Guillermo Torres: The folk singer and former FARC member who sang his way into office

Guillermo Torres

Guillermo Torres bounded inside, leaving his two bodyguards (assigned by the UNP; National Protection Unit) to sip orange juice in the early morning sun outside. Dressed casually in a pair of loose fitting trousers, lime green shirt and sandals, with two mochilas (traditional handwoven indigenous bags) hanging from his neck, the next mayor of Turbaco seems to signify both a sartorial and symbolic shift in Colombia´s political scene. If the current nationwide strikes which have brought multitudes from various distinctive sectors onto the streets throughout the country provide a clear manifestation of the discontent towards the current government of President Ivan Duque and its policies, October´s local elections (where towns, cities and departments elected their mayors and councils) offered a hint at a population ready for change. Bogotá elected its first female governor, and an openly gay one at that, in the shape of Claudia Lopez. The nation´s second city Medellín opted for youthful independent candidate Daniel Quintero Calle, while Cartagena saw William Dau, once exiled due to threats against his life for highlighting cases of corruption, overcome traditional political structures to be elected mayor. However, perhaps the most notable result was that of the municipal town of Turbaco, just a short drive from Cartagena, where Guillermo Torres out-manoeuvred the traditional political machinations to become the first former FARC guerrilla member to be elected to office since the signing of the peace agreement with the government of Juan Manuel Santos in 2016. Torres, under the nom de guerre Julian Conrado, was known as El cantante de las FARC (The FARC´s singer) for his folk songs which were used for both propaganda purposes and to boost morale among fighters via radio transmissions. He first came to national prominence during the failed peace summit of President Andres Pastrana where he entertained the FARC representatives during breaks in negotiation. At one stage thought dead following the controversial bombardment of a FARC camp in Ecuador in which prominent guerrilla leader Raul Reyes was killed, Torres was arrested in Venezuelan territory in 2011. The Venezuelan government declined his extradition and in early 2013, he was allowed travel to Cuba to sit in on the peace negotiations between the Colombian government representatives and their FARC counterparts in Havana. Fast forward six years, and the 65 year old soon to be mayor sat down with La Libertad Sublime to talk about topics ranging from his formative years in Turbaco, the power of music, political violence, the current state of the peace agreement and why a drop of love is what is needed to transform the country.

His election as mayor caps a triumphant return to a hometown which Torres admits to only visiting intermittently and clandestinely during his years in the guerrilla ranks. What is clear from spending time in his company is that his formative years growing up in the town had a profound impact on him and his worldview.  Decades before assuming political power in Turbaco, Torres was championing causes as a folk singer: “I´ve been side by side with the people through my songs since I was old enough to understand things”. Torres tells the story of his first song in the town. It was called La Volqueta (The Dumptruck) and denounced a case of corruption over a promised resource which never materialised. The reaction of the authorities to the song taught the young folk singer a lesson he had struggled to comprehend in the classroom: “(in class) I´d understood the branches of power; executive, legislative and judicial, but the concept of the state in general wasn´t clear to me, until I made that song and the police arrived, gave me a beating, took me to the station and when the people made a fuss about it, an officer shouted We are the law, we are order, we are the state! So, what is the state? A kick from a police officer!” Torres says in those days he was involved with various leftist organisations or whichever organisations were working to defend the rights of the people, work that invited stigmatization both then and now, “…because here, there is always the belief that those who protest, even to the most basic extent, do it because they are influenced by foreign ideas…now they say Castro-Chavismo, but in those days they called you pro-soviet”, an observation reinforced somewhat by last week´s comments from current vice-president Marta Lucia Ramirez stranegly placing responsibility for recent anti-government protests on Moscow. Torres attributes this stigmatization to the Cold War logic of the National Security Doctrine, which highlighted the threat of internal enemies, and suggested that such a train of thought is what allows the recent wave of violence towards social leaders and activists in the country to continue unabashed. The folk singer claims it was this stigmatization that pushed him in the radical direction of armed insurrection. He cites the story of a friend of his, a fellow singer and medical student. This friend was carrying out his rural medical internship (mandatory for all medicine graduates in Colombia) in the town of San Carlos, Antioquia. Torres claims his friend was murdered after gaining a reputation for being a subversive having attended ,without charge, patients who could not afford to pay. Torres, who had already been targeted for his own political activism, explained his feelings at the time: “If they killed Julian, who wasn´t part of any leftist organisation, who is the most passive guy I´ve known in all my life, someone so noble and with such a love for humanity. If they´ve killed him, how are they not going to kill all of us…I said to myself, I either let them kill me here, or else I head for the jungle”.

