This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 4th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

The head of the FARC has died, but will it remain a threat to Columbia?

Juan Carlos Idalgo, the Project Coordinator for Latin America at the Cato Institute's

Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity comments.

The FARC is a guerrilla group in Colombia.

It's been around for 40 years, actually the oldest guerrilla movement in the world and it has its roots in peasant movements

back in the 1960s in Colombia who embraced Marxism and they started waging war against the state of Colombia.

Back in the early 1990s, the FARC adopted the drug trafficking business that was left from the drug

from the drug cartels that were battled and were defeated back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And since then the FARC had been doing the drug trafficking business.

They became a very powerful movement in the late 1990s.

They controlled large swaths of the colonial territory and even threaten the capital itself.

When President Albert Uribe was inaugurated back in 2002, the House of government was attacked with rocket

during the inauguration, with proof

how powerful this group was.

Despite its ideological background, the FARC became a criminal organization like many others. And he conducted drug trafficking business, but also

started targeting civilians with bombings and with kidnappings.

Right now, they are...

Right now they are...

Right now they are... Right now they are known to keeping captivity around 700 civilians in the jungles of Colombia.

Some of these people have been kidnapped for 10 years and they do this in order to get some ransom in a change.

So this is for these kind of activities is that they've been branded a terrorist organization

...