Colombian Ex-Rebel Fights to Forget Haunting Memories of Childhood

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

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."

                                               © 2003