June 3, 2002

From Guerrilla to Candidate

by Michael Easterbrook

Vera Grabe spent years trying to topple the Colombian government and spark a leftist revolution throughout Latin America. A former commander of the M-19 rebel army, she helped plan attacks against the military and was a member of the now defunct guerrilla group when it raided the Palace of Justice in 1985, setting off a bloodbath that killed 115 people. But the former guerrilla fighter, who recently re-entered Colombia's tense political arena after an eight-year absence, is now one of the country's most vigorous, if unheeded, advocates for peace.

Grabe just wound up a vice-presidential campaign beside Luis Eduardo Garzón. Although Garzón lost his bid for the presidency on May 26, some political observers have credited him with reviving the nation's moribund progressive left. Even though most Colombians are more pessimistic than ever about prospects for ending the 38-year armed conflict, the blue-eyed vice presidential candidate took advantage of her short-lived visibility to stress the need for a peaceful solution. "People have said, 'How is it possible that a former guerrilla is a vice-presidential candidate?'" said Grabe, speaking from her rundown office in the capital, Bogotá, less than a week before the election. "I say that my presence shows that peace is possible, that peace is worth the trouble."

Grabe was a young anthropology student at one of Colombia's most elite private universities when she joined the April 19 Movement, more commonly known as M-19, which took its name from the date when anti-establishment candidate Gustavo Rojas Pinilla lost his bid for the presidency in 1970. The group burst onto the political scene in 1974 when it robbed a museum of a prized sword that had belonged to South American liberator Simón Bolívar.

Grabe, the older of two daughters of German parents who left that country in 1950, worked clandestinely in the capital, helped carry out raids in the countryside and eventually became one of the group's few female commanders. She was captured in 1979, after the rebel army humiliated the military by burrowing a tunnel into an arsenal in the capital from a nearby house and stealing more than 5,000 rifles.

In a military prison, soldiers tortured her repeatedly--forcing her to go without sleep, whipping her genitals with a wet towel and plunging her head into troughs of water until she nearly passed out, according to her 2000 memoir, Reasons for Living.

After being released a year a later, she left the country to engage in what she described as "guerrilla diplomacy," returning a few years later. In her book, Grabe says that she was in another part of the country when her comrades stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in 1985. Eleven Supreme Court judges and all the rebels perished when the army retook the palace.

Five years later, Grabe and the other M-19 members surrendered their arms and decided to take their chances in legal politics. "After having participated in a guerrilla struggle for so many years, I began to see that war was badly affecting the civilian population," Grabe said.

In 1990, after laying down her rifle, Grabe became the first former guerrilla elected to Congress. When the constitutional assembly closed down the legislature a short time later and scheduled new elections, she ran for the Senate and won by a landslide. She lost her bid for re-election in 1994, however, and went to work in human rights at the Colombian Embassy in Spain. Three years later, she returned to Colombia and joined the Peace Observatory, a nongovernmental organization that promotes nonviolent solutions to Colombia's conflict.

It was at least partly this dramatic switch from armed rebel to peace activist that prompted Garzón to pick Grabe to be his running mate, said Daniel García Peña, Garzón's campaign manager and a former government peace commissioner. "The message that we're trying to get across is that the armed struggle is simply meaningless and has no possibility of bringing about change in Colombia," García Peña said. "People know Vera as someone who had the courage to give up the armed struggle to dedicate her life to the democratic process."

While Grabe has struggled to get her message of reconciliation across, however, some political observers have faulted her for failing to offer specifics. Fernando Giraldo, a political analyst at Bogotá's Javeriana University, said that much of what he has heard from Grabe and the other candidates sounds like "clichés … general pronouncements that everyone agrees with and that can be very good, but which in the end don't have any depth." Grabe said that the solution cannot come from a single person. "Reconciliation doesn't depend on me," she said. "I'm not a redeemer or a savior."

Despite Grabe's efforts at communicating her message, few Colombians appear to be listening. President Andrés Pastrana's peace talks with the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's largest rebel army, disintegrated in February, and most people seem unwilling to give negotiation another chance. Disillusionment with the rebel army hit an all-time low on May 2, when a homemade mortar fired by the FARC slammed into a church in northwestern Colombia, killing 117 civilians who had gathered there to escape fighting between the rebels and a rival right-wing paramilitary army.

Presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Vélez exploited discontent with the leftist insurgents to win a huge percentage of the vote on May 26. But Grabe believes an Uribe presidency will only delay the inevitable. "I believe that war is not the road to peace," she said. "We have to find another way out."

This article previously appeared in Latinamerica Press. It can also be found in Spanish at Noticias Aliadas.

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