Colombia Signed a Peace Deal Why Are Thousands of Rebels Taking Up Arms Again
Colombia Struck a Peace Deal With Guerrillas, but Many Return to Artillery
Under a torn Colombian flag on a windy hilltop, a ragtag guerrilla militia gathers. One fighter is missing an arm. Another, a leg. A commander who can barely read but goes past the alias "the Poet" tells of a recent firefight with a paramilitary squad in the hills nearby.
It might exist just another scene from Colombia's decades of guerrilla warfare were it non for a puzzling fact: The grouping the fighters say they vest to, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, laid down its arms after it signed a peace deal meant to cease the longest war in the Americas.
The peace accords signed in 2016 by so-President Juan Manuel Santos and the rebels were meant to bring an end to five decades of fighting that left at to the lowest degree 220,000 expressionless and most half-dozen million people displaced from their homes.
Behind the agreement, though, loomed a fearfulness: That many of the thousands of fighters granted immunity under the pact might sour on civilian life and choice up arms once more.
It has already happened.
"Nosotros doing the same work, we have the aforementioned ideals — and we'll charge ahead, God willing," said one of the commanders, who is 25 and goes by the alias Maicol.
These dissident guerrillas invited The New York Times to their army camp, hidden among mountains n of Medellín, to tell the story of why they abandoned the peace deal. But well earlier the visit, the agreement was already fraying.
The government, which had promised to sweep into insubordinate lands behind the FARC, bringing health and education services and potable water, is barely seen in much of the country. President Iván Duque of Colombia campaigned against the accords and now says he will revise them. Ane of the FARC peace negotiators was arrested for trafficking ten tons of cocaine this year — while preparing to take a senate seat.
And then there are groups like the 1 The Times visited, which nowadays a particularly grave threat to the accords. There can exist no peace in Colombia if the rebels rearm.
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Hundreds, if not thousands, of FARC fighters accept resisted the bargain. Insight Crime, a foundation that tracks organized crime groups, estimates that there may exist up to ii,800 dissident FARC fighters — almost 40 percent of the number that fought earlier the peace deal.
One theme continued the fighters' narratives here in the FARC military camp: While the government had promised them a new civilian life under the accords, they soon found themselves under threat by a range of paramilitary groups that rushed to take command of territory the rebels left backside. The dissidents asked The Times not to reveal the location of their camp out of fright the regime or paramilitaries might attack.
"They were shooting up my companions, and I decided to go upward to the mountains," said Maicol. At to the lowest degree 75 former guerrillas have been killed since 2016, according to the political political party founded past the demobilized guerrillas.
While FARC leaders claimed they had handed all of their weapons to the United Nations, that was not entirely accurate. "There were still some weapons, old ones," said the commander known as the Poet, who similar many of the rebels interviewed, uses his alias so as non to endanger his family.
Perhaps equally troubling as the resurgence of dissident groups are new alliances they are forming in these mountains. Some of the rebels now wear the insignia of the Virgilio Peralta Arenas Bloc, a mafia group defendant by the regime of killing civilians and trafficking drugs.
The group once fought the FARC, simply rebels said they now piece of work together for mutual protection. It could one day mean that the rebels look more like an organized crime gang than the Marxist revolutionary army they were founded equally in the early 1960s.
"This is just part of the tragic history of Colombia — one form of violence morphing into some other in the absenteeism of a legitimate land," said Cynthia J. Arnson, the Latin America manager at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "Peace accords offering opportunities that can be grasped or not, and this i is being lost twenty-four hours past day."
Among the onetime FARC leaders now unaccounted for is Iván Márquez, FARC'due south second-in-command, who went missing more than a month ago, leaving many fearing he will rearm.
"If Iván Márquez leaves the peace process and joins the dissidents, then the entire process could fail," said Jeremy McDermott, the co-director of Insight Offense. He estimates that every bit many as 10 other commanders could take up artillery once again, enough to possibly create "the nucleus of a new guerrilla army."
Old rebel leaders are urging old fighters non to return to the fold. But many, similar Julián Gallo Cubillos, a onetime commander who was known every bit Carlos Antonio Lozada, say they also understand their reasons for fighting given the dangers faced equally civilians.
"Nosotros have to respect their decision," he said. "Even though we don't share information technology, and spent a half century going down that path and never achieved what we were looking for."
