Patriotic Union

The Patriotic Union or UP (in Spanish: Unión Patriótica) is a leftist, Colombian political party, founded by the FARC and the Colombian Communist Party in 1985, as part of the peace negotiations that the guerrillas held with the Conservative Belisario Betancur administration. The party was subject to political violence from drug lords, paramilitaries and security forces agents during the mid-1980s, leading to its eventual decline, virtual disappearance, and extermination. The Colombian justice system counts 5,733 murdered militants of the Patriotic Union. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights counts more than 8,000 activists murdered and many more disappeared, tortured or displaced. In September 2002, new electoral laws stripped the UP of formal and legal representative status as a political party, but the Council of State of Colombia gave this status back in July 2013, facilitating its members to again run for office. Origins According to internal FARC documents from the group's 1982 Seventh Guerrilla Conference, the FARC originally intended for the creation of a group of clandestine party cells to be its political branch for recruitment and ideological propaganda purposes, while simultaneously maintaining its armed strength intact, at least initially, as part of the "combination of all forms of struggle". In theory, as the FARC developed a new form of army structure (the "People's Army", Ejército del Pueblo or EP), it would eventually be able to surround the cities with its armed columns, making the support of urban cells and mass movements decisive in order to finally seize power.