'The War Is Just a Business for FARC'

A former guerilla describes daily life with the FARC, the Colombian Marxist rebel group. He explains how the guerillas are not interested in the ideology they preach but in cocaine and money.

Luis Andrés*, 26, joined FARC the Marxist rebel organization at the age of 11. Today he works with a reintegration project run by the Catholic Church.

I joined the FARC voluntarily, and I was the only one in my family to do so. One of my uncles is in the military and another one is part of a right-wing paramilitary group. Weapons have always fascinated me. In the village where I grew up, the guerillas always had the best guns, the prettiest girls and the newest motorcycles. There are many children fighting for the guerillas. Most of them are 14 or 15. I soon realized that there are several classes of guerillas. The commanders have apartments in the city, usually registered to their girlfriends' names. They have newer weapons and get better food.

The FARC was my family. I had a girlfriend, but I had to ask the commander for permission every time we wanted to have sex. My girlfriend became pregnant, and I wanted us to have the child, but the commander ordered us to get an abortion.

Most of all, we fought against the paramilitaries. The government gave weapons to many farmers in the late 1990s, and we never knew exactly who belonged to the paramilitary units. For that reason, we would usually kill entire families. In 1999, the paramilitaries shot my father. Thirteen people died in the massacre. The FARC later captured the man who killed him. I shot him with three bullets, just the way he killed my father.

I was captured by the military in 2000 and put in prison. The guerillas sent an old woman to bring us money, 240,000 pesos (about €120) a month. I escaped during a mutiny. After that I joined the FARC's urban guerillas in Bogotá. We kidnapped a lot of people. Corrupt police officers helped us by stopping cars at night and handing over the passengers to us. We would give them the cars in return.

We took the hostages to apartments on the outskirts of the city, where they were chained around the clock. Having sex with the hostages was forbidden, and it was punishable by death. The guards were frequently replaced to prevent them from forming relationships with hostages.

Sometimes we would check out the families of victims before the kidnappings, to see how many cars and houses they owned. We blew up bridges and power lines in the countryside, and then we blackmailed the companies that were sent in to rebuild. This affected the farmers most of all, driving up the cost of transporting their goods. At that point I asked myself whether we were really on the side of the people.

I was preparing a major operation in 2005. We wanted to shoot down the president's plane. A contact in the air force had given us the landing coordinates. We rented a house in the approach path. The commanders had bought rockets that were hidden near the Ecuadorian border. I was supposed to pick them up. Instead, I turned myself in to the police and the operation was exposed. Nowadays the war is nothing but business for the FARC. There is no ideology. It's just about money and cocaine.

*not his real name