Today is the beginning of December, but the heat shows no sign of letting up. I am in Colombia, where I’ve come to write my master’s thesis and, by chance or fate, I’ve met M.: a soldier in the national army who has discharged himself after six years of service. At that unforeseen meeting at the swimming pool, he was immediately intrigued by my obvious European background. Since then, he has often come to the apartment I share with other students to let us taste typical dishes cooked to perfection, to teach us how to dance salsa and cumbia in the living room, to share with sincere pride the traditions of his country.
Sharing is a trait that distinguishes Colombians, and M. seems to want to share as much as possible with us, especially his troubled past, the history of his country that he loves so much. When I explained to him that I am analyzing the contents of the peace agreement between the government and the FARC guerrillas, his eyes lit up and he confessed to me that he was a soldier in the army in that very conflict that has torn Colombia apart for more than 50 years and that in 2016 seems to have reached a truce. Today he is here to tell me about it. He sits down next to me and pours me a glass of freshly made aguapanela. Let us begin.
LM: “Why have you decided to become a soldier in the National Army of Colombia?”
M: “When I was 17, I graduated from high school and found myself at a crossroads. The idea of being able to choose a military career was given to me by my aunt when she told me about her partner, who was an NCO in the army. She explained to me that those who are part of the institution enjoy several benefits: a fixed salary, the possibility to study, health insurance, retirement after 25 years of work. In addition, I always liked physical activity, in fact I initially enrolled in the university, in the faculty of physical education.
The day they were recruiting to join the army I had to make the first decision: go for the military test or go for an exam at the university. Actually, the choice wasn’t even there: if I had gone to university, I wouldn’t have been able to be financially stable because I didn’t have the support of my parents since my mother didn’t have a job at that time, so I decided to enlist. I joined the army and I had medical, psychological, physical exams and they went very well.
I was first in line of all those who took them in my area. I was also one of the youngest.”
The first time I arrived at the military academy the feeling I had was that I wanted to go home. We traveled in two large buses full of kids. After more than 2 hours of travel, it was 4:30 a.m., we arrived and as we got off the buses a soldier ordered us pick up all the dry leaves from the ground. I did not go home then, I had a lot of eyes on me: my friends in the neighborhood, my family saying around, “M. is gone”… I was testing myself, but if those expectations had not been there, I think I would have gone straight home. That is when one of the adventures I think I’ll never be able to forget in life, which was the National Army, began.”
The military academy: how to become a soldier in the National Army of Colombia
M: “I was in the military school for 18 months. The period is divided into three semesters: first you are a recruit, then a brigadier and finally a dragoon. In the last semester you take a counterguerrilla course and there are tests that are exceedingly difficult; they are challenges. There you perceive them as challenges, but when you get out and see the reality of the situation, you realize that they are real abuse. They put a lot of psychological, physical and nutrition pressure on you, they hit you with the bed slats if you make any mistakes; they use violence to teach.
At one point in my second semester, I fought back against a captain who had just arrived at the school. We slept only 3-4 hours a day when we could sleep. At night we had to clean, and that day we were cleaning the bathrooms as fast as we could so that we could go to sleep. The captain came into the room and ordered us to do exercises on the floor while he walked between us and kicked us. He was approaching me when I told him that if he touched me, I would forget that he was the captain, and I was a student. He still put his foot on me, so I got up, pushed him away and left.
I reported to the school commander. At that time news was coming out from all over Colombia that in the army superiors were taking advantage of their power to mistreat us, no soldier was spared from the abuse. It wasn’t just happening at our place, but in all the battalions it was something quite common.”
“The first time I heard the story of the conflict against the guerrillas, I was told about it there, but since I’ve always liked to inquire things on my own, I looked into the reality of the country.”
