Social work, with guns

The next morning Yurluey had a wary look again, as though she was wondering if she said too much the day before. She was busy with camp chores, she said, and told me to come back later.

I returned with gifts: Medjool dates from California I’d found at a fancy market in Bogota. Yurluey picked one up, studied it, and bit down. “These are good,” she said, then ate four more and invited a few comrades to try them.

Three of Yurluey’s siblings had followed her into the FARC – two younger sisters and a brother who was later killed in combat.

Her parents are growing old, and she wants to help them when the war ends.

Like other rank-and-file guerrillas whose only criminal charge under Colombian law is “rebellion,” Yurluey will probably get amnesty if the peace deal passes.

She said she has a guerrilla “compañero” who would like children. Not her.

“I don’t see myself becoming a mom,” she said. “I don’t want anything right now that ties me down.”

She would like to travel, to go to school, but said she will be ready for whatever postwar task the rebel leaders assign.

Over the years, the FARC sustained itself largely on the profits of the drug trade, and by levying “taxes” on families and businesses in areas under its control. Those who didn’t pay were sometimes kidnapped and killed. Yurluey asked my impressions of her “movement.” I said I thought it had lost a lot of hearts and minds with those tactics.

Yurluey said, fairly convincingly, that she had not handled cocaine and had not been involved in kidnappings. But she said the rebels “made mistakes.”

“We killed civilians. That caused suffering, and it’s something we regret,” she said.

“They were errors made in the course of an irregular war that forced us to use unusual tactics.”

Yurluey described her role in the insurgency as something like being an armed social worker. In areas under rebel control, she would work with farmers to encourage them to grow more food. She taught math and reading to children in remote areas where the government did not, extolling the virtues of Marxism to their parents.

I had asked on the first day how someone like her joins the FARC. She spoke, somewhat vaguely, about wanting to fight for access to public education. She learned to read and write in the FARC, she said.

Yurluey started picking coffee beans and cleaning houses at age eight in southern Caquetá department, where she grew up.

It is one of the many isolated parts of the Colombian countryside where the presence of the state – including schools, health clinics and other government services – was scant.

On the second day, I asked again what turned a 14-year-old girl into a guerrilla fighter. She said there was another reason.

“When I was about seven, on St. Peter’s Day [June 29], I went into town with my father to see the celebration,” Yurluey said.

A band in the plaza was playing songs by request. Her father asked for a popular folk ballad that had a reference to the late FARC founder Manuel Marulanda.

“Two police officers came over,” she continued. “The music stopped. They asked who commissioned the song.”

Yurluey said the police knocked her father to the ground, kicking him, then took him to jail.

“I ran home to tell my mother, but she was nine months pregnant, so she told me to go back to take care of my father,” she said.

The police locked her father overnight in a cell so small he could barely sit down, Yurluey said. “There was a space under the door, and I put my hand under it so he could touch my finger. We sat like that on the floor for a long time.

“I remember how badly I wanted to be big at that moment when they were beating my father,” she said. “I think that’s when I decided I wanted to be powerful, or to be part of something powerful. To make them know they could never do that to us again.”