“We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Since his election in June and his Inauguration on August 7, 2010, President Santos, a formerly hawkish Defence Minister in Uribe’s government unexpectedly went from hawk to dove. His message was that the way to lasting peace was through negotiation and reconciliation. The FARC noticed his efforts. They started reducing the number of attacks to the point that they released all of the military officers who were being held as prisoners. Even more surprising was their renouncing two of their sources of income: kidnapping and extortion.

Regardless, on January 20, 2012, Pip’s brigade was part of a one-hundred-strong force that attacked the radar station outside the village of El Tambo, Cauca Department on the Cerro Santana, a mountain in a remote area of the southern Cauca region. The radar station took twelve hours to demolish. Pip was one of the porters hauling ordinance to the launch sites. The ordinances themselves were a reflection of where they came from: their missiles were made out of gas canisters formerly used to cook with. Plenty of gunfire was exchanged. Two National soldiers were killed in the exchange. The radar station was an air traffic control tower used by the local airport. More important to the local guerrillas, it was also used for surveillance to spy on the guerrillas and the drug trade in the southwestern part of Colombia.

The battle between the eighteen-man police force and the rebels escalated when the army’s Sikorsky gunships arrived. Pip had never seen anything like it. Bullets were raining down from the sky. The Rebels returned fire, but the gunships stayed out of range. At distances beyond 250 metres (800 ft.) it worked both ways, the helicopters couldn’t descend low enough to kill the rebels and the Rebels had the same problem. Eventually, the rebels were beaten off, but not until their mission had been accomplished. They heard later on the news that it would take months, if not years, to replace the tower and restore services to the Cali area. 

The next raid was in the port town of Tumaco in the Narino Department. This was a revenge attack via motorcycle bomb. The explosion killed seven and wounded over twenty more. 

An operation in February involved an attack on a police station, mostly, it was a revenge attempt against a regional Police Commander, General Jorge Rojas, in the port town of Tumaco, Nariño Department. Pip’s part in it was to build the bombs that were subsequently loaded onto a motorcycle that was going to be launched, riderless, into the station. Pip’s exceptionally small, strong hands were considered ideal for the delicate work. The rebels regarded the town of Tumaco as part of their territory because it was such an ideal place to ship drugs from. The hit was mostly successful. Seven were killed and at least seventy were injured. However, the General wasn’t even injured.

From there, FARC’s luck seemed to change for the worse, as Alfonzo Cano's head of security, Alirio Rojas Bocanegra, an explosives expert, was killed in March in Tolima.

On March 17th, in the same area, Pip’s party staged their own ambush killing eleven soldiers on patrol and wounding two others. Three days later, three more guerrillas were killed and four captured. The next day, almost forty guerrillas were killed in a firefight over hostages.

Pip was seeing and hearing about a lot of death. Some of those killed were people she knew. She was developing an acute sense of self-worth. So far, no one in her unit had been lost in any of the skirmishes this year. 

Then on April 27, in another attack in the same area of Puerto Rico, in Caquetá Department, a logistical error occurred when an attack on the police station killed two civilian adults and their baby when one of five improvised mortars fell short and landed on their house. Four soldiers and one police sergeant were later killed in an ambush. Their unit’s raids were being staged at a rate of about one a month. Living in the bush meant that planning was hard to schedule, organize, prepare weaponry for. Plus they had to ensure that in the event the mission was unsuccessful, they had a way to retreat safely. A lot of planning and practice went into each attack. Everyone had to know what they were doing and be counted on to do it properly.

From there, things slowed down when Colombian authorities arrested several important FARC members later in 2012. Ruben Pena Santacoloma, alias "Ancizar," was caught. He was accused of the FARC takeovers of several small towns. He was known for his cruel treatment of kidnapping victims in his custody, and there was ample evidence to support those claims. FARC forces heard in September, that FARC member Angelo "Piloso" Caceres was sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the murder of three American indigenous rights advocates back in 1999. Despite the lack of amenities in the jungle, news travels fast. Conversations around the campfire were inevitably about who died where, what went wrong, and what should have been done to avoid those errors in future. 

Peace talks in Oslo were scheduled for October, and in preparation, a cease-fire was called for and guerrilla operations were being wound down all over the country. 

Not all guerrillas agreed that a cease-fire was in their best interest and not all of the rebels believed anything useful would come of the peace talks being held in Norway on October 18th. As a consequence of that, the very next day an attack took place on Friday night in a FARC stronghold deep in the Putumayo region, near the border with Ecuador. Five soldiers were killed.

…

A closer call for Pip was when government forces started zeroing in on Rebel leader Alphonso Cano, FARC Chief Political Negotiator. He was a key target and had to move around constantly. Someone close to him was a spy. By October 2011, Cano knew that someone was a traitor but couldn’t identify the rat. Pip was integrated into Cano’s coterie in an effort to help identify the offender. She joined his party in Tolima, a mountainous, heavily forested region west of the Capital of Bogotá. It was hoped that Pip’s sunny personality, diminutive stature, and ability to elicit confidence could smoke out the spy. It helped that Cano and Carbonell had known each other for years. Cano knew of Pip, too. He followed Carbonell’s accounts of Pip’s unlikely progress and sometimes humourous pratfalls with interest. He didn’t actually meet her until Carbonell sent her on the pretext of delivering a message. There was no message; it was just her. They hit it off well, and Pip soon fit into the daily camp routine.

That routine was broken when Cano, a man with a four million dollar price on his head, received a message by Sat phone to expect a helicopter invasion imminently. Camp broke in an instant. The site seemed to clear as if by magic. So fast, in fact, that Alfonso forgot his glasses. He left them on the table with his book and his drink. Without his glasses, he used Pip as a human cane. There was no panic; everyone knew what to do. When the choppers hove into sight, The Rebels were watching from the safety of a rocky overhang on the adjacent ridge and watched as the camp they’d just left, near Las Hermosas Canyon was bombed. There was no retaliatory gunfire. 

On November 4th, four months later, there was no warning. About twenty army Sikorskys bombed Cano’s hideout using illegal cluster bombs and toe popper mines as well as a thousand soldiers supported by helicopter gunships to try to kill Alfonso Cano.

Pip was in the outhouse taking a dump when chaos erupted outside. She decided to stay where she was. Nothing was going to make her get up. Something she’d eaten had disagreed with her, and Montezuma was having his way with her. She was staying put. Her AR-15 was standing in the corner should she need it. A boom and the roof was gone. She could see dense smoke wafting overhead. None of it sank into her space. More booms as the area was carpet-bombed. She had no idea what kind of bombs were raining down all around her and didn’t care at the moment. Survival was more of a concern. She knew that once the bombs stopped, soldiers would arrive to mop up. Anyone caught in the vicinity would be shot or captured. Being a girl and being captured was against her training. She had only two options. Commit suicide by gun, or go down the rabbit hole. That’s what they called the latrines in their more permanent camps. They were dug with purpose. It was smelly, but they were built with an escape route. A side tunnel out of the goop and far back into the surrounding forest. She corked her gun, lifted the seat and sat down on the frame,, feet dangling into the hole. She placed the gun across the hole, then used it to hold onto while she lowered herself until she was knee-deep in slimy shit. Pulling the plank seat shut over her,  she waded to the sidewall where the tunnel was.