The Colombian authorities did not respond to requests for an interview. Just on taking office last month, Guillermo Botero, Colombia's defense minister, said, "The dissident FARC have spread far more than what's been said and are in the process of growing."
He likewise offered a warning to dissidents.
"Our armed forces volition recover their combative character," he said.
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The commander called the Poet joined what he calls the "old FARC" when he was eighteen, and spent the side by side 12 years rising through its ranks — until i day his political party was ambushed and he was shot in the tum. Photos of him and others in the campsite were as well published by Bloomberg, which also did not use full names.
Disguised as civilians, his companions sneaked the Poet into a infirmary in Medellín. He said that while recovering he was arrested on suspicion of existence a guerrilla and sentenced to 26 months in jail.
One time a free man, the Poet settled almost the metropolis of Ituango, leading noncombatant activist groups in that location.
But when the peace accord was signed and guerrillas in the expanse withdrew to a disarmament campsite, a chill roughshod over the region as fighters from Colombia's Association del Golfo, the country's largest crime system, took their place. The Clan threatened those they found in their manner.
This happened across the land. Hundreds of rural activists were killed, including erstwhile rebel fighters.
The Poet decided to seek advice from a one-time comrade-in-artillery: Rogelio Guerrero, who had joined the rebels in 1998. The two met at a disarmament camp near the town of Santa Lucía.
Mr. Guerrero told a similar story. Paramilitaries had begun to threaten him, he said, and then concluding twelvemonth a one-time commander living nearby as a civilian was shot dead. Mr. Guerrero feared he was next.
Afterwards hours of conversation, the ii decided to revive their sometime FARC unit, with Mr. Guerrero every bit the leader, they said.
"I felt proud in one case again," said the Poet. "Suddenly I could see it all up and running again. It was just grand."
Returning to the battlefield proved difficult. The FARC's central command structure, which had relayed messages and orders among groups, was gone. The new dissident group was alone.
But they were finding recruits.
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Among them was Cuatro, a fighter who had spent a decade with the FARC. He disarmed final year, but civilian life did non suit him, he said. When he heard that a group of dissidents was forming, he sought them out.
Among the first challenges for the group was protection. Cuatro knew of weapons caches. And Mr. Guerrero, the commander, decided to strike up alliances — fifty-fifty with old enemies like the Virgilio Peralta Arenas Bloc and the Association del Golfo.
"We just need territory without there beingness mortality," Mr. Guerrero said.
The Virgilio Bloc agreed to work with them, he said, merely the Clan del Golfo "responded to us with violence."
The rebels are also seeking out onetime FARC members who have returned to arms elsewhere — including commanders like Walter Patricio Arizala, known by his alias Guacho, who controls the cocaine trade on the border of Ecuador and this yr kidnapped and killed three journalists. (The government is seeking Guacho, also, proverb on Saturday that he had been wounded in an attack.)
"The idea is to find ways to communicate, first coming together and operate similar nosotros did before," Cuatro said. "To unify all the country."
Life in the new FARC resembles the old rebel routines in many ways.
The day begins earlier sunrise. The fighters wake upwardly in their hammocks, drink java and begin classes, discussing Karl Marx and Latin American revolutionaries similar Cuba's José Martí. Every day or two, they pause military camp and march through the forest for hours.
But this is a more impoverished rebellion than the previous one.
The quondam FARC was financed from taxing the coca ingather. The area this group at present operates in has few plantations and no illegal gold mines. The fighters instead take food from nearby towns when it can exist found.
Many fighters do non have uniforms. Some sleep on the ground for lack of hammocks.
"Yeah, we go hungry, nosotros endure everything, but we are articulate almost what nosotros need to do," said a fighter who uses the alias Piscino.
The goals of the rebels likewise seem much reduced: They acknowledge they will never overthrow the authorities and they exercise not want to fight the provincial police. They do intend to defend villages from other armed groups, they said, though since they are on the run, information technology is probable they will mostly defend themselves.
The fate of this latest rebellion in Colombia is uncertain. It may abound, be crushed or just fade abroad. The road ahead is probable to exist rough — just no matter, said Piscino, who lost his left manus to a land mine.
These hardships are necessary sacrifices, he said.
"Those who have armed again,'' he added, "we are ready to die in this struggle."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/world/americas/colombia-farc-peace.html
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