Pubdate: Sat, 26 Jul 2003
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2003 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Scott Wilson
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/colombia.htm

A HARD NEW LIFE INSIDE THE LAW

Colombian Ex-Rebel Fights to Forget Haunting Memories of Childhood

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Morning arrives through a sooty window, and Fabian
Tamayo rises from a mattress with no sheets. Within minutes, he is nudging
his motorcycle between the homicidal buses of rush hour, across a paved
landscape as foreign to him as the rest of his cold new life.

There is no money in the pockets of his gray flannel pants, and only a
trickle of fuel in the motorcycle. But threading through the traffic, his
Tweety Bird key chain slapping against the gas tank, brings respite from the
remorseless memories of a guerrilla childhood.

Words and images come to him in sleep and solitude -- the futile pleadings
of friends he killed, the police officials dancing just moments before he
shot them, his mother's violent death. Regret mixes with rage, and Tamayo, a
slight boy with perpetually tousled hair, black eyes and a flush of pimples
on his hollow cheeks, grinds his teeth as he remembers the outlaw life that
tugs at him even as he casts around for a grip on this one.

"I still have so many problems with what I have done," Tamayo says. "When
I'm with others, it's not so bad, I'm okay. But alone, I remember, and it
hits me hard."

On an April day two years ago, Tamayo escaped the quotidian insanity of
civil war for the mundane battle to survive in this mountain capital, far
from family, friends and the jungles of his stunted youth. The child
guerrilla is now a 19-year-old motorcycle messenger, struggling to make the
bewildering transition from warrior to civilian. The Colombian government
has an enormous interest in seeing him succeed -- and hundreds of others
like him, too, if the country's 39-year-old war is ever to end.

Tamayo is one of the thousands of rootless young men and women who have
served as foot soldiers in Colombia's undiscriminating war. By most
estimates, more than 38,000 Colombians, from teenagers to grandfathers, are
fighters in the country's three irregular armed groups, engaged in a
conflict that draws strength from bleak economic prospects for the rural
poor, a haphazard rule of law and a pervasive drug trade. Tamayo's life has
been lived amid those currents, and in his uncertain struggle to escape them
is the story of the enduring nature of Colombia's war.

Tamayo's restless generation is abandoning the war in greater numbers than
ever, according to the Colombian government, which estimates that 1,561
people have deserted the armed groups over the past year. Many of them have
joined the government's "reinsertion" program, an attempt to coax the young,
in particular, out of the war by offering a brief financial boost, although
many say it is not enough to guarantee a new start. Tamayo received an
amnesty for his murderous time in the guerrillas, an education that led to a
high-school diploma, and money to buy a motorcycle and open a savings
account.

Tamayo's skills, however, remain particularly suited to the demands of
Colombia's lucrative illegal economy, and in his experience lies the
government's challenge. At age 11, he helped steal airplanes for drug
traffickers; at 13, he began a cocaine-exporting enterprise; and at 14 he
was inducted at gunpoint into the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or
FARC, a guerrilla group with a Marxist pitch that is financed largely by the
drug trade.

Tamayo's experience was extreme, even by the brutal standards of his outlaw
world. He won the confidence of drug runners and guerrilla commanders, who
entrusted him with the excruciating duty of executing friends as well as
enemies -- and their final words have not faded with therapy. It is a good
measure of his isolation from the modern world that he has eaten monkey but
never been to McDonald's.

Unlike most of his friends from the program, Tamayo has not succumbed to the
dark lure of easier money, although the job offers continue to pile up. On
his red Suzuki AX100, which he dotes on as if it were a puppy, Tamayo
balances between his past, a world of lawless violence, and his present, a
life of poverty lived inside the law. Guerrilla justice, infamous for its
long arm and memory, has not caught up with him. Nor have overtaxed
Colombian authorities called him to account for his more recent crimes.

This article is based on long interviews with Tamayo conducted over the past
two months and on visits to the harsh venues of his former life. It also
draws on talks with government officials and regional politicians, who
helped corroborate many of the crimes and events that Tamayo recounted, as
well as ordinary citizens trying to help him shake off his past.

