Guerrillas ponder life after proposed peace deal
EL DIAMANTE, Colombia — “Do you want to see my gun?” Yurluey Mendoza asked about 90 minutes into our conversation. Now we were getting somewhere. This was the guerrilla equivalent of being invited inside for coffee. We were in the rebel-controlled hinterlands for what was billed as the final gathering of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC. On Sunday, Colombian voters will decide whether to accept a peace deal with the FARC, whose members have waged the longest-running insurgency in the Western Hemisphere.
The rebels were meeting last week to discuss the accord and figure out their future after 52 years at war.
Many, like Yurluey, are preparing to reenter the modern world. They have spent years roaming Colombia’s mountains and forests, bathing in creeks and sleeping in crude campsites.
Talking to Yurluey was like meeting someone who had stepped out of a time machine. She has never used the Internet, never seen the ocean, never been to the movies or ridden a bicycle.
She was also clearly not used to answering questions. “Why me?” Yurluey asked. “Why did you pick me?” I told her I wanted to talk to someone who had spent their whole life fighting in the jungle. Not one of the younger soldiers. Someone closer to my age (39). She glowered. “You think I’m that old?” Yurluey, the nom de guerre by which all her rebel comrades know her, joined the FARC at age 14, “about 20 years ago,” she said.
Yurluey had been on a helicopter for the first time only a few days before. It was a Red Cross airlift to the FARC gathering.
When she and the other fighters climbed aboard, the crew handed them foam earplugs, and one of the guerrillas tore open the wrapper and popped them in his mouth, thinking they were candy.
“I always imagined that the day I rode in a helicopter would be the day of my capture,” Yurluey said.
She has been to the big city only once, after a bomb shredded her left foot, leaving her nearly crippled. She left the jungle with a fake ID, and took a bus to Bogota, the capital, with a wad of cash for an orthopedic surgeon.
“Do you know what it’s like to spend 20 years at war?” she asked. I said I most certainly did not. “It’s hard,” she said. “Really hard.” Yurluey, one of about 7,000 FARC fighters, was a member of the “Teófilo Forero” mobile column, a feared and despised rebel division linked to some of the war’s worst violence. Her right thigh had a divot from a combat wound, the bullet just missing bone. Her right eardrum was blown out in another bombing, one of six she survived.
She went several days without eating sometimes, she said: “There are times when you can’t walk from so many blisters, or your backpack chafes off your skin. Or you have to step over the bodies of comrades, who you love like family, when they fall.”
Like a lot of guerrillas, she spoke in the language of doctrine. The FARC’s enemies were “the oligarchy.” The United States was “the empire.” The guerrilla army was “the movement.” But Yurluey was no robot. Like other female guerrillas, she accessorized her drab fatigues with big earrings, bracelets and colorful scarves. Her hair was bouncy and dyed blond. Unlike female soldiers in the United States who tend to dress and groom in a way that plays down their femininity, FARC fighters like makeup and lots of pink.
Her bed in the rebel camp was an earthen mattress of sticks and mud, fluffed with dried grass under a sheet of black plastic.
On the pole that was her bedpost hung her MP5 submachine gun. In her ammo belt was a 9 mm pistol, stamped “Made in Israel” and swaddled in cellophane.
She handed me the gun, which was worn and oily. I showed her the iPhone 6. It can take photographs and videos and send them across the world, I said. It also works as a flashlight, a compass and a map. She stared for a moment into the screen.
“There are so many new things I will have to learn,” she said. Was it worth it, all this hardship? I asked. The peace deal includes none of the sweeping revolutionary changes the FARC has long fought for. But Yurluey said she had helped win something, even if it was only the promise of full political rights from a government she has never trusted. She seemed tired, but not regretful.
“You do it because you tell yourself the sacrifice is worth it,” she said. “So that something in this country will change.”
Within weeks, if the peace accord is approved, Yurluey and the other FARC guerrillas will begin turning in their guns.
Yurluey said it will be hard to let the MP5 go. “That gun has protected me for so long,” she said. “But if they really open up a space for us in politics, I won’t need it anymore.”