San Vicente del Caguán is a small town on the edge of the jungle that runs from the Andean foothills of Colombia down to the Amazon river basin. It has a sunstricken central square—a patch of dust and a few mango trees—with a graceless modern church on one end and a nondescript municipal building on the other, and around it a grid of narrow streets laid out in Spanish style. The layout is traditional, but San Vicente has the look and feel of the kind of frontier town where people have been lured overnight by the promise of money. There are loud cantinas; fleshy women in too much makeup under the glaring sun; block after block of storefronts selling boom boxes, high-heeled shoes, glitter eye shadow, and telephones shaped like hot dogs. More boom boxes and plastic jewelry are offered for sale along the narrow sidewalks. Mules, motorcycles, and roaring pickup trucks compete for space on the gutted road.
Beginning in the 1950s, the region was populated by poor campesinos from other, war-ridden, parts of the country, who cleared patches of land here and started a new life. Many hundreds pressed deep into the jungle and were never heard from again. The luckier ones survived to become modestly prosperous cattle ranchers. In the last ten years or so, however, a new wave of poorer and even more adventurous settlers arrived. They were looking to plant coca, the tealike shrub from which cocaine is processed, and thanks to high prices for this illegal crop the region’s economy flourished. So did the finances of Colombia’s oldest guerrilla group, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym as the FARC. For years, the FARC had been involved with coca growers throughout the country, offering protection from government anti-cocaine patrols in exchange for a tax levied on the sale and transport of coca and cocaine paste.
Thanks to the 1990s cocaine bonanza San Vicente prospered, and so did the guerrillas. The most widely quoted estimate of how much protection money the FARC takes in each year from the coca business is $500 million. With these funds, the FARC has severely escalated its thirty-five-year war against the state, and brought the government of President Andrés Pastrana to the negotiating table.
In June of 1998, when he was still running for the presidency, Andrés Pastrana announced that if he were elected he would order military forces to withdraw from a portion of territory in the sub-Amazon region around San Vicente, in order to guarantee the FARC leadership safety so that the government’s peace negotiations with the group could begin. The territory, referred to as the zona de despeje, or cleared zone, would include five municipal districts, each one with only a few hundred thousand inhabitants, but each with as much territory as a small European country. All told the area in question added up to 26,250 square miles—twice the size of El Salvador. San Vicente, which sits on the edge of the cleared zone closest to Bogotá, would be the center for the talks. And the FARC guerrillas, who for all practical purposes already controlled the rolling countryside around it, would be allowed free rein in San Vicente. Six months later, in December 1998, the withdrawal of the military began.
With a handful of other passengers, I boarded a commercial flight from Bogotá in January to the undeclared capital of the zona de despeje. I wanted to request an interview with the leader and founder of the FARC, the aging Manuel Marulanda, whom I had met once before. In 1986, with a group of Colombian journalists, I made the arduous trip on horseback and on foot to the FARC’s command center, deep in the canyons and rain forest of the Andean piedmont. Marulanda had received us then in his spartan compound, where he tended a vegetable patch and the war, surrounded by his private guard, which was composed principally of young women. Marulanda, a campesino from the Andes who had been fighting the government for twenty-two years by that time, was a stubborn and patient man, I thought then. And I was struck by his troops; a surprising number of them were girls, and although the FARC’s leadership was graying, the guerrilla soldiers were remarkably young.
1.
When I arrived in San Vicente, I headed for the FARC headquarters on the town square. A boy with a fuzz of hair above his upper lip opened the door to let me into an enormous, bare, and unkempt room, where a handful of kids were slumped on the floor and on gimpy plastic chairs, watching a Bruce Lee movie on a television set that had been placed on an upended crate. There were machine guns—FALs and AK-47s for the most part—propped against the wall, but the boy who opened the door carried his rifle on his shoulder. The girls had obviously been shopping on main street, and I wondered where they had gotten the money for mascara and nail polish.
To jog Marulanda’s memory about my long-ago visit I had brought a picture I took of him then, smiling into the camera. The commander-in-chief of the FARC does not, as a rule, give interviews, and as it turned out I would be no exception this time around, but the photograph was useful nevertheless. I knew that journalists could spend days waiting for any contact with the high command, but compañera Nora, a trim, agreeable woman in charge of the FARC’s liaison with the public, and the only adult in sight, examined the picture and immediately wrote down my interview request. A courier was leaving in a few minutes for the camp outside town where the FARC commanders live, she said obligingly, and I could send the photograph with him, along with a note. Soon the guerrillas in the room also noticed the picture. They nudged one another and took silent reconnoiters around my chair until at last one of the girls—small, chubby, droll-looking—took it from me and held it up close. Her expression was dreamy. “You love him a lot too, don’t you?” she said.
