Updated March 6, 2026 at 2:24 PM MST
BUGALAGRANDE, Colombia—Ten years ago, former Marxist guerrillas in Colombia signed a peace treaty with the government. The deal allowed them to lay down their weapons and run for elected office.
Now, a decade later, they're discovering that winning votes can be harder than waging war.
Among them is Luis Albán who is campaigning to keep his seat in Colombia's congress. At a get-out-the-vote rally in the western Colombian town of Bugalagrande. the stocky, bearded candidate seems shy and disoriented. He neglects to tell people that legislative elections are on Sunday or even to state his own name.
Albán, 68, is more accustomed 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 the FARC, it used to be the country's largest, and most feared, guerrilla group.
Speaking to NPR from a crowded coffee shop, Albán admits: "I never thought I'd be a congressman."
That changed after the FARC signed a 2016 peace treaty that ended more than a half century of fighting. The guerrillas agreed to lay down their weapons, face justice, and compensate their victims in exchange for political guarantees and government promises to develop poor, rural areas that gave rise to the FARC in the 1960s.
To help the FARC transition to electoral politics, the accord gave the former guerrillas 10 seats in Colombia's Congress for two four-year legislative terms – a grace period that ends this year.
As a FARC congressman for the past eight years, Albán learned how to write legislation and carry out debates. But to hang onto their jobs, Albán and other FARC lawmakers will have to win thousands of votes.
"This is our first serious campaign," Albán says. "It's very difficult."
Other former guerrillas have managed to pull this off -- chief among them Gustavo Petro.
In the 1980s Petro belonged to a Colombian rebel army called the M-19. After the group disarmed, he served in Congress and as mayor of Bogotá, the Colombian capital and in 2022 was elected president.
"Petro's rise to power shows that it can be done if you take sound political decisions," said Javier Florez of the Bogotá-based Ideas for Peace Foundation. "But from the beginning the FARC has taken bad decisions."
A fundamental problem is the name "FARC." It evokes terror because of the group's involvement in massacres, extortion and kidnappings during the war. Yet its leaders initially insisted on calling their new political party the "FARC."
By doing so "they shot themselves in the foot," says Beatriz Gil of Visible Congress, a think tank that monitors Colombian lawmakers. "They remained 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 claimed they should have first faced justice before a special war crimes tribunal before being allowed to serve in Congress and some boycotted the legislative sessions in protest.
Many voters also take a dim view of the rebels-turned-politicians.
Appliance salesman Nielson Muñoz points out that during the war the guerrillas killed his brother-in-law whom they accused of being an army spy. Speaking from the same coffee shop where Luis Albán is seated, Muñoz eyes the FARC candidate and says: "It's hard to vote for a person who has been at war for so long."
Florez, of the Ideas for Peace Foundation, says the FARC mistakenly believed that Colombians living in guerrilla territory during the war – and who were obliged to follow rebel orders – would continue to support them once they disarmed
"They were very naïve," he said
Further muddying the waters, hundreds of ex-FARC rebels who became disillusioned with the peace process, have rearmed and formed a new generation of criminal groups. They call themselves "FARC dissidents" which undercuts FARC candidates trying to convince voters that they are now peace-loving democrats.
"They might be good people but you always have your doubts," said Luz Martínez, a 70-year-old from the Colombian town of Sevilla who said she would not vote for a former guerrilla.
The FARC name is so toxic that other left-wing parties and politicians that share some of the former rebels' goals, like land reform, have kept their distance. As a result, Florez is predicting an electoral wipeout on Sunday, with the FARC losing all 10 of its assigned congressional seats as well as the legal status of its political party.
"The FARC had eight years to prepare for these elections," Florez said. "But they did not prepare and these are the consequences."
Still, Albán presses ahead.
For his campaign event in Bugalagrande, he's hired a five-piece band to attract more attention. However, just a handful of townsfolk show up and the only one expressing much enthusiasm is a lottery ticket seller.
He pledges to help pass out Albán's campaign leaflets, but only after the candidate whips out his wallet and buys a lottery ticket.
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