Death, it can come at any moment
and you have to be
very active, very alert, very vigilant.
Well, living in a country
with such a conflict
is like living
with fear all of time.
That’s logical...
nobody wants to die like that.
On November 24 2016,
at Havana, Cuba,
the peace agreement was signed
between the National Government
and the FARC
for the conflict's ending
and the building of
a stable and long-lasting peace.
Nearly 75% of the
country’s demobilised,
which are about 59,000
in the last 16 or 15 years,
were victims before being aggressors.
They were recruited being underage,
or they were involved
in the conflict due to
serious violations against them.
My name is
Natalia Rivera Taboada,
I’m 20 years old.
I joined the FARC in 2011.
We were bombarded,
the unit I belonged to.
It was about midnight,
I remember clearly
that my hideaway was,
let’s say here,
and alongside lived a girl
whom I loved very much.
Unfortunately
during the bombardment,
maybe she was still asleep
or she didn’t make it to the trench...
and died.
Sometimes, it seems that
you’re seeing them destroyed
or saying help me,
don’t leave me.
Yes, at times, yes,
remembering that is hard.
To be successful
in the peace process,
you have to try to
rehabilitate people that
have been involved in violence
for 30, 40 years.
If we want to really change
the aggressive behaviour
at a large level,
we need to completely change
the intervention process.
You can provide a house,
work, social security
for excombatants.
But they have trauma,
they have 40 years of
experience exposing to violence.
So, not only in Colombia,
but in the rest of the world,
most of the rehabilitation programmes
are not evidence-based.
We need to get funding
from the government to
provide a strong and systematic
rehabilitation process,
regarding to social cognition
and social adaptation,
that are as important
as other dimensions
of the rehabilitation process.
93% of the people entering
the reintegration process
comes psycho-socially upset,
some more serious than others,
and some definitely very serious,
which would go from psycho-social
to psychological,
and some even psychiatric.
We have posttraumatic stress,
we have anxiety disorders,
we have attention deficit,
well, we have a number of disorders
that if not dealt with
during the reintegration process,
the demobilised will not
get ahead in their path.
My name is
Wilson Fabian Caballero Gallego.
I was in the FARC for 15 years.
I entered when
I was 16.
Something hard that I had to do,
and makes me uncomfortable,
and I do not want to
constantly remember is
is the execution of people.
I mean, speaking of common people,
civilians that worked for the enemy.
I want to share this
with you because...
because I want the
people who listen to me,
the people that see me...
to feel and know that that was not,
it was not my own decision,
it was not because I like it,
it was not because I’m like that.
And above all else,
may they forgive us.
It has not been my own will
because it is a hobby,
or because we like it,
but because the life
of all of us was in danger too.
As a researcher, we believe
that the Colombian conflict
is a unique opportunity,
as a living lab,
to understand the real-life
interweaved between biology,
psychology and cultural factors,
involved in violence
and criminal behaviour.
We start with an empathy test,
because we thought at the beginning
that excombatants will have
a low level of empathy.
However, we found that
that is not true.
Basically, we found that
excombatants have almost the same
empathy than other
regular Colombian subjects.
So, empathy can be treated
because not all of them
have problems in empathy.
Because of our research,
we found that we can
offer to excombatants,
a social cognition training,
that trains in social recognition,
emotional recognition,
theory of mind and social skills.
They now recognise how to,
in which situation,
they have to activate
aggressive behaviour.
I think that we can implement
this intervention into
our mental health approach.
I say it, personally,
I have changed 99% out of 100%.
I think that the hardest part
of being an excombatant
and being in the Colombian society,
is that many,
many see us as weirdos,
terrorists, things like that.
I think that the society at large
is not ready to receive
these people,
and we need a societal rehabilitation
process that is more challenging
even than the individual rehabilitation.
Each one of the people
who are in the armed
conflict for X or Y reason,
we are human beings.
We can change, we can be
someone in life,
we can contribute to society,
we can take the country forward.
Together we can make
Colombia a much better country.