“The impression I got was that the guerrilla rebels had armed themselves to claim their rights to be heard by the state, and that they had a different way of thinking. But in the academy what they teach you is that you must hate them, you have to kill them, and blood has to flow. There are military songs that say, “I want to swim in a pool full of blood, guerrilla blood. Blood! Blood! Red! Red! Dense! Dense! Guerrilla blood!” these songs work the minds of all the students in the school and many come out with that desire, that bloodlust. Thank life, thank God, I didn’t come out with that thirst to kill, because I don’t like to hurt other people.”
The conflict in Colombia: M’s debut as a regular soldier
M: “When I finished the three semesters in the school I came out as a squad commander. They sent me to Antioquia, a department in Colombia, to control a section of the Medellín-Bogotá highway and there the first unusual thing happened to me since I became a soldier. There was a Major who was a “hechizo” (enchanted, cursed) officer. “Hechizos” officers are those who did not go to the specific academy for officers but became one through a competition for NCOs who want to move up in rank. Usually there is a certain aversion between “hechizos” officers and NCOs like me.
The Major came to me one day in his Hummer and made me a proposal: “M. I need to talk to you. You will give … a “result”. You only have to go up the hill and that’s all you have to do.” Those were his words. He was not explicit, but it was familiar language. “Go up the hill and everything was ready” meant I just had to go to a spot where there would be a civilian. “‘Give result’ meant kill.”
“At the time, not much was known about the phenomenon of false positives, but my answer was an emphatic no, and that no hunted me like you can’t even imagine.”
“None of my comrades lent themselves to that request.
I was a regular soldier, until they transferred me with the professional soldiers, who were in areas of Colombia where… vulgarly they say you eat more shit. We would spend 3-4 months without having contact with the civilian population, just walking in the mountains. There it is difficult to advance against the FARC guerrillas and have “results”, because the guerrillas know their area, we do not. We are people from the cities, barely moving in the jungle; they do not, they live there. So, it was very strange to see companies of regular soldiers with six months of experience who could count no more than ten kills. Soldiers who came from the countryside, with little training, 19-20-year-old people. The soldiers I was with had over ten years of experience in the military, and they were incredulous. That’s where we started to suspect that something very wrong was going on.”
“During the time I was with the professional soldiers something happened that was the first big blow for me and that started to make me wonder if I should stay or if I should leave right away. One day we were fording a river where the current was extraordinarily strong. To cross the river, we used a “bejuco”, which is a very strong rope found in nature that comes from the trees themselves, because we didn’t have ropes with us.
A soldier who we affectionately called Cookie was with us that day. Private Cookie, in crossing the river, got his whole kit wet. When we got back on the bank he said, “Shit! I’m going to have to sleep all wet tonight!” and I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you some dry clothes.” We had to climb a very steep hill, it was about a thousand feet but there was no path, it was just mud, it was raining hard and it was very slippery. It was evening and already getting dark. Cookie at that point told me I could leave him behind because my team was already at the top, much higher up, while the counterguerrilla commander’s team was further back.”
“In Colombia if you tell any soldier the truth of the facts or think differently, you become an enemy and they always try to screw you over.”
“In the fall, one of these soldiers had arrived, a recruit, who was running the battalion canteen. He was sent to our unit as punishment and had no idea where he was. That night, around 11:30, I was making myself a hot chocolate as it continued to rain heavily. I was with my squad while the soldier had stayed further downstream with the lieutenant’s squad. I was making myself this drink when I heard gunshots. It was dark, completely dark, you could only see something when lightning fell. My reaction was to cover my head with my bag, I grabbed my rifle and waited in silence because I didn’t know what it was, until they start yelling my name, “M.! M.! Run! nurse! Nurse! M.!». I slipped on my boots and quickly ran downstairs with a small flashlight we had, which was barely working.
