Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

M-19 • 405– M –M-19. The Movimiento 19 de Abril (April 19 Movement) was a Colombianinsurgent group, enjoying occasional sponsorship fromother non-Colombian terrorist groups and states, that pursued bothentrepreneurial and revolutionary agendas. Its revolutionary goalwas to lead the Colombian people in a populist revolution againstthe “bourgeois” establishment in Colombia and to resist U.S. “imperialism,”particularly in the form of U.S. economic penetrationof Colombia. The group’s ideology represented an eclectic blendof Marxist-Leninist ideas mixed with heady doses of populism andnationalism. Its entrepreneurial activities included 1) kidnappingand extortion directed against foreign-affiliated companies to forcethem to finance the M-19’s projected revolution, and 2) collaborationwith, and/or extortion of, Colombian cocaine cartels, also as ameans of financing its revolution. As of late 1989, the M-19 enteredthe Colombian electoral arena as a legal political party, the AlianzaDemocrática Movimiento 19 de Abril (AD/M-19), or Democratic AllianceM-19 Movement, but found its candidates targeted for assassinationby the Colombian drug cartels’ leaders, who sought revengefor the M-19’s past attacks on them.The M-19 received help from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Libya, as wellas training from Argentinean Montoneros and Uruguayan Tupamaros.Cuba trained 300 M-19 guerrillas in 1980. Both Cuba andNicaragua supplied the M-19 with arms in the early 1980s. The M-19has had contacts with the Ecuadorian Alfaro Vive Carajo group andother similar groups in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru,and Venezuela. In April 1984 the M-19 announced it had formed tieswith the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) separatists. TheM-19 became a member of the Simón Bolívar Guerrilla Coordinationboard, organized under the auspices of the Revolutionary ArmedForces of Colombia (FARC) in 1985, and later ran candidates in theMay 1990 Colombian presidential elections.Although its activities began with a series of bank robberies in1973, the M-19 first announced its existence on 17 January 1974,when it stole the spurs and sword of Simón Bolívar from his formervilla, now a Bogotá museum. It declared itself retroactively“founded” on 19 April 1970, the date of the electoral defeat of theAlianza Nacional Popular (ANAPO), or National Popular Alliance,