Following a 52-year insurgency, Colombia’s ‘Reincorporation Spaces’ were designed to allow the FARC guerrillas to demobilise while maintaining political, social and commercial autonomy. If they work, the concept could birth a template for peace to satisfy dissident political movements the world over. But all is far from well in Marxist paradise. Words and images by Oliver Gordon.

27 November 2019

We’ve been ascending a dirt road for past forty minutes, winding our way up a remote Andean mountain in northern Colombia’s Department of Antioquia at the dead of night. We are now so high we’re shrouded in cloud, only able to see a few metres ahead. After what feels like an age, we reach a clearing at the summit. Just as I’m asking my translator whether we’re in the right place, floodlights suddenly blast on from all directions. My vision returns to clarity just in time to make out the silhouettes of numerous hooded, jackbooted figures carrying assault rifles emerging out of the fog like Tolkien Ringwraiths. They’re military and they’re on edge, demanding to know why we’re there. Evidently they haven’t been informed of our visit.

We’ve just arrived at one of Colombia’s 24 Territorial Training and Reincorporation Spaces (ETCRs), transitional communities set up to house former guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — the FARC. To the FARC, the ETCRs represent a dream of semi-autonomous collective reincorporation; spaces where they’ll be left to pursue their Marxist-Leninist utopia in peace while also partially reintegrating into mainstream Colombian society. But that dream appears to be fading, slowly ebbing away like sand through fingers, and the palpable sense of unease with which we’re greeted by ETCR Jacobo Arango’s military guard would be mirrored among the community throughout our stay — a well of anxiety fed by various springs of existential and physical threats.

From camps to communes

The ETCRs evolved out of the demobilisation camps that were set up following the 2016 peace agreement between the FARC and the Santos government. In a novel approach to dealing with former rebels, the accords agreed to not only support individual reintegration of former fighters into mainstream society but also “collective, economic and social reincorporation” — permitting the FARC to maintain its structure and identity as it transitioned into a legal political organisation. Collective reincorporation envisaged FARC communities enduring as economic, political and social units, in what many thought could proffer an innovative model for other conflict-afflicted nations; paving a mutually-acceptable pathway to peace for both sides of an armed political insurgency.

Roughly half of the 14,000 FARC rebels who demobilised opted to reintegrate collectively. Initially, the government provided them with basic materials to construct camps with bedrooms units, and communal bathrooms and kitchens. These ‘transition zones’ were only meant to last for 180 days but soon morphed into the ETCRs, equipped with a promise of government support for their collective economic endeavours. The resources for these ‘productive projects’ were to be administered by the FARC-run fund ECOMUN, while the work itself would be carried out by locally-run cooperatives. Some would be single cooperatives with various productive arms; others distinct coops specialising in activities like food production, tailoring and tourism. On top of a $225 monthly salary for each FARC member, the government agreed to provide around $2,000 of materials for each productive project.

Beyond the spatial infrastructure, the ETCRs were meant to incentivise the FARC to make peace and maintain it; allowing its members to return to civilian life while maintaining a political infrastructure and commercial enterprise.

The military and police guarding the ETCRs would not only keep the ex-guerillas safe but also allow the state to keep tabs on their activities; the government keen to avoid a repeat of the attempted decommissioning of the right-wing paramilitary groups in the mid-2000s, which served as a fertile recruitment boon for the country’s organised crime syndicates.

Well at least that’s how it was all meant to work.

Three years on from the peace treaty, only a limited number of the productive projects have received the promised governmental support. The more successful projects have often received their funding from Norway (a guarantor to the treaty), the UN or other European countries. And the FARC have been leaving the ETCRs in droves — there are now more who have left than stayed. According to the government’s reincorporation agency, the ARN, of the 7,000 who entered, only 3,000 remain.

Those that have stayed face an increasingly uncertain future: the financial support from the government — the personal salaries, the support for their projects, even the land under the feet — was scheduled to end in August, only to be given a two-year moratorium at the eleventh hour. Although that was welcome news for the residents, the government’s position on the ETCRs’ future is convoluted and obscure. Even with the extension, most of the communities are still far from any form of self-sufficiency and most are destined to disband unless there’s reinvigorated push by both sides to make collective reincorporation work.

ETCR Jacobo Arango

In Jacobo Arango — located just outside the town of Dabeiba — residents are clinging to the hope the government will allow them to stay on the land permanently, and will continue the financial support that permits for their subsistence until they’re economically self-sufficient. But 80 of the initial 200 residents have already left.

“Our dream is to live in a collective community, not an individualistic one,” says Luis Norbey Caicedo, a local commander who goes by the nom de guerre ‘Manchas’. “We want the government to guarantee access to the land and we want to be able to do our political campaigning. We want the things promised in the agreement.”

