Former Militants Reborn in Bogota

The scar across her forehead is the only visible sign of the past that Luz Miriam keeps locked up like a prisoner.

None of her neighbors knows about the days when she wore fatigues, packed a gun, and saw death and combat up close. No one knows to ask her what it was like to mingle in the Colombian outback with guerrilla leaders who have been waging a bloody war against the government for 41 years.

To them, she’s a cheerful, slightly plump young mother and shop owner hoping to make a success of the Internet cafe she recently opened with her husband in an anonymous corner of Bogota. Her neighbors don’t pry, and she volunteers nothing about the years she spent in the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But her onetime mortal enemy, the state, knows exactly who she is and where she lives. In fact, it helped set up her new life, providing the seed money she needed to start her business.

“I feel happier now. I’m with my family; I have a home,” said Luz Miriam, 36, who asked that her last name not be used. “Maybe this business won’t make me rich, but I’m content to have something to live on.”

The handout was part of an effort by the Colombian government to do what few other conflict-torn countries have attempted: persuade militants to lay down arms, then integrate them back into civilian society even as the war continues to rage, killing thousands of people every year.

It’s a daunting task. The demobilized fighters are often traumatized, unschooled and all too familiar with brutality. There is no guarantee that these former combatants, viewed by society with unease and hostility, will adjust to a new environment free of wanton bloodshed but full of unfamiliar rules, bureaucracy and relative inactivity.

Nor are these men and women assured of finding jobs in Colombia’s depressed economy, despite the vocational training they receive. A few resort to crime; some rejoin their comrades-in-arms.

“The process of reintegration is difficult, and not all of them turn out well,” said Andres Penate, a vice minister of defense. “But at least they have the opportunity.”

Thousands of militants have surrendered to authorities since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002 promising to crush both the FARC guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitaries who battle them. The flood of deactivated fighters hoping to take advantage of government assistance has nearly overwhelmed the integration program, which had expected 6,000 participants in four years but accepted 7,000 in less than three.

The former fighters come from all over the country and from both sides of the ideological divide. Young FARC rebels, some still in their teens, abandon Marx and machine guns for fear that they’ll never see adulthood. Others flee the ferocious world of the right-wing paramilitary groups, which have been blamed for some of the war’s worst atrocities. They leave behind an estimated 13,000 guerrillas and 8,500 active paramilitaries who fight on.

All of the onetime militants yearn for a semblance of normality away from the madness of a conflict that has ground on longer than most of them have been alive, whose twisted logic they no longer understand -- if they ever did.

“We’ve been asking ourselves, ‘Why did I try to kill you? Why did you try to kill me?’ ” said one former FARC guerrilla named Alvaro. “It makes no sense.”

Beside him, two erstwhile paramilitaries nodded, men he might have casually dispatched with a bullet if they had crossed his path just a few months ago.

Now, all three find themselves thrown together in this bustling, bewildering capital, far from their hometowns, close neighbors lodged in government-designated safe houses as they take their first tentative steps toward reentering general society. The men spoke on condition that their full names be withheld for fear of reprisals by their former comrades.

After five years of running with rebels in central and south Colombia, Alvaro gave himself up to the military in January -- “drunk and very nervous,” he recalled. He was sick of the peril and brutality that had claimed 13 of the 16 fighters in his group and also the life of his teenage daughter, who he said was executed by the FARC because she had dared to date a Colombian army soldier.

Alvaro, 44, now lives with his girlfriend in dorm-like quarters on Bogota’s rough south side, in a drab three-story apartment building with 30 other people previously connected to the FARC. The majority of former FARC guerrillas and paramilitaries are housed separately, but some buildings are mixed, with few reports of problems, officials say.

New arrivals undergo three months of background checks to determine whether any were involved in kidnappings, massacres or other war crimes. Those with outstanding warrants are barred from the reincorporation program and remanded for trial.

The lucky ones move on to more permanent group homes or independent housing to begin 21 months of vocational classes in fields such as electrical work and dairy production. Throughout their two years in the program, the state pays for housing, education and healthcare for them and their dependents, benefits that many poor Colombians do not enjoy.

Even so, the path does not always run smooth. Some of the demobilized suffer from post-traumatic stress and need psychiatric care, which the program also provides. Others, recruited or press-ganged into armed groups as youths, must learn basic skills before going on to more technical training. Two-thirds are completely or functionally illiterate.

But many are determined to shut the door on their bloodstained pasts.

“Here we’ve all laid down arms, and we don’t want to know anything more about out there,” said Jose, 46, one of the former paramilitary members, referring to the ongoing conflict. “My commitment to the state is to study, prepare a future for myself, for my kids, and to be a good person.”

For its assistance, the government requests something in return: intelligence.

“It’s not a blank check,” Penate, the vice defense minister, said of the program. “We ask for a commitment to help stabilize justice and public order, information on how they were recruited, information that helps us prevent terrorist attacks. People who have turned themselves in have saved a lot of lives.”