I ran over to where Cookie was and watched him give his last breath of life. When I put my hand underneath, I felt a very large hole in the back of his head. The lieutenant was telling me, “M. do something, do something!” but I told him, “There’s nothing you can do, his head is completely smashed in.” My hand was full of blood and his remains, I saw it when he moved his hand, dropped it and his eyes went away, and that is when we all started crying. That was one of the strongest moments I have ever experienced. I cried, I called my mom later, I told her I wanted to leave, I didn’t want to stay there.”
LM: “How did Private Cookie get shot?”
M: “The new soldier, the one who ran the canteen, was a nervous person, maybe because we were in an area of Colombia that was in guerrilla hands. That night he was doing sentry duty, we were in an operation against “Negra Karina”, one of the fiercest fighters who survived the conflict and is now a peace ambassador for the United Nations. The nervous soldier was on guard duty when Cookie walked out of the tent to the canteen, making noise. The soldier was startled and fired: the bullet entered his throat and exited from behind through his cerebellum, destroying everything. But it did not end there, it was my turn to spend the night with the soldier who accidentally killed the other one. We had to be gun-free because the guy wanted to kill himself after what happened. I spent the whole night talking to him, giving him advice, listening to him.
It was an eternal night, one of those nights when you wish the sun would come out soon. We had to stay three days with Cookie, taking care of the body, because the helicopters could not fly because of bad weather. In those three days I felt a very strong pain because I realized that life doesn’t depend on anything, it’s not stable at all, at any moment it’s gone, and I was sure of it there in front of me. It also shocked me to know how a person who wore a uniform, who went to fight for the causes of the country, leaves. They put him in a bag, tied him up with a rope and took him away hanging from a helicopter. A trial was done on what happened and I had to testify. They opened an investigation and documented everything that happened.
A dirty war
After that traumatic event, M. pulled himself together and continued his military career to make good on the financial commitment he had made. But this was only the beginning of his experience. He continues his story by mentioning a few occasions when he made autonomous decisions going against the wishes of his superiors to keep his values firm. He reveals to me that he has burned many illicit cocaine fields and laboratories in Antioquia. One of these growers had invested all his savings in his field, and after everything was destroyed in one night by other soldiers, M.’s unit organized a collection to give him something. “The man was desperate, I felt sorry for him because he reminded me of my grandfather,” he confesses.
On another occasion he refused to cover up the truth about a deserter soldier, even though a sergeant in his platoon had given the order. And not only did he tell his soldiers the truth, but he also distributed to them the parts of the armament that the escaped soldier had abandoned.
M: “All these things I did against what had already been established stained my reputation. I became a soldier who does not follow orders, who goes against the grain. From there, still in the wake of the punishment for refusing to go along with the Major’s proposal, I was sent to the south of the country. Here there was a different kind of warfare: in the thickest jungle, against many more guerrillas.
One day, while patrolling an area along the Caquetà River, we found a mass grave. Imagine an area larger than a soccer field, in the jungle with trees and plants, sprinkled with pits. In each pit there were two or three corpses, of guerrilla women and men. We reported it and, waiting for a response, we camped there. We slept there, but no one ever came. The response was “get out of there” and that was it. I do not know if nowadays any soldier, anyone has gone to look for the bodies, because here in Colombia people die, disappear and no one knows anything. I didn’t have the foresight to write down the coordinates or keep a diary, but I think I could get there with what I remember of the journey.”
For a moment, M.’s mind goes totally absent and he returns to being a soldier retracing that path through the jungle, across rivers and up the mountains of Colombia, to that open-air cemetery with no names or coffins. It is a real business of death that lies behind the Colombian conflict. The army battalions compete to receive days off, and the competition consists of the highest number of deaths: one “result” is equivalent to 5 days off, for two you get 10 days, and so on. The battalion that wins at the end of the year earns vacations in December.
And that is not all: here the rules of war are wastepaper. According to human rights before shooting you must announce loudly: “Stop, we are the National Army, hand over your weapons and your life will be respected”. This is only on paper. It is never done: the notice that is given by the soldiers is a bullet and if it hits the target, it is much better.