The camp has four productive projects, in which a number of the residents have pooled their resources: a chicken farm, a community vegetable garden, a plantation of lulo (a local citrus-like fruit), and a pig farm. But the projects have so far not proved themselves to be viable businesses.

“There are issues with competition, with the intermediaries, and with the commercialisation,” says Manchas. “But it’s also difficult because we’re only in the process of learning about things like accounting and banking and other activities related to creating a local economy.”

Each weekday, state-assigned teachers provide reintegration classes for the ETCRs’ residents. But in Jacobo Arango progress is painfully slow, according to one of the teachers, held back by factors such as the low-level of prior education of many of the FARC (although I witness a pupil correcting his teacher on the spelling of bourgeoisie), the political sensitivity of the syllabus, and the general lack of enthusiasm for learning about the quotidian functions of a capitalist life — how to open a bank account, take out a loan, and so on.

“We’re political militants, we take orders and fight. So how are we meant to know how to build cooperative economies in just two years?” Complains another commander, who asks not to be identified. Indeed, a 2018 report by the think tank International Crisis Group concluded that many of the productive projects were “likely to fail for lack of technical expertise, support and investment over the long term”.

A weary and resigned sense of hopelessness comes across from both commanders as they speak. The sentiment reverberates among the community, a tangibly stale and uneasy atmosphere lingering throughout the camp. In the day, young men languidly play billiards in the community hall, while a few residents work the fields, tend chickens or make furniture in a communal workshop. But most are cooped up inside their houses. It’s more ghost town than hub of cooperative activity.

The only relief to the stilted ambience comes from a noisy cohort of young children as they are chaperoned between classes and meals. They are evidence of a post-peace baby boom. The guerrillas were banned from having children in the conflict; those that did were forced to send the child away to relatives, or often just give them away to local villagers — only reunited following peace agreement.

The camp’s residents point to external subversive forces as the source of the problems, primarily the government not living up to its end of the agreement. The overarching complaint is that the state is covertly trying to ensure the ETCRs — and their collective reincorporation — fail and the inhabitants are forced to reintegrate individually, with the political movement suffocating in the process.

Leaders at Jacobo Arango complain they have seen little of the state funding promised in the treaty for the camp’s economic and political initiatives. They say that instead of helping the FARC transition from coca farming to other crops, the state has instead increased the spraying of the banned herbicide glyphosate. And they complain the “oligarchy-run” media perpetuate the government’s message that normal Colombians will have to be further taxed to pay for the FARC’s insatiable and decadent demands for funding.

Colombia’s latest President, Ivan Duque, and his political mentor, a hard-right former President called Alvaro Uribe (the Putin to Duque’s Medvedev), are outspoken critics of the peace deal. Earlier this year, Duque returned a bill defining the country’s war crimes tribunal to Congress, ignoring warnings by supporters of the peace and the International Criminal Court. The controversial move was the biggest blow to the peace process since Duque took office last year. While he only objected to six of the 150 articles of the statutory law, the articles formed the foundation of the accord and are thought integral to its success. Under heavy opposition, Duque has since been forced to retreat on his position.

On one of the days of our stay, a march through the camp is organised to protest against the President’s move. Though the camp’s leaders attempt to whip up some fervour in the crowd, the event has a lacklustre and futile undertone to it.

Jacobo Arango’s members also face a very clear and present physical danger. According to the UN, around 150 of the FARC have been murdered since the peace was signed, mostly by illegal armed groups fighting for control of former FARC territories. And Dabeiba, the town at the foot of Jacobo Arango’s mountain perch, is teeming with paramilitaries, the FARC’s age-old adversary.

“They killed two of our men nearby in Peque,” says Manchas. “We don’t know what happened but it was clearly because of their political ties.”

This was the source of the camp guards’ anxiety upon our arrival. The week previous, they had seen paramilitaries scoping out the camp. And shortly before we arrived, the camp was hit by a power cut. Understandably, the sound of two scrambler motorbikes — often associated with drive-by shootings in Colombia — appearing out of the mist in the pitch black put the guards on high alert.

Fading ideology

But Jacobo Arango’s Marxist dream is also suffering from its own internal dilution. The camp’s leaders lament the loss of socialist values in the move from the armed struggle to civilian life.

“Now, in the ETCR, it’s a lot more individualistic,” says Luz Mary Cartagena Ceballos (AKA ‘Yudis’), another of the camp’s leaders. “Everyone has their own palace, takes care of their own stuff, and has a lot less concern for their neighbours. When we returned to civilian life, everything disappeared: the discipline, the solidarity, the fraternity.”

