Politics & Power Quote by Alma Guillermoprieto

Follow the money, and the romance drains out of revolution. Guillermoprieto, a journalist steeped in Latin America’s long hangover of insurgencies, frames Colombia’s guerrilla longevity not as an ideological miracle but as an accounting problem solved by narco-capital. The line is blunt on purpose: it refuses the reader the usual interpretive comforts (poverty, grievance, anti-imperialism) and replaces them with a harsher engine - cash.

Her specific intent is corrective and demystifying. By calling drug profits “tax money,” she borrows the language of the state to describe a shadow-state economy: traffickers pay; armed groups collect; violence becomes the enforcement mechanism. That phrasing is doing a lot of work. It suggests a grim symmetry between insurgent financing and government revenue, collapsing the moral distance both sides often insist on. It also hints at complicity: if the left is “being funded,” the passive construction lets the taint spread beyond the guerrillas to the broader ecosystem of leftist politics that benefits, directly or indirectly, from narco cash.

The subtext is a rebuke to anyone still treating Colombia as a straightforward ideological battlefield. Unlike other Latin American guerrillas that withered when Cold War patronage dried up, Colombia’s groups persisted because they plugged into a market with permanent demand. The context is key: decades of conflict in which the drug trade wasn’t a side hustle; it was the stabilizing infrastructure. Guillermoprieto isn’t offering a conspiracy so much as a diagnosis: movements survive when they can professionalize, and nothing professionalizes like reliable revenue.