FROM COMBAT TO CONSERVATION

After half a century of armed conflict, Colombia’s ex-guerillas have no war to fight. Their new mission: preserving biodiversity in the jungles they occupied for decades.

Deep in the Colombian Amazon rainforest, dozens of sweat-soaked men and women weave through a maze of ceiba and rubber trees. Armed with machetes, they hack through vines as thick as saplings. They move in utter silence, eyes squinting in the dim light. They approach their mission — cataloging and protecting endangered species — with intent focus. A few years ago, these former members of the guerilla group FARC might have been tracking enemy soldiers or preparing to kidnap a political prisoner. Now their targets are far more elusive: giant river otters, nimble brown spider monkeys, Dracula orchids with black petals and fanglike protrusions, the riotously colored Flor de Mayo.

In 2016, after half a century of armed conflict, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

(in Spanish, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC) signed a peace treaty with the Colombian government. Emerging from the rainforest they had occupied for decades, the former guerrilla fighters were suddenly confronted with the question: “What now?” Part of the peace agreement stipulated that the Colombian government support the 14,000 ex-FARC members financially for several years; after that, they must live independently.

So far, former combatants have faced enormous hardship on the road back to civilian life, and COVID hasn’t helped. In mid-2020, Colombia’s urban unemployment rate surged to 15.4 percent. It’s difficult for anyone to find a job, but for former guerillas, it’s particularly challenging. Colombian citizens often still regard them with suspicion, and many have been out of the workforce for decades.

“It’s hard,” says Hugo Ramirez, who joined FARC in 2001 at the age of 17. “There is an abysmal amount of absolute poverty, and we still witness children dying of starvation.”

But where so many saw a problem, Jaime Gongora, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Sydney, saw an opportunity. Colombia is the second most biodiverse nation on the planet; rainforests play an integral part in this, with more than 56,000 species that call it home. But, until recently, researchers haven’t been able to study it in person due to FARC’s occupation. Teeming with rare specimens, from the pink river dolphin to the critically endangered Magdalena River turtle, alongside countless undiscovered plants, the Colombian

rainforest is a naturalist’s dream. Who better to explore that terrain than the people who had once lived there?

So, in 2017, Gongora created Peace With Nature, a series of workshops in the Guaviare region of Colombia to train past combatants in conservation science. The hope is that they’ll later apply those skills to ecotourism initiatives, like creating new nature trails, and become citizen scientists themselves. The workshops are led by a multidisciplinary team of teachers, including conservationists and biologists. These experts have guided over 100 former soldiers through brainstorming sessions on combining their lived knowledge of the jungle with the rigors of the scientific method. They learn how to take plant samples, how to handle binoculars and the best techniques for observing wildlife. For the participants, the program aims to provide both a new purpose and a promising path forward. “The idea was to empower these combatants with knowledge [of] biodiversity,” explains Gongora. “This [work] could be incorporated into activities that will allow them to incorporate into society.”

Today, he returns to Colombia between three and four times a year to hold these sessions, which each last about a week. The homecomings are a joy for Gongora, who grew up in the Colombian countryside. He speaks of a youth spent playing in nature, creating makeshift huts with friends and observing the jungle’s magnificent wildlife. Gongora carried that passion for wildlife into adulthood; in 1999, he left Colombia to pursue a doctorate in animal genetics in Australia. However, the war continuously loomed in the background of his childhood — a conflict with a complex history spanning nearly 70 years before the peace accord.

A PROLONGED CONFLICT

FARC was founded in 1964, six years after Colombia’s bloody civil war — known as La Violencia — came to a close. The conflict erupted in 1948, when Jorge Gaitán, a popular presidential candidate for the country’s center-left Liberal party, was assassinated. His death ignited riots and, eventually, a decade

PARTICIPANTS LEARN HOW TO TAKE PLANT SAMPLES AND HANDLE BINOCULARS, AND THE BEST TECHNIQUES FOR OBSERVING WILDLIFE.

of armed conflict between the Liberals and the country’s Conservative party. After 10 years and 200,000 deaths, the two parties agreed to the establishment of a bipartisan political system, known as the National Front, in 1957. Though it put an end to La Violencia, the system was overwhelmingly bipartisan and excluded participation by political leaders identified as heads of guerrilla groups.

One such group was the Colombian Communist Party, or Partido Comunista Colombiano (PCC). Communists first became active in Colombia after World War I, a reaction against the enormous wealth disparities between the working classes and large landowners. Many of these individuals established communes throughout rural Colombia that the government initially ignored. The guerrillas called for land reform and better conditions for peasants, and vowed to defend the defenseless against the government’s intrusions. But in 1964, the Colombian military began invading and destroying the communes. Members were forced to flee into the jungles, eventually regrouping to form FARC.

In the decades that followed, FARC’s numbers grew and shrank before settling at 15,000 members at the dawn of the 21st century. It was during this period that Ramirez, a current participant in Gongora’s program, joined FARC. At the time, FARC was an extremely powerful organization. The group’s members were still fighting for communist causes, but the organization was also heavily involved in drugtrafficking, illegal gold-mining, kidnapping and extortion. The guerilla fighters caught the attention of other countries whose political and financial interests the group threatened, including the U.S. Between 2000 and 2015, the U.S. provided 10 billion dollars in military aid to help the Colombian government fight the drug-trafficking and terrorism that were FARC’s cash cow.

Ramirez’s description of his time living with the guerillas is two-pronged: a time of learning in the splendor of the Colombian rainforest, but also a period of profound loss and trauma. Living under the constant threat of enemy fire takes its toll, no matter the beauty of one’s surroundings. Ramirez says he watched friends die in horrific ways, torn apart by aviation bombs or shot out of trees by the Colombian army. He was also taught to kill — an aspect of his time in FARC that he speaks about only in vague, simple terms.

Still, Ramirez insists that bloodshed composed only a small fraction of his life in FARC. When not patrolling, he and his comrades would study the works of communist scholars and learn new skills like medicine and cartography. In rare, nonregimented moments, they’d enjoy one another’s company.

Above all, Ramirez remembers the moments that he shared with local people, including Indigenous communities. Because his regiment remained constantly on the move to avoid government surveillance, he often encountered neglected pockets of the Colombian diaspora. Ramirez says the guerillas would share sustainable ways of living with the locals, such as teaching them medicinal practices, as well as how to live in an ecologically responsible manner. Many of these practices were taught to the former FARC members by the Indigenous communities they encountered, who have a long history of protecting biodiversity and countering deforestation through traditional, sustainable farming practices. “The true goal of FARC was to make a positive social change,” adds Ramirez.