Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

594 • REVOLUTIONARY ARMED TASK FORCEregular payrolls for its troops. FARC offsets its defections by usingits income from cocaine trafficking to recruit unemployed youngColombians to replenish its ranks. FARC strength in early 2009 wasestimated by some observers to be around 12,000.The most severe public relations defeat for FARC recently wasthe 2 July 2008 covert operation by the Colombian army, aided byU.S. interception and decoding of FARC radio traffic, that led to thefreeing of Ingrid Betancourt, held hostage by FARC since February2002, along with three U.S. captives and 11 Colombian soldiers.This operation won praise from French President Sarkozy, whohad been petitioning Chávez to pressure FARC for the release ofBetancourt, who also holds French citizenship. A mark of FARC’sdeclining foreign support was a statement by Cuban President FidelCastro not only praising the freeing of Betancourt but also criticizingFARC for the harshness of its military campaign, its holding ofcivilian hostages, and its inability to win support for itself throughits political fronts. In the same message, Castro continued to criticizethe U.S. role in Colombia; however, the United States continued tomaintain that its military advisers had played no active role in the 2July operation.REVOLUTIONARY ARMED TASK FORCE (RATF). The RATFwas a nonstate U.S. leftist terrorist group that sought to force changes inU.S. foreign policy through armed propaganda and “consciousnessraising”of the U.S. public. Sometime in 1979, or shortly thereafter,remnants of the once exclusively black Black Liberation Army(BLA) merged with the mainly white Weather Underground to formthe Revolutionary Armed Task Force. This new group attempted inturn to create an outreach umbrella organization, known as the May19 Communist Coalition, for recruiting other leftists or black prisoninmates into the RATF or BLA organizations. The May 19 groupestablished contact and fraternal ties with other revolutionary or ethnonationalistgroups, such as the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters,the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation separatists,and even the Palestine Liberation Organization. The RATF financeditself through bank robberies while its bombing campaign targetedoffices of corporations doing business with South Africa, such as IBM,as well as U.S. federal government offices. The group used a numberof aliases, such as the Revolutionary Fighting Group, the Armed Re-