It was an ambitious plan: create a hit record so irresistible that it would bring in legions of new fans. Minions set to work scouting international talent and putting together slickly packaged tunes and lyrics, complete with glamorous publicity shots. The result: Guerrilla Dance, a would-be breakthrough album for Manuel Marulanda, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a group better known for bombing and kidnapping than topping the charts.
Intercepted e-mails from Colombia’s Marxist rebels recently revealed that its grizzled founder came up with the idea in 2000. After four decades in the jungle waging Latin America’s bloodiest insurgency, Marulanda wanted to broaden the FARC’s appeal and win new recruits.
Senior commanders such as Mono Jojoy, Marcos Calarca and Felipe Rincon chipped in with their own ideas.
“We have to get the guy who makes merengues and we have to offer him a big budget,” Rincon said, referring to merengue, a rival to salsa, which is popular across Latin America.
Colombia’s El Tiempo says the FARC spent almost US$150,000 commissioning musicians from the Dominican Republic and polishing their tracks before uploading them on YouTube last year. The lyrics blend battlefield ideology — “Taca taca taca, the government will fall,” “carry the grenades and the rifles,” “enemy to the left, enemy to the right” — with more traditional merengue injunctions to “move those hips.”
Guerrilla Dance did not storm the charts but attracted attention as a slick contrast to previous rebel offerings of turgid, patchily recorded ballads.
Marulanda died of a heart attack in 2008. His scattered forces are left to ponder the lyric: “With this song we will get to Bogota.”
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