Patriotic Union (Colombia)
political party from Colombia
The Patriotic Union (Spanish: Unión Patriótica, UP) was 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.
When the negotiations with the Betancur administration began after a 1982 amnesty, a cease-fire was declared in October 1984. The cease-fire was initially respected by both parties, but the FARC as a whole did not demobilize or directly renounce to the armed struggle. The UP was founded in May 1985 and several prominent FARC members were among the party's original founders, as well as members of the Colombian Communist Party (PCC).
The public source identifies “Patriotic Union (Colombia)” as political party from Colombia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Patriotic, Union and Colombia.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q930790. VIAF identifies the subject as 2600154137635715370000. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2002, 2013 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Patriotic Union (Colombia)” 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.