It feels like floating down the aisle of a flooded cathedral. Large rock walls rise from placid, muddy waters, which echo with dripping vines and squawking parrots. Then the river widens and accelerates, sometimes blocked by boulders which, to be dodged, require paddle strokes that burn
the biceps. Waves of cold water crash into the rafting boat as it bounces between foamy rapids. Eventually he stops on a beach, where a local family awaits us with sugar cane and guava juice.
“We have replaced the rifles with the oars,” Frellin Noreña smiles as he drives the raft wet from head to toe. His nom de guerre was Pato, or duck. “You have to be crazy to prefer war to peace”. Noreña is a former fighter in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), a guerrilla group.
About seven thousand of his comrades have abandoned their weapons after the 2016 peace agreement that formally ended the longest internal conflict in the Western Hemisphere. Today he works as a guide with Caguán expeditions and takes tourists to the rivers near Miravalle, in the Caquetá department, a remote corner of Colombia where very few outsiders have ventured in the last few decades. Backed by the UN, the initiative aims to reintegrate former guerrillas by putting their knowledge of the Amazon region to good use.
There are several such projects. Former guerrillas offer bird-watching activities, excursions, and hearty field cooking as part of the Tierra Grata Eco Tours in La Paz, a city near the Venezuelan border. Over the course of a two-day hike along the swampy mountain paths, Jhonni Giraldo, a former Farc soldier, leads the bravest tourists to the small village of Marquetalia. In 1964 the army dropped a hell of a bomb on this common army founded by refugees; the survivors headed for the hills and the Farc insurrection was born. There isn’t much to see, apart from the rusted remains of a downed helicopter. Giraldo is thinking of rebuilding the house of Manuel Marulanda known as Tirofijo, the founder of the Farc.
Battle scars
Staying with local farmers offers tourists a window into the persistent poverty that the 2016 deal was supposed to solve. “There are no roads and doctors rarely visit these areas,” says Fredy Conde, who trudges her cheese on mules to sell at the local market. “In Colombia the campaign has been abandoned”. The stay in the resettlement camps of the Farc, established after the peace agreement to rehabilitate the former
fighters, it also offers a taste of what the difficulties of this demobilization are.
Miravalle, covered in murals by Farc leaders and perched on a valley of lush nature, boasts a fish farm, an organic greenhouse and a small museum, as well as rafting activities. His rebels who became rowers have even competed in Australia.
But some river guides have decided to work as bodyguards for their former commanders, Noreña says (about three hundred demobilized Farc fighters have been killed since 2016). Many still worship their former commander, Hernán Darío Velásquez, better known as El Paisa, who left Miravalle and returned to the jungle with a handful of men in 2018, leaving girlfriends and young children behind. El Paisa, who was reportedly killed in Venezuela in December 2021, was a drug trafficker who killed dozens of civilians, says Sebastián Velásquez of the Colombian Federation of FARC Victims.
Given the persistence of tensions, it is unlikely that these initiatives by former members of the Farc will become a reference point for international tourism. Only 10 percent of Caguán Expeditions’ customers were foreigners, says Noreña. Freshwater rafting in San Gil, a seven-hour drive from the capital, is more thrilling, she admits. The route that passes through Marquetalia is probably of particular interest to history buffs and coffee fanatics (the volcanic slopes of the region are rich in them).
The initiatives are helping some families to earn a legal living. And this is no small feat in a country where the scars of armed conflict are still fresh. In its final report of June 28, Colombia’s truth commission, set up in 2016 under the peace agreement, found that more than 450,000 people were killed between 1985 and 2018, double the previous estimates. Paramilitaries, often linked to business elites and landowners, were responsible for nearly half of the killings; the Farc and other minor rebel groups, by a quarter. About seven million people fled their homes over the same period.
The newly elected left-wing president, Gustavo Petro – himself a former M19 guerrilla – has vowed to implement the commission’s recommendations, including military reform and drug trafficking regulation. Even an ordinary soldier who briefly ran into Mr. Giraldo on the path to Marquetalia argues that the state has so far failed to keep its rural development promises. “The conflict is not good for anyone,” says the ex
rebellious, trudging uphill to where it all began. The soldier agrees. “Neither for civilians, nor for the government.”