The folk singer and activist says he joined the FARC guerrilla without “a minimal military vocation” and that in fact such a life was contrary to his worldview. He admits to finding the transition difficult but maintains he was never a guerrilla soldier in the true sense of the word: “In the jungle, with the guerrilla, I was a guerrilla singer, always doing my cultural work with the guerrilla soldiers. I sang to them (the fighters) but I also went out into the countryside to sing in the villages, to sing to the campesinos, to the workers and to the indigenous people. Whatever track we followed, through the mountains, I was always singing to the people”. Many would rightly question such a romantic view of the FARC and their presence in various rural sectors of the country, and if the post-conflict and its search for truth and reconciliation are able to develop as outlined, the country and the world will hopefully have a much more accurate picture of a very troubled period in the nation’s history. If history had turned out differently, Guillermo Torres´ time in the jungle would have been dramatically shorter. He joined the FARC in 1983 and was based in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range in the world boasting snow-capped mountains overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Yet within a year, he was down from the mountains as part of a ceasefire and partial agreement signed with the government of Belisario Betancur. These peace talks resulted in the formation of a new political party, Union Patriotica (UP), a left-leaning party whose members came from various sectors of society and included representatives of the FARC and other guerrilla groups such as the M-19. Torres says the idea from the FARC was to take tentative steps with the party to explore how the political path would unfold without abandoning the armed struggle. Again citing the National Security Doctrine and its stigmatization of alternative political movements, Torres recounted the frosty atmosphere in which those early political steps were taken: “(There was a sense of danger) from the beginning. I remember that my first official visit was to the Governor of Magdalena…When I was coming down from my conversation with the governor, on the same stairs I was coming down, some officials were going up, and the look from those officials said everything; hatred was seeping out of them…I perceived a very negative spiritual force, and well, later materialized what everyone knows of, the mass genocide of the UP”. The National Centre for Historical Memory states that up to 5,000 representatives of the nascent political movement (which had made impressive electoral during the late 80s) were killed or disappeared between 1984 and 2002 in a frenzy of violence perpetrated by right-wing paramilitaries, drug trafficking organisations and members of the state security forces. Many more were forced into exile due to the bloodshed, in a wave of constant violence which was declared by the Attorney General´s office as a crime against humanity in 2014. Among the victims were two presidential candidates (Jaime Pardo Leal and his replacement Bernardo Jaramillo Osso), 8 congress representatives, 13 deputies, 11 mayors and 70 council members, with the motive not lost on Torres: “They said that the people didn´t accept us, they did accept us, because we had so many councillors, so many mayors…and they killed most of us. We moved democratically and they took our seats with bullets…Well once more we went back to the jungle”.

The massacre of the UP was followed by two decades of spiralling violence in which paramilitary and guerrilla groups fought for territory, people were routinely kidnapped or disappeared, state security forces were implicated in collusion and cases of mass homicide where young men were lured to their death and later presented as guerrilla fighters killed in combat. In the midst of this slaughter, Guillermo Torres once more found himself involved in peace talks, this time the failed talks between the FARC and the government of Andres Pastrana between 1998 and 2002. While it has long been accepted that the FARC took advantage of these talks and the large demilitarised zone surrounding the town of Caguan (where the talks took place) to strengthen their strategic presence, Torres claims the government was concerned by what they perceived as apparent support for the guerrilla from certain sectors of society: “The other public audiences (at the talks) had around 400 people, then a thousand, two thousand and three thousand, when they noticed how the people embraced us, how they sang with us, how they danced with the insurgents, it made them uncomfortable and when they decided to break the talks, Colombia saw the biggest war it has seen”. The failure of the talks led to the election of hard-line candidate Alvaro Uribe, who became president on the back of a pledge to take the fight to the guerrilla forces, backed with vast resources from the U.S. through the Plan Colombia agreement. This period was among the most bloody in the history of the country with clashes between the military and the FARC, increased aerial bombardments and a large number of massacres carried out by the guerrillas, and disproportionately, by right wing paramilitary groups before their eventual and controversial demobilisation in 2006. The level of collusion between politics and paramilitarism has long been known and investigated through the parapolítico scandal and Torres touched on some of the more cynical motives behind such alliances: “They have a concept, and it´s in the documents Santa Fe 1 and Santa Fe 2…the guerrilla move among the population like a fish in water. If we can´t take the fish from the water, then we´ll take the water from the fish, and that´s when there was this amount of massacres in Colombia…But these massacres didn´t only happen because there were sectors who supported the guerrilla. Here, there´s regions where the guerrilla never went, and they massacred people with the argument that they supported the guerrilla. But if there were no guerrilla there? No, it´s because they´d thought of doing a macro-project there, or they were going to put in a mining company…You know that here they´ve taken millions of hectares of land from the people”. This oppressive violence has tended to disproportionately affect minority groups such as campesinos, indigenous communities, and Afro-Colombians, resulting in Colombia having the second highest rate of internally displaced people in the world, an issue Torres will have to face as incoming mayor: “Here in Turbaco, three days ago, I went to meet a displaced community from Córdoba, the Zenu (indigenous community). Here in Turbaco, there are Zenu. Why here if the river Zenu is in Córdoba? Because they displaced them”.

