Right Side of Left Coast: Inside a Guerrilla Camp in Colombia, Poised Between Peace and War

Gustavo, a commander, stood at the corner of a formation of FARC guerrillas.

A rebel named Andrea drew on Michael’s shoulder in one of the FARC’s jungle camps. While the guerrillas reject marriage, relationships among them are common.

3/3 SLIDES © Federico Rios Escobar for The New York Times

Samuel walked from the camp to the place where his unit would spend the night.

1/3 SLIDES © Federico Rios Escobar for The New York Times

2/3 SLIDES © Federico Rios Escobar for The New York Times

Samuel walked from the camp to the place where his unit would spend the night.

IN THE MOUNTAINS OF COLOMBIA — The rebel camp is a Communist time capsule. An old guerrilla fighter sings songs about Che Guevara on his guitar as a crowd leans in to listen, armed with rifles and grenades.

Salaries do not exist here, or even marriage. The fighters believe in free love, saying they are wed only to the revolution. They say life is still possible with Karl Marx in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other.

“We have prepared for peace, but we are also ready for war,” said Samuel, a 31-year-old fighter who, like many of the rebels, has never set foot in any of Colombia’s cities.

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I was invited by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, to witness this sprawling jungle hide-out for about 150 fighters during what were supposed to be its last days.

The journey took us through rugged mountains on horseback and on foot, requiring us to abandon our satellite phones and any equipment that could be tracked by government soldiers, then place ourselves in the hands of a rebel group infamous for kidnapping civilians and holding them for years.

Now, the two sides are negotiating an end to decades of fighting, the longest conflict in modern history. But the end was nowhere in sight that day.

It was around 6 p.m. when the communiqué reached the guerrilla camp — and the news was not good.

The message, read aloud under a tent, came from Rodrigo Londoño — or Timochenko, as he is called here — the top FARC commander negotiating with the government to lay down arms after so much war.

The talks were in a state of collapse, the communiqué warned. The rebels had stormed from the negotiating table in anger.

War could be on the horizon once again.

“There may be nothing else than to continue with what we came here 50 years ago to do,” the message concluded, as the fighters in the camp gasped and gripped their weapons tighter.

The Colombian peace negotiations are supposed to be in their final and most critical stage. The war has killed more than 220,000 people, left 40,000 missing and displaced an estimated 5.7 million. It has stretched on for half a century and stymied two previous truces meant to bring lasting peace.

Both sides are saying that the March 23 deadline for a final deal may be missed, leaving little certain now.

After the letter was read, a hushed silence fell under the tent. It was broken by a man in a beret with a red star who yelled slogans shouted by guerrillas throughout the ages:

“Against imperialism,” he shouted.

“For the Fatherland!” the camp roared back.

“Against the oligarchy,” he shouted.

“For the people!” they replied.

Far From Home

The day begins here an hour before dawn. At 5:15, the fighters line up for the day’s tasks: guarding outposts, slaughtering a cow. Breakfast is served out of a thatched-roof hut with ovens built into the ground.

The prospect of peace might be a national question in Colombia, but it is a very personal one in this camp. Will the fighters return to the villages they once knew? Will they reunite with children abandoned years ago, children who are now adults themselves?

Samy is 28 now, but she was barely 16 when she became a guerrilla.

Like many rebels, who used their first names to keep their families safe, her childhood was filled with memories of deadly campaigns waged against peasants by paramilitary groups searching for guerrillas. She remembers six people shot dead in her small village. She decided that taking up arms was the way to survive.

“Here, you form another family,” she said.

Since then, Samy has seen her mother only once, during a brief meeting in a safe house when she was 21. The two women talked about what Samy had been like as a child, a distant memory that is almost gone. Samy has no plans to go home if the FARC disarms.

The FARC once ruled the Colombian countryside with the profits of the illicit cocaine trade. But resolve from the government, and a $10 billion aid package from the United States, has left the rebels on the run.

The group, listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department, once counted some 17,000 fighters in its ranks; now it is down to just 7,000.

Many here in the camp are still teenagers. Didier, 15, has barely shot the rifle he was given by the FARC when he joined the group six months ago.

He came with two other teenage runaways, ushered away before sunrise on motorcycles by FARC militiamen from a small river port town. He hopes a peace deal will allow him to head home to explain to his father why he left: His family was running out of food.

