Prospect of Peace: Talking With the FARC
Two members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia talk about their goals and their accountability in five decades of armed conflict.
Video by Ernesto Londoño and Alexandra Garcia on January 17, 2015.
HAVANA — A VARIATION of the scene has played out in sporadic nightmares I began having as a child. A band of guerrilla fighters with scraggly beards, dirty camouflage uniforms and rifles slung over their shoulders walk toward me. Their glares are callous, their words gruff. I watch as black rubber boots caked with mud advance toward me. It is too late. I am cornered, trapped.
Growing up in Colombia, I imagined being kidnapped as the only way to end up face-to-face with militants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist-inspired guerrilla group that has battled the government for over half a century. Yet, on a recent afternoon, I found myself with two members of the FARC, unarmed and dressed in civilian clothes, as they nursed drinks at a hotel bar in Havana, sitting on pastel green chairs.
“Are you guys by chance Colombian?” I asked meekly, verifying that these were the men who had agreed to meet me after several awkward phone calls earlier in the week. When they nodded, I sat at their table for the first of a series of fascinating conversations with countrymen I grew up fearing and loathing.
Years ago, had we met on a country road, these men would likely have seen me as fair game to hold for ransom, an embodiment of the class of privileged Colombians they call oligarchs. Years ago, I might have felt relief, even a bit of delight, to see news footage of their bodies left on the battlefield. But this is a new era for Colombians. So I shook hands and ordered a round of beers.
A little over two years ago, the first team from the FARC traveled from jungle hideouts to Havana for peace talks with the government of President Juan Manuel Santos. The negotiations here, by far the most expansive effort to de-escalate one of the longest-running armed conflicts in modern history, have forced all Colombians to take stock of a painful past. There is reason to be hopeful: Late last year, the FARC declared a unilateral, indefinite cease-fire that seems to be largely holding, and just days ago, the Colombian government stated its willingness to work toward a bilateral suspension of hostilities as soon as possible.
The FARC, which is estimated to have 7,000 members, is by far the largest insurgency group in Colombia’s conflict, which over the decades has been fueled by entrenched inequality and a multibillion-dollar narcotics trade. Getting it to disband would not bring about peace overnight, but it would go a long way toward ending a cycle of bloodshed that has left an estimated seven million victims, including people who have been slain, abducted and displaced amid the fighting. Over the past four decades, more than 39,000 Colombians have been kidnapped, according to government estimates.
If a peace deal is signed, Mr. Santos has vowed to put it before voters as a referendum before it becomes binding. But just how much Colombians are willing to forget, forgive and put behind them is a vexing question.
My first meeting with the FARC members lasted about half an hour and for the most part, we stuck to pleasantries. I asked to interview Luciano Marín Arango, better known by his alias, Iván Márquez, the second-in-command and lead negotiator in Havana. They offered to get him to answer a few questions in writing, before eventually committing to a meeting.
A couple of days later, they summoned me again to the hotel, and in the lobby, I was asked to surrender my cellphone before being guided into a small conference room.
Inside, were two FARC leaders whose faces I recognized from the news and fugitive bulletins. Jorge Torres, 61, known by the alias Pablo Catatumbo, and Felix Antonio Muñoz, 55, who uses the nom de guerre Pastor Alape, were sitting on soft couches. With them were two young women, who were part of their delegation. Both men are among the FARC leaders under indictment in the United States for allegedly smuggling more than $25 billion worth of cocaine. Washington has offered up to $2.5 million for information leading to the arrest of each.
The FARC members were cordial, but reserved, as Cuban waiters served us beer. I asked what they had heard from their victims, many of whom have been invited to Havana to offer their accounts. Mr. Muñoz said that the prevailing sentiment during the peace negotiations in Havana is not recrimination over the past. “Despite the pain, the victims have not conveyed hate, but rather an immense desire for peace,” he said.
Mr. Muñoz, however, was quick to point out that the people who have traveled to Havana to offer testimony as the two sides map out an accord include victims of government forces and right-wing paramilitaries, which committed some of the most heinous abuses in the conflict. Many FARC members, he told me, have suffered enormously, too.
The women, who spoke little at first, appeared to watch me warily. I asked one, who goes by the alias Camila Cienfuegos, who wore butterfly earrings and had piercing black eyes, how she wound up in the group. As a child, she told me, she dreamed of being a journalist. But in her late teens, she saw no good avenues to get ahead in life and found in the guerrillas camaraderie and protection.
“You see the differences that exist,” said Ms. Cienfuegos, 34. “Some people can go to school, and some people can’t.” Samy Flores, 27, said Colombians who are raised in districts wrecked by violence are often forced to pick a side. She did so as a teenager.