M. at that point mentions one of his sergeants who has been on trial. After being in the department of Arauca, in an area where the fighting went on for up to two weeks without stopping even to sleep, the sergeant had been assigned to his unit. The process was initiated because, when they came across a house where there were five alleged guerrillas, the sergeant took an RPG, a kind of bazooka that can disintegrate an armored Hummer and shot at the house. Among those people were two pregnant women. They all died.
M: “The sergeant told us about these experiences he had that didn’t let him sleep, in fact he would stay up all night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. It is clear that a person who carries all this in his head, when presented with such an opportunity, tries to take it. I’m not justifying it; I’m trying to analyze the situation!” M. tells me, immediately making his words clear. “You stand in that moment, you see it very easy, you take this weapon, and you kill them all. But the sergeant was in pain, he knew he was going to be caught because his conscience would not let him sleep. So, he was there, all night smoking and drinking coffee.”
The civil conflict in Colombia: the responsibilities of a specialized soldier
War is a succession of extreme situations that arise, and that M. had to face. When he was in the academy of the National Army of Colombia, he received training as a nurse soldier and EXDE expert, specializing in neutralizing explosives, so he often took care of his wounded comrades.
He tells me about a time he even had to dissect the body of a boy. “There was no one in town who could do it, and we represented the state at that time. The boy’s mother had called, wanting to see her son one last time before they buried him. From Bogota it was a minimum of six days of travel to where we were and, you know, the body decomposes very quickly.” He confesses to me that he did not eat anything else for the next two days: seeing what we have inside took away his appetite. His nursing training, by the way, was insufficient. He knew how to give injections, how to measure blood pressure and temperature, how to perform CPR, how to apply a tourniquet to stop bleeding. But removing a person’s insides, they had not taught him that one.
M: “I did it that time, I haven’t done it since, and I don’t think I ever will again. Yeah, I really don’t think I want to do it again.” He tells me with a bitter smile.
Signals from nature
M. “One of the events that prompted me to make the decision to retire happened when we were about to go on vacation after almost eight months of being in the jungle. We were staying in a mountainous area and had received information about a guerrilla group that was near us in the adjacent mountain. In these narrow paths with overhangs on both sides of the trail you had to take turns going forward, and usually when there were two units, as in this case, one day one would go forward and the next day it would be the other’s turn. That day it would have been my turn to go on, but the other corporal asked for a change because when you were more exposed you had a better chance of getting results, and he wanted more days off. I gave it to him because I do not like killing and I have never been out for blood.
After a descent we entered a valley, and in this valley… I am a great believer in the signals that sometimes nature, the environment, the universe, God give you. We heard a human voice calling to us, but it was not from any soldier; it seemed to come from nature itself. I turned around, and as a soldier was explaining what it could have been… PUM. Up ahead, those who had gone first fell into a minefield. After the explosion only a PUUU (ringing in the ears) remained, and everything went in slow motion, just like in the movies.
It was not the first time I fell into a minefield, the first time it happened to me in Antioquia. On that occasion I understood to what extent war moves your insides, during the eternal second of the explosion and after, when only a whistle remains. That time a soldier was taken away wounded and with damaged hearing. Not this time.
When the silence ended and the fog rolled in, I heard the scream of pain. A soldier fell, lost both legs. I ran to him, he grabbed me and, in despair, told me that he did not want to die. He was my same age at the time, 23. He did not want to die. I told him, “You’re not going to die,” but I was lying to him because he had no legs from the knee down, neither, and he was very pale and soaked in blood. I tried to inject him with a saline solution because he was losing a lot of blood, but I could not find the vein. The other nurse found it, and we gave him this injection and then put something strong on him for the pain. He came out of there alive.
There was another soldier who was wounded although not as badly: the explosion had not hit him directly, fortunately. These guys fell into the minefield where I should have fallen. The helicopter was able to open up a space only an hour after the explosion; it threw the ropes to put on the stretchers and took them both away. At 8:30 in the evening we were informed that the boy was dead.
