Election posters of FARC candidate Luis Alban campaigning for a seat in Colombia’s Congress on March 8.
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BUGALAGRANDE, Colombia—Ten years ago, Colombia’s former Marxist guerrillas signed a peace deal with the government. This agreement allowed them to lay down their arms and run for elected office.
Now, a decade later, they have discovered that winning votes is harder than waging war.
Among them is Luis Alban, who is campaigning to retain his seat in the Colombian Congress. At a vote-out rally in the western Colombian town of Bugalagrande. A stocky, bearded candidate looks shy and bewildered. He neglects to tell people that the legislative elections are on Sunday or even mention his own name.
Alban, 68, is more used to hiding who he is. At age 12 he joined a clandestine communist youth group then spent 40 years on the run as a high-ranking member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Known as FARC, it was the country’s largest and most feared guerrilla group.
Speaking to NPR from a crowded coffee shop, Alban admits: “I never thought I’d be a congressman.”
That changed after the FARC signed a 2016 peace accord that ended more than half a century of fighting. The guerrillas agreed to lay down their weapons, face justice, and offer compensation to their victims in exchange for political promises and government promises to develop the poor, rural areas that led to the FARC in the 1960s.
To aid the FARC’s transition to electoral politics, the agreement gave the former guerrillas 10 seats in Colombia’s Congress for two four-year legislative terms – with a grace period ending this year.
As a FARC congressman for the past eight years, Alban learned how to write legislation and conduct debates. But to get on with their jobs, Alban and other FARC lawmakers will need to win thousands of votes.
“This is our first serious campaign,” says Alban. “It’s very difficult.”
Other ex-guerrillas have managed to pull it off — chief among them Gustavo Petro.
In the 1980s, Petro joined the Colombian rebel army called M-19. After the group disarmed, he served in Congress and as mayor of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, and was elected president in 2022.
“Petro’s rise to power shows what can be done if you make the right political decisions,” said Javier Florez of the Bogota-based Ideas for Peace Foundation. “But the FARC has made bad decisions from the beginning.”
The name “FARC” is the fundamental problem. It breeds terrorism as the group is involved in massacres, extortion and kidnappings during wartime. Yet its leaders initially insisted on calling their new political party “FARC”.
By doing so, “they shot themselves in the foot,” says Beatriz Gil of Visible Congress, a think tank that monitors Colombian lawmakers. “They were stuck in the past rather than thinking about their future.”
Instead of promoting new faces, the FARC allowed veteran commanders accused of war crimes and drug trafficking to occupy several of the group’s congressional seats. Some lawmakers had to face justice before a special war crimes tribunal before being allowed to serve in Congress, and some boycotted legislative sessions in protest.
Many voters have a dim view of the rebel-turned-politician.
Luis Alban campaigns to retain his seat in the Colombian Congress.
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Louis Alban, next to his campaign bus. Alban, 68, is more used to hiding who he is. He spent 40 years as a high-ranking member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Known as FARC, it was the country’s largest guerrilla group.
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Equipment salesman Nielsen Muñoz points out that during the war, guerrillas killed his brother-in-law, whom he accused of being an army spy. Speaking from the same coffee shop where Luis Alban sits, Muñoz looks at the FARC candidate and says: “It’s hard to vote for someone who’s been at war for so long.”
Florez, of the Ideas for Peace Foundation, said Colombians who lived in guerrilla territory during the war — and were obliged to follow the rebels’ orders — mistakenly believed the FARC would continue to support them after they disarmed.
“He was so innocent,” he said
Further muddying the waters, hundreds of former FARC rebels, disillusioned with the peace process, have rearmed and formed a new generation of criminal groups. They call themselves “FARC dissidents,” an attempt to convince voters that FARC candidates are now peace-loving democrats.
“They may be good people but you always have your doubts,” said Luz Martinez, 70, from the Colombian town of Sevilla, who said she would not vote for the former guerrilla.
The FARC name is so toxic that other leftist parties and politicians who share some of the former rebels’ goals, such as land reform, have kept their distance. As a result, Florez predicted an electoral wipeout on Sunday, FARC would lose all 10 of its congressional seats and its political party legal status.
“The FARC had eight years to prepare for these elections,” Florez said. “But they weren’t prepared for the consequences.”
Still, Alban presses on.
For his promotional event in Bugalagrande, he has hired a five-piece band to garner more attention. However, only a handful of townspeople show up and the only ones who express much enthusiasm are lottery ticket sellers.
He pledges to help deliver Alban’s campaign leaflets, but only after the candidate whips out his wallet and buys a lottery ticket.
