Operation Christmas
2010 Colombian military campaign
Operation Christmas was a campaign launched by the Colombian military during the Christmas season of 2010 to encourage FARC guerrillas to demobilize. The military selected nine 75-foot trees along paths the insurgents used and decorated them with Christmas lights and a message encouraging them to come home. The operation was deemed a success; 331 guerrillas demobilized while the campaign was active, a 30% increase from the previous year. It was followed by Operation Rivers of Light, where civilians close to the conflict areas as well as friends and relatives of guerrillas were encouraged to send a Christmas letter in floating LED-illuminated balls via rivers used by the insurgents. 180 guerrillas demobilized during the campaign's duration, including one of FARC's main bomb makers. A study on individual demobilization from the FARC, based on information about 19,504 reported deserters between 2002 and 2017, did not find any impact of the Christmas campaigns, including Operation Christmas (2010), Operation Rivers of Light (2011) and Operation Bethlehem (2012), on demobilization rates.
Background
Colombia has been involved in a low-intensity insurgency since 1964 with paramilitary groups and guerrillas, mainly The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Since the early 1980s, the government has been engaged in sporadic peace talks, convincing such groups as the EPL and the EPR to demobilize. In 2002, the government launched the Program of Humanitarian Attention to the Demobilised with a promise to reintegrate former guerrillas by supporting them with education, job training, and psychological support. Colombia's National Ministry of Defence worked with an advertising agency to research the lives of former guerrillas and to understand why they had joined FARC and what the conditions were like in the jungle.
“Operation Christmas” enters the record as 2010 Colombian military campaign. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Operation, Christmas and Colombian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17144805. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2002, 2017 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Operation Christmas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.