Officials say that intelligence gleaned from more than 1,000 former militants -- who get paid extra for their information -- has resulted in the foiling of 21 terrorist plots in Bogota, the discovery of 28 tons of explosives and 2,000 antipersonnel mines, and the destruction of six cocaine labs.

“We have a lot of information to give,” Alvaro, the onetime FARC rebel, said.

Some of the program’s participants have complained of being pressured by authorities to inform on their former cohorts. Alvaro said he had refrained from informing on anyone because he was afraid for relatives back home whom the guerrillas could target in retaliation. Only the immediate families of former fighters are relocated by the state.

The locations of the safe houses are kept secret to minimize the danger of attack by militant groups bent on hunting down defectors. Spies have been known to try to infiltrate the program; some demobilized fighters say they have been threatened by their old comrades. The administrator of the program, Juan David Angel, travels in a bulletproof car with two bodyguards.

Security officers are posted at the shelters, curfews are enforced at night, and local police are instructed to maintain extra vigilance in the area.

Inevitably, however, word leaks out.

Last month, 400 residents in Alvaro’s neighborhood, a district that is home to more than a dozen safe houses, turned out for a town meeting to discuss the potential danger of former armed combatants in their midst. Officials tried to allay their worries, while a few demobilized fighters stood and made personal pleas to be given a chance.

A few also warned the government of feelings of idleness and uncertainty, which could lead some to drop out of the program and rejoin their armed groups.

“The general population has to understand that they have to be generous with these people,” Penate said. “All of Colombia likes the concept of demobilization, but few people want the shelter for the demobilized in their neighborhood. Everybody says how great it is that they’re helping in the fight against terrorism, but nobody wants to give them jobs.”

So far, no private companies have stepped forward with employment opportunities for those who have laid down arms. The government has provided most of the jobs, and even then to only a fraction of the program’s graduates. The rest go into business for themselves or keep mum about their backgrounds when applying for work.

“People see the demobilized as folks with horns and tails,” Penate said. “It’s harder to get society to welcome them than to get them to demobilize.”

The Bogota mayor’s office has warned of rising public resentment over perceived increases in crime in areas around the shelters.

Federal officials dismiss such complaints, saying that they keep close tabs on the fighters, who know that missteps can cost them their benefits. There have been 200 identified cases of militants who have turned to crimes such as theft and armed robbery, but “we have to see the forest and not just the trees,” Penate said.

This year, the government has allotted about $42 million to the integration effort. Because Washington classifies the FARC and paramilitary groups as terrorists, U.S. aid to Colombia -- $3 billion since 2000 -- cannot be used directly to subsidize the program or assist the former fighters.

But a Colombian official, who asked not to be identified, said the government had found ways of using U.S. funds to defray about 10% of the program’s costs, such as for the radio propaganda urging militants to turn themselves in.

Some of the program’s expenses take the form of the seed money for the fighters to start businesses when they graduate. Ventures have included a butcher shop, a small mining operation, a shoe factory and a carrepair garage. The subsidies can even be used toward a down payment on a house if the person intends to operate a home-based enterprise or small farm.

About 2,500 alumni have launched their own businesses. The government has not systematically tracked the former fighters after they leave the program, partly because, officials say, many prefer not to be contacted so that they can wipe the slate completely clean.

Luz Miriam and her husband, both former FARC rebels, pooled their allotment of about $3,500 apiece to open their Internet and phone cafe six months ago.

It’s not what Luz Miriam thought she would be doing.

Trained by the FARC as a nurse, she was accustomed to stitching up the wounded, tending to aging guerrilla leaders and even performing minor surgery, like the time she extracted bullets from a fighter’s stomach. Flying shrapnel from a showdown with paramilitaries left her with her own battle scar, etched above her left eyebrow.

She was just 13, and a little restless and bored, when the FARC recruited her in southern Colombia. She left home without saying goodbye, then joined other youths on a 15-day trek to begin her initiation as an armed fighter. Those who didn’t pass the three-month training course -- about 50 out of her class of 150 -- were shot, she said.

The freshmen guerrillas attended political indoctrination classes, but she “was a little too smart” for that, so the FARC enrolled her in nursing courses taught by a Russian doctor, Luz Miriam recalled. Her strong performance earned her an assignment to the secretariat, where she helped treat rebel leaders such as Alfonso Cano and Manuel Marulanda, the FARC’s No. 1 man.

About five years ago, her comrades convened a “war council” to try her for shooting and wounding a civilian whom she had accused of making unwanted sexual advances. The council exonerated her, but she knew she had to start plotting her escape.

It took time to find the courage and the right moment. One morning before dawn in 2002, Luz Miriam crept away, flagged down a bus and rode toward a new start -- as a Bogotano, a newlywed to a man she met in the reintegration program, a mother reunited with the children she had left with a sister to raise, and, now, an optimistic entrepreneur.

Although she would like to continue nursing, she’s content with the newfound tranquillity of her life in Bogota, even if adjustment to a strange place has been a challenge.

“The change was tremendous,” Luz Miriam said.

“But I tell people, if you come here, it’s to change. There’s no reason to keep on doing harm to society.”