What angers me most is that demobilized guerrillas, who have left the conflict, pass information to the army. They point out on the map where the landmines are, so from the higher ranks they should have warned us soldiers not to walk in that spot. The brigade commander knew that. And he did not say it. He did not say it because he wanted us to cross the minefield, flying or I don’t know how, because he wanted the “results,” he wanted the dead. Not ours but theirs, he just didn’t give a damn what might happen to us.”
The permanent leave odyssey
M: “At that point I decided to retire. That was an odyssey, too, because they make everything difficult for you, they hinder you. A colonel told me that he was going to stop me from being discharged because the Army had invested money to train me as an EXDE expert in explosives. I replied to him that when I had gone home for vacation, I had left some documents with my father so that he could go to the prosecutor’s office in case this situation arose. I knew what it meant to be a soldier in Colombia, I knew how things worked. He sent me to another location that was remote in the middle of the jungle to get a general’s signature.
The trip to this location began aboard a plane carrying gasoline, which was not for passengers. Once I landed, I looked for someone I trusted who would take me to my destination the same day because that was an area full of guerrillas. This is where Ingrid Betancourt was kidnapped. I left very early, at 3, 4 in the morning, and when I arrived, I had to wait for the general until after lunch for him to receive me. He asked me why I wanted to take leave, that I should continue in the institution and he told me some stories. I told him that I wanted to study and live quietly because that is not life: you are a slave to the army; you have to do what they ask without question. I had lost my love for the institution; I did not want to be there anymore. He tried to insist by telling me that some soldiers were studying with auditions, but then he signed my document.
There began my wait for discharge. Not only did they not notify me when it arrived, but they also made me stay in the battalion. Once, when I was in boot camp, they ordered me to explode the grenades that were left unexploded. There were about ten of them, and I was supposed to detonate them and turn the safety ring over to my superior. So, I started throwing them, but one of them got stuck in the mud without exploding. I got the great idea to throw another grenade nearby, so I grabbed the bomb, took the safety off, and threw it. This one did not explode either. So, I picked up the third one, pulled the safety off, and that’s when it all exploded.
I do not know how I did not get hurt because there were millions of pieces flying around, and even though I had a helmet on my head, my face was covered in mud. And I really do not know how I did not drop the bomb. The grenade goes into action as soon as you take the safety off, you have 3 to 5 seconds to throw it. As soon as I remembered I had a grenade in my hand, I immediately threw it in the air… BOOM. I got a headache you cannot imagine; my face was full of mud and I still had 3 or 4 grenades left to explode. When the other corporal arrived, I told him the story, that I almost killed myself, and told him that I would not die as a soldier in the National Army of Colombia.”
M: “After what happened with the grenade, I gathered my soldiers and told them I was leaving. Some of them made the same decision as me because we realized that we were pawns in the hands of our superiors. Once, in the jungle, we were in the middle of a counterguerrilla operation when suddenly we were ordered to retreat and leave the battlefield. This made us realize that there was business going on among the higher ranks, that they had agreed among themselves. At worst, we would be killed, and it didn’t hurt anyone, or at least not the state. No one would cry but our parents, those who really loved us, our friends.
So, before I retired, I gathered with my soldiers and we talked. One of them told me this, “the good goes and the bad stays. It always happens that way.” Then we cried for a while, hugged, and said goodbye. They went further into the jungle and I went back to Bogota, where I waited for my discharge, which came more than a month later. So, I worked for more than a month without pay.
In that month I was on guard duty, I argued with the commanders because they wanted to send me to the mountains again. I had developed an umbilical hernia and they had to operate on me at the military hospital. One of these commanders absolutely wanted me to go back to the battlefield while I waited for my operation and discharge. But I, whether he liked it or not, was not going to go. Besides not wanting to, I would not have been useful there because I could not load the rifle nor could I hold the armament. A soldier in Colombia carries between 35 and 50 kilos, between armament, backpack, uniform, and helmet. And I had a hernia.”
