- Daniel pardo
- BBC Mundo correspondent in Colombia
“Instead of getting better, it’s getting worse,” says Oscar Duarte, a former Colombian guerrilla, when I ask him if the reasons why he joined the insurgency as a child are still valid.
The 32-year-old Duarte was one of the 13,000 soldiers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who signed a peace agreement with the state on September 26, 2016, five years ago now.
“I am already a man of peace,” he adds, with the sound of a hen behind, “but peace can be said to have failed, yes? banana instead of coca ”, affirms to BBC Mundo.
The former combatant speaks from San José del Guaviare, a small city that was a guerrilla stronghold and now welcomes a large number of demobilized people.
“Today we had a super powerful time“, Says Duarte, who works as an escort in a state institution. “We are fine, with our families that we left abandoned for so long.”
Duarte, also known by his nom de guerre Cristian, is now a father and married to Kelly Patricia, a former guerrilla he met during the conflict.
“In war, everything that is done in the field was done,” he says. “You get a girlfriend, you drink, you dance, you live the same life as in the city, but in the jungle, with rules and with a rifle on your shoulder practically all the time,” he says.
The story of how they met and fell in love was turned into a documentary, “Amor rebelde,” by director Alejandro Bernal, which opens in October.
Duarte explains that, even now, five years after having demobilized, Most of his life was at war, since his entry into the FARC occurred when he was 12 years old.
“I did not enter the guerrilla out of obligation, I entered conscientiously, but it is also true that I did not have any other option, because If I didn’t go in, they would kill me and if I left, too“, Explain.
19,000 children
The recruitment of minors was a central facet of the armed conflict that the Colombian state waged against insurgent movements for 60 years.
A study recently published by the Hernán Echavarría Olózaga Institute of Political Science concluded that the recruitment of children and adolescents was “a systematic practiceWhich sought to expand the armies of the war, especially the FARC.
At least 13,000 minors were recruited during the conflictsays the report, and most of them when they were under 15 years old, which is the limit established by the protocols of international law to declare the recruitment of young people a crime against humanity.
“Many minors enter conscientiously, most of them. But there were others (children) who had no other option because they killed their parents“, Assures Duarte.
In his case, he joined the guerrillas for a clear reason: paramilitarism, the counterinsurgency army that, according to official data, generated more deaths than any other armed group in Colombia.
“Young people had two options so that the paramilitaries would not kill them: either they followed their orders or they escaped and joined the guerrillas; there was no other, ”he assures.
The Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a transitional justice court resulting from the peace agreement, has said that investigates almost 19,000 cases of forced recruitment of minors during the conflict.
Not at its peak did the FARC have a similar number of active soldiers.
But didn’t the guerrillas also impose their logic like the paramilitaries? I ask him.
And he responds: “The guerrilla norms were not to steal, not to smoke marijuana, not to enter into vices, but when the paramilitaries enter, they are not going to do the same, because they came to pressure, to label people as guerrillas. , to impose the military boot, to create terror ”.
“Cast –justifies– forced us youth to look for weapons“.
The precarious life of the countryside
Duarte was born in the Vereda de la Cumbre, a remote area in the foothills of the eastern mountain range of Colombia, in the department of Meta. His parents lived off the countryside, especially from coffee picking.
“Life and education in the country is very hard“, He points out. To go to school, he tells me, he had to travel for three or four hours a day.
“What I remember is that my childhood was helping out there on the farm and making noise (noise) and making disorder there,” he adds.
And in this context of paramilitary threat and precarious life in the countryside, “there is no shortage of a friend who comes and tells you to ‘walk for the guerrillas,’ and I left.”
After joining the FARC, he lost contact with his parents for 15 years. If he called them, if he let them know he was alive, there was a possibility that the paramilitaries would retaliate against them..
“I stayed in the guerrilla not because I believed that we were going to take power, but because I was afraid that I would compromise them (their family),” he explains.
And he adds: “Many other (children) came (to the guerrillas) because they did not have anyone to be with, because they felt alone, and because there are very great needs in the countryside.”
Duarte continues to think that inequality, exclusion and corruption, that is, the reasons for which he had sympathy with the Marxist discourse, continue to be a reason to fight against the state.
But over time he learned that war was not a solution for that, he says, “because too many deaths were reached.”
“I realized that the war is lived by the peasants, the poor in the army and the poor in the guerrilla, while the rich were there sitting in their office laughing, “he says.
“The poor were killing each other, and that does not make sense.”
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