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Colombia’s Female Guerrillas

Terry Gibbs of the Department of Political Science was one of the last foreigners to meet FARC commander Raúl Reyes before his assassination in March 2008. The story of her journey into rebel territory is a chilling blend of domesticity and danger…

In the pre-dawn hours of March 1, 2008, the second-in-command of Colombia’s oldest and largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) and 21 other rebels were killed by an army incursion into their jungle camp located two kilometres across the border with Ecuador. It is the first time in the decades-long civil conflict that the Colombian military has been able to kill a member of the FARC’s seven-person central command and the cross-border strike brought Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela to the brink of war. Eight months prior to his death, I had traveled to one of Reyes’ jungle camps with my partner and colleague Garry Leech. It was a rare opportunity as few North Americans had met face-to-face with Reyes during the last six years. We not only met Reyes in person, but also gained insights into guerrilla life.

Reyes, who was chief negotiator for the FARC during the failed peace process (1998-2002), was known as a hardliner. He refused to accept a peace agreement that did not include social justice. This necessarily implied a transformation of Colombia’s political and economic structures—a process not welcomed by either Colombia’s elites or Washington. Colombia has been enmeshed in a civil war for over 40 years and while a small minority have benefited from its vast resource wealth, a majority of the population lives in poverty. The FARC are battling against the U.S.-backed government and its right-wing paramilitary allies, calling for an end to U.S. imperialism and a redistribution of wealth. Reyes was the international voice of the guerrilla group and he spent a great deal of time working to build international solidarity.

At the time of our departure from Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, we had only a vague idea about the specifics of our two-and-a-half day journey to the remote guerrilla camp. Our trip began with a one-hour flight to a small city in southern Colombia. After a night in a hotel, we journeyed for two days on two buses from high in the Andes Mountains down into the Amazon rainforest. One of the bus trips lasted over nine hours, five of which took place on harrowing and meandering mountain roads dropping off into cavernous valleys. While the views were stunning in all their green majesty, I was too terrified for much of the journey to venture a peek out the window. My fellow travelers found this distinctly amusing. There were several bends in the road that required the bus to grind its way through fallen rocks or running water. To add to the terror, our driver appeared to be in a rush, heading into many of the curves with the determination of a Formula One race car driver.

At one point on the second day, as our bus approached a river, we recognized the spot where we were told to disembark. It is here that we were to rendezvous with our guerrilla contacts. While we waited, a local woman in the solitary house beside the river served us cups of strong black coffee. We were able to make out a shadowy figure in the distant trees talking on a hand-held radio. After about twenty minutes, two young women in civilian clothing, one of them the figure in the trees, approached and informed us that they would be taking us down the river. We traveled in a dugout canoe that was powered by an outboard motor for approximately two hours. After stopping to pick up gasoline and four large planks of wood, we continued on our journey. Our river trip terminated at a seemingly arbitrary spot along the riverbank. Equipped with rubber boots and ponchos, we disappeared into the Amazon Rainforest on a narrow muddy trail. The two women insisted on carrying our backpacks in addition to the two six-foot long, heavy planks of wood each of them carried on their shoulders. With seeming ease, they made their way along the winding, hilly trail, while Garry and I struggled to avoid falling, and to keep apace with our guides.

Nightfall came during our hike and we were soon surrounded by darkness except for the dim glow of our small flashlights, which were pointed downwards at all times as per the instructions from our guides. After an hour of hiking, we were greeted by a fully-uniformed guerrilla armed with an AK-47 assault rifle. There was a brief conversation between this man and the two women. He remained at that point on the trail when we resumed our trek. We passed several more guerrillas over the next few minutes and each of them greeted us with a nod of the head. And then, appearing suddenly out of nowhere, the carefully constructed wooden structures of the camp became visible through the trees. At one end of the camp we saw a bright light perched over a table where a middle-aged man sat at a laptop computer. It was FARC commander Raúl Reyes.

[Read the rest of Terry Gibbs’s article here, as published on ZNet]