Leadership
After these developments, eventually many U.S. and other military experts considered that the FARC's Manuel Marulanda Vélez, as a veteran guerrilla fighter and as an efficient commander for four decades, was able to lead perhaps the most capable and dangerous Marxist guerrilla organization in the world.
Marulanda is very often referred to as "Sureshot" (Tirofijo), because of a reputation for using firearms very accurately during his earlier years as an insurgent. For some of those analysts, an allegedly problematic aspect in Marulanda's profile concerns the fact that he has limited educational background, due to the poor economic conditions that his family and many others had to face when growing up in rural Colombia.
Jacobo Arenas, on the other hand, as the FARC's main ideologue, had political and ideological education as a communist intellectual, thus it is believed that he realized that FARC's initial status was not up to the necessary standards needed to properly fight a Colombian Army that could count on the aid of the United States from time to time.
This was possible since, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the United States increased its military influence throughout the region through the activities of the U.S. Southern Command, an organization tasked with overseeing and handling military affairs in Latin America. U.S. Special Forces, such as the Green Berets, specifically trained to fight in Latin America jungles for counterinsurgency operations. Additionally, the widespread Spanish language was also taught to many members of U.S. forces in the region. From the perspective of Arenas, the challenge of having to potentially face the most technologically advanced military in the world made upgrading FARC's own military capabilities a necessity.
Read more about this topic: Military Structure Of The FARC-EP
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—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
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—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)