“All that surrounds you is war and suffering,” she said. “If you remain as a civilian, you’re exposed. And you feel a responsibility for the freedom of Colombians.”
I grew up in a house with two maids and attended a private American school where many of my classmates were dropped off in bulletproof cars packed with bodyguards. For years, many wealthy Colombians had the ability to keep the war at arm’s length, a troubling reality but not an imminent threat. As a child, after watching the news, I would sometimes ask my father, as he tucked me into bed, how close the nearest battleground was. Four, six hours, he would say, comfortingly.
But in fact it was a lot closer. One ordinary evening when I was around 9, we were robbed at gunpoint in our house. As heavily armed thieves packed my mother’s jewelry and our electronic appliances into bags, one spotted a framed photo of me, smiling as a 3-year-old, at Walt Disney World. “I also would have wanted my kids to meet Mickey Mouse,” the robber said derisively. The men forced my dad to open a safe at gunpoint, warning that if he didn’t, they would abduct my 2-year-old sister. We had no reasonable expectation that the men would be caught or punished. But we had the comfort of knowing we had money to replace the appliances, build a wall around the house and hire an armed guard.
During the 1990s, a war once largely confined to the countryside increasingly crept into the cities. Targeted assassinations of judges and prosecutors became routine. Bombings occurred with chilling frequency. Kidnappings, most carried out by the FARC, were so rampant that many Colombians took out ransom insurance.
Several classmates abruptly moved abroad. Weeks after high school graduation, the parents of a close friend from school, Adriana Escobar, were snatched by the FARC at their country house some 30 miles from Bogotá.
Jorge Cavelier, my friend’s stepfather, and her mother, Margarita Lega, were locked in a tiny, squalid room with a twin bed. They urinated and defecated in jars and were constantly reminded that a rescue attempt would force their captors to put a bullet through their heads. Mr. Cavelier was freed in December 1999, after more than five months in captivity, once his family paid a ransom that had been brokered for the release of the couple. The FARC reneged on the deal, though, holding Ms. Lega for six more months as it extorted even more money from desperate relatives.
When I finally got an audience with Mr. Marín, the group’s top man in Havana, he showed no remorse for all the kidnappings, though even the FARC has disavowed that tactic.
“Retentions,” he corrected me, “were done to support rebellion.”
He also brushed aside questions about the group’s role in drug trafficking, which has been well documented, and said he hoped the United States would roll back the criminal cases that would hang over FARC leaders after a peace agreement is signed. He is the subject of a bounty of up to $5 million offered by the United States.
While he is chillingly unapologetic about kidnapping, Mr. Marín said he had found the testimony of the victims of both sides haunting, an experience that forced the negotiators and international observers in the room to reflect on a brutal history. “We’ve borne witness to the pain that weighs on many Colombians as a result of this confrontation,” he said.
At the negotiation table in Havana, the two sides have reached tentative agreements about agrarian reforms, a long-term approach to curb the drug trade and a political framework that would allow the guerrilla group to compete at the ballot box. The ongoing session has focused on victims’ rights.
The final and most complex task, which negotiators hope to conclude this year, involves agreeing on who will be punished, and how severely, for abuses committed in wartime, and how to absorb rank-and-file guerrilla members into civilian society. Mr. Marín argues that guerrilla leaders shouldn’t face prison sentences. “No peace process has led to that outcome,” he said. “We are not going to ask for forgiveness for having taken up arms.”
RECENTLY, I asked Mr. Cavelier, my friend’s stepfather, who now lives in Miami, what he would like to see happen. His career as an artist was derailed for years after the kidnapping. His wife, to this day, feels afraid every time she visits Colombia. “I think everyone must be held responsible for their acts,” Mr. Cavelier said. “I don’t see how they could argue that there weren’t victims, that this was all about their political ambitions.”
There was no discernible anger in his voice, but he was not optimistic. “These people have a different type of conscience,” he said, referring to the FARC. “They’re unable to speak a single truthful word.”
Colombian government officials are struggling to draw up a transitional justice framework that strikes the right balance.
“Blanket amnesty is out of the question,” the government’s top negotiator, Sergio Jaramillo, said in an interview. “There has to be accountability.”
Mr. Marín said Colombians who have played leading roles in the conflict, including statesmen, ministers, generals and businesspeople, must come together at the end of the peace talks for an “act of collective pardon.”
“We need to pledge to a ‘never again,’ ” he said.
That night, after our meeting, I lay awake thinking about how vulnerable and anxious I felt during much of my childhood. I yearned for the country I left behind as a teenager and thought about the dimming extent to which it still felt like home. I don’t trust Mr. Marín. But our best hope might require having faith in his words.
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