The very fact that Guillermo Torres will become mayor on January 1st 2020 would have seemed highly fanciful as the FARC´s singer sat in a Venezuelan jail cell nine years previously. It is of course a fact only made possible by the peace agreement signed with the Santos government in 2016. Torres was present for the talks in Havana but was not part of the negotiation team. If he was sore at not being more central to the talks, the incoming mayor of Turbaco seems more concerned by the outcome: “They managed something which left the government in disbelief. Many people thought that it would not happen, that the FARC insurgents would lay down their arms and pass towards reincorporation in civil society”. Having experienced first-hand what happened to the UP in the 1980s and seeing the Caguan peace talks lead to perhaps the most violent period in the history of the Colombian conflict, one would suspect that the guerrilla rank and file were apprehensive at the thought of laying down their arms. Torres elaborated on the mood within the FARC reincorporation camps: “There were nerves, there was distrust but there was hope. I suppose you could say that hope outweighed the distrust…so even with all the distrust, we gave up our arms because it´s not as if we are not aware of what has happened historically with the guerrilla movements who have handed over their arms (in Colombia)”. Torres went on to highlight examples from Colombia´s 20th century to demonstrate that insurgent groups have not fared favourably following the laying down of weapons before stating that nearly all of the country´s political parties could be traced to some form of armed group. Despite this tragic history of bloodshed, and the fact that more than 130 demobilized FARC fighters have been killed since the signing of the agreement, and indeed the apparent ambivalence of the current Colombian government towards the agreement, not to mention that some high profile FARC commanders have joined the dissident ranks, Torres remains convinced that the peace deal will prevail: “I continue with the same hope…I know that there are comrades that have returned to the jungle. I cannot give an explanation for why they have done that. I can only explain why I stay on the path of peace”.

With question marks over the future of the peace agreement, and the history of violence associated with moves towards peace in the country, the election of Torres places a huge spotlight on his tenure, what it represents for the post-conflict, and it perhaps also places him in the crosshairs of those who wish to see the process fail. Interestingly, Torres did not stand as a candidate for the FARC political party, which has performed poorly in the voting process thus far, but as a candidate representing Colombia Humana (a broad progressive movement under the general leadership of Gustavo Petro, who lost in the presidential run-off last year) and the aforementioned UP. When quizzed on how he managed to score such an impressive victory in the town he responded that “With love. I sang during the campaign a song called Una Gota de Amor, a drop of love, and with that song and others, we went from house to house talking to the people…I´d say more than the people voting for a mayor, they voted for the peace process, that Turbaco has given an example to Colombia and to the world that peace is possible. Now we have to see how the other side responds”. When quizzed on feeling the pressure ahead of his inauguration as mayor, and whether he feared for how others may react, Torres sounded a defiant tone: “I am not going to fail the aspirations of the Colombian public. I know that there are intentions that have been expressed publically (from figures within the party of President Ivan Duque): We are going to tear up the peace agreement. I say it the other way round; I´m fighting to tear up the agreement of war. It´s the public who need to identify who says one thing, and who says the opposite”.

Guillermo Torres will assume office at the beginning of January as an unlikely flagbearer for the future success of the Colombian peace process. The folk singer turned insurgent propagandist turned mayor of Turbaco. Critics of the peace agreement will seize on any perceived failure to highlight why the FARC should not belong in politics. But if he manages to leave the town and its people better off than how he receives it, then a narrative of hope and reconciliation can gather important momentum. In his favour, he seems to have a clear and sincere perception of what his role should be: “What is the greatest responsibility of a municipal administration? Resolving problems in public services; health, education. But here something happens, politics stopped being politics and turned into a business. That stops with me”. He cites the poor state of public healthcare in the town and a general lack of opportunities for young people once they finish their schooling, and how this feeds into issues of insecurity in the town: “Who is responsible for the delinquency? The kids, the youths or the state which denies them the opportunity of work or study?”.  He stresses the need for more investment in the town, better protection of natural resources and the promotion of eco-tourism, and seems confident that the support of the town´s people will help him achieve these goals. Students of political science might argue that represents only half the battle but Torres certainly talks a good game, and he comes across as sincere and enthusiastic. Whether that will be enough to enact real change can only be decided in four years’ time. What shines through during the course of the interview is his belief in the peace agreement as a path forward for the country, so it seems appropriate to end with a plea from Torres for the Colombian public to come together in order to strengthen the peace process and reject a return to conflict which he sees now as an industry in its own right: “I am not going to participate any more in the business of death. My business now is not a business at all, it´s peace”. With that he was back out the door and away with his bodyguards.