SUMMARY
M-19 (Movimiento 19 de April; the 19th of April Movement) was a Colombian rebel group, active in a conflict against the government in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. The group was founded by Jaime Bateman Cayón, a former FARC member, and Carlos Toledo Plata, a former member of the opposition movement the National Alliance (ANAPO). M-19 was formed as a reaction to the electoral fraud against ANAPO and its presidential candidate Gustavo Rojas Pinilla during presidential elections on 19 of April 1970 (thus, the name). Initially, M-19 wanted to become the armed wing of ANAPO, but when they failed to persuade the party leadership, they broke away and created their own movement in 1973.
The movement was born as an urban group consisting of young middle-class students inspired by South American guerilla groups such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Montoneros in Argentina. Their ideology was a mixture of nationalistic revolutionary socialism and populism and they criticized other left-wing groups in the country, who were rooted in the international models of Soviet, China, or Cuba.
Seeing the need for democracy in Colombia, M-19 defined its struggle to be an armed struggle for democracy. At the beginning of the 1980s, the group decided that the struggle also needed to be towards peace in Colombia, which facilitated the transition to a negotiated peace at the end of the decade. M-19 saw peace as a way to connect with the people in order to regain their influence in national politics. Other democratic movements on the Latin American continent at that time, as well as negotiated solutions in Central America, also influenced them.
M-19 built a guerrilla army using mobile guerrillas, army ambushes, camouflage for infiltration operations, mining for defense operations, and combined rural and urban styles in their force, eventually reaching a level where they could take on the state army. In 1980, M-19 was officially regarded as the second largest guerilla group after FARC in Colombia. The number of active members at that time was estimated at between 1500 and 2000. M-19 mainly focused its military activity in Colombian cities. Military, the group had two fronts: the Southern Front in Putumayo and the Western Front in the Caldas, Cauca, Valle de Cauca, Quinine, and Tolima. They carried out bomb attacks and their main source of funds for M-19 was ransom money from kidnappings.
The group received external support of different kinds, from both states and non-state groups. As for the former, both Cuba and Libya provided training to many of the M-19’s fighters in the early 1980s. Internally, in relation to the other rebel groups in Colombia, the group promoted unity and strove for cooperation. In the early 1980s, M-19 worked alongside EPL in its fight against Government of Colombia. In 1987, M-19 joined the Simon Bolivar Guerilla Coordinated Board (CGSB) an umbrella organization set up to unify leftist guerrilla movements, including the FARC, the ELN, the EPL, the Quintin Lame Movement and the Workers Revolutionary Party. However, CGSB failed to become a successful united guerilla front.
On 9 March 1990, a peace agreement was signed between the Government of Colombia and M-19. The agreement concerned socio-economic, political, and judicial reforms, the political transformation of the M-19 as well as an amnesty and Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) provisions affecting the M-19. It also called for constitutional reform to combat drug-trafficking. Shortly after the demobilization, M-19 created a political party called the Democratic Alliance M-19 and took part in presidential elections. The party received strong support in the elections, making it possible for it to play an important role in the 1991 constitutional reform process.
