy."

Palmera, whose father was the lawyer of choice among wealthy Cesar families, belonged to the exclusive Club Valledupar with its clay tennis courts and swimming pools. His former friends here recall his fondness for clothes, his sharp mind and his slightly arrogant air. Local newspapers called the tall, broad-shouldered Palmera, who traded black curly hair for an austere baldness as a guerrilla, one of Cesar's most eligible bachelors.

After completing his economics degree in Bogota and then a fellowship at Harvard, Palmera settled in Valledupar and began teaching history at the Popular University of Cesar. Soon afterward, he entered banking, eventually managing the Banco del Comercio, where his clients included the ranchers and cotton growers he grew up with.

Palmera's involvement with the rebels began in the 1980s, when the FARC, far smaller at the time, was romanticized by much of Colombia's left and ignored by its elite. The FARC had embarked on a doomed peace effort with the government by the middle of the decade, and started a political party with the idea of entering electoral politics.

In Valledupar, FARC-inspired peasant demonstrations demanding a more equitable distribution of land coincided with the peace efforts. After the first protest, Palmera was arrested for helping to organize the occupation of the town's main square. His friends were stunned.

Soon after, Palmera made his break for the mountains, taking several hundred thousand dollars of the bank's money with him. He embarked on a war against the state that was peculiarly personal as he turned his years of partying among the wealthy and managing their finances into valuable intelligence.

"What's clear is that after he joined the subversion, the kidnappings started, the extortions, the attacks and the death threats," said Hernando Molina, the governor of Cesar province and son of Consuelo Araujo. "The violence grew to touch everyone, no matter if you were an industrialist or a farmhand. You were targeted, attacked."

As the violence grew, so did Palmera's reputation. Because he managed the Caribbean Bloc's finances, he was thought to be orchestrating the wave of kidnappings for ransom, setting the "tax" that ranchers had to pay the guerrillas and plotting attacks on distant towns. Many victims were Palmera's friends; some were his own relatives. But he was never seen.

He surfaced again in 1998, when then-President Andres Pastrana turned over a 16,000-acre enclave in southern Colombia to FARC control as an incentive to begin peace talks. Palmera was named to the negotiating team, confirming his place among the FARC's most influential political officers.

"Up to that point it was all just legend," said Araujo, the rancher and a nephew of the slain former culture minister. "When we saw him at the table, we knew that his power was as great as we had suspected."

Those talks failed in February 2002, after guerrillas hijacked a commercial airliner and kidnapped a Colombian senator who was on board, a crime that Palmera has been charged with as a FARC leader. He disappeared, and was arrested Jan. 2 in Quito after what officials described as months-long surveillance by Colombian security forces. He flashed the victory sign and screamed "Long live the FARC, army of the people!" as he was marched to jail.

At the time of his arrest, Palmera, whose life once promised an endless string of parties, private clubs and country homes, was suffering from a flesh-eating disease contracted during his years in the jungle. "The only stain on my life," he said in a newspaper interview years before his capture, "was being a member of the Valledupar oligarchy."