LM: “After you retired, the president and FARC leaders started peace dialogues and in 2016 they signed the peace agreement. Do you think anything is changing?”
M: “So, there they created the JEP (Special Justice for Peace) and the Truth Commission, but everything is not as good as it seems. Hypothetically, if I went and reported the things I know, like the false positives they made in Antioquia, two things would happen. The first is that the people I go to report it find out. They are people who are part of the underworld and they would retaliate, they would come after me. To me and to any other soldier anywhere in Colombia who wants to do things right, who denounces. The second is that once the complaint is made, that is it: they are guilty, but if they don’t want to turn themselves in, it’s not the JEP’s responsibility.
In concrete terms, there is no justice, there is no one to force them to go and testify, so I do not think it’s worth going and doing it. In Colombia today, as then, there are no protections or safeguards, whether you are a soldier or a demobilized FARC member. There is no protection for those who want to help clarify the truth, to help those who have lost a relative, a friend.
When I was a kid, a neighbor of mine left for war and his sister has been looking for him ever since. She does not know if he is alive, if he has lost his memory or if he is in one of those open pits along with hundreds of other bodies. His sister was 24 when he left, now she is over 60. We all have the right to know the truth, but if you go and say that The Major gave the order to do this, this man will talk to his people. After all, the bandit knows the bandits, just like professors know professors and lawyers know each other. He will contact people to ask them for the favor, and here in Colombia they kill you for 500 pesos (about 10 cents, ed.).”
LM: “So you think there are gaps in the JEP and the Truth Commission?”
M. “Yes, these people have to be judged. They need to be judged.”
He is excited, furious to say the least. He chants these last words emphatically and then silence falls in the room, broken only by the deep sigh he takes to calm himself. After a minute, I ask him what he would do if he were on the other side, in the guerrilla war. He tells me that he would return to arms, as some of the demobilized FARC members are doing, to feel safer. The State does not give security, it makes agreements and does not respect them. Not only that, since they handed in their weapons, ex-guerrillas have been dying one after the other, assassinated by unnamed killers, but whose origin we can imagine. The current government is not implementing the peace agreement because the president is a puppet in the hands of the warlord: ex-president Álvaro Uribe Vélez. He wants more blood to flow, but with the agreement this will not happen.
The government opposes the will of the Colombian people because there are economic and personal interests in the war.
The guerrilla known as “Negra Karina” killed Uribe’s father, so he promoted the “no” to peace in the referendum, he suspended the agreements through the current president.
M: “Now that I am telling these things I am much calmer. It has been a long time, and I feel that it is necessary to raise my voice so that they are spread. So that the history is known, so that the truth is known about what happened and what can continue to happen. If the facts are not known, they will be repeated. In fact, today’s situation is not new, it has already happened in the past. Now that I am telling you these things, I feel stronger. There was a time when I would not have been able to do this because I was incredibly sad, I would shed tears just thinking about it. Today the sadness is still there because some things are irreparable, like the boys who are no longer there. The only thing the war did was cause the unjust ending of their lives, and that hurts.
However, reviewing these things from afar makes me feel good because I know I stayed strong in my decision not to be a part of something I would have regretted my whole life, which was being a murderer. It would have been haunting to be a murderer. Had my answer to the Major’s proposal been yes, I would not have the peace of mind to tell my story today. Nor peace, nor sleep.
After my discharge I had nightmares where I was haunted, but I was calm because I knew I had not done something I didn’t enjoy doing in combat (where I had every reason to do it), let alone for a supposed reward, an “achievement” that at the end of it all was just a deception. The peace of mind I live with today and can count on was the decision I made at that moment. To say no. If it had been a yes, the story would have been completely different.”