"I ask God every day, 'Please, don't let me return,' " Tamayo says.

Frontier Youth

Puerto Elvira is a town in Colombia's southern jungle, a timeless place that
changes only with the rotation of the armed men in charge. Tamayo's father,
Martin, owned Puerto Elvira Billiards, which filled each day by noon with
the young men who pick coca, process it into cocaine and fly it over the
border, bound eventually for points north. Profits from his own coca farm
paid for it.

The light, airy rooms of the family home hummed with seasonal rains falling
on the tin roof. Tamayo and his younger brother shared bunk beds. But on
Christmas Eve 1990, guerrillas attacked the town, scattering the Tamayos and
ending what he remembers as the happiest time of his life.

Most of the family moved to Villavicencio, the provincial capital, while
Tamayo's father headed for the northern emerald mines in hopes of striking
it rich. He didn't, and four years later the family returned to Puerto
Elvira. The Colombian government had ceded control of the town to the FARC,
a rural insurgency founded in 1964 whose strongholds in the southern jungle
are home to many of its 18,000 fighters.

Across from the family home was a tiny school, the Divine Child, that Tamayo
had once attended. But it now seemed beside the point in a town where
opportunity had nothing to do with education and everything to do with
willingness to participate in the drug trade. Tamayo told his father he had
no intention of entering fifth grade.

The 10-year-old became manager of the pool hall, allowing his father time to
expand his drug business. Each week the boy paid $50 in protection money
from the pool hall profits to John Edgar, the FARC commander who ran the
town. In addition, his father paid the guerrillas a tax on each kilo of coca
base he moved along the River Guaviare.

"They were good people, taking care of us," Tamayo recalled of the
guerrillas. "The whole town survived on coca and the government was trying
to take it away."

Like many young boys his age, Tamayo had a quarrelsome relationship with his
mother, Maria Elvira. He had lived without his father in the relative safety
of Villavicencio, pedaling his bicycle to school each morning in a red tie
and white shirt with a crest on its pocket. But now they fought over
business accounts, over the money he took from her purse to buy gifts for
his girlfriends, and about his future.

Then one day in July 1995 she was shot dead in the rambling family home in
Puerto Elvira. She was only 28 years old, a plump woman with dark eyes and a
broad smile. Hilberto Tavares, the owner of a movie theater, had fallen in
love with her in Villavicencio while Tamayo's father was away in the emerald
mines. Tamayo, who had argued bitterly with his mother the last time he saw
her, said Tavares' wife hired the men who killed his mother. Years later,
Tamayo avenged her murder.

With his father living on the coca farm and his mother dead, Tamayo explored
the opportunities available to an 11-year-old boy who was "empty and full of
rage," as he recalled it. He took a job with a man known as "the Fox," a
drug trafficker who made him stable boy for his Paso Fino horses.

He was promoted quickly, becoming an armed companion to pilots making
midnight runs to the mountains of Peru, the beaches of Puerto Rico and
hidden airstrips in Brazil's Amazon. Soon he was stealing Cessna airplanes
and spending the fees he earned doing it in Puerto Elvira's bordellos and
cock-fighting arenas.

With $40,000 in savings, the 14-year-old invested in a drug shipment bound
for Spain. He and his father bought 97 pounds of cocaine, paid off the local
authorities along the route, and then watched as Colombian police seized the
haul before it left port.

He had 18 pounds of coca base left, hidden in a bordello. But he had not
paid the protection taxes to the guerrillas, and one of the women who worked
there told the local commander about Tamayo's duty-free stash.

"He gave me a choice -- join them or be killed," Tamayo says of the
conversation he had with John Edgar at the billiards hall in September 1997.
"It never crossed my mind to join them until that moment."

He boarded a canoe and joined them that afternoon.

Guerrilla Life

Tamayo's war was intimate and horrible.

The first assignment came six months into the rote drudgery of weapons
training, obstacle courses and soaking jungle rains endured in open-air
hammocks. His unsmiling commander, Luis Cordoba, told him to hop a canoe to
Puerto Elvira with another guerrilla and kill an army informant. He was not
told the man's name.

