While I was traveling around South America, I read David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect. The prologue opens the book with the story of Oscar Morales, a Colombian web developer, who created the One Million Voices Against FARC page on Facebook in 2008 to rally 12 million people against the Colombian guerilla organization FARC.
The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia is Latin America’s oldest insurgency. FARC was formed in 1964 as a peasant army to overthrow the Colombian government. Later, FARC’s platform has expanded to not only the struggle against Colombia’s wealthier classes, but also opposing the U.S. expanding influence in Colombia, multinational corporations monopolizing natural resources and paramilitary violence. FARC has engaged in kidnapping wealthy Colombians and trafficking drugs to fund its operations.
The Colombian government has been trying to negotiate a truce with FARC since the 1980s. The government and FARC held peace talks in 1999 and 2002. The last peach talks failed after the guerilla organization hijacked an airplane. The two parties have held several rounds of talks but continue to be at loggerhead over the terms of the cease-fire. President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos has stated that FARC rebels must show they are serious about peace before the peace talks can resume, tweeting “We don’t want more rhetoric, the country demands clear acts of peace.”
My team will be arriving in Bogota, Colombia this weekend to work on-site at Oruga Touching Dreams, a Colombian animation studio with plans to break into the U.S. market. For the past semester, our team has been trying to come up with a coherent market entry strategy for Oruga Touching Dreams. We have created a list of advertising agencies that hire animation studios for TV commercials to interview. One of the award-winning ads that we came across in our research was “FARC Operation Christmas” by Lowe and Partners.
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