By 1 p.m., it had grown hot. The fighters were washing clothes and swimming in the river. Angela, a girl of about 18 with the nickname “Gunpowder,” stepped out giggling in her underwear to escape a group of young men and teenage boys splashing water at her. She picked up her Kalashnikov and left.

While marriage is unknown here, relationships among guerrillas are common. The man asks his commander for permission, just as many rural Colombians would ask the father for a woman’s hand. When the two want to have sex, they tell the commander and then slip off into the woods, with palm fronds for bedding. The relations come and go.

“How long did we live together, Andrea?” asked the fighter Samuel, 31.

“I don’t even remember,” said Andrea, 26.

The two laughed. Both now have children by other partners, civilians living elsewhere in Colombia. They both plan to go raise them if there is a peace deal.

Camilo, 19, had a relationship, too, but the woman was killed along with 10 other fighters in an aerial bombing six months ago by the government.

“We are in a war, and that is just how it is,” Camilo said. “The things you see in a place like this. A leg over there, a foot across the river, and then an arm in some other place.”

Night falls, and marches begin into the forest. One squad of fighters heads to a distant part of the jungle. They sling up hammocks between trees next to large spiders and a few tree frogs.

Someone whistles, a signal that an airplane is approaching overhead, and the guerrillas turn off their lights so as not to be seen from above.

Evolving Hopes

For many in the older generation, the graying fighters of the FARC, the future brings the possibility of a political rebirth. They have abandoned any hope that the guerrillas will topple the government one day, as revolutionaries did in Cuba and Nicaragua. The future in Colombia, they say, will come through joining the system that exists.

“We will get rid of the arms and become politicians,” said Luisito, the camp’s second in command. “But we will not lose our structure. We will be at the ballot boxes this time.”

The FARC is preparing its rank and file for what life will be like after a peace deal. Most mornings, fighters assemble under the tent for “pedagogy.” Leaders explain the agreement being negotiated in Havana and solicit responses from fighters.

Hand-painted signs reinforce the new tone: “In principal, we are for peace and not for war,” says one sign hanging above a row of Kalashnikovs.

Some fighters want to know where they will live after a peace deal. Can they stay in the camp, simply without weapons? How will life be financed if the FARC can no longer levy its “taxes” in the hinterlands, like the one on the lucrative coca trade?

Others want to know if they will even be allowed to live.

One fighter with the nom de guerre Teófilo Panclasta said he had gotten out of a Colombian prison this month after serving two years on rebellion charges. In the mid-1980s, he said, he was part of the FARC’s largest experiment in political participation, the Patriotic Union, a party that the guerrillas formed as part of peace talks at the time. The effort brought part of the FARC out of the shadows.

The response of paramilitary groups was brutal. In all, about 3,000 members of the party, from supporters to presidential candidates, were killed in retributive violence.

“Don’t think this could not happen all over again,” Mr. Panclasta said. “If we give up our rifles, our grenades, our pistols, we can only defend ourselves with our words.”

Enduring Ideas

Members of the camp say they came under fire last month when they ran into the Colombian military about 30 miles away. Eight guerrillas were wounded. One commander, Alberto, jumped off a rooftop to take cover. He now hobbles around the camp on crutches.

But more often, teachers come with instructions on using Facebook and Twitter — tools the guerrillas see as vital for future electioneering. There is talk of looking for “new models” now that Cuba has reached its own dé tente with the United States.

Aldana, a Soviet-educated commander known here as “the Russian,” sat on a hillside and mused that the collapse of Communism had finally reached the camp. He recalled watching that change begin decades ago while he was still a young man backpacking in Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“We had no idea what it meant was that socialism was coming to an end,” he said.

While the model may be ending, the FARC will remain, he insisted. “We are seeking peace, but we are not demobilizing,” he said. “We’re simply taking a new shape.”

Mr. Panclasta hoped for the same.

He seemed to feel liberated in the outdoor camp, after his years in a prison cell. He was shouting old slogans, slapping shoulders and pouring coffee for the fighters.

He cited a phrase from Marx. “ ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,’ ” he said. “These ideas may be old ones — but they are the ones which have saved us in the forest here, and the ones that will save us through whatever is next.”