The two boys strolled toward the square, past the family billiards hall and
into a drug store owned by Chucho Quinones. Tamayo had known the man since
childhood, having attended Divine Child with his son, Frankie, before
dropping out.

"Hey, Tamayito, how's it going?' Quinones called out, using an affectionate
nickname.

Tamayo squeezed the trigger of his pistol four times, leaving the man
bleeding to death behind the glass counter. That evening, in the line of
wooden cots in camp, Tamayo cried himself silently to sleep over the first
person he ever killed.

In the FARC's 44th Front, Tamayo's nightmarish home for the next three
years, days began before dawn on the central and southern plains of Meta
province, a key crossroads for incoming gun shipments and the outgoing drugs
that paid for them. Morning formation gave way to long afternoons running
patrols, collecting taxes from coca farmers and staging roadblocks in search
of food. If there was combat, it happened almost always by accident --
Tamayo's patrol bumping into another from the anti-guerrilla paramilitary
force then brutally penetrating the region alongside the military.

Each evening at 6 o'clock, the front assembled for a two-hour lesson on the
guerrilla struggle, which placed class warfare and state corruption at the
heart of the cause. Then, to the shrill cacophony of a jungle at night,
Tamayo played chess with Tuco, the group's 45-year-old second in command.
"He told me the war was like our chess game," Tamayo said. "Moving pieces
around, taking theirs and losing ours, controlling squares. I always thought
the FARC's politics sounded good -- rights to housing, to opportunity, to
justice. The problem is they never put it into practice."

From his vantage point, in fact, the guerrillas appeared to be at war with
themselves. With discouraging regularity, the front's 200 fighters assembled
for war councils to judge alleged deserters. Testimony would last hours,
then the troops would vote. Tamayo carried out the death sentences, his
reward for winning his commanders' confidence.

Tamayo's closest friend was La Bruja, another child pressed into the
guerrillas' ranks. They stood guard together, slept side by side on the
wooden cots and swam in the river during free afternoons. Then one day,
after a few weeks on different duties, La Bruja was brought before the war
council on charges of desertion. The inevitable guilty verdict was
delivered, and Tamayo escorted him to a jungle clearing.

"Please don't kill me," he begged Tamayo, who grinds his teeth at the
memory. But Tamayo pulled the trigger, then dug a shallow grave.

"I never made any other attachments," he says. "You never knew when someone
you cared about would be killed or you would have to kill them."

The front moved west, camping under the jungle canopy, headed for the coca
trading town of Puerto Rico on the Ariari River. In the spring of 1999,
Tamayo and another guerrilla were dispatched to kill a police captain and
his lieutenant in preparation for an assault on the town of 20,000 people.
They traveled by canoe, dressed in jeans and T-shirts after months in
uniform, and stayed in a small hotel.

Tamayo spent the next few days stalking the two policemen, from their
morning coffee to their midnight visits to a downtown nightclub, where they
dispensed with their usual armed escorts. The club was dark, dappled with
colored lights.

"I walked up to him on the dance floor and shot him in the head," Tamayo
says. "My companion shot the lieutenant, and we ran out of there with people
shouting and others firing guns."

From his first day with the guerrillas, Tamayo had harbored dreams of
escape, most of which faded further each time he was forced to execute a
failed deserter. But as the killing mounted and his assignments grew more
dangerous, he focused on finding a way out. "I knew they would eventually
kill me, too," Tamayo said.

On April 2, 2001, he fled. After a morning of fighting near Puerto Rico,
Tamayo waited at the end of a long line of guerrillas to board a canoe back
to camp. The moment, unplanned and risky, had arrived. He took three steps
off the jungle path into a damp thicket of palm and banana trees and watched
breathlessly as the canoes slipped into the current without him.

