Tough Intellectual Takes Rebel Reins in Colombia

"Cano has to manage his internal consolidation of the FARC, and that means the priority will be on the military before the political," said Camilo Gómez, a former government peace negotiator who met with Cano in 2002. "In this first stage, Cano cannot act on any political impulses because that would be a message of weakness to the FARC."

Defense Ministry officials said that with the death of Marulanda, as well as two other top commanders killed in March, the Secretariat has undergone a political makeover. Cano and most of the members of the group's ruling junta were educated in the old Soviet bloc and cut their teeth practicing a Stalinist brand of urban Communist Party politics marked by ideological rigidity and strict adherence to hierarchy.

Gen. Mario Montoya, head of the army, said the Secretariat's political tilt could help spur negotiations, but he said that could take a year or two. "Neither the country or the army or anyone should have illusions of peace with the arrival of Alfonso Cano," he said.

In sharp contrast to Marulanda, who came from peasant stock and whose struggle had its roots in the fight over land, Cano is the son of middle-class parents and attended the large National University in Bogota. He first learned about revolution from books, devouring Karl Marx, and from there joined the Communist Party's youth organization.

Still, in the 1970s in Latin America, radical campus politics and the dream of fighting to create a better society were not unusual. Some classmates did not consider that the young anthropology student -- remembered by friends for his polite formality, his dance moves at parties, and his love of literature, poetry and film -- would resort to violence.

"I always thought he would be an anthropology professor," said Lisandro Duque, who was in the youth group with Cano. "Because he was never really a rabble rouser. He was always in the behind the scenes, like a political adviser."

In reality, Cano had already begun to drift into the FARC's clandestine world. At first, he traveled to an isolated stretch of mountains south of Bogota to give classes in Marxism to young guerrillas. In 1982, after a stint in jail for rebellion, Cano became a full-fledged FARC guerrilla.

His rise was nothing short of meteoric, and he quickly won a place in the Secretariat. Close to Jacobo Arenas, then the FARC's top ideologue and leader of its political wing, Cano became a key political strategist in talks in Colombia in the 1980s and later a top negotiator in Mexico and Venezuela.

Some who have had frequent contacts with the FARC said Cano's rise irritated some rebels, while generating whispers that he was a "part-time commander," soft in the ways of Colombia's increasingly brutal conflict. It is a reputation that Cano might still be trying to shake.

"He started at the top and stayed at the top," said Carlos Lozano, editor of the Communist weekly, Voz, and one of Cano's comrades in the 1970s. "This creates a certain distance with some parts of the FARC."

Cano's faith in a political solution, though, would wane. Peace talks would fail, and death squads exterminated a political party he helped create as a vehicle by which the FARC would join the political process once peace was achieved. Hundreds of politicians from the party, the Patriotic Union, were gunned down, many of them close friends.

"It is state policy to destroy anyone who isn't in favor or sympathizes with the government," Cano said in the 2000 interview. "We exist precisely because the government does not give the country the possibility to participate in its own development. That is why we have to fight."