There were no signs of a personality cult on the walls. In fact, there were no posters, no slogans, no banners—hardly anything at all. In the small office where Nora received visitors there was a creaky desk, a fan, a couple of chairs, and a lone photograph of Marulanda in conversation with Victor G. Ricardo, Pastrana’s peace commissioner. A second framed picture could only have come from the former Soviet Union: it was a full-length pastel-tinted lithograph of Lenin, in which Vladimir Ilyich was portrayed with unusually small hands and feet, standing on a mound of flowers and gazing upward—looking for all the world like the Virgin Mary ascending. A third photograph, a blurry snapshot of the FARC’s deceased ideologue, Jacobo Arenas, graced the entrance hall. There were in conversation no references to Marulanda’s teachings or to his superior wisdom, and yet the more I talked with the round little girl who loved him so much—I’ll call her “Claudia”—I wondered what kept her going if it wasn’t a kind of absolute faith.
Her family was from the region, I soon found out. She had taken to bumping up against me and squeezing me every time she found me chatting with Nora in the little office, with a persistence I was beginning to find alarming until I thought to ask how old she was. “Seventeen,” she answered. And how long had it been since she’d seen her mother? “Four…no, five years,” she said. She had left home to join the guerrillas when she was twelve. Later I listened while she told her best friend—also seventeen and as lively and doll-eyed as Claudia—how on a recent day, in a moment of daring, she had taken a taxi to her home town, which is outside the demilitarized zone. The access roads to the zone are patrolled by the army and also by members of a paramilitary detachment that operates in the neighborhood. But Claudia felt sure she would pass unnoticed because she had grown up so much since she’d left home, and because she was wearing civilian clothes.
“I just thought I’d like to say hello to my mom, you know?” she told her friend. “But when I got to the last checkpoint I saw one of the soldiers staring at me and I thought, sonofabitch! I didn’t take off my bracelets! All the soldiers know that we guerrillas like to wear these little black elastic bands—they’re expensive! One thousand five hundred pesos [about seventy-five US cents] just for one, and if I take them off now he’ll suspect something. I said to the taxi driver, ‘Turn around, take me back to San Vicente right now!’ and the taxi driver kept saying, ‘You’re a guerrilla, aren’t you? I’ve seen you before.’ ‘No I’m not,’ I said. ‘Take me home now!’ I was scared.”
About 30 percent of the guerrillas’ troops are estimated to be female. Nora, who is thirty-three, told me how she too had joined the guerrillas as an adolescent eighteen years ago. “It was something I wanted to do since I was little,” she said. She came from the highlands, or so I guessed from her sharp Andean features and her accent, and when she was ten a guerrilla column with women fighters passed through her village. Nora says that she saw the brisk young women, in uniform and carrying guns, and thought they were the most powerful and glamorous creatures she had ever seen. When she turned fifteen, she persuaded her parents that she had to join them. I wondered if she had missed her family, and if she hadn’t found the life unbearably hard at first. “Not really,” she said. “There were so many of us children. It wasn’t like our mother had time to baby us.” And as for the hardship, “maybe if I’d been some middle-class momma’s girl,” she glanced up at me and corrected herself, “maybe if I hadn’t been of campesino origins, I would have suffered. But I was so used to hard work that what I had to go through felt easy.”
Perhaps only a Colombian campesino could survive the hardships imposed on the FARC troops, but it didn’t seem to me that Claudia, sturdy and young as she was, found her life easy. Life for the guerrillas has changed, in any case, since Nora’s days as a foot soldier, as a result of the FARC’s decision to shift away from traditional guerrilla ambushes and hit-and-run operations. Since August of 1996, when the FARC overran a government military base for the first time and took sixty soldiers prisoner, the guerrillas have been waging something very like real war against the Colombian state. Attacks on police stations in small towns and military bases in the countryside are now the norm. The element of surprise is key to the attacks, and from what I could understand, Claudia might have been part of one of the FARC’s two mobile columns, whose specialty is marching cross-country at such speed that they have attacked and retreated before the military intelligence services can even detect their movements.