Shucking his ammunition vest, Tamayo broke into a run, down a jungle path,
an assault rifle in one hand and two pistols bouncing in his uniform
pockets. A peasant suddenly appeared on the path with a shotgun in his
hands. Tamayo recognized him as a guerrilla supporter. In his panicked
flight, he was seized by fear of being captured. He raised his AK-47 and
squeezed the trigger. The man fell dead.

"No one believed me," he says of the police reaction in Villavicencio, where
he turned himself in as a runaway guerrilla hours later, after hijacking a
cattle truck. "I was too young." He was 17 years old.

Freedom began at the Pilot Center, a government juvenile detention camp on
the outskirts of Villavicencio. Jail was not the destination Tamayo had
expected, and within days he escaped. Soon after, on the street, Tamayo
passed Tavares, the man he held ultimately responsible for his mother's
death. He followed him home, then grabbed him the next day as Tavares left
his house. Tamayo took him to a friend's store, where the two boys tied his
arms to a pipe. Over the next two days, Tamayo recalled coldly, he tortured
the man with a hot iron before shooting him in the head and dumping his body
in a creek outside town. The specifics of the killing could not be
independently verified during a visit to Villavicencio.

"I felt nothing about it at all," he said. "He was nothing, a terrible man.
If he didn't actually pull the trigger, he was still responsible."

Days later he lit a candle at his mother's mossy grave at Central Cemetery.

Grasping the Future

"Classmates, we can expect many hard days ahead and we will need much
strength and caution," Tamayo told 54 former guerrillas at a graduation
ceremony last December. A year had passed since he had joined the
government's reinsertion program, a mostly happy time spent in group homes,
on soccer fields and in classrooms, studying computers, at the 21st Century
School. His classmates had chosen him to deliver the commencement address.
In cap and gown, he thanked his teachers, the government and his mother for
her "brief presence in my life."

"Who created this cruel war? I'm sure it wasn't us," he told classmates.
"Now is the time for society to open its doors to us."

Tamayo's high-school diploma came with a grant from the government, enough
to buy his Suzuki. At the urging of a friend, he deposited the remaining
$500 in a savings account that he cannot touch for at least a year.

Bogota is like another country to him, remote and forbidding. Neither his
bosses at a prestigious publishing house nor his landlord knows of his
guerrilla past. His $250 monthly salary is consumed by rent, gasoline, food
and beer drinking with colleagues from work. The walls of the tiny room he
rents are bare; sofa cushions serve as pillows. Getting his hands on $5 to
fix a flat tire can take up a whole day. There is no more government help,
only the kindness of a few women he relies on for food, money and advice. He
no longer visits the reinsertion office, which is now a target of guerrilla
attacks.

The former guerrillas with whom he entered the program are losing their
tenuous hold on new lives, falling into crime or returning to war. Two
months ago he ran into Ana Maria, a classmate who now works as a prostitute
at a strip club. She darted into the kitchen when she saw him, his own eyes
dropping in embarrassment. Another friend, Guillermo, a child guerrilla with
whom he lived for a year in a group home, joined the paramilitaries in the
town of Soacha just south of the city.

For a few months, Tamayo saw a government psychologist to deal with his
daytime anxieties and nightmare recollections of killing friends and being
pursued. His jaws flex anxiously when he talks about La Bruja and the others
he killed. Not long ago, he sold a pistol he had hidden at a nearby
restaurant, a passkey to his old life. He needed the $50 for rent.

"Only I am going to be able to get over this," he says. "No one else can
help."

The war is all around him as he speeds along Bogota's avenues -- the
displaced peasants begging at stoplights, the bombed social club now
shrouded in a black curtain. In moving between the looming skyscrapers of
Bancafe and Banco Union he senses possibility. For now, there is the wind in
his face and a long list of pickups and deliveries to keep him busy.

The dreams keep coming, and with them despair and thoughts of returning to
the south and the countless malign opportunities available there. At the
Villavicencio airport, its hangars full of decrepit Antonovs and DC-3s used
to carry drugs, Tamayo is propositioned by a friend: How about joining a
colleague flying stolen planes for the narcos?

"It's not worth it," he said. "I don't want to go back to the violence. It
seems like my whole life I have been trying to push against that current."
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