Military Equipment
At the beginning of the FARC's military campaign in 1964 they employed a diverse assembly of weaponry, most of it captured or bought from individual sellers, and this generally continued to be the case. Even today, several FARC fronts still possess small quantities of many different kinds of rifles and shotguns.
After the end of the 1980s, the FARC has widely adopted as its most reliable weapon the Russian made AK-47 assault rifle. The AK-47 rifle is famous worldwide as employed by members of the Vietnamese guerrillas, when they were fighting the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States Army. According to many guerrillas, the AK-47 is easy to use, as sometimes it can be hidden in water or mud, and after a cleaning it usually works without any trouble (such as ammunition jamming).
According to U.S. intelligence (such as CIA), the FARC-EP has purchased thousands of AK-47 rifles from Russia, through connections with the Russian mafia. Colombian and regional authorities believe that the FARC has bought possibly greater quantities of such weapons from black market dealers in Peru and Central America, as well as corrupt military officials.
Based on these facts and believing that the FARC is looking for additional AK-47 suppliers, the United States opposed the 2004 announcement of Venezuelan arms purchase of 100,000 AK-103 rifles from Russia, for the purposes of upgrading the military equipment in Venezuelan army. Despite US opposition the purchase went ahead as planned. The United States has not been able to show any link between the democratic socialist government of Venezuela and the Marxist-Leninist FARC.
Since the end of the 1990s, the FARC has made widespread use of homemade mortars, adapted from domestic gas cylinders. The resulting blasts from gas cylinder bombs can produce sizable explosions comparable to military grade small artillery pieces, and as such have been very effective during FARC attacks against somewhat hardened targets in rural military bases, as well as Colombian Police positions in small towns and villages. The know how for making these mortars is believed to have been supplied to the FARC by the Provisional IRA.
However, this weapon is considered to be extremely hard to aim with a decent degree of accuracy, causing a large quantity of collateral damage and many potential civilian casualties. Human rights organizations, the Catholic Church and the United Nations have repeatedly demanded that the FARC abandon its use of this particular weapon, which they condemn.
A few 60 mm and 81 mm mortars, some of them captured from Colombian Army personnel, were also effectively used by the FARC to support attacks on Colombian military and Police bases between 1996 and 1998, as well as during smaller scale operations leading up to the year 2000.
Other known explosive devices used by the FARC are anti-personnel landmines and roadside bombs (sometimes considered similar to "claymore mines"), increasingly employed during the FARC's 2005 attacks. Civilian casualties due to the use of these mines have also led to their rejection by NGOs and human rights organizations.
Read more about this topic: Military Structure Of The FARC-EP
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