Growing up just a few hours away in Uraba, Yudis joined “the organisation” in 1986 when she was fifteen. Serving as a medic, she had two daughters in the conflict — whom she had to hand over to her parents to raise — and survived being shot through the cheekbone in battle. She now heads up Jacobo Arango’s gender committee.

But she maligns a regression in gender equality that has accompanied the move to the ETCR. In the conflict, the guerrillas were all equal fighters — man or woman — and roles were purposefully desegregated. “It was a crime to discriminate based on gender,” she says. “But now lots of the compañeras are taking on traditional gender roles again; they stay at home with the kids while the husband goes out to work. They just threw out empowerment when civilian life came along.”

We are staying in Yudis’s house and above our beds hangs another reminder of the FARC’s crumbling value system: a wooden cross. As a Marxist organisation, the FARC has always been strongly opposed to organised religion. “In the conflict, they would make us watch the Lucy documentary to teach us about evolution,” recalls the unnamed commander, referring to an anti-creationist film about the discovery of one of the oldest human ancestors. “But you would always see people praying in gunfights. And it’s slowly but surely returning in the ETCRs,” he concedes.

The commander posits that the disintegration of many of the FARC’s values is caused simply by the former-rebels returning to what they knew before the conflict. Particularly in the latter years of the war, many of the Colombians who signed up to the FARC — or often were forced to sign up — were campesinos (farm folk) looking for a way out of economic destitution, rather than being keen adherents the organisation’s Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

He points to the friendly relations between Jacobo Arango’s residents and their military and police guards, who all play football together most evenings. “The soldiers and policemen are just like us: they’re campesinos. It’s just campesino killing campesino on the orders of rich people in Bogota fighting for control of the country.”

An uncertain future

To date, the ARN says it has approved 35 productive projects and 431 individual projects, benefitting more than 2,200 ex-combatants. Many of these have been greenlit in the last few months, in what has been noted as an encouraging sign of progress for the ETCRs by the head of the UN’s Verification Mission, Carlos Ruiz Massieu. A visit by Duque to an ETCR in the Caquetá Department in September was commended by Massieu and is hoped to be a sign the President is now committed to the cause after his attempts to undermine the wider agreement came to nothing.

The projects themselves have experienced varying degrees of success. There have been two successful collective projects, involving their ETCRs’ entire communities operating as a single cooperative: a craft beer and textiles enterprise in Iconozo, Tolima; and a whole foods farm in Miravalle, Caquetá. There have even been successful initiatives in ETCRs in Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare in which residents have repurposed their guerrilla training to offer adventure sports and jungle tours.

“An ETCR is only as successful as the quality of its leaders,” a Jacobo Arango resident confides in us one evening. As we drink rum and listen to Irish and Sandinista revolutionary songs in his humble quarters, he tells us how one ETCR in Mututa (Antioquia) has successfully removed itself from under the thumb of state support.

When the camp was first established, the residents lived off the land — as they had in the conflict — for months, while pooling their state salaries. With the savings, they eventually bought the land outright and began collectively building houses, one by one. They also built a large fish farm, which is gradually pushing the community towards a self-sustaining economy. The brains behind all this was a revered FARC commander named Rubén Cano (‘Manteco’) — “many people swear they’ve seen him shapeshift into animals in combat,” our host informs us, only half joking.

But for Jacobo Arango, and for the majority of the country’s ETCRs, a dark cloud of uncertainty looms over the future. For many, the recent comments of the UN’s Massieu come more out of hope than expectation, the willful blindness of mother desperately clinging to the faintest sign of reconciliation between two antagonistic brothers.

While the government did issue a new decree for the ETCRs in August, it provided few concrete answers. It didn’t specify a new date for when the camps’ legal status would expire, nor did it establish a plan for their future use and administration, and uncertainty also surrounds the continued funding of the public forces protecting the camps. This precariousness was further fuelled in late October by the murder of a former guerrilla in the Department of Meta. The murder was carried out within the confines of an ETCR, calling into question the ability of the public forces to protect the ETCRs’ residents and the government’s general commitment to the peace.

Some fear the closure of the ETCRs will see many of their inhabitants return to the armed struggle. Indeed many already have. Roughly a third of the FARC’s former army — around 2,300 fighters — have taken up arms again since the 2016 peace accord, according to a military intelligence report seen by Reuters. And Iván Márquez, a dissident former FARC leader, has called on those in the ETCRs to re-arm to ensure the government’s compliance to the treaty.

Asked whether he thought members of Jacobo Arango would return to the insurgency if forced to leave the camp, Manchas was diplomatic: “We hope to show the government that we can make these productive projects work so they’ll allow us to stay.”

The anonymous commander, however, was more frank: “We need this land if the peace process is going to work.”